Milton's presentation of his various literary characters can be controversial because so many people still believe in, or worry about, the actual existence of some of his most important ones: Adam, Eve, Satan, Jesus. But Milton's God is especially controversial. For all Milton's 'language of accommodation' (see PL 5.572-4, 6.893, 7.176-9), Milton never presents his God as if he is not really God, the eternal and almighty Being who created the heavens and the earth, who reveals himself in the Bible and in the life and person of Jesus Christ, and to whom all beings owe thanks and worship for his goodness and greatness. Moreover, to believe or not to believe in this God is such a fundamental thing that one cannot realistically join the conversation created by Paradise Lost and expect one's belief or unbelief to go unaddressed. Nevertheless, Milton does not force the issue concerning belief in God's mere existence, for that is something he simply assumes; for him God's existence is a premise much more than a conclusion (see YP 6: 130-2). In spite of the radical polarities of belief about God in Paradise Lost, its humans and devils and angels are united in this: they all believe that he is.

Milton's prose is probably most often approached from the perspective of its political content or its polemical skill. Much of it was written during the period 1641-60, when Milton contributed to the attack on episcopacy, opposed more conservative Puritans by redefining the relationship between church and state and by proposing changes to the law relating to the right to publish, and defended the English republic while justifying the execution of Charles I. Milton's mastery of the arts of persuasion makes a rewarding study in itself, and demonstrably the political values explicitly developed in the prose suffuse his major poems in pervasive and complex ways. Martin Dzelzainis offers an account of Milton's politics in chapter five; my principal concern is with Milton's style, though, as we shall see, issues of style cannot be separated from politics.

All of Milton's earliest vernacular prose, that is, his five antiprelatical tracts of 1641‒2, and some of his pamphlets of 1643‒5, including what is currently his most popular, Areopagitica (1644), are characterized by a flamboyant style, rich in imagery and lexically innovative to the point of playfulness. In it, metaphors and similes abound, often in great elaboration.

That eight biographies of John Milton were written within sixty years of his death in 1674 not only demonstrates the popularity of his works during the first half of the eighteenth century, but also suggests the enduring strength of Milton's personality. Because most of these accounts were published with editions of Milton's works, readers became accustomed to interpreting his writings biographically. Milton still had his detractors - William Winstanley in his 1687 dictionary of English poets, for example, dismissed Milton as 'a notorious Traytor' who had 'most impiously and villanously bely'd that blessed Martyr, King Charles the First' (195) - but such attacks only encouraged readers to approach Milton's works as a function of his identity. As Samuel Johnson complained in his Lives of the English Poets, the 'blaze' of Milton's reputation was preventing people from examining his poetry objectively (1: 163, 165).

In 1740 the Whig scholar Francis Peck announced that Tyrannicall- Government Anatomized, published (according to its title page) on 30 January 1642 by order of a committee of the House of Commons, was in fact the work of John Milton. Peck argued, plausibly enough, that the publication of this work (which he identified as a translation of Baptistes (The Baptist), a Latin tragedy by the sixteenth-century humanist George Buchanan) was a riposte to Charles I's notorious attempt to arrest five members of the Commons in January 1642. For the leading figures in Buchanan's dramatization of the conspiracy against John the Baptist 'might be understood to answer to the characters of divers great persons then living'. The seventeenth-century counterparts of King Herod, his wife Herodias, and the High Priest Malchus, were King Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria, and Archbishop Laud; and the play thus formed a stinging commentary on the 'league between LAUD & HENRIETTA MARIA, to extirpate the protestant religion in the three nations'. Peck's case for declaring Milton the translator rested on Milton's 'utter aversion for the clergy of every sort', on the fact that 'LIBERTY was MILTON'S darling subject', and on 'the republican turn of his principles' (Peck, 271, 274, 276, 279).

[Note: Those who wish to use this bibliography on-line may do so by directing their browser to the following Universal Resource Locator: <http: //purl.0clc.org/emls/iemls/p0stprint/CCM2Bibli0.html>.]

