The aim of this paper is to outline the characteristics of one very important class of Southeast Asian law texts—the “Indian-derived.” In the process, it may be possible to throw light on some basic questions such as the nature of State, and the definition of sovereignty in medieval Southeast Asia. The texts are important examples of the adaptation of Indian legal culture in new environments. I hope to show that the idea of law exhibited in the texts, while dependent upon such basic Indian ideas as “duty” (dharma), is not only differently defined in the various cultures of “Indianized” Southeast Asia but transcends such limited legal definitions as “rules” or “coercion.” Law instead rests upon native concepts, giving rise to rules of conduct that ought, to be observed by reason of social condition. It is among these rules that law is to be found; law is an aspect of dharma, the definition of which varies from one law text to another. It is ultimately concerned with a definition of obligation that is simultaneously suitable in local terms and consonant with absolute principles derived from the Indian texts.

When Nitobe Inazō became principal of the First Higher School (Ichikoō) in the fall of 1906, he was immediately perplexed by the customs and rituals of his students. Here on the campus of Japan's most prestigious university preparatory school was an isolated community of students immersed in a subculture that seemed totally unrestricted by the mores of civilized twentieth-century society. There was a “rustic barbarism” in the students' daily behavior as they swaggered around the campus in worn-out uniforms and battered geta, bellowing out incoherent lyrics of “dormitory songs.” No one thought twice about using a sleeve for a handkerchief, or making “dormitory rain” from the second-story windows of the residence halls (instead of using the appropriate ground-floor facilities.) At night, some students might be seen stripped down to their underpants and dancing wildly around open bonfires, while others were strolling aimlessly through the grove in front of the dormitory, intoning lines from Hamlet or The Sorrows of Young Werther. For Nitobe—the Christian theologian, the international diplomat, the impeccably well-dressed and wellmannered gentleman—the first sight of the Ichikō students was something of a shock. How strange it was that those young men destined to become the leaders of an emerging world power should be conducting themselves in a way that seemed, on the surface at least, to be in proud defiance of the codes of civic responsibility and social acceptability.

Peasant movement studies based solely on economic and political data may miss important social and cultural elements in the constellation of forces that generate those movements. The process of leadership entry—that is, the legitimation of the outside organizers to the peasants—has seldom been a subject of systematic investigation. However, I suggest that examination of what makes peasants accept as leaders persons who are in many respects different from themselves may yield important insights into the nature of the problems of organizing peasants.

Tamil country, in the southeastern portion of peninsular India, has been an identifiable cultural region for almost two millennia. Tamil literary productions dating from the early centuries of the Christian era to the present time speak of Tamilakam (the land, or the abode, of Tamils)—setting out its boundaries by reference to mountains, rivers, and the sea, but making few distinctions within this macroregion and not specifying what lay beyond it. This paper is an attempt at more precise definition of the nature and development of this cultural region and its changing structure, by means of consulting a variety of evidence and by using the concept of “circulation.”

Even under the best of circumstances, “religion” can be a slippery term. In Buddhist Sri Lanka (Ceylon), it is especially so. Anthropologists recognize a religious complex that includes spirit exorcism as well as orthodox Buddhism; yet in Sinhalese usage, the word for religion, agama, applies to the latter but specifically excludes the former. On the other hand, from a Western perspective, orthodox “doctrinal” Buddhism—rationalistic, atheistic, non-supernatural—hardly seems to qualify as religion by any ordinary definition of the English word or its European equivalents. Indeed, that has, historically, been one of the strong appeals of Buddhism to the West. However, the terminological problem is not a vital one. Though it is well to keep in mind the indigenous distinctions, the various beliefs and practices of Sinhalese Buddhists so blend into one another and are so overtly connected, ritually and ideologically, that they present themselves as an identifiable complex that has been conventionally and justifiably called “religious.”

The cult of Khaṇḍobā, one of the largest contemporary popular Hindu cults in the Deccan, is extremely rich in both mythology and ritual; yet, the most popular ritual festival in the cult has no corresponding cultic myth. Interviews with pilgrims, analysis of pilgrim behavior at the festival, and examination of certain astrochronological notions prevalent in popular Hinduism indicate that explanations of the place of the festival in the cult and of its importance for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year are to be found not in any aspect of the mythology of the cult but rather in notions, preserved generally in popular Hinduism, of the special accessibility of power at special times.

Baniyas (moneylender/traders) have a bad reputation. Though the functions they perform are similar, they in no way enjoy the respectability and admiration accorded bankers and businessmen, their brethren in spirit. They are castigated by villager and scholar alike as shylocks, parasites who—if given half a chance—squeeze clients dry through exorbitant interest rates on loans and on goods-on-credit. In an Indian village, one quickly becomes aware of the sometimes fearful respect they command. One approaches them for credit as a supplicant; for the defaultor, there is no more distressing sight than the Baniya at the door demanding to go over accounts. Baniyas are far from lovable; their popular image as fawning, cowardly, greedy sorts who take undue advantage of the weak while ingratiating themselves with the powerful appears singularly well deserved.

