This essay became a much publicized plea for the toleration of Christian educational and missionary activities in India. Being presented to the East India Company's Court of Directors on August 16, 1797 by Charles Grant, and to the House of Commons in 1813, the Commons ordered its general printing in 1813.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This wide-ranging volume presents new developments in Asian studies across many fields and periods of history. The geographical scope of the work ranges from Gujerat to the mountains of western Japan and from Tibet to Madagascar. They cover a time-scale from tenth century China to the present situation in the Pacific Rim, and deal with such political issues as minority rights and legal reforms, and analyses of academic discourse in Asia.

Recent theoretical and methodological innovations in the anthropological analysis of South Asian societies have introduced distinctive modifications in the study of Indian social structure and social change. This book, reporting on twenty empirical studies of Indian society conducted by outstanding scholars, reflects these trends not only with reference to Indian society itself, but also in terms of the relevance of such trends to an understanding of social change more generally.The contributors demonstrate the adaptive changes experienced by the studied groups in particular villages, towns, cities, and regions. The authors view the basic social units of joint family, caste, and village not as structural isolates, but as intimately connected with one another and with other social units through social and cultural networks of various kinds that incorporate the social units into the complex structure of Indian civilization. Within this broadened conception of social structure, these studies trace the changing relations of politics, economics, law, and language to the caste system.Showing that the caste system is dynamic, with upward and downward mobility characterizing it from pre-British times to the present, the studies suggest that the modernizing forces which entered the system since independence--parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage, land reforms, modern education, urbanization, and industrial technology--provided new opportunities and paths to upward mobility, but did not radically alter the system. The chapters in this book show that the study of Indian society reveals novel forms of social structure change. They introduce methods and theories that may well encourage social scientists to extend the study of change in Indian society to the study of change in other areas.