Recent concern with the process of modernization has heightened interest in the origins of bureaucracy in societies which have succeeded in modernizing. Relatively little attention, however, has been directed to territorial governing elites as an element of bureaucratic development. In what sense did governors in premodern societies resemble modern bureaucratic officials? Did the resemblances increase as the societies approached the modern period; or (as Marion J. Levy suggests) did the bureaucratic elements tend to degrade in the particularistic environment?

It is axiomatic to the expansion of Europe, informal or otherwise, that the perpetrators of that expansion—explorers, officials, missionaries et al.—brought to the societies they infiltrated the ideas, concepts, technology and prejudices of their own cultures. This was a process, which, by definition, encompassed great variations in its penetrative power, dependent as it was on frequently intermittent contact dictated by policy, opportunity, necessity, and numerous other factors. Cultural borrowing on the part of the recipient polity is often seen as mere technological osmosis, the acquisition of more efficient military techniques and weaponry, and the indiscriminate consumption of the externals of European life in the guise of ‘trade goods’. To rest our conclusions here does a considerable disservice to the subtlety of such contacts.

In recent years the study of the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ has become a very fashionable subject. Everett M. Rogers stressed the fact that his book on the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ was based on 506 diffusion studies published in the last decades. Of course quantity is not necessarily synonymous with quality and brilliant ideas are not a function of the number of titles printed. The first of the major conclusions reached by Rogers after perusing the 506 diffusion studies is that ‘innovativeness of individuals is related to a modern rather than a traditional orientation’. One may doubt whether such an extraordinary conclusion was worth the input of energy and goodwill that allegedly went into its production, but there is no doubt that innovations and their diffusion are a topic of major relevance in the study of social development. Innovations are to history what mutations are to biology. Actually, innovations show a remarkable tendency to cluster in time and space, and this incidentally suggests that attention should not be devoted exclusively to the eccentric individual genius of the innovators, but should also be extended to the anonymous forces of the environment.

Traditional law—Hindu, Muslim and customary—has been almost entirely displaced from the modern Indian legal system. Today, the classical dharmaśāstra component of Hindu law is almost completely obliterated. It remains the original source of various rules of family law. But these rules are intermixed with rules from other sources and are administered in the common-law style, isolated from śāstric techniques of interpretation and procedure. In other fields of law, dharmaśāstra is not employed as a source of precedent, analogy or inspiration. As a procedural-technical system of laws, a corpus of doctrines, techniques and institutions, dharmasastra is no longer functioning. This is equally true of Muslim law. 3 The local customary component of traditional law is also a source of official rules at a few isolated points, but it too has been abandoned as a living source of law.

Anthropologists' view of law, as Bohannan (1963: 288) recently summarized, is generally concerned with two aspects: one studies the legal procedures of foreign cultures and discovers and compares inquisitorial and correctional devices, and the other focuses on basic axioms or ‘postulates’ underlying the stated norms or laws of a society. Bohannan amplifies the scope by noting that not only the ‘institutions of counteraction’ should be studied but also the events that precede and follow counteraction, for the anthropologist has learnt that legal institutions are, after all, a product of and constantly molded by indigenous culture. We are better aware of this interrelationship in simple cultures (for examples, see Bohannan, 1957; Gluckman, 1955,1965; Hoebel, 1954; Llewellyn and Hoebel, 1941; Pospisil, 1958; Schapera, 1938; and Beattie, 1957). The anthropologist has attempted to compare and analyze the legal institutions of one society with another, and tried to learn what the natives thought they ought to do, and what they thought constituted a ‘breach’ of norms.

The scarcity of skilled professional manpower in developing nations has given rise, of necessity, to a formidable array of para-professional personnel. Khare's description of the touts of Lucknow and the ‘sea-lawyers’ of Gopalpur serves as a useful starting point for discussion in this vastly important but little-treated subject. From a lawyer's point of view, most of the crucial questions are not answered here. How much actual legal business, in terms of letter-writing, negotiations and simple giving of advice, is in fact carried out in the village by the para-legal individuals described? To what extent are their opinions, and ways of operating, similar? Do they, by virtue of pervasive and agreed practice, in fact ‘make’ law? Are they possibly, being closer to the people, more acceptable to the people, more efficient than ordinary lawyers, and cheaper?

The development of the modern Indian legal system provides, as Marc Galanter notes, a remarkable instance of the total displacement of a major intellectual and institutional complex in a highly developed civilization with one largely of foreign origin or at least inspiration and the replacement of the savants and practitioners of the older system by a new elite. The bulk of this modern elite, the second largest body of legal practitioners in the world, comprises the district lawyers or vakils. This paper describes some aspects of social organization among the vakils of Ambala City, a small district headquarters town in the North Indian state of Haryana.