The nationalist rhetoric of Aurobindo Ghosh and other leaders of the political movement protesting the decision of the Government of British India to partition Bengal province in 1905 contained frequent allusions to Hindu myths and symbols. Militant political leaders primarily drew upon Śakta symbolism, especially the imagery of the Hindu cult of Kālī worship, and they adopted philosophical justifications of nationalism which were based on modernist, Neo-Hindu interpretation of Śaṁkara's Vedānta philosophy. The nation was described as an incarnation of the goddess Kālī, and nationalists were considered her devotees.

In an interview given in July 1974, Intiār Ḥusain, one of the most perceptive creative writers of Pakistan, had this to say about the experience of migration that was the direct outcome of the Partition of India in 1947:

A decade ago when I was talking about the experience of migration and the articles I wrote concerning it, I was in a state of great hope and optimism. It was then my feeling that in the process of the Partition we had sudenly, almost by accident, regained a lost, great experience—namely, the experience of migration, hijrat, which has a place all its own in the history of the Muslims—and that it will give us a lot. But today, after our political ups and downs, I find myself in a different mood. Now I feel that sometimes a great experience comes to be lost to a nation; often nations forget their history. I do not mean that a nation does, or has to, keep its history alive in its memory in every period. There also comes a time when a nation completely forgets its past. So, that experience, I mean the experience of migration, is unfortunately lost to us and on us. And the great expectation that we had of making something out of it at a creative level and of exploiting it in developing a new consciousness and sensibility—that bright expectation has now faded and gone.

S. J. Tambiah has drawn attention to two recent developments in Thai Buddhism which strike him as having a particularly seminal significance. The first is ‘the new politico-economic role of monks themselves as promoters of government-sponsored community development programmes’. The characteristics of this aspect of Thai Buddhism have been charted into the early seventies at least, by Tambiah, Suksamran and Ruth-Inge Heinze.

The growth of modern nation states seems to have inevitably entailed the progressive encapsulation, incorporation and integration of local, relatively autonomous systems into a broader political and socioeconomic framework, generating in the process new pressures on local systems as they are forced to reformulate their relationship with the encompassing state. Even in the case of peasant societies where there is, by definition, a relationship between local community and an overarching political and economic structure, there has, historically, been a high degree of decentralization in many spheres, and a relatively low demand for the integration of the total society. The process of modernization, however, is generally accompanied by increasing central interference in subordinate systems, leading to new pressures, opportunities, interests and alignments.

The study attempts to delineate the degree of system rigidity of three major dialect groups, namely, the Cantonese, the Hakkas and the Hokkiens. The principal source of data is derived from inscriptions collected by Chen and Tan (1972). The findings reveal that at the individual level the system boundary of the Hokkiens was more rigid than that of the Cantonese and the Hakkas. This confirms earlier observations made at the organizational level.

Earlier observations dictate that after 1854 the Cantonese and the Hakkas were, at the organizational level, not on good terms. This was, however, not the case at the individual level. We also found that the system boundary of religious organizations, i.e., temples and burial ground bodies, was least rigid.

The second generation of constitutional elites who adopted the fundamental law of the Philippine Republic had hoped that through legislative discretion local governments would develop into strong and effective agents of the national government. This hope was dashed by the unwillingness of the legislative branch to make the local units less dependent on the central government and the meticulous way in which the President of the nation tried to control local officials instead of merely supervising them as the constitution provided. Against this background, the third generation of constitutional elites in the seventies felt that the constitutional compromise in the thirties between the historical view of localism and the legal theory of centralism in the form os presidential supervision over local governments was counter-productive. Accordingly, they considered a number of choices by which local autonomy could be clothed with constitutional protection. And so they wrote in the new Philippine constitution a mandate to the legislative branch to institutionalize the concept of local autonomy not only in form but in substance as well. They also modified Dillon's Rule, which used to govern national—local relations, by subjecting the legislative power to create or abolish local units to popular approval by placing a shotgun behind the door—the referendum. Elite decision to opt for this type of mandatory autonomy was not in response to mass demands, since the masses were uninformed about the local autonomy issue. Rather, it was due to elite perception of what they considered to be the public good which motivated them to take this bold and forward step towards local political development during the nation's crucial period of its existence.