As the conflict entered its third winter, an Allied victory appeared remote and uncertain. The bloody four-month Battle of the Somme had sputtered out in the cold and rain of November with negligible gains. Despite strenuous efforts, the Italian offensives along the Isonzo River in 1916 had not succeeded in denting the Austrian line or pushing it back significantly. Hopes that Romania, which joined the Entente on August 17, 1916, would become a factor in the war had been quickly dashed when it was overrun by the Central Powers four months later. In June 1916 Russian armies under General Brusilov attacked the Austrians along a wide front, but their advance, which began with such promise, was thrown back when the Germans rushed troops to support their ally. When the fighting ended, the Russians had lost another million men and their army was practically finished. On the seas, German U-boats were taking an increasing toll on Allied and neutral shipping. Sir John Jellicoe, then C-in-C of the Grand Fleet, found it necessary to warn the cabinet that shipping losses on the present scale might drive the Allies out of the war by the early summer of 1917. Adding to this somber picture was the cost of the war, which had risen to about £5,000,000 a day. In the autumn of 1916 the Treasury revealed that Britain's reserves of gold and convertible securities were nearly exhausted and that soon it would have to finance the war with US loans.

Adopting the diverse roles of spy, missionary, and Arabian explorer, like his contemporary Burton, Gifford Palgrave was an outsider who travelled both in order to test himself and in pursuit of an identity. Brought up in a conventional Anglican household though half Jewish through his father, Palgrave enjoyed a controversial reputation during his lifetime owing to perceived disloyalty to his country. After a brilliant academic career at Charterhouse and Oxford he surprised his family by giving up his studies to join the army in India in 1847. An even greater shock ensued when he converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit in South India in March 1848, staying at Jesuit College, Negapatam, and then Collegio Romano, Rome until 1855. In the same year he travelled to Syria as Father Michel Sohail, where he witnessed in 1860 the massacre of Maronite Christians during their conflict with the Druze. By now well versed in Arabic language and culture, he went to Arabia as an agent of Napoleon III in the disguises of a Syrian doctor/merchant. He set out from Ma'an in June 1862 and traversed the heart of Central Arabia to Ha'il via Djowf and Jebel Shammar, then went on to Riyadh from where he crossed the Dahna desert to Hufuf, sailing around the northern coasts of Bahrain. Here Palgrave departed from his travelling companion, continuing to Qatar then through the straits of Hormuz, completing his journey in Muscat.

Son of a small Eskdale farmer, Malcolm went to India as a boy soldier for the East India Company and his career took off there under the patronage of Lord Wellesley. A second career as a diplomat began when aged 30 he was sent as the Company's envoy to Persia in 1799. A speaker of Persian and admirer of Persian poetry with experience of the etiquette of the Persianized courts of the Indian Nawabs, Malcolm seemed well qualified to lead a diplomatic mission to Persia, and should his superiors have chosen to employ force he could equally have put to use his military skills. Although he negotiated a treaty with Persia in 1801 this was never ratified, and after the French gained a foothold in Persia in 1807, Malcolm sailed to Bushire with a military force to threaten dire consequences if the Shah did not expel them. The option was still open to seize Kharg Island in the Gulf; however Harford Jones pursued the diplomatic route, arriving in Tehran in 1809 to successfully negotiate a new treaty. Malcolm's mission to replace Jones and restore the preeminence of the Indian Government in Persian affairs was unfruitful. Knighted in 1815, he spent the last three years of his career as Governor of Bombay, retiring in 1830. Given his limited early education and soldier's background, Malcolm's achievement as a writer is all the more remarkable.

At the close of Act I, a new day dawning prompted a Panthea “who loves” to leave Prometheus and seek out Asia. Now in response, an Asia with her eyes fixed on the same “point…[of the morning star] quivering still/Deep in the orange light of widening morn” implores her sister “wear[ing]/The shadow of that soul by which I live” (30–31) not to delay any longer but to come:

Act I starts out with Prometheus in chains; its successor begins with Asia in suspense, hanging on every word her sister might be bringing of Prometheus.

But at this dawn of a new day and a new act, Panthea does not directly tell Asia what has happened to Prometheus in his long night of pain and bondage. Instead, she tells of two dreams that have presumably arisen from within the tortured psychic and textual space of Act I.

