102
■Book Review■
KUWAJIMA
Sho, Indian Mutiny in Singapore (1915)
Calcutta: Ratna Prakashan, 1991, xiv + 161pp. Rs. 200.
1. Age of the Revolutionary Movement Abroad
In the early 1910s echoes of the excitement during the Swadeshi Movement were still sounding in some circles. Due to the severe sup-pressive measures of the Government, the extremists' trend in the na-tionalist movement tended to go underground taking the form of terror-istic revolutionary attack, often from abroad. While, during the First World War, India supported the British by dispatching so many soldiers to the front, and the scene of the nationalist movement was dominated by the moderate line of asking for the constitutional concessions, the revolu-tionaries, however, took the War as their best opportunity to put their terrorism into practice. It cannot be denied that in the history of the nationalist movement in India, the 1910s was the recessive period be-tween the Swadeshi (1905-08) and Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Move-ments (1919-22). The period was, however, characterized by such revo-lutionary movements, which were unorganized and mostly unsuccessful but accompanied by many colorful incidents with wide geographic scope.
In this field of study we already have substantial numbers of academic works ranging from the biographical narratives to the general history of the chronological perspective.1) Those works are the outcome of rather troublesome academic efforts on the part of the researchers, who are sometimes confused with the mutually contradictory evidence while tracing the underground life of revolutionaries. And yet, now that mini-mum basic contributions on this topic have been accumulated, it is nec-essary to pursue more analytical studies in linkage with some adjacent research fields, whether economic or social. It is irrefutable that the revo-lutionary movement abroad in this period never obtained enough effect
Book Review 103
to overthrow the British hegemony, nor did it match the homeland
na-tionalist movements in terms of continuity and the strength of its
sup-portive base, but it contained its peculiar importance and perspective
with its wide expansion to other problems. Moreover, quite independent
of reflectively judging the effectiveness of a certain movement, there
should exist the necessity of properly understanding its various
implica-tions and the whole surrounding context. This is, of course, true of the
activities of those revolutionaries abroad. Plainly speaking, if a
revolu-tionary traveled through 10 countries or areas and in each made contact
with the big-names and found shelter with the Indian immigrant society,
an elaborate endeavor would be indispensable to collect information on
various matters such as the politics of each country and the state of that
immigrant society. This introductory part turned out to be somehow
lengthy, but proper treatment and understanding of the book here under
review, Prof. Kuwajima's Indian Mutiny in Singapore (1915), needs at
least a consideration of this kind of background. The work is an outcome
that went through with such an elaborate task. Though many previous
works benefited him substantially,2) his own strenuous effort to search
for the hitherto unknown historical sources, including private memoirs
both in Hindi and Japanese and unpublished archival materials such as
the records of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, enabled him to
achieve this work.
2. Singapore Mutiny •\ Beyond the Narrative as an Incident
In 1915, during the First World War, some six hundred Indian
sol-diers of an infantry corps, mostly Muslims, stationed in Singapore
sud-denly revolted against the British. They dispersed with the plundered
ammunition, collided with the British troops, tried to join other Indian
soldiers, and even tried to free German prisoners. Though Singapore fell
into complete disorder for several days, the British managed to recover
law and order with the help of the Japanese, French and Dutch armies.
However, this incident gave the British authorities serious alarm and
shock, not just because of the death of some British residents, but
be-cause it took place in the British army in the midst of World War I.
Kuwajima starts his discussion by refuting the official discourse about
the origins of the Mutiny. The colonial authorities then attributed the
inter-104 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
nal sectarian conflict, the instigation of some ringleaders who received
ideological control from outside, and the contact with German prisoners.
According to Kuwajima, however, the Mutiny was necessitated among
others by the general mistrust towards the British and the serious
reluc-tance to serve in the British armies. While admitting the strong
possibil-ity of direct contact of the soldiers with the Ghadar movement outside
(indeed, the British authorities soon began to strengthen their suspicion
about this and it was also to be reflectively boasted of by the Ghadar
ideologues), he emphasizes more the general and spontaneous anti-war
feeling among the soldiers. Such a feeling had been generated by the
character of the War as a European war not related to India at all, and it
was accelerated by the participation of the Ottoman Empire into the War
on the side of Germany (Chap. 3, esp. section 2). In terms of their
mistrust of the British, Kuwajima finds continuity from the
Koma-gatamaru incident (1914), where the fate of Indian
would-be-im-migrants from Hong Kong, mostly of Punjabi origin, was trifled with by
arbitrary and vigorous measures on the part of their destination country
Canada, and then Japanese and British authorities, leading to the loss of
some of their lives in a clash with the authorities after their forceful
deportation back to Calcutta. Therefore Kuwajima begins the story from
this tragic incident especially in connection with its effect on the Indian
immigrant society in South-East Asia (pp. 13-25), and thereafter; finds
the reluctant mood to do army service in other regiments as the
preced-ing case of the Mutiny (pp. 25-27); accesses the prevalence of the
Ghadar ideology (pp. 28-41); and in the following chapter discusses the
various possible causes of the Mutiny mentioned above (chap. 3). But he
does not stop here. As is well-represented by his full coverage and
analy-sis of the Japanese involvement on the part of suppressors like volunteer
corps, then called giyutai in Japanese (chap. 4), his interest goes beyond
the Mutiny as a mere incident. Indeed, the narrative of Mutiny is, by his
inquiry into the complexities of history, related to adjacent academic
fields, such as the social history of Singapore, the history of South Asian
immigrant society, the history of Japanese penetration toward the South
(nansin) and the critique of imperialism. In this sense this work has a
meaning as a clue to the task of reforming the narrative of the
revolution-ary movement abroad from a sequence of incidents to a more analytical
description. At the same time, however, such pioneer character was
un-Book Review 105 avoidably accompanied by an impression left on us that it presents us some new facts and suggestions and leaves them for our further analyti-cal discussions. This is, in a way, natural since each related academic field is large and rather independent.
