‘Individual’ (cá nhân) came to theVietnamese language in the first decades of the twentieth century, alongwith a host of other evocative neologisms, such as ‘society’(xã hôi), ‘ethnic group/nation’(dân tôc), ‘ideology’(chu' nghĩa), ‘democracy’ (dânchu' chu' nghĩa), ‘science’(khoa hoc), and ‘progress’ (tiêńhóa). Initially, ‘individual’ was very much the poorrelation among these new concepts—merely an irreducible human unitbelonging to something else more significant. Thus, each individual wasurged to be a loyal citizen of the nation, an eager participant in some newpolitical organization, or a responsible member of society. Individuals wereoften compared with cells in the body, each one having a legitimate role insustaining and enhancing the vitality of the organism, but meaningless andincapable of surviving on their own. On the other hand, the danger alsoexisted of individuals acting in a selfish, short-sighted manner, whichcould jeopardize the larger order of things. Such persons were said to bewitting or unwitting perpetrators of ‘individualism’(cá nhân chu' nghĩa).

Although the issue of citizenship has attracted the interest of somepolitical scientists in relation to the problems of contemporary Indiandemocracy, historians have generally tended to shy away from exploringthe concrete demands for civic rights that accompanied, but were by nomeans identical with, the struggle for national self-determination. Indeed,the dominance of nationalist and nation-oriented frameworks in Indianhistorical writing has tended to thwart interest in the materialities oflocal issues directly affecting the livelihoods of people. The astoundinglylow profile accorded to what Manuel Castells described more than a quarterof a century ago as ‘the urban question’, is a revealing manifestation ofthe relative neglect of local and social histories.

As Jog Maya remarked to me, there are religions enough for everyone tochoose, just like vegetables in the morning bazaar. Gellner 1992:70

The family was in continuous communion with a whole range of businessassociates, gods and men. Bayly 1983:390

Of late, increasing attention has focused on (mainly male) constructions ofwomen in colonial India. On the one side, it has been noted how Europeanwomen were frequently held responsible and disparaged for upsetting thecomparatively relaxed relationships existing between British (especiallymales) and Indians (especially females) up to the late eighteenthcentury. Seen as the staunchest upholders (if not the keenest advocates) ofracial distinctions which evolved in the course of the nineteenth century,European women were vilified for elaborating (if not actually creating)social and cultural hierarchies which led to a widening of the distancebetween colonizer and colonized. At the same time, they were stereotyped asfrivolous, vain, snobbish and selfish (Barr 1976: 197; 1989: 1; Brownfoot1984: 186). Indeed, Gartrell suggests that ‘few women have been describedso negatively as the British memsahibs’ (1984: 165). In drawing attentionto these portrayals, a number of writers have recently pointed out, inmitigation, that the memsahibs were simply reproducing official Britishattitudes, were themselves proud symbols of British power, and subjectsof a strict patriarchal culture within European circles (see Barr 1989: 5;Bharucha 1994: 88–9).

Ever since its beginning, organized dalit politics under the leadership ofDr B. R. Ambedkar had been consistently moving away from the Indian NationalCongress and the Gandhian politics of integration. It was drifting towardsan assertion of separate political identity of its own, which in the end wasenshrined formally in the new constitution of the All India Scheduled CasteFederation, established in 1942. A textual discursive representation ofthis sense of alienation may be found in Ambedkar's book, What Congress andGandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, published in 1945. Yet, within twoyears, in July 1947, we find Ambedkar accepting Congress nomination for aseat in the Constituent Assembly. A few months later he was inducted intothe first Nehru Cabinet of free India, ostensibly on the basis of arecommendation from Gandhi himself. In January 1950, speaking at a generalpublic meeting in Bombay, organized by the All India Scheduled CastesFederation, he advised the dalits to co-operate with the Congress and tothink of their country first, before considering their sectarianinterests. But then within a few months again, this alliance brokedown over his differences with Congress stalwarts, who, among otherthings, refused to support him on the Hindu Code Bill. He resigned fromthe Cabinet in 1951 and in the subsequent general election in 1952, he wasdefeated in the Bombay parliamentary constituency by a political nonentity,whose only advantage was that he contested on a Congress ticket. Ambedkar'schief election agent, Kamalakant Chitre described this electoral debacle asnothing but a ‘crisis’.

Pursued over the last two years of the Pacific war, the Free French effortto organize and direct an effective resistance to the Japanese occupation ofIndo-China ended in military failure. Characterized by administrativecomplexity, inadequate supplies and attenuated communications, Gaullistinsurgency was marred by Free France's de facto reliance upon AdmiralLouis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command (SEAC). While there-conquest of Malaya and Burma remained incomplete, British backing fora resistance network in Indo-China was bound to be limited. And as Britishinterest in the final re-conquest of their own territories climaxed in thespring and summer of 1945, so material provision for the French inIndo-China inevitably declined. Although Mountbatten consistently supportedhis Free French protégés, Churchill, in particular, wasreluctant to take issue with his American allies. Neither the US governmentnor American commanders in China and the Pacific supported Free Frenchmethods and objectives. By 1945, the American Office of Strategic Services(OSS), dedicated to supporting guerrilla warfare and resistanceorganization, and the Office of War Information (OWI), which disseminatedUS propaganda, were developing independent contacts inside northernIndo-China. As a result, the OSS increasingly endorsed the one trulyeffective resistance movement: Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh coalition.

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese embarked upon a swiftideological transition that enabled them to accept a considerable influx ofWestern ideas and systems. A key to their successful adoption of the valuesof ostensibly different cultures has often been attributed by observers ofJapan to the receptivity and adaptability of the Japanese to new, alienelements. Yet, the receptivity of the Japanese to alien elements as the keyis inherently connected to their recognition of affinities found indifferent cultures. Valuable insights on the process of Meiji acculturationwill be gathered from a case study based on the examination of the earlyyears of the Sapporo Agricultural College, established to acceleratemodernization, and the impact on the students of the values inculcated bythe New Englander staff. A study of their interaction suggests that it wasthe affinities the Japanese found between Japanese syncretic, revisionist,thought development and values of different cultures that formed thefoundation for successful assimilation of elements of Western culture, aprocess that also helped the Japanese to reinvestigate and remould theirown cultural tradition.