Wei-ch'eng; (hereafter referred to by the translated title Fortress Besieged) by Ch'ien Chung-shu (1910?—) has been hailed as the most “carefully wrought novel in modern Chinese literature” and “perhaps also its greatest.” Despite such distinction, however, neither this work nor any other of Ch'ien's creative writings has been widely studied. This paper is an initial exploration directed at investigating the above claims from the linguistic and stylistic points of view. One focus is figurative language, of which there is a substantial amount in this novel: some 680 uses in 340 pages, one page having as many as nine. (Approximately seventy-four percent of these figurative uses are similes.) Though in the absence of norms it is difficult to make a relative statement, in absolute terms this is rich usage.

The socio-religious songs composed in village Bengal by the adherents of the mystical sect known as the Bāuls are of great interest to students of folk music and poetry, but they are of no less interest to a student of the history of the religions of Bengal. In his songs, the Bāul expresses his religious beliefs and experience, his view of life and of the world, his thoughts and emotions. They are his only form of worship; there is no treatise embodying the doctrines and practices of this sect. It is only in his songs that we can get a glimpse of what a Bāul is and what he believes in. Famous for their spontaneity of expression and charm of melody, their rustic language and imagery, these songs clearly bring out the various themes that together form the general body of Bāul thought. And there are threads of many religious traditions: tantric; Sahajiyā—both Buddhist and Vaiṣṇava; and Ṣūfī.

Hanumān, the ancient monkey-divinity of India: for many, he represents the force of life in man's struggle to exist. He is most famous for his devotion to the god-king Rāma, and for his exploits as leader of the monkey army that helped save Rāma's princess from the demon-king of Laṅkā. Yet in the Bhojpurī-speaking area of western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, Hanumān is a god of great importance in his own right. There he is worshiped as the epitome of strength and vitality; popular legends associate him not so much with the self-restrained Rāma as with Śiva, possessor of creative and destructive energy.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “caste” organizations and “caste” polemics were, to a greater extent than has been appreciated, responses to foreign definitions of Indian society. The most important stimulus toward caste-cluster consciousness released by the British presence was neither their advanced technology (which revolutionized the means of communication and transportation) nor their military prowess and administrative skill (which obliterated “the territorial limitations inherent in the pre-British political systems” and “brought a new administrative unity to India in the establishment of a centralized bureaucratic government”—both of which are commonly noted. Rather, the growth of caste-cluster consciousness was largely an unintended but direct consequence of the fact that the foreigners engaged in a continuous attempt to describe, define, interpret, and categorize the social complexity that India presented to them—a society so puzzlingly different from their own.

The profound impact of the civil service examinations upon students' lives marks one of the most important developments in Sung education. During the Sung, the whole process of education gradually became geared to the purpose and demands of the examinations; the new important role of the examinations in the recruitment of government officials in turn resulted in the transformation of Chinese society.

In the entire body of scholarly writing—Japanese and foreign—on modern Japanese history, perhaps no subject has been treated with less care or greater indifference than the imperial universities. Western scholars, when commenting on the subject, are usually content to note their supposed indebtedness to the universities of nineteenth-century Germany and to emphasize their role in training government officials. Thus Robert Scalapino wrote in 1962: “The government … accepted a far-reaching system of education patterned essentially after German concepts….”; he was seconded in this opinion by Ronald P. Dore in 1965. And of the universities' social functions, Herbert Passin wrote in 1965 that Tokyo University had been conceived as a “training school for officials”; this was echoed by Chitoshi Yanaga in 1968.

At the tip of southeastern Sri Lanka is the shrine of Kataragama, sacred to Skanda, the son of Śiva. There, every year in the Sinhala month äsala (July/August), devotees walk the length of a pit containing a thick layer of red-hot coals. Many Buddhists and Hindus, the fire-walkers as well as ordinary devotees, believe that this custom of the annual fire-walking ritual comes from mythic times and commemorates Skanda's victory over the asuras (titans). In fact, the present form of fire-walking in Buddhist Sri Lanka dates not from the asura war, but from World War II. Furthermore, those who walk the fire are not members of a hoary ancient ritual lineage; rather, they are modern urban people, uprooted from traditional Sinhala Buddhist peasant culture. Fire-walking is a new phenomenon, and it is a product of recent social change.

