Introduction Part I. Ideologies 1 Religious vs. regional determinism: India. Pakistan and Bangladesh as inheritors of empire 2 Classical Hindu scriptures 3 Suttee or sati: victim or victor? 4 Some observations on the evolution of Modem Standard Punjabi 5 The hidden hand: English lexis, syntax and idiom as determinants of modem Hindi usage 6 A hero or a traitor? The Gurkha soldier in Nepali literature 7 Milton and Madhusudan 8 Indian architecture and the English vision Part II. Institutions 9 Legal pluralism in the Hindu marriage 10 Islamic law and the colonial encounter in British India 11 Notes on 'peasant insurgency' in colonial Mysore: event and process 12 Ideas in agrarian history: some observations on the British and nineteenth-century Bihar 13 Smallpox and colonial medicine in nineteenth-century India 14 The Indian National Congress: a hundred-year perspective 15 Charan Singh (1902-87): an assessment