In this paper I want to explore the implications of the rise and fall of Jharkhandi ethnoregionalism from the point of view of tribal policy and tribal politics in Independent India. More especially I want to examine an ideology of tribal economy and society which informs most existing accounts of Jharkhandi politics and which makes the case for a specifically ‘tribal’ policy. The main propositions of this ideology are recounted in Section One of this paper. They are (1) that the concept of a tribe is given and uproblematical; (2) that the tribals of South Bihar are the original inhaitants of the Jharkhand, where they still predominate (see Figure I); and (3) that tribal politics and tribal policies are effective because individual tribes are themselves undifferentiated, united and geographically concentrated. (A corollary of this third proposition is that any decline in Jharkhandi ethnoregionalism since the mid-1960s must be due to factional disputes within the tribal leadership and/or to inter-tribal clashes, perhaps along denominational lines). These three propositions are examined in Sections Two, Three and Four of the paper, where they are measured against the recent historical experience of India's Jharkhand. The implications of any shortcomings in the ideology of tribal economy and society are taken up in the concluding section of the paper where comments are offered, too, on an alternative ‘model’ of tribal policy and politics in the Jharkhand.

In 1986 the International Activities Committee of the Economic and Social Research Council decided to undertake reviews of progress in ‘area studies’, and to do this by means of small, inter-disciplinary conferences. A review conference on South Asian studies was held in Cambridge, and attended by forty-one scholars from different disciplines and from India, France, Holland and the USA as well as from Britain. The purpose of the review was understood to be a ‘stock-taking’ in different fields of research, intended to identify conceptual, theoretical and substantive issues at the frontiers of enquiry; and to examine the implications and contributions of research on South Asia for historical research and for the social sciences in general. In the pursuit of these objectives the conference had three components. First came sessions in which two economists (Toye and Chaudhuri), two historians (Tomlinson and Washbrook), an anthropologist (Fuller) and a sociologist (Hawthorn) presented views of ‘progress and problems’ in their fields. Then came two pairs of concurrent working groups on broad themes, drawing partly on the earlier papers and discussions; and finally three panelists (Bharadwaj, Breman and Lipton) offered commentary on the proceedings. The review papers by Toye, Tomlinson and Washbrook appear in this issue of Modern Asian Studies. What follows here is a commentary on some of the themes that emerged in the papers and discussions.

Over the last fifteen to twenty years, interest in the history of early modern and modern South Asia has grown enormously and has engaged the attention of an increasingly international audience. Whereas, at the end of the 1960s, research in the subject was largely confined to universities in South Asia itself and the rest of the British Commonwealth, today a variety of projects, conferences and regular workshops link together scholars from South Asia and the Commonwealth with those in Japan, Indonesia, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and the United States. Equally, whereas twenty years ago the publication of South Asia-related research was restricted to a few specialist journals, today this research provides the staple of at least four quarterlies with major international circulations and appears regularly in most of the leading historical periodicals. In the last five years, monographys on South Asia related historical subjects have been published by presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, the Soviet Union and Japan as well as, of course, India and Pakistan, the rest of the Commonwealth and the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to review recent analyses of the process of development in India which have used the concept of ‘political economy’ as their principle of intellectual organization. The focus will be primarily on studies which have been published in the 1980s. Some of these make explicit their reliance on political economy as their analytical framework (e.g. Jha, 1980; Rubin, 1982; Bardhan, 1984). For others it remains more implicit but the underlying concern to fuse economic with political analysis is much the same.

Study of the economic and social history of modern mainland South Asia—covering present-day India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh over roughly the last hundred years—has been a major academic growth industry since the 1960s. The result has been a bulky and disparate corpus of work, spinning off in many directions and adopting increasingly inter-disciplinary approaches, with historians borrowing from, informing, and interacting with anthropologists, sociologists, and economists among others. The sheer volume of recent research is impressive. One survey of empirical work on the nineteenth century (N. C. Charlesworth, The Indian Economy under British Rule, 1800–1914, London, 1983) lists over 150 titles, more than half of them published in the 1970s; another discussion of conceptual material available for the study of Indian economic growth and development in an historical context has over 100 footnote references, and an appendix listing 109 further relevant works published between 1979 and 1984.

A compelling vignette of the use of political influence for private gain in the expansion of the British empire is provided by the way King Thebaw' s legendary ruby mines in Upper Burma were acquired by British speculators in the late 1880s. The details of how the ruby-mine concession was awarded to a syndicate soon after Upper Burma was annexed to Britain in 1886 are not well known, although the concesion-mongering created a furore in the India Office and the House of Commons. There was even, at the time, a suggestion that the rubymine affair infleunced Lord Dufferin's decision to resign as Viceroy in 1888.

Kim Yôn-su (pen name Sudang 1896–1979) was among the few widely successful Korean entrepreneurs during the years of Japanese colonial rule on the peninsula.1 He served as managing director and later as president (1935–1945) of the Kyôngsông Spinning Company (Kyôngsông Pangjik Chusik Hoesa), the largest of the Korean-owned industrial enterprises. He also founded, managed and owned the Samyang company, the largest indigenous agricultural company of the period.2 What distinguished Kim was not merely the extent of his investments and administrative responsibilities, but the continuity of indigenous ownership and management in his ventures despite strong Japanese dominance of the colonial Korean economy.