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The strategic partnership between New Delhi and Washington will remain a potential factor in shap... more The strategic partnership between New Delhi and Washington will remain a potential factor in shaping the future relationship between India and China.

Trace the pattern of social changes during the early medieval period of Indian history. How are t... more Trace the pattern of social changes during the early medieval period of Indian history. How are these changes related to processes of agricultural expansion and state formation? The major historical-societal processes or changes that occurred during the early medieval period of Indian history were in close correspondence with the political, economic, religious and ideological processes that had been in run throughout the major part of Indian history, but gained prominence particularly during the early historical phase. Thus, every process can be better understood in association, and interrelationship with, and dependence on, other processes that were simultaneously taking place as certain fundamental movements within regional and local levels considering the diversity of the Indian subcontinent, and not as a homogenous phenomenon occurring at a pan-Indian level. Historians of early medieval India might be divided on their opinion about the nature of the changes that were taking place. But there is a general consensus among them that the phase of early medieval India saw the strengthening of regional identities, agricultural expansion and proliferation of castes, over the subcontinent, including in areas which had earlier remained peripheral. These changes were not unrelated to each other and have been explained by several historians through the use of the feudal model, by others through the use of the so-called 'Integrative Model', while some others have tried to explain it through the analysis of regions at a micro-level. According to R. S. Sharma, the social changes that were taking place can be best understood in the light of the feudal structure and ideology that came to dominate the politics, society and economy of this period, which was based on an intense preoccupation with land and the absorption of the tribal people into the Brahmanical fold through conquest and land grants to the Brahmanas and others.

Book Reviews by Harshita Roy

The Hundred–Year Marathon, a national bestseller in USA, is a popular yet controversial work by M... more The Hundred–Year Marathon, a national bestseller in USA, is a popular yet controversial work by Michael Pillsbury, an independent China analyst at Washington’s conservative Hudson Institute. The book can be best described as a mix of memoir, analysis and history that offers a one-man perspective. The author claims his work to be a wake-up call for the otherwise gullible and ignorant U.S. government and policymakers to the greatest national security threat of the twenty-first century – China’s secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower.

Peasant Life in China is a classic text by one of China’s finest anthropologist and sociologist, ... more Peasant Life in China is a classic text by one of China’s finest anthropologist and sociologist, Fei Xiaotong. He was born on November 2, 1910, in Wujiang, just south of Suzhou in coastal China during the last years of the Qing dynasty. During his lifetime, he would see China’s collapse as an empire, conception as a nation, inception into a Republic and finally, its tryst with Communism. In Barbara Celarent words, “By his death, China had been not one but many Chinas, and Fei himself not one but many Feis….. The first Fei was a Westernized academic researching the countryside, the second Fei a popular writer forcibly adjusted to New China, and the third Fei an elder statesman who brokered the reemergence of Chinese sociology after 1978”1. His work under review is a product from his early westernized period, writing under the strong influence of the American-trained Wu Wenzao and foreign scholars like S. M. Shirokogoroff, whom the book acknowledges. During his time in London School of Economics, working under the guidance of Bronislaw Malinowski, he completed his doctoral thesis based on two months of his fieldwork in a village, Kaihsienkung, south of Lake Tai, in Yangtze Valley of Eastern China. After he returned to China, his dissertation was published as this book in 1939.

Papers by Harshita Roy

The question that piques interest of any student of Modern Japan is how Japan rose to become the ... more The question that piques interest of any student of Modern Japan is how Japan rose to become the only non-western world power among the clique of Western nations when all its immediate neighbours were backward and reeling under colonial or semi-colonial status? To answer this question, historians have primarily emphasized the achievements of the distinctive institutions and values of Japanese society as Japan’s success in industrializing appeared unique. It is not to say that historians ignored the external influences such as the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, or the onset of the Great Depression, or the outbreak of a world war in Europe, and so on that shaped Japanese policy. But, they were mostly preoccupied with internal forces for change. Kenneth Pyle argues in his works that “the external environment of states exercises strong influence on a state’s domestic structure” which has especially been true in the case of Japan. Modern Japanese history mirrors how profoundly the nature and workings of the international order shaped Japan’s behavior and ambitions, as well as its domestic institutions.

The Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security signed between the United States and Japan in 1960 ... more The Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security signed between the United States and Japan in 1960 was a revision of the historic San Francisco Peace treaty of 1952 that had ended 7 years of postwar American occupation of Japan. Japan had gained back its sovereignty, however, due to the adoption of Article IX in its postwar pacifist constitution, de-militarized Japan's security came to virtually lay with the Americans, who were by the 1952 treaty not explicitly obligated to use their forces in Japan for Japan's defence. The treaty was not mutual and suffered from asymmetry; it was seen as Japan's subservience to the US. To alleviate this one-sided unequal 'big brother-little brother' relationship to an equal and respectable bilateral relationship of that between two independent, sovereign powers; the Japanese statesmen made use of patient, skilful diplomacy and compromise on limited rearmament as a means to their end, leading upto the signing of a new Security Treaty in 1960. The new revised treaty did not alter the US-Japan security relationship but only set down in writing the actual arrangements that had already evolved since 1951. Nevertheless, it stirred unprecedented political turmoil and heated public opposition. The year of 1960, characterised by student agitations, parliamentary and public debate over the nature of US-Japan relations, came to be remembered as one of the most turbulent years of postwar Japanese history.