On one of his many visits to India Kingsley Martin was once asked how he saw the prospects for Western Europe. His reply was that he was very optimistic as most of the leaders of Western Europe then were very old. If the transition from age to youth in national leadership is a sufficient basis for hope, we certainly have much to be grateful for in India. And our young Prime Minister has already struck a very responsive chord among large sections of Indian society by his promise of change. His mother had won the 1980 election on the promise of a ‘Government that works’. Mr Gandhi promised in 1984 a ‘Government that works faster’—thus heralding a promise of greater efficiency in general. When asked about the objective of his new Government, he used the now famous phrase that his objective was to take India into the twenty-first century. Taken at its face value, this was a rather vacuous phrase. It is not necessary for anyone to carry India, Atlas-like, into the twenty-first century. It would arrive at our doorstep in due course, as it will at everyone else's, and most probably without even a whimper.

‘Tax avoidance’ and ‘tax evasion’ are terms so frequently referred to in economic and business relationships today that they constitute part of our conversational language and people in general use these terms even without knowing their exact meaning and difference. Whereas tax avoidance implies a situation in which the taxpayer reduces his tax liability by taking advantage of the loop-holes and ambiguities in the legal provisions, in the case of tax evasion, facts are deliberately misinterpreted and the tax liability is understated. Thus, while tax avoidance is perfectly legal and is, at times, referred to as ‘tax planning’, tax evasion is illegal and, therefore, carries with it the risk of penalties and prosecutions under the tax laws. As such, the black economy comprises the sum total of all the various methods of tax evasion but does not include tax avoidance. Accordingly, whereas the consequences of the two phenomena are different for the taxpayers, both reduce the revenue of the Exchequer and consequently need to be checked to the greatest extent possible.

The management of public affairs in northeast India has been in focus in the regional, national and world press in recent years. Much of the attention has been confined to insurgency, the ‘foreign nationals’ issue, tribal ‘uprisings’, ‘brutalities’ committed by the security forces, ‘involvement’ of foreign agencies in the area, political ‘horse-trading’ and floods. There has been no analysis of the economic, cultural and demographic factors which have acquired different nuances in the wake of the rapid modernization taking place in the region since the 1950s and which have a decisive say on the formulation of policies and the efficacy of institutions of governance in northeast India. This paper proposes to offer some facts and reflections on these aspects.

There seem to be at least two elusive concepts in the sociology of India: caste and communalism. On caste Eric Wolf makes the point eloquently: ‘The literature on the topic is labyrinthine, and the reader is not always sure there is light at the end of the tunnel’ (1982: 397). The sociological perspective on caste seems to be obscured by a great deal of confusion about the place of religious values and sentiments in Hindu society. According to Louis Dumont (1970: 6, 7), the primary object of the sociology of India should be a system of ideas and the approach that of a sociology of values. Since the religious ideology, on which the caste system is based in his view, seems to have been fixed already in the classical period of Indian civilization, caste becomes a static, a-historical phenomenon in Dumont's writing and in much of the debate originating from it (cf. Van der Veer 1985). The same may easily happen with that other most elusive concept of the sociology of India, communalism. Again Dumont can be our misleading guide here. He argues that ‘communalism is the affirmation of the religious community as a political group’ (1970: 90). In terms of their religious values and norms there is a lasting social heterogeneity of the Hindu and Muslim communities (95–8). This argument amounts to a ‘two-nation’ theory, based upon an a-historical sociology of values.

