According to the view current among most Japanese today, the samurai lost their last hope of surviving as a distinct social or political group when Saigō Takamori died in the autumn of 1877. In fact, the fate of the samurai class had been sealed as early as 1866, when Satsuma and Chōshū joined forces to destroy the only institutional order in which the samurai had any functional meaning. Their disappearance from the Japanese stage was brought about by forces that Saigō helped to set in motion, but over which neither he nor any other individual could possibly have exerted much control. In the end he had no significant effect on the fate of the samurai.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Sino-Soviet conflict intensified and at the same time the Sino-American rapprochement was well under way. When the Americans began to search for an answer to the question of ‘Why Vietnam’, some US foreign relation documents in the later 1940s were released, which indicated that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had made certain friendly overtures toward the United States. Since then, it has become a widely-accepted interpretation among scholars that Washington ‘lost a chance’ to win over the CCP from Moscow in the late 1940s. The fundamental premise of this interpretation is that the CCP earnestly bid for American friendship and support as a counterweight to pressure from the Soviet Union. It is argued that the CCP sincerely sought the US recognition right up to the middle of and that it was only after their bids for American support were rejected by Washington that the Communists had to choose the ‘lean-to-one-side’ policy. In short, Washington's shortsighted policy in 1949 ‘forced Beijing into Moscow's embrace’, and therefore set in motion a train of disastrous events: the Korean War and the Vietnam War. A promising postwar Asian balance in favour of the US was ruined.

The Chinese in Sarawak, like their counterparts in other parts of Southeast Asia (Nanyang), were staunch advocates of education where every Chinese community had its own school which was built, managed and financed by local resources, and largely independent of government control.

Writing to John Morley, the Secretary of State for India, a few days after the first terrorist bomb was thrown by a Bengali, the Viceroy Lord Minto declared that the conspirators aimed ‘at the furtherance of murderous methods hitherto unknown in India which have been imported from the West, and which the imitative Bengali has childishly accepted’.This notion later was taken up and developed by Times correspondent Valentine Chirol, who wrote that Bengalis had ‘of all Indians been the most slavish imitators of the West, as represented, at any rate, by the Irish Fenian and the Russian anarchist’. Chirol went on to say that ‘European works on various periods of revolutionary history figure almost invariably amongst seizures of a far more compromising character whenever the Indian police raids some centre of Nationalist activity.’ This indicated that Bengali revolutionary terrorism was simply a takeoff on the European variety. The only indigenous element in it was the dangerous infusion of Hindu religious fanaticism.

In the West it is commonplace to regard sport as either an extracurricular form of leisure, or else as a business enterprise. Games and contests of all kinds are a form of distraction; and for some a very lucrative form at that (Smith 1978). Almost by definition sports direct our attention away from ‘real life’ to some form of fantasy world where there is high drama but little by way of the material or ideological substance of productive, pragmatic and ‘rational’ labor (cf. Rojek 1985; Simon 1985). Hand in hand with such a notion of marginal utility goes a folk attitude that sport is meaningless by virtue of its being purely and simply fun, as though pleasure and purpose are somehow antithetical.

Few books are exemplars of real hard work sustained over a lengthy period of time as is John Smith's The Epic of Pabuji(1991). Starting his investigation of the scroll of cloth painting in 1973, a huge structure measuring fifteen feet by four, locally termed par, before which this epic is sung by a special caste of people, lower in hierarchy, called Naik Bhopa, Smith in a span of eighteen years has accomplished a work of lasting stay in the ethnographic tradition of south Asia as well as the discipline of folklore in general. Before this book was published, he had also contributed some important papers (in 1986 and 1989) on Pabu-ji. As far as I know, it is rare that Sanskritists, which Smith is at Cambridge, pay attention to ‘popular (or “non-Sanskritic”) traditions’ of people, and if at all they do, introducing the anthropological method of fieldwork in their study, their works are still laden with Indological references and scholarship where the actual voice of people is lost in oblivion or relegated to the back seat. But it does not happen with Smith; he is not only committed to listening to people's voice in its own right and place, but also provides a fair, up to date, and scholarly account of Pabu-ji's story and its role and niche in the local culture of Rajasthan. Therefore, his work is also of considerable interest to anthropologists, especially those working on the sociology of cult, popular religion, and non- literate traditions and their meanings.

A puzzling feature of interwar Anglo-Indian economic relations is the contrast between Whitehall's relatively hands-off attitude to Indian tariff policies, and its insistent hands-on approach to monetary policy issues in the colony. Both sets of issues were, at various times, equally contentious. But while Britain's strategic objectives in India paved the way for the Fiscal Autonomy Convention, the road towards a similar monetary ‘convention’ was never taken. Rather, thanks to Britain's external financial problems, the interwar decades saw initially a tightening, and later a refinement, of London's control over Indian monetary policies. This paper hopes to set out the processes at work more clearly than has been attempted before, and to account for them. The interpretation offered here is consistent with the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ explanation of British imperialism during the interwar years, and of the postwar de-colonization process.

This paper is an attempt to understand one case of ‘ethnic’ conflict in India—Assam. By looking closely at this one case I hope we will understand better the phenomenon of India's persistent dilemma of micro-nationalist politics that from time to time seems to be fundamentally at odds with India's macro-nationalist project. To be sure, despite the seriousness of some of these conflicts—say Punjab and Kashmir at present, or Assam until recently—the incidence of micro-nationalist dissent should be kept in perspective. The Indian state can claim quite a bit of success in its project of ‘nation building’-it has been able to incorporate micro-nationalist dissent of a number of peoples by using persuasive and coercive means at its disposal. Moreover, cven conflicts that appear stubborn at one time turn out to be surprisingly amenable to negotiated settlement. Irrespective of the Indian state's ability to manage micro-nationalist dissent, the assumption that nationalisms have a telos that inevitably leads to a demand for separation relies on a rather sloppy and lazy naturalist theory of the nature and origins of nations and nation states. What the Indian experience forces us to confront is the fate of nationalism and the nation state as they spread worldwide as a modal form. In the Indian subcontinent these new forms that privilege 'formal boundedness over substantive interelationships," come face to face with a civilisation that represents a particularly complex way of ordering diversity.2 In a subcontinent where the historical legacy of state formation is marked by an intermittent tension between the imperial state and regional kingdoms, nationalisms and the nation state may have proved to be rather unfortunate modern transplants.3