‘Individual’ (cá nhân) came to the Vietnamese language in the first decades of the twentieth century, along with a host of other evocative neologisms, such as ‘society’ (xã hôi), ‘ethnic group/nation’ (dân tôc), ‘ideology’ (chu' nghĩa), ‘democracy’ (dân chu' chu' nghĩa), ‘science’ (khoa hoc), and ‘progress’ (tiêń hóa). Initially, ‘individual’ was very much the poor relation among these new concepts—merely an irreducible human unit belonging to something else more significant. Thus, each individual was urged to be a loyal citizen of the nation, an eager participant in some new political organization, or a responsible member of society. Individuals were often compared with cells in the body, each one having a legitimate role in sustaining and enhancing the vitality of the organism, but meaningless and incapable of surviving on their own. On the other hand, the danger also existed of individuals acting in a selfish, short-sighted manner, which could jeopardize the larger order of things. Such persons were said to be witting or unwitting perpetrators of ‘individualism’ (cá nhân chu' nghĩa).

Although the issue of citizenship has attracted the interest of some political scientists in relation to the problems of contemporary Indian democracy, historians have generally tended to shy away from exploring the concrete demands for civic rights that accompanied, but were by no means identical with, the struggle for national self-determination. Indeed, the dominance of nationalist and nation-oriented frameworks in Indian historical writing has tended to thwart interest in the materialities of local issues directly affecting the livelihoods of people. The astoundingly low profile accorded to what Manuel Castells described more than a quarter of a century ago as ‘the urban question’, is a revealing manifestation of the relative neglect of local and social histories.

As Jog Maya remarked to me, there are religions enough for everyone to choose, just like vegetables in the morning bazaar. Gellner 1992:70

The family was in continuous communion with a whole range of business associates, gods and men. Bayly 1983:390

Of late, increasing attention has focused on (mainly male) constructions of women in colonial India. On the one side, it has been noted how European women were frequently held responsible and disparaged for upsetting the comparatively relaxed relationships existing between British (especially males) and Indians (especially females) up to the late eighteenth century. Seen as the staunchest upholders (if not the keenest advocates) of racial distinctions which evolved in the course of the nineteenth century, European women were vilified for elaborating (if not actually creating) social and cultural hierarchies which led to a widening of the distance between colonizer and colonized. At the same time, they were stereotyped as frivolous, vain, snobbish and selfish (Barr 1976: 197; 1989: 1; Brownfoot 1984: 186). Indeed, Gartrell suggests that ‘few women have been described so negatively as the British memsahibs’ (1984: 165). In drawing attention to these portrayals, a number of writers have recently pointed out, in mitigation, that the memsahibs were simply reproducing official British attitudes, were themselves proud symbols of British power, and subjects of a strict patriarchal culture within European circles (see Barr 1989: 5; Bharucha 1994: 88–9).

Ever since its beginning, organized dalit politics under the leadership of Dr B. R. Ambedkar had been consistently moving away from the Indian National Congress and the Gandhian politics of integration. It was drifting towards an assertion of separate political identity of its own, which in the end was enshrined formally in the new constitution of the All India Scheduled Caste Federation, established in 1942. A textual discursive representation of this sense of alienation may be found in Ambedkar's book, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, published in 1945. Yet, within two years, in July 1947, we find Ambedkar accepting Congress nomination for a seat in the Constituent Assembly. A few months later he was inducted into the first Nehru Cabinet of free India, ostensibly on the basis of a recommendation from Gandhi himself. In January 1950, speaking at a general public meeting in Bombay, organized by the All India Scheduled Castes Federation, he advised the dalits to co-operate with the Congress and to think of their country first, before considering their sectarian interests. But then within a few months again, this alliance broke down over his differences with Congress stalwarts, who, among other things, refused to support him on the Hindu Code Bill. He resigned from the Cabinet in 1951 and in the subsequent general election in 1952, he was defeated in the Bombay parliamentary constituency by a political nonentity, whose only advantage was that he contested on a Congress ticket. Ambedkar's chief election agent, Kamalakant Chitre described this electoral debacle as nothing but a ‘crisis’.

Pursued over the last two years of the Pacific war, the Free French effort to organize and direct an effective resistance to the Japanese occupation of Indo-China ended in military failure. Characterized by administrative complexity, inadequate supplies and attenuated communications, Gaullist insurgency was marred by Free France's de facto reliance upon Admiral Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command (SEAC). While the re-conquest of Malaya and Burma remained incomplete, British backing for a resistance network in Indo-China was bound to be limited. And as British interest in the final re-conquest of their own territories climaxed in the spring and summer of 1945, so material provision for the French in Indo-China inevitably declined. Although Mountbatten consistently supported his Free French protégés, Churchill, in particular, was reluctant to take issue with his American allies. Neither the US government nor American commanders in China and the Pacific supported Free French methods and objectives. By 1945, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), dedicated to supporting guerrilla warfare and resistance organization, and the Office of War Information (OWI), which disseminated US propaganda, were developing independent contacts inside northern Indo-China. As a result, the OSS increasingly endorsed the one truly effective resistance movement: Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh coalition.

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese embarked upon a swift ideological transition that enabled them to accept a considerable influx of Western ideas and systems. A key to their successful adoption of the values of ostensibly different cultures has often been attributed by observers of Japan to the receptivity and adaptability of the Japanese to new, alien elements. Yet, the receptivity of the Japanese to alien elements as the key is inherently connected to their recognition of affinities found in different cultures. Valuable insights on the process of Meiji acculturation will be gathered from a case study based on the examination of the early years of the Sapporo Agricultural College, established to accelerate modernization, and the impact on the students of the values inculcated by the New Englander staff. A study of their interaction suggests that it was the affinities the Japanese found between Japanese syncretic, revisionist, thought development and values of different cultures that formed the foundation for successful assimilation of elements of Western culture, a process that also helped the Japanese to reinvestigate and remould their own cultural tradition.