In the satirical Letters of Obscure Men circulated by Crotus Rubeanus, Ulrich von Hutten and others shortly before the Lutheran Reformation, one of the lampooned old-style clerics pours scorn on Erasmus' new learning:

In fact, all through the Letters, special scorn is poured on ‘poets’, i.e. those who have imbibed the new literary and philological tenets of the Revival of Learning. In another letter, Erasmus is coupled with the clerics' special target, the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin:

The first Chinese immigrant to Calcutta was Yang Tai Chow. He arrived in 1778 on the banks of the Hooghly. He gathered together a group of Chinese, many of whom had jumped ship and decided to stay on in the area of Calcutta or were working on the Khidderpore docks. Yang started a sugar mill with the eventual goal of saving enough to start a tea trade. Though history has obliterated the sugar mill, Yang's endeavour has been immortalized in the Bengali word for sugar, chini, which is derived from the Mandarin (similar to the Bengali word for porcelain, chinamati). Yang, known locally as Tong Achi, established the first Chinese community in the area which came to be known as Achipur, a place 33 km from Calcutta, near Budge Budge. The place no longer has any Chinese inhabitants but Yang Tai Chow's grave, and a temple that he built, are still visited by the Calcutta Chinese at the time of the Chinese New Year to seek his blessings.

Geographical proximity of the city to China and its accessibility by land made Calcutta the natural choice for many emigrating Chinese. The first record of modern Chinese immigration to India, writes Haraprasad Roy, can be found in a short notice in the Chinese book of 1820, A Maritime Record. It mentions the city of Calcutta as housing a small Chinese population from Fujian (Fukien) and Guangdong (Canton).

For a writer often credited with radically changing the style of earlier nineteenth-century English travel writing, Alexander William Kinglake had a surprisingly conventional background and upbringing, and lived the largely uneventful life of a Victorian gentleman. Born into a well-off family in Taunton Somerset, like his father he went into the law, though without any great success. Eton and Cambridge would have strengthened a predilection for Classics first given him by his mother and which is inscribed in the Greek title (‘from the East’) of his celebrated work of travel. Eothen, or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East was published in 1844, a decade after its author set out on a tour of the Levant. It is the product of a young, unattached Englishman confident in the superiority of his class, race and nation. Rejected by the publisher John Murray on account of its irreverent style, ‘it had undergone more than thirty printings by the end of the century’ (Corwin, DLB/166: 191). In the preface Kinglake made it clear he had intentionally produced a travel book that ‘was quite superficial in character’ having ‘discarded from it all valuable material derived from the work of others.’ However, while displaying his ‘egoism and colonial attitudes’ these are ‘continually undercut by his irony’ (Baker LTE: 677) and self-mockery. At the Catholic church in Tiberias, for example, the English gentleman sneers at the genuflections of a local ministrant only to break into a lament over ‘the fleas of all nations’ consuming his flesh.

On First Impressions and Lasting Choices

“The first impression is always the strongest,” writes Doroshevich of his initial view of Sakhalin island, and this well-worn adage is also appropriate here, for this translation introduces Doroshevich to English-language readers. Despite having been imperial Russia's most famous and successful journalist; having changed Russian journalism with his feuilleton-style; having been read by every segment of society and lauded by such literati as L. N. Tolstoi, A. P. Chekhov, V. G. Korolenko, A. M. Gor′kii and V. V. Stasov; and despite his Sakhalin feuilletons' renewed popularity in post-Communist Russia, Doroshevich remains largely unknown to non-Russian readers. A pity, for he deserves wider recognition.

Vlas Mikhailovich Doroshevich was born 5 April 1864 (old style) to Aleksandra Ivanovna Sokolova (1836–1914), of the wealthy and titled Denis′ev clan of Riazan′ Province. Details concerning Vlas's father are vague, but he appears to have been an unsuccessful writer who died shortly before his son's birth. Aleksandra was educated at the prestigious Smol′nyi Institute, but was disinherited by her parents for having married beneath her social status. Struggling, and with two other children, Aleksandra took her son when he was six months old to Moscow and gave him to a childless woman and her husband, one Mikhail Doroshevich, with a note pinned to the infant's blouse requesting he be called Blez (Blaise) in honor of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Granddaughter of Lord Byron, Anne Isabella Noel became Lady Anne Blunt on her marriage with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in 1869. Together they formed a travelling couple, embarking on a series of journeys in the Muslim world beginning with Anatolia (1873) Algeria (1874) the Egyptian Western Desert (1876), Mesopotamia and Persia (1877–78) and the deserts of Central Arabia (1879). Lady Anne reports the last two in Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (1879) and A Pilgrimage to Nejd (1881). Her travel writings were developed from notes taken on the spot, and rewritten material initially based on impressions and dialogues (Hout DLB/174: 44). Wilfrid added introductions and also acted as ‘editor’, by no means an unusual practice given the unequal gender relations of the period, which required: ‘a woman's representation of the exotic Other … to be authorized by a male orientalist’, and demarcated roles ‘between the woman as fieldworker and the man as analytical theorist’ (Behdad 1994: 95, 97). These writings propose an ideal of an Arab aristocracy of the desert, initially stimulated by Palgrave and later by the Blunts' contact with sheykhs and emirs on their travels. They established a winter retreat, Sheykh Obeyd, in the desert outside Cairo from which Wilfrid was banned for several years after his involvement with the nationalist side in the Urabi revolution of 1881–2. They also assembled a stud of Arabian horses at Crabbet, their Sussex estate.

