Eyes turned toward India can see a new pattern emerging. Whatever other political readjustments may result from future negotiations, it appears certain that at least two main political units are to replace the area formerly known as British India. Hindustan will cover those areas predominantly Hindu; Pakistan will include those areas with Muslim majority. The differences of opinion concerning the desirability of effecting this division are now part of history, since both of the major political parties have agreed to the principle of division. Only the boundaries of the split remain to be worked out.

It should be emphasized at the outset that Georges Dumézil does not consider himself to be a social theorist of any sort, least of all a “structuralist.” Indeed, his opinion of the structuralist movement, to say nothing of the extent to which others have attempted to associate him with the origin and development of that movement, is less than enthusiastic; and in the Introduction to Mythe et épopée III he has explicitly denied any connection whatsoever with structuralism per se and, implicitly, with the theories and methods of the leader of the movement, Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Depuis quelques années, le mot “structure” est devenu ambigu. Tout en gardant sa valeur précise, ancienne—lorsqu'il est question, par exemple, de la structure d'une démonstration, d'un roman, d'un État—, il a pris un emploi technique beaucoup plus ambitieux dans un système philosophique aujourd'hui fort en vogue, auquel il a même donné son nom.

During the Cultural Revolution (CR) the numerous “Red Guard” and “Revolutionary Rebel” organizations published an enormous amount of printed materials in various forms, all of them now referred to as “Red Guard publications.” Some of them have become available to the academic community outside China, thus providing China specialists with their best opportunity for the foreseeable future—until we are able to interview Chinese people freely—to study Chinese politics. This paper contains a general bibliographical survey of the available Red Guard publications and an appraisal of their potential value as source materials.

Historians of religion who investigate the myths, rites, and symbols of the multilocal Indo-European speakers are not unlike historians of the planet earth who investigate the dispersed continental land masses and ocean floors of the present time. The former labor to reconstruct from hundreds of thousands of mythological, philological and iconographical details the language, religion and social structure of an ancient parent culture, while the latter proceed from an equally bewildering variety of geological and oceanographical puzzle-pieces to determine the character of that primordial “Pangaea” from which continental plates of the earth's surface originated. Interestingly, both areas—comparative mythology and earth science—have recently been reinvigorated by fresh schools of investigation after long lapses subsequent to the discrediting of nineteenth-century hypotheses. A generation ago no Asian studies scholar would have supported the claim that the massive Indian epic Mahābhārata and the Iranian epic Shāhnāmeh have preserved significant structures of the Indo-European mythological worldview that went unreflected in the vedic and avestan texts, any more than a reputable earth scientist would have maintained the idèa that the Himalayan massif was created by a wayward “India” crunching into central “Asia” after a multithousand-mile journey from the loins of South Africa.

Recently, a group of scholars, all either students of Anil Seal or persons very much affected by his thinking, have produced a volume entitled Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870–1940,1 which is reprinted from Volume VII (1973) of Modern Asian Studies. Included in it are an introductory essay by eal himself entitled “Imperialism and Nationalism in India,” two essays on U.P. by C. A. Bayly and F. C. Robinson entitled “Patrons and politics in northern India” and “Municipal Government and Muslim separatism in the United Provinces, 1883 to 1916.” There is one essay by R. A. Gordon called “Non-cooperation and council entry 1919 to 1920” and one by David Washbook entitled “Country politics: Madras 1880 to 1930.” The volume ends with two essays on Bengal by Gordon Johnson and John Gallagher entitled respectively “Partition, agitation and Congress: Bengal 1904 to 1908” and “Congress in decline: Bengal 1930 to 1939.” This volume raises issues of great substance for the study and interpretation of recent Indian history. Seal, in his essay, argues that previous historians of India (in which he includes himself) have been too much concerned with policy and with the educated elite bound together by a common ideology. Instead of looking at partnerships of fellows, we should be looking at vertical alliances. After all, according to him, these alliances were mostly cross-caste and cross-religion. “Hindus worked with Muslims, Brahmins were hand in glove with non-Brahmins; and notables organized their dependents as supporters …” (p. 3).

The Himalaya, the southern frontier of Central Asia, has been for centuries a geographic enigma akin to the headwaters of the Nile and the wanderings of the Lop Nor. The earlier problems of location and elevation were solved, for the most part, by the pioneering efforts of the Surveyor General of India and the Survey of India, conducted since the mid-nineteenth century. Unfortunately, virtually all of the maps produced by the Surveyor General of India are officially restricted and thus normally not available. Far from satisfying our curiosity of the Himalaya, the Surveyor General and the Survey generated a host of questions regarding the population, cultures, and human ecology of that mountain system. These questions have attracted the full attention of numerous scholars representing many disciplines. Among geographers interested in the Himalaya, the cartographic work of Professor Pradyumna P. Karan is well known.

The failure of nations to win wars they fight has a profound effect on the way their prewar history is studied and evaluated. After the traumas of a two-decade military involvement in Southeast Asia, American revisionist historians have recently unleashed a barrage of critical assessments of modern American history and its chroniclers. The revisionists' artillery has been aimed particularly at earlier historians who characterized contemporary American history in positive terms, or presumed the existence of noble and moral principles at the core of “what America has stood for.” The revisionists contend that the “objectivity” of their predecessors has been anything but objective or disinterested, and paradoxically, many have also sought to affirm the legitimacy of “subjective history.”

For Western scholars, occupied Japan remains something of an anomaly: too remote (1945–1952) for most economists and political scientists, still uncomfortably close for historians. Americanists seem intimidated by the exotic hieroglyphics on the other side, while Japan specialists shy away in fear of losing their assumed thoroughbred image should their footnotes betray too much English. Buried under a veritable mountain of grist for research, as these two recent bibliographies attest, there is as yet no single scholarly overview of the subject in English. Such neglect is unfortunate, for the problems and potential insights involved are substantial.