The role of caste in indian politics is undergoing considerable change. Caste and patron-client links have been regarded traditionally as the building blocks of political organization in India (Brass 1994; Manor 1997; Migdal 1988; Kothari 1988; Weiner 1967), and vertical and horizontal mobilizations by patrons and caste leaders, respectively, have been important influences on political outcomes (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). There are indications, however, that the influence of patronage and caste might have declined considerably in recent years:

[National-level] survey data reveal some important facts that run counter to the conventional wisdom on voter behavior. … In 1996, 75 percent of the sample said they were not guided by anyone in their voting decision. … Of the 25 percent who sought advice, only 7 percent sought it from caste and community leaders … that is, less than 2 percent of the electorate got direct advice on how to vote from caste and community leaders. … The most important survey data show the change over time. In 1971, 51 percent of the respondents agreed that it was “important to vote the way your caste/community does” (30 percent disagreed), but in 1996 the percentages were reversed: 51 percent disagreed with that statement (29 percent agreed). … In 1998, “caste and community” was seen as an issue by only 5.5 percent of the respondents in one poll … and [it] ranked last of nine issues in another. All the evidence points to the fact that these respondents are correct: members of particular castes … can be found voting for every party. … It is less and less true that knowing the caste of a voter lets you reliably predict the party he or she will vote for.

(Oldenburg 1999, 13–15, emphasis in original)

In the sixteenth century, Makassarese in the South Sulawesi courts of Gowa and Talloq began to write. What they chose to write were historical texts that chronicled their origins and preserved the words of their ancestors. Scholars once knew how to make sense of such an event: it could not be but a watershed, a fundamental change or turning point of the first magnitude. Such is the nature of what we liked to call the “transition from orality to literacy,” yet more careful examinations have suggested that this confidence in the very idea of a shift from orality to literacy was misplaced. Literacy and orality are not states of being that are simply manifested in places like Makassar. This article extends the efforts of scholars to grapple with the considerable overlap, symbiosis, and exchange that seem to characterize a boundary once believed to demarcate firmly orality and literacy. Considerable work has gone into documenting the inadequacy of trying to delineate what formal characteristics mark oral and literate productions. For example, Wendy Doniger notes that it is only when we distinguish among texts that were composed orally, preserved orally, or performed orally “that we begin to glimpse the complexity of the problem” (1991, 31). Similarly, what should we do about traditions such as Javanese wayang in which oral performances are based on stories in texts, even though few puppeteers own, consult, or have even seen the written texts (Sears 1996)?

Here's a short version: The “-ism” we invoke when we posit things like “Daoism” was glimpsed for the first time by Sima Tan . (d. 110 b.c.e.), lord grand astrologer (taishigong) to the Han court. His essay “Yaozhi” (Essential points), included in the final chapter of his son Sima Qian's Taishigong, analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of six approaches to governance:

Yinyang ,

Ru (known to us as Confucians),

Mo (the Mohists),

Fajia (called Legalists),

Mingjia (called Sophists), and

Daojia (or Daode , the supposed Daoists).

It is widely believed that the Allahabad Kumbh Mela is an ancient religious festival or that it is “ageless”, that its roots lie obscured in time immemorial. Editorials and articles in the press at mela time (every twelve years) lyrically emphasize the continuity of the pilgrimage throughout India's past, find inspiration in its durability and changeless character, and marvel at the anachronism of an ancient festival thriving in the modern world (“The Kumbh Mela”, Pioneer, 17 February 1918; “Editorial”, Leader, 16 January 1942; “Pilgrim's Process”, Times of India, 24 January 2001). There is no better example of this than the oft-quoted section of Jawaharlal Nehru's will and testament, in which the avowedly secular modernist explains his desire to have a portion of his ashes scattered at the triveni sangam, the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers and the site of the Kumbh in Allahabad:

I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people. … She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. … And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from that past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that it has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India. That chain I would not break, for I treasure it and seek inspiration from it.

(2000, 612–13)