If Milton's oeuvre itself is daunting, Milton scholarship must appear much more so. Huckabay and Klemp (see 23, below) document some 4,500 studies appearing between the years 1968 and 1988 alone; the MLA International Bibliography (see 32, below) records another 1,500 for the ten years prior to 1998; and several hundred items a year continue to be published. Inordinate as this plethora of writings may sometimes seem, it is in fact a measure of Milton's continued vitality, and it offers the student of Milton much good company. Although of course there is no substitute for firsthand engagement with Milton himself, the following list of over three hundred items is intended (complementary to the reading lists at the end of the preceding chapters) as an avenue into the disparate but companionable society of Milton's many editors, expositors, critics, and admirers - and also as a tool with which one may develop one's own links with the ongoing world of Milton scholarship.

Milton read Scripture with a commitment to its themes, genres, and style. He read its two Testaments thematically as forming one body of saving truth, consistent but gradually becoming clearer to the understanding. He read it genetically as consisting of law, story, prophets, and poetry, the poetry divisible into further genres. He read the poetry as composed, stylistically, with greater skill and purity than any other ancient national poetry. These three modes of reading influenced his own poems from the beginning to the end of his career, as he took scriptural themes, events, or doctrines for them, adapted scriptural genres to them, and echoed biblical style in them.

The earliest of his poems Milton thought worth saving were English paraphrases of Psalms 114 and 136, the first carrying the headnote 'This and the following Psalm were done by the Author at fifteen years old' (Poems 6). The last of his poems, Paradise Regained, published when he was sixty-three, was a debate poem like Job, with a plot taken from Luke, expounding an interpretation of Christ's redemptive work drawn from Hebrews, framed by angelic hymns, and foregrounded by human laments modelled on Psalms. That last poem is a particularly good place to see what reading the Bible meant to Milton, since it engages with Jesus at the moment when by his own reading of Scripture he understands his messiahship and holds to it throughout Satan's temptations. At that moment, the New Testament interprets the Old, changing, for Milton, the way the Hebrew Bible should thereafter be understood.

This book began with an account of academic theories and debates, but it has argued throughout that no one model or explanatory formula can account for either the durability or the dynamism of caste. Indeed it has held that it requires the insights of both history and social anthropology to explore and interpret this contentious and multi-faceted element of Indian life.

Of course there have been other interdisciplinary studies of the subcontinent; these have inspired the methodology if not necessarily the conclusions of this work. Yet the fact remains that, for many historians of India, it has been difficult to relate the issues debated by anthropologists to the problems which they see in relation to caste, both in the distant past and in more recent times. So too for many anthropologists who, while acknowledging the fluidity of the Indian social order, have in some cases relied on oversimplified historical language in the attempt to identify its ‘traditional’, ‘colonial’ or ‘modern’ aspects.

It is not surprising then that the two disciplines sometimes seem far apart in their treatment of the subcontinent. Yet the two fields can and should be brought together, as has been done for so many other socially complex environments. As far as caste is concerned, striking things happen when we attach historical perspectives to the anthropologists’ models. The principles identified by social scientists need no longer be taken as contradictory or mutually exclusive; nor need we opt for only one key theme in the analysis of caste, be this power, purity or orientalist constructions. What can be seen instead is a multidimensional story of changing and interpenetrating reference points.

THEMES AND APPROACHES

This book is an attempt to account for and interpret the phenomenon of caste in the Indian subcontinent. It deals primarily with the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day, though the first two chapters explore the spread of castelike norms and values in the age of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Indian dynasts.

Of all the topics that have fascinated and divided scholars of south Asia, caste is probably the most contentious. Defined by many specialists as a system of elaborately stratified social hierarchy that distinguishes India from all other societies, caste has achieved much the same significance in social, political and academic debate as race in the United States, class in Britain and faction in Italy. It has thus been widely thought of as the paramount fact of life in the subcontinent, and for some, as the very core or essence of south Asian civilisation.

There is of course an enormous body of academic writing on caste. Studies by anthropologists and other social scientists provide a wealth of closely observed ethnographic detail; many propose sophisticated theoretical interpretations. So, given the notorious sensitivity of this terrain, what is the case for an attempt to explore it from an historical perspective?

In recent years historians have broken much new ground in the study of political and economic change in the subcontinent, both before and during the colonial period. But caste, which is best seen as a meeting ground between everyday Indian life and thought and the strategies of rulers and other arbiters of moral and social order, tends to provoke more heated debate than almost anything else in the specialist literature.