The substantive aim of this essay is to document popular attitudes towards the forest and its biotic resources through time as I have encountered these in the northernmost areas of the modern Indian state of Kerala. The interviews and folk-lore I have drawn upon in the present, however, are very much a legacy of Kerala's past. And since, sadly, most of the forests themselves have become a rapidly fading memory, my approach must be not only anthropological, but also folkloric and ethnohistorical.

This is an essay in the sociology of knowledge. It aims to demonstrate, firstly, how development institutions construct rural society in terms of organizational imperatives, and secondly, how these ‘constructions’ come to be underpinned by social theory. The focus is on irrigation in south India and colonial and contemporary state policy initiatives to promote local institutions for the community management of decentralized resource systems. The essay presents the social and historical origin of an important and powerful set of contemporary policy ideas. The significance of this lies in the continuing misperception of local institutions of resource management, and in particular the systematic isolation of resource management from its particular social and historical context.

. . . the people of India love and venerate Sanskrit with a feeling which is next only to that of patriotism towards Mother India.

Report of the Sanskrit Commission, 1956–57

This essay raises the language question in its relationship to the wider problematic of the nationalization of pasts by focusing on the curious and puzzling status accorded to Sanskrit in the nationalization of the Indian past in this century. I use the words ‘curious’ and ‘puzzling’ deliberately, for the Sanskrit issue unsettles many well-entrenched assumptions about language and nationalism that circulate in scholarly circles and popular imagination. Just as crucially, Sanskrit's (mis)adventures in the past century or so, draw our attention to the troubling linguistic turns taken by the nationalization process in India with its disquieting complicity with colonial categories and certitudes. The concerns of this paper have thus been shaped by three related issues pertaining to language, nationalism, and modernity.

In the late 1970s, a modest scholarly clash took place between James C. Scott and Michael Adas over the extent to which, if at all, the British administration in Burma had granted tax remissions to the rural population of the province during the economic crisis of the early 1930s. This formed an important part of their wider debate on the causes of the major rebellion—the Hsaya San rebellion—which erupted in Lower Burma in the closing days of 1930. First into the arena was Scott, in The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, published in 1976. On this issue, Scott's starting point was the observation that the colonial world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a very marked increase in the capacity of the state to extract tax revenues from rural populations. The decisive strength of colonial administrations in this respect lay in paperwork, in ‘the inexorable progress of cadastral surveys, settlement reports for land revenue, censuses, the issuance of land titles and licences, identity cards, tax rolls and receipts . . .’, in other words, in the creation of ‘nets of finer and finer official weave’ that trapped rural taxpayers with increasing thoroughness.

Since the 1930s shipping and trade in Southeast Asia during the early modern period have attracted much attention from historians. The pioneer in this field was the Dutch scholar, J. C. van Leur, whose original work was translated into English during the 1950s (Van Leur 1955). Van Leur's interest was heavily weighted toward what he labelled ‘old Asian trade,’ and as such he was one of the first who called for an Asia-centric perspective. He drew attention to the fact that the maritime sector of Southeast Asia had its own dynamics. In the 1960s, M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz carried on the work of analyzing the indigenous maritime sector as well as the effects of the Portuguese and Dutch onslaughts on it up to the 1630s (Meilink-Roelofsz 1962). Limiting our perspective to the Malayo-Indonesian Archipelago, in the last decade several regional case studies have further enhanced our knowledge of the subject, such as those on Sulu (Warren 1981), Batavia (Blussé 1986), Amboina (Knaap 1987), Central and East Java (Nagtegaal 1988), and the Straits of Malacca (Vos 1993). Furthermore, Anthony Reid has recently tried to create a synthesis for the entire region of Southeast Asia up to 1680 (Reid 1993).

The foreign missionary was always a prominent source of Sino-foreign friction. The appearance of Protestant missionaries in China's interior, and their intrusion into Chinese society in the latter half of the nineteenth century, caused strong resistance from the Chinese and many outbreaks of xenophobia. After the Boxer Uprising of 1900, however, this resistance and these outbreaks greatly declined. And the foreign missionary in the second and third decades of the twentieth century had to face new problems: namely, tension between the foreign and Chinese members within the church. In the late 1910s the missionaries found that their well-educated Chinese colleagues demanded equal treatment. Between 1925 and 1928 the missionaries and their Chinese members were involved in a severe conflict between ‘foreign’ Christianity and ‘Chinese’ nationalism, and this created even greater tension. How the missionaries responded to these problems, and how they influenced Christianity in China, deserve further analysis.

China's foreign relations during the Second World War underwent a radical metamorphosis. The Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) earned new international respect by mounting a tenacious resistance against the Japanese enemy. By allying itself with powerful countries in the West for the first time in modern history, China emerged from its involuntary diplomatic isolation. The new Grand Alliance facilitated China's diplomatic initiatives seeking to eradicate the legal stigma of its semi-colonial status through the abrogation of the unequal treaties. In the process China also leaped to the rank of the ‘Big Four’. At a time when the Western colonialism was receding, the Japanese Empire was collapsing and national independence movements were on the rise in many Asian countries, China seemed positioned to achieve a new prominent leadership role in Asian and world affairs.

Japan, in contrast to other industrialized democracies, has enjoyed a falling or steady crime rate for much of the post-war period. This has been despite the potentially adverse effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The low crime rate and high clearance rates shown in the official statistics are seen as both a result and a reflection of the development of successful policing techniques in Japan. Even allowing for the dark figure of unrecorded crime, this record is impressive, and it is claimed that it has been achieved using fewer resources in manpower terms than those available to European and North American forces. Explanations for this phenomenon of a relatively low crime rate and high clearance rates in Japan have focused on three main areas of concern. The most popular approach has been to examine the organization and intelligence-gathering activities of the Japanese police at a local level through studies of the system of satellite police boxes: the kōban in urban areas and the chūzaisho (residential police boxes) in rural districts.