Pakistan is today moving toward a population crisis with two dimensions. The source of this crisis is both internal and external. Internally the country is experiencing one of the greatest population growths in the world, externally the conflict in Afghanistan has resulted in the world's greatest refugee migration. Together these two dimensions of population pressure have generated a potentially explosive condition.

In the process of opening up China, the French representatives, like their other Western counterparts, came into contact with the Chinese mandarins who represented a culture and world view that were almost totally foreign to them. Part of the daunting task of preservin their country's glory and pursuing its interests, was to try and comprehend the world they were attempting to engage. They arrived in China with an intellectual luggage replete with stereotypes and misconceptions about the Chinese, on the one hand, and on the other hand they were committed to their mission civilisatrice in China which was to help the Chinese save themselves from themselves.

The nature of British interests in the Far East in the 1930s meant that both the Treasury and the Board of Trade were necessarily closely involved with the making of foreign policy. While Foreign Office officials resented this intrusion into their domain, they were themselves disdainful of so-called ‘technical’ considerations connected with tariffs or currency reform, and were willing to leave them to the specialists. Under the dynamic impetus of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, and the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Warren Fisher, the Treasury, encouraged by the apparent abnegation of the Foreign Office, made a bold and aggressive foray between 1933 and 1936 into realms of foreign policy-making hitherto regarded as the exclusive sphere of the professional diplomat.

This paper deals with socio-cultural innovation in the hills of southeastern Bangladesh. Outsiders have always been struck by the ethnic diversity of this area. The literature—written mainly by British civil servants, Bengali men of letters, and European anthropologists—presents a picture of twelve distinct ‘tribes’, all practising swidden or shifting agriculture, locally known as jhum cultivation. In addition, there are Bengali immigrants who do not engage in swidden cultivation.

In 1928, the newly established Nationalist government faced the formidable task of rebuilding the country after years of political disintegration. The central concern was national strengthening and modernization, and the government embarked on various programs of political, social and economic reconstruction. Medical modernization was part of this process. A study of the Nationalist efforts in this area is crucial to our understanding of the complexity of health developments in modern China since the Nationalist decade of 1928–1937 was the only period in pre-1949 China when a central government was able to assert some measure of control over the nation and preside over the construction of a modern health system. This process would include not only the initiation of new programs but also the consolidation and coordination of efforts on the part of individual reformers and groups. The examination of the evolution of such a system will illuminate a much neglected but important aspect of social and institutional developments in the Republican period. It will also lend historical perspective to the understanding of health developments after 1949. This essay focuses on the development and implementation of rural health programs in the Nationalist decade as well as the factors affecting the establishment of a viable health care system in the countryside.

One of the unresolved issues of Indian anthorpology is how to characterize and weigh the social importance of individuality and achievement in Indian social history. Of course, the individual as ‘empirical agent’ exists in India as everywhere (Dumont 1970a:9), yet because Hindu culture stresses collective identities over those of the individual, individual achievement, which is a measure of individuality, has been overlooked and sometimes outrightly rejected as a cause of history and social order (Dumont 1970a:107; 1970b; cf. Silverberg 1968). In consequence, the motivations underlying achievement that might explain historic action have also been ignored. This undervaluing of individuality and achievement has given rise to a long debate among South Asianists about the role of the individual in Indian society (e.g., Marriott 1968, 1969; Tambiah 1972:835; Beteille 1986, 1987), a debate that raises questions in wider arenas about the nature of society and culture in relation to individuals (e.g. Brown 1988; Mines 1988).

This paper attempts to examine Śrīnivāsdās's Parīksāguru ‘Experience is the only teacher’ (1882) generally considered to be the first novel in Hindi,as a novel which draws its subject matter from the extravagant life-styles of the traditional Hindu elites, the rich Hindu bankers and traders, rather than from the peculiar traits of the middle class as is generally asscrted by Hindi scholars.

In June 1930, units of the 10th Red Army, which had been formed in northeastern Jiangxi by Fang Zhimin and Shao Shiping, entered the ancient porcelain town of Jingdezhen. The capture of the town brought the modern revolutionary politics of the Chines Communits Party (CCP) into contact with the local government and trades union organizations of a conservative, traditionally-minded town. Jingdezhen remained under the influence of the Red Army from 1930 until the strategic withdrawal from the Northeast Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 which was the forerunner of the complete withdrawal from the Jiangxi base areas and the Long March. There is ample information on the organization of the N.E. Jiangxi Soviet base and its best-known leader, Fang Zhimin, but most studies concentrate on the political structure of the Soviet government, the career and personality of Fang and the peasant milieu in which the Soviet emerged.1 Jingdezhen was not a peasant society or a major city: it was an intermediate small town world with part of the population permanently resident and many seasonal workers from the rural areas who provided a link with peasant communities.

The spring month of Māgh heralds festivals, pilgrimages and popular rituals in the north Indian countryside. In 1872, the small village Bhaini, in Ludhiana district, was the scene of feverish activity. Participants in a millenarian community popularly known as Kukas had collected there in connection with the spring festivities on the 11 and 12 of January. They had, however, very little to celebrate. In the past four months nine of their numbers had been hanged by the colonial authorities on charges of attacking slaughter houses and killing butchers, others had been imprisoned, and many more were subjected to increasing surveillance and restrictions. British officials nervously shifted their views of the Kukas. Earlier seen as religious reformers within the Sikh tradition, they were now deemed to be political rebels. As those present felt heavily suspect in the eyes of the administration, the atmosphere at Bhaini must have been tense and unnerving.

Following the adoption of 8 August resolution at Gowalia tank in Bombay, Indian masses rose to revolt, which became famous as the Quit India movement. It was a call for freedom. ‘Nothing less than freedom’, to quote Gandhi. Unlike the 1920–21 Non-cooperation and 1930–32 Civil Disobedience movements which were basically peaceful campaigns against the British rule in India, the Quit India movement was the ultimatum to the British for final withdrawal, a Gandhi-led un-Gandhian way of struggle since the Mahatma exhorted the people to take up arms in self-defence, and resort to armed resistance against a stronger and well-equipped aggressor.

Kang Sheng—a veteran counter-intelligence official and close political ally of Mao Zedong's—is said to have remarked in the winter of 1959 that among the critics of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) there was ‘One soldier’ and ‘One civilian’ whose criticisms were ‘in close harmony’. The soldier was Peng Dehuai, China's Minister of Defence, who had clashed with Mao at the Lushan Conference that summer, and whose criticism of the GLF had subsequently been denounced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee as an ‘attempt at splitting the Party´ and ‘a ferocious assault on the Party Center and Comrade Mao Zedong's leadership’. The civilian was Yang Xianzhen, the President of the Central Party School, who had aroused Kang's wrath by condemning the GLF as hopelessly Utopian, and by claiming that it already had brought on starvation and might yet bring about the collapse of the CCP.

Indian newspapers and academic journals assault their readers with stories of large-scale communal violence and of the communalization of India's political institutions. These stories are frequently accompanied by pious editorials which enact the well-known Indian ritual of paying lip-service to the concept of ‘secularism’. Secularism is one question on which intellectuals have made common cause with social workers and politicians, joining them in meetings and seminars, even participating in the peace marches which are commonly organized in the aftermath of communal riots. There have even been occasions in which individuals who are known to have been involved, directly or otherwise, in communal battles, have participated in these rites of secularism.