The pre-colonial Javanese kingdom was an unstatistical sort of state. Naturally it counted soldiers, taxes, wives, concubines and children, but it rarely kept detailed social and economic statistics. Nevertheless, some statistical records survive, largely through being preserved in Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Comparison and analysis of these, plus one or two leaps of imagination, enable one to build some historical hypotheses upon these materials and thereby to illuminate something of Javanese social history after the mid-seventeenth century and particularly in the eighteenth century. For the period from the mid-eighteenth century to 1812, important demographic and economic data relating to the kingdom of Yogyakarta alone will be made available in a forthcoming volume edited by Dr P. B. R. Carey and to be published by the British Academy.

Now it is the interest of Spirit that external conditions should become internal ones; that the natural and the spiritual world should be recognized in the subjective aspect belonging to intelligence; by which process the unity of subjectivity and (positive) Being generally—or the Idealism of Existence—is established. This Idealism, then, is found in India, but only as an Idealism of imagination, without distinct conceptions;—one which does indeed free existence from Beginning and Matter (liberates it from temporal limitations and gross materiality), but changes everything into the merely Imaginative; for although the latter appears interwoven with definite conceptions and Thought presents itself as an occasional concomitant, this happens only through accidental combination. Since, however, it is the abstract and absolute Thought itself that enters into these dreams as their material, we may say that Absolute Being is presented here as in the ecstatic state of a dreaming condition (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 139).

Understanding how unequal relations are reproduced over time is as significant as comprehending inequality itself. For unequal relations exist only in human practices that reproduce them. More than a play on words, the coupling of production with reproduction in recent anthropological studies highlights processes that provide the basis for production. The necessity of reconstructing practices that reproduce social relations is perhaps nowhere more neglected than in the study of South Asian history. When it comes to explaining how unequal relations between social groups were maintained, the caste system is the perennial favorite. This is particularly so where relations between landlords and landless laborers are concerned. Thus, even Jan Breman's sophisticated and rich study of dependent laborers in South Gujarat points to the jajmani system, the institutional form of caste relations in the agrarian context, as the basis for relations between laborers and landlords in the past. While his study illuminates how bonded labor relations can be understood in the light of the jajmani model, it fails to explain how these relations were reproduced. Are we to assume that the transactional norms of the caste system, once in place, simply drove laborers and landlords into actions that reproduced bondage?

Buchanan arrived in India in 1794 and left in 1815. He was employed by the East India Company for these twenty years in a number of capacities but he is chiefly remembered today for two surveys he conducted: the first of Mysore in 1800 and the second of Bengal in 1807–14. These surveys have long been used by historians, anthropologists and Indian politicians to depict the nature of Indian society in the early years of British rule. Recently economic historians, Bagchi in particular, have used the ‘statistical’ tables compiled by Buchanan as a data base against which later statistical evidence about the Indian economy is measured. Bagchi believes that by doing this he can furnish firm proof of the extent to which British rule was detrimental to the people of India in the nineteenth century.

This paper briefly charts the progress and findings of European scholars approaching the issues of caste and sect in the Jain community over the last two centuries. Other authors have already discussed the European interest in Jain textual and philosophical issues, and while I touch on these briefly, my main concern is to outline Jain social organization, with particular reference to Swetambar communities in the north.

The spectre of a ‘Malthusian’ catastrophe engulfing the subcontinent commands less attention currently than in relatively recent times. This is largely attributable to the greater sense of confidence in the food-grain supply capacity of Indian agriculture in the wake of the Green Revolution. From the mid-1960s through to 1980, output has maintained a growth rate in excess of 2.5% p.a., with yield increments rather than area increments accounting for the major part. Since 1950, per capita net availability of foodgrains has increased by over 20%, while the real price of foodgrains has shown a steady downward trend since 1968. Current projections suggest that self-sufficiency in food production can be sustained through to the end of the century. Yet this remains partly contingent on climatic factors and a slackening trend of population growth. However, population growth rates currently exceed 2.2% p.a. and the relative stability of fertility rates means that a diminution is by no means assured. While supply shortfalls could be met through increased imports of food commodities, the possible emergence of India in the longer term as a food deficitary economy could have serious implications for the international grain market, given the current structure of supply for foodgrains and the growing dependence, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, on food imports.