The Government of India Act of 1935 was a constitutional device meant to extend the Raj's political alliances in Indian society. The Congress Party, on the other hand, construed the Act as a new challenge to the demand for independence. The authorities discovered that the Congress ministers’ primary loyalties lay with the imperatives of the party and not with the constitutional arrangement. Concern on this account was heightened by the resurgence of ground-level Congress activism. The Congress strengthened and expanded its volunteer organization while it governed the provinces. If the formal party institutions were weakened by corruption and factionalism during the ministry period, its grass-roots cadres were revitalized and mobilized opinion against compromises with the Raj, strengthening the ministers’ hands in any major clashes with the authorities. The latter were disturbed by links between the Congress ministers and party activity hostile to the Raj, even though a certain convergence of Congress and British interests kept the experiment of provincial autonomy going. The official response to this situation consisted, at one level, of making expedient concessions.But the authorities explored an alternative possibility as well. The Muslim League, which emerged as a mass party after 1937, was not exactly an ally, but it offered the most powerful resistance to the possibility of total mobilization under the Congress.

From 1945 to 1947 the Communist Party led the impoverished Warli tribals of Bombay's Thana District in a movement for fair wages and freedom from forced labor and landlord violence. The immediate targets of the action were the local landed interests and moneylenders who dominated the region and held the tribals (known as ‘adivasis’) in virtual slavery. The longer range goal, however, was to build the Communist Party and challenge Congress dominance.

The social context of land endowed for the maintenance of temples in the Kandyan region of Sri Lanka has long been recognized by scholars as an important topic for historical and sociological research. Most historical writing on the subject is concerned with changes in government policy towards temple endowments after the imposition of British control in 1815. The first forty years of British rule have received more attention than any later period; consequently emphasis has been placed on the gradual of process British disengagement from the pre-colonial policy of close official involvement in the administration of temple land. This research has fruitfully illustrated tensions inherent to colonial rule in the early nineteenth century, especially the conflict between the religious beliefs of the colonizers and the desire to avoid unrest among non-Christians. However, little detailed research has been carried out on either official or popular attitudes towards temple endowments after the colonial government formally gave up its responsibility for their administration in the middle of the nineteenth century. As a result, the uneven and partial official movement towards a reassertion of government control in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is usually portrayed as official recognition of earlier mistakes concerning disestablishment. This view does not take into account the considerable economic importance of the endowments. Changing official attitudes towards religion, as well as internal developments within Buddhism, did indeed influence government policy, but changes in economic policy and in the control and use of land were also important.

A Common but curious sight of the Indian bazaar is the hijḍā, the ‘eunuch’ of Indian English. Obviously transvestites, the hijḍās beg from merchants who quickly, under threat of obscene abuse, respond to the silent demands of such detested individuals. On occasion, especially festival days, they press their claims with boisterous and ribald singing and dancing. Popular Indian opinion would label the hijḍās as nothing more than male prostitutes. Yet at the same time, and hinting at a more complex social function, they are expected if unwanted visitors at wedding parties and birth celebrations where they demand their share of the general largesse. Seen solely as one element in the fabric of contemporary society, the life of a hijḍā is surely ‘an alternative social role … which cater[s] not only for the temperamental misfits but also for disavowed yet persistent needs of the community as a whole’. However, such characterizations are made without much investigation of the ‘alternative social role’. The vast Indian underworld—the low caste and outcaste; the beggars, touts, petty criminals, and prostitutes; and also the hijḍā—has been much neglected as a subject of serious scholarship.

M. N. Srinivas (1952) first introduced the concept of ‘Sanskritization’ for describing cultural and social change among the Coorgs of South India. More specifically, the term was used to explain the integration of Coorgs into Indian society through their adoption of various Sanskritbased beliefs and practices. It also referred to caste mobility, a process whereby the Coorgs attempted to raise their caste status by observing various rules of behavior as defined in Sanskritic scriptures and practiced by Brahmins. In elaborating this concept, Srinivas (1956, 1967) has sought to extend it to Indian society as a whole, focusing particularly on the problem of caste relations. He has emphasized that the extent of Sanskritization among the jātis of a region depends upon the character of the locally dominant caste. The latter provides an immediate model for the lower castes to emulate. In generalizing this concept, Srinivas has also attempted to assess the compatibility (and to some degree, conflict) between Sanskritization and Westernization.