If Calcutta of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a city of ‘banians,’ can Madras of the same period be called a city of ‘dubashes’? The parallels in the early history of these two port cities, and particularly in the emergence of similar groups of Indian collaborators, are not hard to find. Nor are they especially surprising in view of the common goals and needs of the English traders who founded them. The need for intermediaries and collaborators was built into the very economic and political structures of these towns. In turn, these groups inevitably had a tremendous influence on the development and environments of these colonial urban centers.

The British controlled their empire in India through the twin instruments of the army and the civil services. But the army was never used much to administer British territories and the day-to-day business of law and order was left to the civil services, headed by the élite corps of covenanted officers, the Indian Civil Service. This corps was the vital link that carried the dictates of the centre to the two hundred and fifty districts that made up British India. Obviously a Service only a thousand or so strong had a presence too thin to achieve what some hagiographers have claimed but it was, nonetheless, a vital part of the structure of British rule. In the years immediately following the first world war, this vital part seemed unable to cope with the galaxy of problems with which it was beset: its own members increasingly questioned the value of their role; Indian politicians attacked what they saw as the remnant of imperial control whilst, on the widest scale, the complex task of governing India seemed to be beyond the creaking, anachronistic and overworked I.C.S.

The first attempt to bring together all women interested in female education in Bengal was the convocation of a Bengal Women's Education Conference in February 1927 which led to the formation of the Bengal Women's Education League. The problems of female education had received considerable attention from social reformers in nineteenth-century Bengal, but the formation of the League signified that for the first time women were taking over the responsibility for leadership of the women's education movement. The All-India Women's Education conference had been held in January of the same year, 1927, indicating that the formation of the League in Bengal was part of a national trend of coordinated activity to improve educational opportunities for women.

The study of federal political systems, particularly parliamentary or representative federal political systems, such as those in the United States, Canada, or India involves complexities that do not exist in unitary states such as Great Britain or France. In the first place, there are three or more institutional levels in such systems, each of which has its own arena in which political struggles take place. Second, the balance of power among the levels in federal systems varies in different systems and in the same system at different times. Third, the study of the extraparliamentary organizations, such as political parties, and of social movements, also becomes a more complex task since it cannot be assumed that a political party or social movement with the same name is the same sort of formation in New York and Mississippi or in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Moreover, in federal systems with a high degree of regional cultural diversity, each federal unit in the country may have a distinctive configuration of extraconstitutional political formations and social forces. This is certainly the case in India, the most culturally diverse of all existing federal parliamentary systems in the world today. Fourth, politics in federal systems takes place between levels as well as within levels, again in far more complex ways than in unitary systems.

With the climax of imperialism in China at the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese nationalism in its modern form grew rapidly and became ever more assertive. As the imperialists concentrated on economic gains, the frustrated nationalists gave increasing attention to economic defences. The prime target of the imperialists was the control of mining and railway construction in different areas; so ‘to resist the imperialists’ became the catchword of the day, and the movement for recovering mining and railway construction rights highlighted the development of Chinese economic nationalism. While revolutionaries and the fugitive reformers abroad worked out their political programmes for the salvation of China, the conservative Manchu government and scholar-gentry tried to resist imperialism by promoting economic nationalism. To recover the mining and railway rights, to find the alternative capital for economic modernization and to play one power against another, became the strategic aims of economic nationalism.

Widely recognized as a leading writer of prose fiction, Kurahashi Yumiko (b. 1935) produced several early works permeated by stark modernist imagery, then combined this approach with an imaginative drawing upon the ancient prose narrative tradition. She thus developed a unique style which has been characterized as a fantasy that ‘relies for its powerful effects upon a kind of imagination that does not so much engage in romanticizing … as lay things bare with shocking candor and with a cynicism comparable to [that of] an anatomist at [an] autopsy.This attribution of cynicism to her works undoubtedly derives from the author's dispassionate treatment of various kinds of heightened sexuality, including trading sexual partners and the practice of incest. Kurahashi's unusual ‘kind of imagination’ also encompasses the portrayal of contemporary situations suffused with many attitudes and values expressed in the early prose narratives which mirror the court tradition of ancient Japan. One of the earliest works, The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari c. 1015? by Lady Murasaki Shikibu), seems to have exerted a strong influence on Kurahashi's recent novel, A Floating Bridge of Dreams (Yume no ukihashi, 1970). Kurahashi is likely to have been attracted to The Tale of Genji not only because it is the first important long narrative written by a woman, but also because this complex and beautiful work has long been held in esteem as the greatest narrative in Japanese literature, and has been accorded the same stature as The Divine Comedy or Don Quixote. The following essay considers the ways that Kurahashi's novel adapts the Japanese classical literary legacy, and explores the potential of this inheritance to act as a framework for describing contemporary experience.