By an edict of 15 February 1805 the Governor-General ordered the Chinese moneylenders from the town of Buitenzorg to report to the Commissioner of Native Affairs how much money the inhabitants of the Buitenzorg Regency owed them. Non-compliance with this order would result in cancellation of the debts. The Commissioner compiled a list, based on these reports, dated 30 June 1805. In 45 pages, consisting of 672 entries, the debtors of and debts to 26 Chinese are listed. The debtors and debts are listed under their creditor, the Chinese moneylender. The entries are probably given as they were reported by the Chinese themselves, although there is no logic in the ordering of the names. An ‘ideal’ entry yields the following data: name of moneylender, name of debtor, his place of residence, year that the debt was incurred, amount of money borrowed with sawahs (wet rice fields) as collateral, number of pétak (embanked ricefield) sawah, amount borrowed with buffaloes as a collateral, number of buffaloes, amount of cash borrowed (without securities), amount of credit for merchandise, amount of annual interest, number of years paid, number of years still to be paid.

The starting point of this essay is with some findings on employment in the South Indian city of Coimbatore which we reported in an earlier paper (Harriss, 1982). There we described the principal social characteristics of broad groups of workers, defined after categories proposed by Bromley and Gerry (1979)—those of ‘permanent wage work’, ‘short-term wage work’, ‘casual work’ and ‘self-employment’ or ‘dependent work’ in petty production and trade. We established that in Coimbatore there is little movement of individual workers from other forms of employment into permanent wage work and also that it is unusual to find households with members both in permanent wage work and in other forms of employment. These findings prompt the question whether or not there can be said to exist a ‘labour aristocracy’ in the city of Coimbatore. More broadly they suggest questions concerning forms of social organization and class formation amongst urban workers. We will take up these questions here complementing our earlier studies of small-scale production and the relationships between different levels of production in Coimbatore, and so contributing to the rather limited literature on the lives and work of the urban working poor of India. A further part of our purpose is thus to describe the backgrounds, conditions of work, residential communities and organizations of this important group of people.

The system of medicine known today variously as ‘international,’ ‘scientific,’ or ‘Western’ entered South Asia as early as the seventeenth century. For two centuries this system, known in India as allopathic medicine, coexisted with the medical traditions indigenous to South Asia. In 1835 the period of coexistence ended and the adherents of the allopathic tradition began to press claims that they, and only they, should be allowed to direct and staff the medical and health programs of the East India Company and, after 1858, the various Governments of South Asia. Allopathic medical men wished to decide the goal or goals of governmental medical efforts, who was to be allowed to participate in those efforts, and who was to be served by those programs. In short, allopathic medical men wanted control of the development of all facets of health policy in South Asia.

That people get the governments they deserve is a saying born out of the expectation of citizens to influence the choice of rulers, or that societies mould states. Perhaps, conversely, when governments are imposed on people, especially by outsiders, they are likely to be more than usually influential. Certainly, in India, social and religious changes are thought to have occurred under British rule. Official records provide much of the evidence for this. Yet British policy and attitudes in this area have not been very fully analysed. This essay is an attempt to start closing the gap, and it is hoped will provide some insight indirectly into how the records were produced and what was seen of social and religious change in the later nineteenth century—both matters ultimately of importance to the understanding of the period. Special attention will be paid to the cow-protection movements between 1880 and 1916.

Students of Javanese society have long recognized that the Java War (1825–30), the bitter five-year struggle against European colonial rule in Java, constituted a watershed in the history of modern Indonesia. In his recent textbook, Professor Ricklefs has characterized the year 1830 as ‘the beginning of the truly colonial period in Java’, arguing that the Java War marked the transition point between the ‘trading’ era of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the years of ‘colonial’ exploitation ushered in by Johannes van den Bosch's well known ‘cultivation systems’. In military and political terms, the costly Dutch victory over the javanese made them, for the first time in their three and a half centuries of involvement in the archipelago, the undisputed masters of Java. At the same time, scholars of Javanese Islam have suggested that the defeat of the Javanese leader, Dipanagara (1785–1855), and the religious ideals for which he fought (most notably his goal of strengthening the institutional position of Islam in Javanese society), temporarily undermined the morale and self-confidence of the Islamic communities in Java. Specialists in the history of the central Javanese principalities (vorstenlanden), especially those interested in cultural developments, have also seen the Javanese failure in 1825–30 as a setback to the vitality and independence of the Javanese cultural tradition, a time when Javanese society began to turn in on itself and lose something of its strength and flexibility.