At the conclusion of the war in 1895, Japan acquired two territories from China: Liaotung Peninsula and Taiwan, including the islands of Penghu. (Hereafter Taiwan will denote the main island of Taiwan and the Penghus.) It is easy to understand why Japan annexed Liaotung: because of its proximity to Korea. But why was she interested in annexing Taiwan, located more than a thousand miles away from the principal battlefield and more than half of it controlled by headhunting aboriginal tribes? According to the conventional interpretation, Japan's decision on the annexation was based on consideration of two factors: (1) the island's potential as a new market, and as a supplier of food and raw materials for the rapidly expanding Japanese capitalism and labor forces and (2) its military value as a stepping-stone for future expansion in south China and southeast Asia. Implicit in such views is the assumption that Japan had planned the annexation long before the war—perhaps as early as 1874, when a Japanese expeditionary force briefly occupied a part of the island.

Lost texts are common in the history of ancient Indian literature. Many must have perished altogether—even from memory—victim to neglect and hostile insects; a great number survive only as fragments or brief quotations embedded in other works, and sometimes only as titles. One of these lost works is Bṛhatkathā (“The Great Romance”). Legend tells us that the poet Guṇāḍhya composed it in Paiśācī, an obscure dialect of Prakrit. Now it exists only as a title; but once, to some commentators, it was a famous and important work. Witness Govardhānācāry's high esteem, for example—”We pay homage to the poets of the Śrī Rāmāyaṇa, the Bhārata, and the Bṛhatkathā,” or his remark, “Who would not say Guṇāḍhya is this very same man [Vyāsa] reborn?” Yet, to most scholiasts Guṇāḍhya and his illustrious work are but a memory and a faint one at that. How fortunate it is then that the work has survived, testament to its once great popularity, in several ver¬sions: three in Sanskrit, one in Prakrit, and one in Old Tamil.

The problem of ethnic identification is an important but neglected theme in Southeast Asian history. Historians of the region are indebted to Leach, Lehman, and Moerman for their pioneering work on the nature and history of upland societies in Southeast Asia. In Political Systems of Highland Burma, Leach demonstrates that culture and ethnic identity are not necessarily synonymous. He points out that the process of identification among tribal people like the Kachin is never simple; it entails migration, intermarriage, barter trade relations, warfare, interpenetrating political systems, and values and beliefs shared with non-Kachin. Manifest in the work of all these anthropologists is a conscious effort to define the nature of social categories applied to ethnic groups in Southeast Asia across time. Their work has led to a more complete understanding of the nature of ethnic groups and the processes responsible for “accomplishing ethnicity” among upland peoples in Southeast Asia.

Contemporary Japan has been consistently portrayed as a highly integrated society. Countless sociological works have argued that its mechanism of value consensus and social solidarity works efficiently and extensively. According to Ezra Vogel, for example, Japan is essentially a society where rapid transition has taken place in an orderly manner without much social disorganization. For Nakane Chie, Japanese society is composed of internally cohesive and vertically structured groups which tend to stabilize its system.

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) is quite possibly the best-known, most widely studied, and most frequently quoted writer of the early Meiji period. More of his writings have been translated into English than those of any other nonliterary Meiji writer. So much attention is given to Fukuzawa that he often appears as the Meiji intellectual. One recent textbook describes him as nothing less than “the most influential man in Meiji Japan outside government service.” In another description he is portrayed as “one of the most remarkable” of men, one of that small number of men who move history through their own personal power, and “the man who above all others” explained Western material and spiritual culture to Meiji Japanese. Overall, scholars have been only slightly more reticent in describing Fukuzawa's importance than he himself was. In his own view, the reforms undertaken in the early Meiji period were influenced by himself to such a degree that it was appropriate to say “If I did not chiefly initiate them, I think I may have been indirectly influential in bringing them about.”

Marx's writings on Asia do not bulk large in the corpus of work he published in his lifetime: several articles for Charles Dana's Daily Tribune; scattered references in his Critique of Political Economy, Capital, and Theories of Surplus Value; and (more precise and analytic than the aforementioned) the statements in the Grundrisse. Obviously, his overriding interest lay in the description of capitalist society in western Europe. Nevertheless, what he studied about Asia significantly affected his understanding of capitalism, communism, and dialectical naturalism. Though he never wrote in an extended manner on Asia, the Orient was implicitly present in, and had profound influence on, his western-centered scholarly work. It is impossible to grasp the central meaning of communism and the dialectic without comprehending Marx's attitude toward Asiatic history. Failure to correctly appreciate Marx's writing on Asia has led many scholars to distortions in their evaluations of Marx and their projections about a communist society. Karl Wittfogel is a case in point; because he misconstrued what Marx thought of Asia, he was led to make invalid judgments about the nature of communism and the course of communist revolution in the twentieth century.