Few books are exemplars of real hard work sustained over a lengthy period of time as is John Smith's The Epic of Pabuji(1991). Starting his investigation of the scroll of cloth painting in 1973, a huge structure measuring fifteen feet by four, locally termed par, before which this epic is sung by a special caste of people, lower in hierarchy, called Naik Bhopa, Smith in a span of eighteen years has accomplished a work of lasting stay in the ethnographic tradition of south Asia as well as the discipline of folklore in general. Before this book was published, he had also contributed some important papers (in 1986 and 1989) on Pabu-ji. As far as I know, it is rare that Sanskritists, which Smith is at Cambridge, pay attention to ‘popular (or “non-Sanskritic”) traditions’ of people, and if at all they do, introducing the anthropological method of fieldwork in their study, their works are still laden with Indological references and scholarship where the actual voice of people is lost in oblivion or relegated to the back seat. But it does not happen with Smith; he is not only committed to listening to people's voice in its own right and place, but also provides a fair, up to date, and scholarly account of Pabu-ji's story and its role and niche in the local culture of Rajasthan. Therefore, his work is also of considerable interest to anthropologists, especially those working on the sociology of cult, popular religion, and non- literate traditions and their meanings.

The Indian state of West Bengal is governed and politically dominated by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M) for short) which has been in Government there since 1977 as the largest constituent party to the ruling Left Front. The CPI(M)'s position in West Bengal is unique both in India and in the world in the sense that it is the only Communist party to be popularly elected and reelected to power for such a long period. Today it draws most of its electoral support from the rural areas where the party is supported by peasants of practically all socio-economic sections. It is to an interesting period in the history of Communism in Bengal that this article will turn, namely to the creation of a particular alliance of Marxists and peasants in the restlessness in that state in the late 1960s and the virtual elimination of non-Marxist forces in large areas.

If to Gandhi goes the credit of having drawn out Indian women from their cloistered protected environment to join the national movement for freedom, to Jawaharlal Nehru surely goes the credit for having recognized the need formally to grant equality between the sexes and to enshrine it in the Fundamental Rights drawn up at the Karachi Congress of 1931.

The literature on the new international division of labour (NIDL) highlights the rapid growth of the electronics industry in East and Southeast Asia. By contrast, the Indian electronics industry has received less attention because of its traditional emphasis upon import substitution and relatively weak articulation with the prevailing global division of labour. Moreover, the application of the microchip technology in India is still in its early stages, though government interest and support for it suggest a promising future. Nevertheless, in computer software India is emerging as a competitive location for software development and exports.

A puzzling feature of interwar Anglo-Indian economic relations is the contrast between Whitehall's relatively hands-off attitude to Indian tariff policies, and its insistent hands-on approach to monetary policy issues in the colony. Both sets of issues were, at various times, equally contentious. But while Britain's strategic objectives in India paved the way for the Fiscal Autonomy Convention, the road towards a similar monetary ‘convention’ was never taken. Rather, thanks to Britain's external financial problems, the interwar decades saw initially a tightening, and later a refinement, of London's control over Indian monetary policies. This paper hopes to set out the processes at work more clearly than has been attempted before, and to account for them. The interpretation offered here is consistent with the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ explanation of British imperialism during the interwar years, and of the postwar de-colonization process.

In the 1970s the Gandhian movement split over fundamental philosophical issues and twenty years later it has not yet recovered. While the generally presented reasons for the decline of the Gandhian movement since Gandhi's death show substantial depth of analysis, they nevertheless overlook one essential aspect. They focus on issues such as whether a movement that was effective against a specific enemy, for example the British, can continue when the focus of the movement has been removed, and whether such a movement that stresses selfsacrifice can survive in an emerging consumerist and ‘democratic’ society, whether it is really anachronistic and inapplicable as we move towards the twenty-first century. Or perhaps, it is argued, that the movement was not able to survive the passing of a charismatic leader, especially when that leader's philosophy was adopted by the populace as a policy because of its instrumental value rather than as a creed and, further, that the leader was determined not to set up a sect of the chosen faithful around himself.

This paper is an attempt to understand one case of ‘ethnic’ conflict in India—Assam. By looking closely at this one case I hope we will understand better the phenomenon of India's persistent dilemma of micro-nationalist politics that from time to time seems to be fundamentally at odds with India's macro-nationalist project. To be sure, despite the seriousness of some of these conflicts—say Punjab and Kashmir at present, or Assam until recently—the incidence of micro-nationalist dissent should be kept in perspective. The Indian state can claim quite a bit of success in its project of ‘nation building’-it has been able to incorporate micro-nationalist dissent of a number of peoples by using persuasive and coercive means at its disposal. Moreover, cven conflicts that appear stubborn at one time turn out to be surprisingly amenable to negotiated settlement. Irrespective of the Indian state's ability to manage micro-nationalist dissent, the assumption that nationalisms have a telos that inevitably leads to a demand for separation relies on a rather sloppy and lazy naturalist theory of the nature and origins of nations and nation states. What the Indian experience forces us to confront is the fate of nationalism and the nation state as they spread worldwide as a modal form. In the Indian subcontinent these new forms that privilege 'formal boundedness over substantive interelationships," come face to face with a civilisation that represents a particularly complex way of ordering diversity.2 In a subcontinent where the historical legacy of state formation is marked by an intermittent tension between the imperial state and regional kingdoms, nationalisms and the nation state may have proved to be rather unfortunate modern transplants.3

A number of papers have been written in the west on the subject of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia. Hyer and Heaton's (1968) account of the period in the China Quarterly deals with events up until 1968, and relies heavily upon an analysis of the news reports broadcast by Radio Inner Mongolia at that time. The paper focuses upon the fate of Ulanhu, the Chairman of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region who fell from power during the Cultural Revolution. Hyer and Heaton are concerned primarily with the power struggles within the political apparatus, and they include no first-hand or eyewitness accounts. The paper gives no indication of the effects of the Cultural Revolution upon the great bulk of the population of the I.M.A.R., either Mongolian or Han Chinese. However, the article does carefully document the rapidly changing tide of Inner Mongolian government policy and the emergence of populist groups which challenged the political establishment, over the period 1965 to 1968.