. . . according to Manu, for slandering a Vaisya or a Shudra the fines are only twenty-five or twelve panas, respectively. For members of the lower orders who slander their betters the penalties are much more severe . . . the equality of the law was never admitted in ancient India, and was quite contrary to most Indian thought. (A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, 1954: 120).

The 1895 riot at Kalugumalai in the Tirunelveli District of Madras Presidency, South India, pitted the local Nadar community, then newly-converted to Roman Catholicism, against the main Hindu castes of Kalugumalai, particularly those associated with its Hindu temple and the Ettaiyapuram zamindari estate within which the town lay. It was the violent climax to a long-running dispute over the Nadars' right to take processions through the main streets, and one of the bloodiest episodes in a conflict which posed a severe threat to public order throughout South India in the late nineteenth century.

‘The influence of William Morris, even here.’

Stephen Potter, One-Upmanship

Introduction

In 1978 the village of Kukulewa, in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), was selected for development under the Gam Udava (Village Awakening) program launched by the recently elected UNP (United National Party) government. Five years later, in 1983, I spent nine months in Kukulewa, studying the changes that had taken place since I had first done ethnographic research there from 1968 to 1970. As I examined the local impact of the Village Awakening project, in the broader context of escalating ethnic violence, I was repeatedly struck by the official priority given to the task of revitalizing the village community, not just in programs of rural development, but in the discourse of Sinhala nationalism more generally (Brow 1988, 1990a, 1990b, 1992, 1996; cf. Moore 1989, 1992; Woost 1993, 1994).

Upon inquiring into a boundary dispute between Tooringi and the Dutch-owned village of Jagannaikpuram, Leveston G. K. Murray asked generally of inhabitants ‘how far they supposed their ground extended’. But on that day in April 1795, and to Murray's dismay, he ‘received no other answer than that they did not know’. L. G. K. Murray and Mr Topander, both East India Company officials based in Masulipatam on the Teluga-speaking Andhra Coast of Southeast India, then tried a different approach, and showed those gathered a ‘Gentoo Paper’ containing a Dutch account of the nature of the boundary between the two villages. The consensus among the Telugu-speaking onlookers, in fact, was that the document was in order. No one proposed any problems with its authenticity to those Company officers.

In the literature on plantation development in Asia, the issue of ‘free’ versus ‘unfree’ labour has been very much debated. To start with, a first group of scholars argues that from the workers' point of view the decision to work on the plantations seems to have been a rational and conscious choice (see for example: Galenson 1984; Emmer 1986). They stress that a high degree of social differentiation in the various Asian societies has made low-class people leave their areas whenever an improvement in their position seemed possible. Most plantation workers came from areas where they had only limited or no access to the means of production and where many of them were indebted to local landlords and/or moneylenders. For low-caste Indian labourers, the opportunity to work on plantations meant a way out of their depressed conditions in their caste-ridden villages.

A previous work on British Indian Army logistics from 1757 to 1857 called into question the accuracy of labeling Arthur Wellesley ‘The Logistical Architect of the British Indian Army’. As the ‘soldier brother’ of India's Governor-General Richard, Marquis Wellesley, Arthur was bound to have drawn some attention while in India; but secondary sources have tended to be too ethnocentric in their interpretation of his South Asian military experience. Arthur Wellesley's successful command-apprenticeship, during the Dhoondiah Waugh Campaign, led him to the promotional track which culminated in his appointment as the Commander of the Southern Theatre in the 1803 Anglo-Maratha War. However, one should not confuse his prominence with precedence and I have argued elsewhere that East India Company (EIC) logistical policy was essentially South Asian in origin.

The partition of India is customarily described in surgical metaphors, as an operation, an amputation, a vivisection or a dismemberment. By extension, the new borders created in 1947 are often thought of as incision scars.

As is well known, Islam arose in Arabia, which, alongside the pagan Communities, had a large number of tribes and groups which professed Judaism and Christianity. So far as we know, the relations between the Jews and Christians and their Arab neighbours in pre-Islamic times were cordial, or were not at any rate adversely affected by differences of faith. In its self-view Islam represented both a continuation and a supersession of the two earlier Semitic faiths. The Jewish Gospel as well as the New Testament had originally represented divine messages, and so those who follow them were ‘People of the Book’, to be distinguished from the ‘Infidels’. But the Gospel texts, the Quran itself had claimed, had suffered from unauthorized deletions and insertions; and this claim, of course, created a fundamental point of disagreement between the Muslims, on the one hand, and the Jews and Christians on the other. Nonetheless, early Muslims seemed fairly well familiar with both the earlier Semitic religions.