MUSLIMS AND HINDUS IN INDIA The fraught relations of Muslims and Hindus in contemporary India are the precipitating concern for the first two essays, examining different aspects of the question through a tangled history.

I want to begin this paper with two simple points. One is that nations are established by constructing a core or mainstream—the essential, natural, soul of the nation, as it is claimed. The other is that minorities are constituted along with the nation—for they are the means of constituting national majorities or mainstreams. Nations, and nationalisms, are established by defining boundaries. However, these are not always—or perhaps, ever—sharply or easily defined. Nationalisms have therefore commonly moved along the path of identifying the core or mainstream of the nation. Alongside this emerge notions of minorities, marginal communities, or elements,Brackette F. Williams makes the point as follows in her discussion of ethnicity in the context of territorial and cultural nationalism. Like tribe, race, or barbarian, she notes, the label ethnicity identifies those who are at the borders of empire or nation. “Within putatively homogenous nation-states, this border is an ideologically produced boundary between ‘mainstream' and peripheral categorical units of this kind of ‘imagined' social order.” Williams, ‘A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain,' Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1989), 439. the fuzzy edges and grey areas around which the question of boundaries—geographical, social, and cultural—will be negotiated or fought over.

Over the past decade, many scholars have put forward the claim that Hinduism was constructed, invented, or imagined by British scholars and colonial administrators in the nineteenth century and did not exist, in any meaningful sense, before this date.I thank many scholars for their comments on this and earlier versions of this essay, particularly Saurabh Dube and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. Prominent among scholars who have made this constructionist argument, if I can call it that, are Vasudha Dalmia, Robert Frykenberg, Christopher Fuller, John Hawley, Gerald Larson, Harjot Oberoi, Brian Smith, and Heinrich von Stietencron.See Dalmia 1995; Frykenberg 1989; Fuller 1992; Hawley 1991; Larson 1995; Oberoi 1994:16–17; B. Smith 1989; Stietencron 1989 and 1995. W. C. Smith is sometimes identified, quite correctly, as a noteworthy precursor of these scholars.Smith 1991. First ed. 1962. Romila Thapar (1985; 1989, 1996) and Dermot Killingley (1993:61–64) have offered somewhat similar arguments, but both display greater sensitivity to historical ambiguities, distributing the construction of a distinctly modern Hinduism among British orientalists and missionaries and indigenous nationalists and communalists. Carl Ernst (1992:22–29, n.b. 23) discusses early Muslim references to “Hindus” and their religion, but he joins the above scholars in claiming that the terms “do not correspond to any indigenous Indian concept, either of geography or religion.” J. Laine (1983) agrees with Smith and his modern epigones that Hinduism was invented in the nineteenth century, but credits the invention to the Indians rather than to the British.

Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy made explicit an influential but usually unstated principle for comparative political sociology. In his search for the social sources of different sorts of political systems, Moore devoted chapters to revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary upheavals in England, France, the United States, Japan, China, and India. He did not feel it equally important to consider the history of democracy in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, or Switzerland (not to mention Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The lesser players on the world stage, buffeted by the prestigious ideologies of the greater players, tied to the latter's economies and sometimes assaulted by their armies, are less rewarding as research sites for comparativists looking for distinct national “cases” to test their ideas. Small, weaker powers are not, in this reasoning, independent cases of anything. One presumes the same logic led Moore to include only third world giants like China and India and not the many other countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Characteristically, it is Germany and Russia that Moore regards as the most significant cases of democratic failure omitted from his study: not Spain or Italy, let alone Bolivia or Burma.Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. xi–xiii. Moore went on to tackle the missing German case in Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1978) and, more briefly, the Russian in Authority and Inequality Under Capitalism and Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). In many a theory of “modernization,” England—or England and France—have been taken as prototypes or paradigmatic cases, and the broad outlines of their histories are therefore far more likely to have entered the education of American sociologists than the histories of other places in Europe or beyond. Sometimes the presumed centrality of one or more of these cases is made explicit, sometimes not.

Democracy has expanded remarkably throughout the world during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 1972, there were fifty-two electoral democracies, constituting 33 percent of the world's 160 sovereign nation-states. By 1996, the number had risen to 118 electoral democracies out of 191 states, or 62 percent of the total, for a net gain of 66 democratic states. Among the larger countries with a population of one million people or more, the number of political democracies nearly tripled during the same period.We derive these data on electoral democracies from the annual world surveys that Freedom House has compiled systematically since 1972. Although crucial in its own right, we are critical of the electoral approach in evaluating democracy, as will become clear below. If it took two hundred years of political change from the Age of Revolution to 1970 to generate about fifty new democratic states, it has taken only ten years since the mid-1980s to yield the same number again. This movement of political democratization has swept over every region of the globe, taking root in societies with very different cultures and histories, from Papua New Guinea to Botswana, Brazil, and Bulgaria. In the one region where it has not transformed the nature of national rule, the Middle East, it has nevertheless generated a plethora of local democratic projects and debates. At the end of the millennium, democracy has indisputably become a global value adopted by the most diverse societies.