Nayantara Sahgal's Rich Like Us (1985) is her most ambitious and complex novel. Its importance, both artistic and political, was recognized in its being awarded the Sinclair Prize for fiction and the Sahitya Akademi award for the best Indian book in English for the year 1986. It is also the key novel to consider if we are examining how the women characters respond to the tradition–modernity issue. In it we find Sahgal's most scathing attack on tradition and her most radical political critique of India. Finally, in Rich Like Us, Sahgal properly enters the fictional domain of postmodernism. So far as the narrative shift is concerned, The Day in Shadow (1971) marks the end of the phase of straight narration. A Situation in New Delhi (1989) is a transitional novel in which the style becomes clipped and elliptical, the closure uncertain and abrupt. Sahgal has moved into new pastures formally. But the real breakthrough occurs, as I shall show, in Rich Like Us. From the more or less chronological progression of her previous work in which the fictional mode might be termed mimetic, Sahgal uses symbolism and allegory extensively in Rich Like Us. The earlier novels are, formally, somewhat dull and stodgy; they are boring in an upper class, well-bred, genteel, ‘club’ manner. But Rich Like Us attempts an adventurous form which is both challenging and refreshing.

INTRODUCTION

Nationalist historians for long have interpreted the impact of colonial policies on Indian agriculture in terms of stagnation. It has been argued that British revenue policies, which functioned as a ‘built-in depressor’, effectively resulted in the flight of capital from the countryside and precluded any form of improvement in agricultural production. Challenging the nationalist paradigm in recent years revisionist historians, notably C A Bayly (1988), have argued persuasively that British rule in course of the nineteenth century had in fact resulted in the ‘consolidation of the Indian peasantry’ as pastoralist groups and shifting cultivators were increasingly forced to take to settled cultivation. It is assumed that the sedentarization of marginal groups, such as the tribal and nomadic pastoralists thus contributed significantly towards agrarian expansion. Yet, as this paper argues, expansion of settled cultivation did not necessarily negate the pauperization of the peasantry as is evidenced by developments in West Singhbhum, a remote district located in the southwestern part of Chota Nagpur Division of the erstwhile Bengal Presidency.

In Singhbhum, as in other parts of Chota Nagpur, the most significant change associated with the colonial period was the expansion of settled cultivation in the late nineteenth century. This constituted one of the ways in which the early colonial administration sought its control over the tribal people of the region. Extension of cultivation served the dual purpose of ‘civilizing’ both the countryside and the ‘savage’ through sedentarization and control of their volatility.

The crucial role of institutions in agricultural development has been widely discussed, be it with regard to credit or land reforms or to incentives like support prices and subsidies. The institutionalist perspective has also been extensively used for understanding the role of institutions in natural resource management. Within both areas of study, namely agriculture and environment-related issues, scholars have tended to include the international dimension when analysing the process of designing, adapting and enforcing institutions which operate nationally and regionally. In particular, some of them have observed the emergence of a so-called global phytogenetic governance, a concept ‘commonly used in the discussion of global environmental issues to denote the more or less binding application and enforcement of norms, rules, and procedures in a given issue area’ (Thomas, 2002: p. 177). The field of agricultural biodiversity is particularly interesting, because it is regulated by two broad global regimes, one pertaining to agriculture and trade and another related to environmental conservation issues. This so-called global governance, which, in turn, impacts on local realities through the action of institutions which are designed and/or implemented at the national level, attempts at balancing competing interests. Constrasting pressures are exerted on these regimes to evolve. Bringing social movements into the picture is a way of making sense of the resistance met by institutions at the local level and also of their potential role as a pressure group impinging on institutional evolution.