Who or what constitutes the dominant power and/or authority in village India today? This sort of question is hardly ever amenable to any generally agreed answer for any society, and the Indian case is no exception. But to say this is already to have made a comment on the main stream of post-independence scholarship on agrarian India. Very soon after independence an academic orthodoxy hardened as to the character of agrarian social structure and power. The argument of this paper is that this orthodoxy is no longer valid and that it obscures what is a profound transformation in the character of agrarian India.

In the nineteenth century the towns and cities of the North-Western Provinces witnessed a huge expansion in public expressions of Hindu identity: temples mushroomed, new processions graced the streets and the cow attained new prominence as a symbol of Hindu piety. Rarely, if ever, were such activities motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment, but they could provoke ill-will between Hindus and Muslims, especially in the towns where Islamic government, buildings and festivals had previously set the tone for the public life of their inhabitants. The colonial administration was a powerful but ill- informed force, able either to suppress or to protect the new display, and its responses were crucial in determining people's understanding of their rights to public religious expression.For the first half of the nineteenth century the British tried to preserve the balance of religious display in each town and city as they had found it, but this goal required that individual officers piece together a local history from imperfect sources and then invest it with the authority of the new state. It is easy enough to delineate the simplistic and sometimes crass categorizations that the agents of colonialism employed to explain Indians' religious sensibilities. What I want to do here, however, is show how their fundamentally novel reconstructions of a town's history of public religious display could feed back into Indians' own reading of their past and hence their future, even long after the British had abandoned their pursuit of a locality's ‘established usage’.

Many years ago I was asked in a viva voce examination to name the first work which describes the Indian jajmani system. I knew that the jajmani system was of great antiquity, but I had no idea whether it was first described by one of the early European travellers like Bernier, an early 19th century British authority on Indian criminal castes and tribes like Sleeman, or a later authority on castes and folklore like Crooke. So I was rather surprised to learn, after my fumbling, that the first description was that of the Wisers, published in 1930.

The historian Geraldine Forbes, writing on the origins of the woman suffrage movement in India, stated: ‘the firm insistence of organized women—that they be treated as equals of men on the franchise issue—emerged not from the perceptions of the needs of the women in India, but as the result of the influence of certain British women, in the case of the first demand for the franchise, 1917, and as a response to the nationalist movement, in the case of the second demand for franchise, 1927–33.’

The available literature on the uprising of 1857 is fairly voluminous. Successive generations of historians have studied the subject in its varied aspects. Their concern, however, quite often lay with long-term political issues, with questions of the growth of the colonial state, of nationalism, of the unity and integrity of the country. These problems were made central to the study of the rebellion not because they were of any relevance to the rebels but because contending imperialist and nationalist historians were seeking to accommodate the event in a longer time span of history.The rebellion of 1857 was thereby assimilated to a linear order related to a context that largely lay outside of the occurrence itself. To most early English writers the mutiny marked the watershed between Company rule and Crown rule, an interlude in the transition to a better imperial system. For Indian writers it was the beginning of India's struggle for national independence

Since the Second World War, an important school of social science scholarship in Southeast Asia has explained pre-national social hierarchy in terms of religious cosmology, or religious beliefs in the ordering principles of merit and karma (Heine-Geldern, 1956; Geertz, 1980; Errington, 1989). With respect to Siam/Thailand, Tambiah (1970, 1976, 1984) exemplifies this approach in its strong form—he has attempted to explain all religious practices of the ‘Thais’ as expressions of Buddhist orthodoxy. For these writers, religious and cosmological meaning is fundamental, and subsumes the economic dimension. Their emphasis on cultural coherence contrasts with a second school of thought exemplified by Scott (1977, 1985) which focuses on slippage or difference between the ‘great traditions’ represented in Thailand by Buddhism, and little traditions of peasantries, based on local experience, pre-existing little traditions or the appropriation of past ‘great traditions’.

The Provision of housing for the urban poor has been a problem of long standing in the Third World. In some countries efforts at housing supply go beyond events which began forty years ago after World War II when large numbers of people began moving to the cities of Latin Amercia, Africa, and Asia giving rise to uncontrolled urban settlements and causing crowded living conditions in the already built-up areas. In Southeast Asia some colonial governments recognized the housing problem at the beginning of the twentieth century and began programs to ameliorate housing shortages and to improve living conditions for the urban masses. The investigative housing commissions in Singapore beginning in 1907 and the faltering efforts of the Singapore Improvement Trust perhaps are the best known examples. They were the precursors of the Housing and Development Board established in i960 in whose structures live some 85 percent of the Singapore population today. Urban officials in colonial Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies, also had concerns for the housing of the masses. The Dutch colonial government eventually passed legislation which in a mild way supported housing and- was concerned to some extent with housing construction. For their part, the large cities on Java were more active.

A historian, like any other scholar, incurs many debts. I am no exception. I would like to begin this occasion by acknowledging some of those debts. I have benefited greatly from the generosity of colleagues—from the generosity of colleagues in my particular field of Islamic and South Asian history in North America, Europe and the Subcontinent, but also from the generosity of historians in general. It is a great privilege to work amongst historians in the University of London, who form arguably the largest group of historians in the world, that work together.