Beginning in the early 1970s, a large number of countries initiated transitions from forms of authoritarian rule to democracy.The research for this essay was made possible by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship as well as support from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Institute for Turkish Studies, and Princeton University's Center for International Studies and Council on Regional Studies. The author wishes to thank John Waterbury, Atul Kohli, Jeffrey Herbst, Anna Seleny, and two anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting thoughtfully on earlier versions of this essay. This democratizing trend, dubbed “The Third Wave,” began in Southern Europe and continued in Latin America, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe.Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Similar transitions were also begun in parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The Middle East, by contrast, has remained untouched. Some instances of political liberalization (i.e., enlargement of the freedoms of speech and movement, and the freedom from arbitrary state action) have taken place in the region. But no country held democratic elections that contained the possibility of real change in the locus of political power.

A significant paradox of the missionary endeavor in many parts of Africa, as elsewhere, is the preponderance of female adherents to Christianity, despite concerted efforts by most mainstream missionary groups to convert men.Theoretical or comparative studies of missionization, conversion, or religious experience and change which have informed this article include Beidelman (1974), Etherington (1977), King (1995), Holden (1983), Bowie (1993), Rafael (1993), Blakeley, Van Beek and Thomson (1994), Swatos (1994), Shaw (1995), Kipp (1995), and Spear and Kimambo (1999). “Again and again in a mission history,” notes Adrian Hastings, “the early significant baptisms were mostly of women” (Hastings 1993:112).In her history of Christianity in Africa, Elizabeth Isichei (1995) corroborates Hastings' findings, as does much of the ethnographic and historical literature on missionization in Africa (e.g. Barrett 1968:148; Landau 1995:197; Hastings 1993:112–114). Although not self-evident, such an outcome is of course more understandable for missionary groups who tried to convert and train African women to be the “good wives and mothers” necessary for the propagation of the Christian family and the “domestic” duties of the Christian home (Gaitskell 1979, Hunt 1990, Labode 1993, Kanogo 1993). Certainly this has been the case among Maasai in Tanzania, even though Catholic missionaries from the Congregation of the Holy Ghost have spent over forty years trying to evangelize Maasai men. In vain they tried to convert men first through schools, then in their homesteads, and finally in individual instruction classes. Maasai women were restricted from attending school, tolerated but not encouraged to attend homestead instruction and services, and dissuaded from holding formal leadership positions in the church. Despite these gender-based evangelization strategies and objectives, however, significantly more Maasai women than men have sought instruction and baptism in the Catholic church. Conversion to Catholicism was never easy for these women, as they had to overcome not only the reluctance of the missionaries but also the objections of their husbands and fathers. Yet they persevered, and now constitute the majority of practicing Catholics. Intent on creating Christian communities premised on male leadership and patriarchal authority, the men of the church have instead facilitated the creation of a “church of women.”

In Rescuing History from the Nation, Prasenjit Duara challenges the repressive power of the nation-state to frame historical narratives in modern China and India. According to Duara, dominant narratives in both countries have been based on a linear, evolutionary, Enlightenment model of history that stresses national progress toward modernity, whether through idealist evolutionism, anti-imperialism, or even Marxism. As a result, he argues, such narratives have excluded other important discourses on political community that rejected the modernist mode of thought. In order to provide a “multiplicity of historical representations of political community,” he examines a series of alternate narratives like federalism, which promoted goals other than the nation-state, or which expressed critiques of modernity through the promotion of “Asian values.” With this, he attempts to “rescue” historical narratives from the dominant, repressive power of the nation-state, by writing “histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress toward modernity.”Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

In an intriguing essay on colonialism in India, Appadurai (1993:316) draws attention to the importance of “number in the colonial imagination.” He argues that previous work on the colonial history of India has focused on modes of bureaucratic classification but has paid less attention to issues “of numbers, measurement, and of quantification in this enterprise” (Appadurai 1993:316). His argument suggests that the capacity to count, whether bodies or resources, was intrinsically connected with particular classificatory schemes such as castes or races. In their related ways each engendered an “illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a colonial imaginaire in which countable abstractions . . . at every imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, created sense of a controllable indigenous reality” (Appadurai 1993:317; cf. Anderson 1991:163–78; Gellner 1983:139–40; Kula 1986:120–22). Together these colonial procedures “had the effect of redirecting important indigenous practices in new directions” (Appadurai 1993:316). Subsequent (often violent) events in Indian colonial and postcolonial history, Appadurai argues, attest to this illusion, and the disjunction between the imagination of the governed and the governing.