The concept of “Sanskritization” was found useful by me in the analysis of the social and religious life of the Coorgs of South India. A few other anthropologists who are making studies of tribal and village communities in various parts of India seem to find the concept helpful in the analysis of their material, and this fact induces me to attempt a re-examination of it here.

Even if one uses Sanskrit only as the instrument of investigation, it is apparent that Indian culture was a current which, as it flowed and spread, was fed by many a stream and absorbed many a small and stagnant pool. With volume, it gathered often bewildering variety, which was synthesized in a systematic plan. That diverse sources contributed to its making is obvious, but to identify each of them, to survey all the material accepted, and to be reasonably precise in the innumerable details that such a study involves, seems a stupendous and baffling task. It is possible, however, to point out certain instances in which the main tradition embraced smaller group-cultures and incorporated regional elements. As this culture became consolidated throughout India, it employed certain characteristic methods wherever it went, not only in India and the peripheral regions, but in all those trans-Indian territories to which it expanded. Sanskrit was the ultimate medium of transmission used by the main body of this culture and Sanskritization the chief technique of the take-over. Hence an examination of Sanskrit literature, in its different branches, will prove useful in investigating the incorporation of regional and folk elements. Without going into questions of pre-Vedic or Indus Valley cultures, or the problem of contributions by Munda, Austric, Dravidian, and Mongoloid, data can be found in Sanskrit literature which help to illuminate Hindu sociology, religion, and the arts during the historic period.

It is not wrong to say that the nature and intent of a society reveal themselves in the legal and customary concepts of property held by the various members and classes of that society. These property concepts do not change without an incipient or fundamental change in the nature of the society itself. The history of property relations in a given society is thus, in a way, the history of the society itself.

The current Chinese language reform movement is of the most profound cultural and political importance in China itself as well as to foreign students of the area. Its goal is within a relatively short period to standardize the basic northern dialect as the common national language of China and to replace traditional Chinese characters with a phonetic script. As Mao Tse-tung stated in 1951: “The written language must be reformed; it should follow the common direction of phoneticization which has been taken by the world's languages.”

As Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Japanese occupation was a decisive factor in the shaping of political developments in Indonesia after 1945. It is indeed probable that the impact of those eventful forty months was greater in Indonesia than in Burma and the Philippines, both of which countries had progressed further toward autonomy and self-rule under Western colonial rule than had the Netherlands Indies. It is certainly no coincidence that Japan granted “independence” to these areas during 1943, while in Indonesia a guarded promise of the distant goal of such independence came only as the result of the adverse course of the Pacific War in the latter part of 1944, when Allied landings in Indonesia appeared a probability. It was not until September of that year that, on instructions from Tokyo, the military administration on Java took steps which facilitated the ultimate success of the nationalist revolution in Indonesia. An examination of Japanese policies during the early months of the occupation of Java, the center of Indonesian political life then and now, leaves little doubt that the fate of Indonesia would have been far different had Japan continued victorious in the war.