The nature of the pre-colonial Indian state, especially as one could see it in similarity or opposition to the state in Europe, has exercised a particular fascination since the seventeenth century, when François Bernier spelled out his theory about Oriental monarchies, with special reference to the Mughal Empire and Turkey. It may be recalled that he saw eastern states different from the European in two major particulars: (1) The king here was the owner of the soil, in other words, the exactor of rent; and (2) those who actually collected the tax-rent held only temporary tenures, as holders of jagirs or timars, unlike the hereditary European lords. The temporary tenures, which were a necessary reflex of state ownership of land led to over-exploitation of the peasantry, and, therefore, a progressive decline of the economy and polity. This was in contrast to Western Europe, where the limitation of state right of sovereignty and the dominance of private property over the land, under its protection, were the surest means to progress and prosperity. Already in Bernier we have the articulation of the contrast between the Oriental despotic state and the occidental laissez faire state.

In this paper an attempt is made to outline the basic structure of taxes on trade and commerce at the Mughal port of Surat during the seventeenth century. This is explored chiefly from documents relating to the English East India Company. By the very nature of the Company being a foreign corporate body, it did not represent a typical ‘peddling’ tax-payer. But the system in so far as the ordinary merchants were concerned, can be restored for us indirectly by considering how far the Company was favoured in taxation matters. We may also reconsider the common view that the English enjoyed ‘invidious trading privileges’ by virtue of the orders of the imperial court, and that it was their privileges that explain their ultimate success in India.

Lord Curzon was the imperial gatekeeper who opened the way to parliamentary government in India by composing Edwin Montagu's declaration of 20 August 1917. He defined British policy as ‘the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’. Curzon himself acknowledged his authorship in an endorsement on his own printed copy of the declaration. On the eve of the War Cabinet's agreement to the declaration he included his proposed key words in a letter to Montagu, a document strangely overlooked in all of the many accounts of the matter. The only Cabinet departure from Curzon's key words was the substitution of ‘progressive’ for ‘fuller’. Montagu questioned the latter term and Curzon proposed the former. There was nothing impromptu about the drafting. For months variations on it had been floated in correspondence between the authorities in India and London. The use and meaning of ‘self-government’ had been widely canvassed. It is generally understood that ‘responsible government’ went beyond ‘self-government’, for in constitutional parlance it must mean a parliamentary system (with a responsible executive), whereas ‘self-government’ might be achievable in non-Westminster forms. The justification for dyarchy, the essence of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, lay in its apparent satisfaction of the declaration's espousal of the principle of responsiblity.

Between 1943 and 1945, 1,500 Indian women in Burma, Malaya and Singapore exchanged their colorful saris for the khakis, breeches, half caps and boots of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, the all-female brigade of the Indian National Army (INA). Under the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, members of the moneyed elite and the daughters of rubber plantation laborers shared the same food and fate to fight a jungle war for India's freedom.

I came upon this passage in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1927: 1: 1: 19) after having spent a year in the provincial town of Janakpur, documenting the Maithili language of northern Bihar and southeastern Nepal. Many local people encouraged and assisted me in my research, but all told me in good faith that I had come to the wrong place. I should have gone twenty miles to the southeast, where the ‘authentic’ language is spoken. It seems that I had not been alone in having been urged by informants and well-wishers to go somewhere else: either in pursuit of languages that do not exist or being redirected down the road to where the language is really spoken. Unfortunately visa problems prevented me from taking up the advice of friends, yet a cursory reading of the literature on regional and social dialectology would have been enough to turn anyone into a skeptic about what one might have been gained from such a journey. Subjective dialect boundaries do not often register on maps of isoglosses, and the objective methods of linguists usually reveal local perceptions of speech behaviour to be based on stereotypes.

Who or what constitutes the dominant power and/or authority in village India today? This sort of question is hardly ever amenable to any generally agreed answer for any society, and the Indian case is no exception. But to say this is already to have made a comment on the main stream of post-independence scholarship on agrarian India. Very soon after independence an academic orthodoxy hardened as to the character of agrarian social structure and power. The argument of this paper is that this orthodoxy is no longer valid and that it obscures what is a profound transformation in the character of agrarian India.

Since the Second World War, an important school of social science scholarship in Southeast Asia has explained pre-national social hierarchy in terms of religious cosmology, or religious beliefs in the ordering principles of merit and karma (Heine-Geldern, 1956; Geertz, 1980; Errington, 1989). With respect to Siam/Thailand, Tambiah (1970, 1976, 1984) exemplifies this approach in its strong form—he has attempted to explain all religious practices of the ‘Thais’ as expressions of Buddhist orthodoxy. For these writers, religious and cosmological meaning is fundamental, and subsumes the economic dimension. Their emphasis on cultural coherence contrasts with a second school of thought exemplified by Scott (1977, 1985) which focuses on slippage or difference between the ‘great traditions’ represented in Thailand by Buddhism, and little traditions of peasantries, based on local experience, pre-existing little traditions or the appropriation of past ‘great traditions’.

The Provision of housing for the urban poor has been a problem of long standing in the Third World. In some countries efforts at housing supply go beyond events which began forty years ago after World War II when large numbers of people began moving to the cities of Latin Amercia, Africa, and Asia giving rise to uncontrolled urban settlements and causing crowded living conditions in the already built-up areas. In Southeast Asia some colonial governments recognized the housing problem at the beginning of the twentieth century and began programs to ameliorate housing shortages and to improve living conditions for the urban masses. The investigative housing commissions in Singapore beginning in 1907 and the faltering efforts of the Singapore Improvement Trust perhaps are the best known examples. They were the precursors of the Housing and Development Board established in i960 in whose structures live some 85 percent of the Singapore population today. Urban officials in colonial Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies, also had concerns for the housing of the masses. The Dutch colonial government eventually passed legislation which in a mild way supported housing and- was concerned to some extent with housing construction. For their part, the large cities on Java were more active.