On 3 May 1945, British—Indian forces landed in Rangoon. The Japanese had pulled out. The city was liberated. On 16 June there was a victory parade, though the final victory over Japan was still distant and most of their conquests were intact. Admiral Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, took the salute while detachments representing the one million men under his command passed by in massed array. Famous regiments from Britain, India and Nepal; the Royal Navy; the Royal Air Force; men from the United States Air Force. It was an impressive sight, though the ceremony took place in pouring rain. Amongst them all was a somewhat ragged band representing the Burma National Army which, having been raised by the Japanese, had fought for three months alongside the British. Watching the parade from the central dais was a young man dressed in the uniform of a Japanese Major-General, though he also wore an arm-band with a conspicuous red star. The outfit was incongruously crowned by a pith sun-helmet—a topi. Probably most foreigners present assumed he was a Chinese officer. He was actually Bogyoke Aung San, commander of the BNA.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) attempted throughout his public life to mobilize the Indian populace for mass political action. He did this by means of his speeches, journalism, leadership and philosophy. His desire was to throw off the yoke of British colonialism, to deliver his countrymen out of bondage. To this end Tilak sought a cogent and comprehensive, yet distinctly Indian, justification for anti-British pro-Hindu activism. He believed that the divergent sects of India could converge to form ‘a mighty Hindu nation’ if they would only follow the original principles of the Hindu tradition as set forth in such texts as the Rāmāyana and the Bhagavadgītā. And this convergence should be the goal of all Hindus.1 Tilak's interpretations of these texts, especially the Gītā, provided him with his ‘justification’ which rationalized his political work in religious guise.

The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom … respect the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live, and they wish to see sovereign rights restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.

Historians, statesmen, administrators, nationalists and others have disagreed sharply about the impact of modernization in the era of Western domination. Did Western rule provide the tools for Indian progress but did economically medieval, ‘other-worldly’ Indians fail to maximize the benefits of modernization and even thwart advances? Conversely, did Western imperialism systematically impoverish India by making it a ‘satellite,’ freezing the subcontinent into a neo-feudal social pattern while sucking up its wealth? Finally, is a ‘new revisionist’ interpretation correct that India experienced real if undramatic economic growth during the Western era and that notions of exploitation or Indian suffering induced by development were myths? Interpretations expressing either the great success and benign innovations of Western rule, or its exploitiveness both appear flawed, according to Bombay's modernizing experience. Bombay underwent a great expansion of wealth and became the source of India's new factory textile production, the hub of a great newwork of trasport and trade, and the cosmopolitan abode of wealth Indian merchants, industrialist and professionals, whose affluence, modernity, industrializing activies and eventual nationalist orientation distinguished them from a supine or neo-feudal comprador class, cooperating with Western masters in exploiting ‘natives’ for a myrmidon's share of the profits. Alternatively, Bombay's prosperity did not flow down to the masses; its modernization was complex, dynamically helping to produce progress and wealth, but for some decades impoverishing and destroying many lives. In the half-century of rapid development preceding the first world war, the great majority of Bombay's populace, its ordinary working classes, experienced significant declines in living standards, worsening environmental conditions and escalating death-rates. Diminished real income and increased mortality among Bombay's ordinary inhabitants warn against extrapolating from rising indices of material production an optimistic conclusion about the general human condition in the city or in British India.

The Cultivation System, introduced by the Dutch in Java in 1830, was grounded on peasant coercion. Capitalizing on the colonial government's ability to force peasants to produce large, cheap and regular quantities of tropical agricultural goods and to labour unrelentingly at a great variety of other tasks, the System succeeded in its aim of transforming Java from a financial millstone around Holland's neck into a highly profitable resource. Coercion, in the eyes of the Cultivation System's founder and guiding light, Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch (1830–33), was the most appropriate and effective means of creating wealth from Java's peasant masses. The power of incentive alone, he argued, had failed in the recent past to spur the Javanese to greater productive activity because the peasant had not reached the required stage of social development. ‘Never forget’, he remarked in 1830, ‘that the javan has progressed no further in intellectual terms than our children of 12 or 13 years old, and possesses even much less knowledge than they do. They must be led and governed as children…’. Van den Bosch's branch of coercion, however, was not a blunt instrument. It was based upon the time-worn notion of domesticating the indigenous elite and employing its customary authority over the peasantry to achieve Dutch ends. Under the overall direction of the colonial authorities and their officials, then, peasants were to be ‘led and governed’ by their own leaders, for whom, Van den Bosch claimed, they possessed a ‘childlike respect’.

