The first five papers in this issue of Modern Asian Studies were originally written for a panel that came together at the 40th meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in San Francisco, in March of 1988, to discuss ‘Civil Ritual in India: British and Indian Modes of Symbolic Representation.’

The exchanges that comprised the formal meetings between Indian Rulers and the British Residents attached to their courts both reflected and, in some measure, determined the changing political relationships between the Indian states and the English East India Company. As the Resident and his staff introduced new symbols and meanings into his ritual intercourse with an Indian Ruler, these new elements affected the attitudes and actions taken by the audiences of these exchanges, in both India and Britain. As the military and political power of the Company flowed over or around the regional states of India during the period 1764–1858, the Company's Residents proved able to assert increasing influence over the shape of these rituals in the Indian courts.

As the British Empire extended its power across the Indian subcontinent, the military and political pressures which it could bring to bear had proved to be its most significant assets. However, both to establish and to maintain an English political paramountcy which could guarantee economic dominance came over time to be revealed as two separate tasks, demanding very distinct skills. To maintain and secure this newfound power in India, the British were forced to come to know more about India. They had to grasp the ‘rules’ of India's preexisting political ‘game’ and, more frequently, to confront their need to rewrite these rules into a form which they could comprehend, in which they could compete, and where their dominance could be virtually assured.This process suggests the ‘gathering in of the threads of legitimacy’ towhich D. A. Low has to eloquently drawn our attention.

With the publication of Bernard Cohn's seminal article in the Invention of Tradition, the study of ritual in colonial India has acquired a new significance and a new respectability for South Asianists, particularly those inclined to ‘ethnohistorical’ approaches. Recently a number of essays on imperial ceremony have begun to appear with very profitable results. But those working on this subject have generally confined themselves to examining one of two problems: either they have looked at the ideological models and cultural meanings that informed the thinking of the British designers of these observances or they have explored the role of ritual in the setting of princely India. As yet scholars have developed little sense of how Indians outside the ‘native states’ conceived of their participation in durbars and other forms of public ceremony. Many materially inclined historians seem to assume that imperial ritual was a meaningless charade for Indians, that those who participated in ritual acts did so at best as a means of avoiding offence to their rulers, that the locus of ‘real’ politics lay elsewhere. A few no doubt consider the current focus on imperial display even to be a waste of time. In part this attitude issues from a nationalism that refuses to acknowledge its imperialist antecedents. In part it stems from a more general cynicism among late twentieth-century intellectuals toward ritual.

Here I apply a theory of ‘political displacement’ to the study of an incident that took place at King George V's investiture as ‘King-Emperor’ of India at the ‘Delhi Durbar’ on December 12, 1911. By ‘political displacement’ I mean the shifting of political attention from one domain to another, or from one idiom to another, where problems emergent but unresolvable in the first are dealt with by conversion into the second. My purposes are these: First, to describe the problem created by the incident when the Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda, second in rank among the Indian Princes, ‘insulted’ the King-Emperor; second, to trace reactions, both British and Indian, to the series of events that followed; and third, to examine how the incident's conversion from one political idiom to another rendered it interpretable, thereby reducing confusion and permitting action.

Three great Durbars, royal assemblages, were staged in Delhi by the Government of British India, in 1877, 1903, and 1911. These are particularly interesting as examples of explicitly political rituals, their purpose being to legitimate and popularize British rule in India. The rituals would therefore exemplify, for many social theorists, a form of political manipulation which employs symbolic action as an adjunct to raw force. Yet, while many anthropologists, at least, would reject, in favor of an analysis which addresses the political aspirations of ritual manipulators, any unreconstructed Durkheimian paradigm that would equate ritual acts with social consensus (Moore and Myerhoff, 1975:9), many would also reject, as Tambiah has, the notion that ritual, by nature, constitutes a ‘diabolical smokescreen.’ The more useful approach, in Tambiah's view, is that ritual is ‘an ideological and aesthetic social construction that is directly and recursively implicated in the expression, realization, and exercise of power.’ (Tambiah, 1979: 153)1 shall be working with a similar theoretical point of view and not, largely, with the opposed view that the ritual form is merely a strategy employed by manipulative agents to perpetuate, in Bloch's words, an ‘institutionalized hierarchy’ or ‘legitimate order of inequality.’ (Bloch, 1977:289)

In April of 1868, the Restoration government issued an anti-Christian proscription—‘a fixed law for all ages’ it was styled. Christianity was declared a pernicious sect; rewards were offered for information leading to the discovery of Christians. In the name of the proscription, the government carried out a persecution which, in the first four years of the new era, resulted in the deaths of as many as 500 native Christians. These men, women and children died from torture, starvation or from sickness induced by the conditions in which they were kept. The native Christians were, of course, from the recently discovered hidden Christian communities around Nagasaki. The Nagasaki Christian affair is a fascinating one to which I shall return, but I mention it at the outset since it serves usefully to stress the climate of the times as far as Christianity was concerned. Given this climate, it is remarkable that there emerged by 1871, or thereabouts, a small number of enlightened intellectuals who criticized government policy on Christianity and went so far as to advocate religious freedom. The most famous of the few were Mori Arinori, Nakamura Keiu, Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nishi Amane—names known to anyone familiar with early Meiji intellectual history. There is, however, one other name that needs to be added to this short list. That is Fukuba Bisei. The little known Fukuba Bisei was, perhaps, the most remarkable of these men since he was an early Meiji Shintoist.

In July 1983 communal violence in the southern towns of Sri Lanka left between 300 and 3,000 people dead, nearly all of them members of the minority Tamil population. While such a disturbing manifestation of social pathology would seem to demand a response from concerned social scientists, there are special difficulties in confronting such events. Dominant trends in the historical study of popular disturbance, for example the concern to recover the rationality and dignity of participants in food riots (Thompson 1971), or the current interest in manifestations of ‘resistance’, may look altogether inappropriate in this context. Explanation can all too often look like apologetic, and this may explain why much of the existing writing on communal violence in South Asia deals with virtually everything except the violence itself. One recent study in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer's Legends of People, Myths of State (Kapferer 1988), has recently tackled this question head on, arguing that there is a clear link between collective violence in Sri Lanka and what the author describes as a ‘logic of being in the world’, or ‘ontology’ to be found in everyday Sinhala life. While Kapferer has earned our gratitude for even raising the issue of the connection between collective violence and everyday life, his specific argument, as I shall show below, is based on a limited reading of the available evidence.