In his 1955 book, The Political Role of Women, Maurice Duverger brought our attention to the lack of representation of women in politics. Since that time, the dismal underrepresentation of women in politics has not much improved. Few women rise to leadership positions in politics; as Jean Blondel found in a more recent cross-cultural comparison of political leaders, less than 0.005 percent of all leaders were women (1987, 116–17). Regarding women's political participation, political scientists used to assert that women tended to “limit attention to the superficial and irrelevant aspects of politics” (Lane 1959, 213). Many argued that women had a different political view than did men: they were apolitical, they personalized politics, and they adopted their husbands' political orientations. Accordingly, they became political leaders only by default, as substitutes for deceased husbands or fathers.

The penal colony that the british established in the Andaman Islands at the end of the 1850s was originally intended as a place of permanent exile for a particular class of Indian criminals. These offenders had, for the most part, been convicted by special tribunals in connection with the Indian rebellions of 1857–58. As the British vision of rehabilitation in the Andamans evolved, the former rebels were joined in the islands by men and women convicted under the Indian Penal Code. In the islands, transported criminals were subjected to various techniques of physical, spatial, occupational, and political discipline (Sen 1998). The slow transition from a convicted criminal to a prisoner in a chain gang, to employment as a Self-Supporter or a convict officer in the service of the prison regime, to life as a free settler in a penal colony was in effect a process by which the state sought to transform the criminal classes of colonial India—the disloyal, the idle, the elusive and the disorderly—into loyal, orderly, and governable subjects.

While modern readers willingly acknowledge the virtues of informing themselves about the ways the cultural contexts of fiction of various times and places differ from their own and the ramifications this may have for interpretation, we tend to assume that the emotions depicted in the fiction of other cultures are essentially the same as those we find in our own hearts. Scholars of literature exert considerable effort to help readers understand such things as contemporary political systems, kinship structures, marriage practices, and norms of etiquette, but we have not wondered whether the smiles, tears, and frowns of characters of other times and places reflect the same feelings as our own. Love, hate, jealousy, anger, joy, and sadness are popularly taken to be universal human emotions. However, classroom experience teaching classical Japanese literature and close readings of texts have led me to the conclusion that there are subtle but significant differences between the nature of love as depicted in premodern Japanese literature and love as we expect to find it in American society today.

While boating down the ganges delta on a visit to the Reserve Forest Tiger Sanctuary, I noticed on the bank some idols overlooking the river. When I asked about their significance, it was explained that a tiger had killed and carried off a girl; these idols were meant to ward off future attacks. Since I was on tour with a West Bengal government Secretary who had police bodyguards to protect him against pirates and tigers, we had none of the apprehensions locals experienced. As the launch continued downstream, the conversation among the government officials took an unexpected turn. They talked of a massacre in the area of Untouchable refugees who had illegally settled in the protected forest reserve: the killings were said to number in the thousands of families.