One of the paradoxes of the history of Islam in the twentieth century is that many of the first Muslim socialists were men who at earlier stages in their lives had been devout Muslims, often passionately involved in the fate of Islam throughout the world. In Russia, socialists emerged from various silsila of the Naqshbandi sufi order, most notably the Vaisites of Kazan who fought alongside workers and soldiers in 1917 and 1918. In Indonesia, many sufi shaikhs became Communist party activitsts in the midst of the Sarekat Islam's great pan-Islamic protest of the early 1920S.In India, Muslim socialists came from those who, concerned to defend Islam wherever it was threatened and in particular the institution of the Khilafat, had come to oppose their British masters. These champions of Islam sought help against the British from Muslims outside India; they supported Britain's enemies. A few actually left India in order to join other Muslims in their fight against the British. Their experiences in Afghanistan and Central Asia brought disillusionment. They discovered that others did not share their faith in the brotherhood of Islam; they began to consider other ideologies. Some were convinced by the Bolsheviks, who supported Muslim peoples and opposed the imperialism of the West, that socialism might offer the key to success in their struggle against the British. In the process they discovered similarities between Islamic and Bolshevik ideology, which eased their transition to socialism.

The choice of the word ‘perspective’ in the title of this lecture exploits the ambiguity to which the English language so happily lends itself. For the lecture will, on the one hand, look back over the valley of the years at the research project on technology and agrarian change in two rice-growing areas, one in Sri Lanka and the other in Tamil Nadu, which was organized from the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridgejust over ten years ago, remembering some of its findings (see Farmer, 1977) and discussing certain further changes that have taken place in the study area and elsewhere in South Asia in those ten years. The project, it should be said, was inter-disciplinary; involved both sample surveys and studies in depth; and can claim to have attained the fruitful relationship between disciplines and between techniques of field study that some have described as ‘hard to achieve’ (e.g., Hoben and Timberg, 1980).

An underlying premise of much of the comment on developing countries' agricultural research organizations and capabilities, has been that they are weak, and have been unsuccessful in generating new technologies and meeting farmers' needs. Indeed, one of the very justifications for the setting up of the series of international research institutes, such as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) was that national research programmes were seen to lack sufficient strength and organization to be able to respond to the urgent needs of food production that were identified in the 1960s. It was argued that a primary role of the International Centres would be to support and develop such national research programmes both through training and the provision of new plant varieties and technologies, and that the building up of local research capability in developing countries would come only after the International Research Centres had developed and transferred the new technologies.

The concept of the city as religious centre, administrative capital and economic pivot for a society, state or kingdom, expressed in the Islamic concept of madina (Gibbs and Kramers 1961: 291; Lapidus 1969: 69) pre-dates Muslim influence in Southeast Asia. The physical as well as functional characteristics of the Southeast Asian city, deriving from its urban features, as distinct from its rural surroundings, were a culmination of gradual evolution since the rise, about the middle of the second century A.D., of the first trading ports and cities. The distinction between the city as urban centre and its rural surroundings is attested in the traditional Javanese view of the negara. In the fourteenth century Nawanatya the negara is defined as ‘all where one can go out (of his compound) without passing through paddy fields’ (Pigeaud 1960, 3: 121). It is by virtue of their evolutionary origins through their total symbiosis with the surrounding rural peripheries that Middle-Eastern and Southeast Asian cities, even pre-dating Islam, contrasted significantly with the cities of Medieval Christendom with formally constituted municipal laws and corporate institutions (Hourani 1970: 15).1 The pre-eminence of cities in their composite role as capitals for religious, political and economic activity was a significant feature of the historical evolution of pre-modern Southeast Asia and will constitute the definition of a city within the purview of this survey.