In an age sceptical of the historic role of great men there is universal agreement that Mahomed Ali Jinnah was central to the Muslim League's emergence after 1937 as the voice of a Muslim nation; to its articulation in March 1940 of the Pakistan demand for separate statehood for the Muslim majority provinces of north-western and eastern India; and to its achievement in August 1947 of the separate but truncated state of Pakistan by the Partition of India. Subcontinental judgements of Jinnah are bound to be parti pris and to exaggerate his individual importance. While Pakistanis generally see him as the Quaid-i-Azam, Great Leader, or father of their nation, Indians often regard him as the Lucifer who tempted his people into the unforgivable sin against their nationalist faith. Among distinguished foreign scholars, unbiassed by national commitment, his stature is similarly elevated. Sir Penderel Moon has written:

There is, I believe, no historical parallel for a single individual effecting such a political revolution; and his achievement is a striking refutation of the theory that in the making of history the individual is of little or no significance. It was Mr Jinnah who created Pakistan and undoubtedly made history.

The aim of this paper is to interpret the life experience of a south Indian landholder at the end of the nineteenth century. The basis for interpretation comes from the author's analysis of the values of political economy among, chiefly, warrior castes as they adjusted to constraints of imperial rule from 1800 in Madras Presidency. The method of exposition is, for the most part, descriptive and narrative, with the intention of highlighting and contextualizing major concepts governing the man's thoughts and actions. Because the subject, a wealthy Tamil zamindar, kept English-language diaries, problems of cultural anachronism in the prose below are mitigated. Having the English vocabulary—or a small part of it—of our subject subverts the bugbear of ethnosociology, the cultural distortions inherent in using an alien language as one discusses the values of a social group. Contemporary newspaper commentary in English also lends cultural accuracy to the narrative. Memories of the subject linger still in Madurai Town, scene of many of his activities. I wrote the major part of the piece in Madurai and was honoured with a request to read it to the membership of the local Historical Society. That membership gave me paradoxical relief in saying of this cultural account, ‘She has told us nothing new about Baskara Setupati.’

In absolutist Europe the administrative device called ‘farming’ covered at most the collection of customs and a number of other indirect taxes. In contrast we find in India and in many Muslim states that, in addition to customs, indirect taxes, and a wide range of less important miscellaneous items, the land-revenue itself could be farmed as well. It is chiefly with that of the latter, as implemented by the Maratha government, that this article is concerned. We will attempt to show that a variety of forms of land-revenue farming prevailed not only under the much-discredited Baji Rao II, the last of the Peshwas, but was also of regular occurrence under comparatively paternalistic rulers like Madhav Rao I and Nana Fadnis, and in fact throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Secondly, it will be argued that revenue farming was either a characteristic response to crisis, or otherwise occurred only under frontier conditions.

There is no part of the sacred law … which is regarded with such pride by Muslims, or has been worked out by their jurists in such extravagant detail, such meticulous precision or such a spirit of religious devotion. There is even a famous dictum attributed to the Prophet that a knowledge of the shares allotted to the various heirs under this system is equivalent to half the sum total of human knowledge.