Hereafter, within the limit of the reviewer's understanding and knowl-edge, some new viewpoints which seem to be suggested and elucidated through this work will be summarized with the present state of academic research on each topic mentioned whenever necessary.
3-1. Nationalism and Migration
It has been mentioned to a limited extent that the Ghadar Party or the Ghadar movement which was started in the early 1910s in North America to represent the age of revolutionary movement abroad, had as its supportive base immigrant labor and farmers, many of whom were Punjabis.3) However, it can not be denied that the Ghadar tends to be discussed only as extremists or mutineers as the term literally means. It is a fact that the main organizers of the movement such as Har Dayal were intellectual ideologues in the ideological legacy of extremists since the time of the Swadeshi Movement, but those leaders were not mere thinkers or ideologues. They tackled the problems of immigrants such as the restriction of immigration by Canadian and American customs and their low social status, and furthermore, their Ghadar movement was being constructed on the basis of a network of local immigrant societies and was given financial support by the big entrepreneur in it.4) Then, it should not be so hasty to assume that those immigrants had their own concerns in their support of the Ghadar movement, such as protection of their freedom to move over the oceans in accordance to the demand of labor or the demand of trade, and the improvement of their status in the new society. The reverse is that we could see the reflection of these concerns in the Ghadar movement.
Indeed, Kuwajima's work contains some suggestive, though fragmen-tary, facts which could lead to the discussion of the relationships between the Ghadar and the migration, or between the migrants and Indian na-tionalism. Passengers of Komagatamaru, on the way back from Canada, received encouragement from the Indian immigrant society in the port city like Kobe and Hong Kong. The character of Gurjit Singh, an immi-grant trader in Singapore, who chartered Komagatamaru for shipping
106 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
those Punjabis to Canada, is interesting as an example of a supporter or
potential agent of the Ghadar. He seems to have been moving around the
various British colonies on business making use of the expansion of the
colonial economy, but at the same time supported Indian nationalism
sympathizing with the Ghadar. (pp. 14-15) I think that such a character
of "a businessman with a strong sense of nationalism" symbolizes the
converging arena of migration and the Ghadar. Moreover, the Mutiny
can also be interpreted as a revolt of immigrants, since, as is later
men-tioned as well, they were not always dispatched away for action nor were
they isolated from the local society in their period of stationing. Thus
these points convince us of the need to explore the study of nationalism
represented in the immigrants/migration.
3-2.
Tong-Distance
Nationalism'
in History
Recent academic interest seems to be gradually growing around this
problem, and now we recognize that the seeming opposition of nation
and migration: the former given the metaphor of boundedness,
rootedness and territory, and the latter dispersion, transience and
min-gling, is a creation of 'nationalist' ideology.5) In the real historical
proc-ess, for example in Europe during the half-century before 1914, mass
international migration itself paradoxically emphasized or produced
na-tionalism.6) B. Anderson describes how the migrants at the turn of this
century with the electronic tools in hands imaginarily go back to their
homeland in an instant, thus manifesting what he calls long-distance
nationalism/nationalist.'7) In the case of South Asia, emigrants have
em-bodied such `long-distant nationalism' in very concrete forms: Sikhs
overseas demand the creation of independent Khalistan in Punjab, and
Hindus overseas support the Ayodhya Ram Temple erection campaign
in the form of donating bricks.8) Closely looking at history we come
across some other similar cases: Gandhi experienced some severe
colonialistic prejudices during his initial legal career in South Africa and
began to embrace the Indian nationalism; immigrants in Malaya
sup-ported the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose during World
War II both mentally and materially;9) and the migrants in relation to the
Ghadar mentioned above. Seen only in terms of the flow of the migrant
population, South Asian homeland, under the indenture system,
dis-persed 3 and regained 1 in total," thus unmistakably lost a part of the
Book Review 107 nation. However, seen in terms of the flow of ideology and material sources the homeland gained due to the feedback and consolidated its existence as a nation.
Thus it is not so difficult to find examples of long-distance national-ism' or what we may call 'remote-control nationalism' stressing the di-rection of ideological and material effect from the migrant society abroad onto their motherland, but it must be noted that such nationalism was not universal nor uniform. H. Sato could not find a positive reaction to the Ram Temple erection movement in the immigrant society of Thai-land, and he points out the historical memory which the core part of immigrants moulded in the homeland before emigration as one of the determinants of the manifestation of long-distance nationalism'. In this case, the core part of the old-age migrants did not hold up the movement since they are keeping the memory of a communally more harmonious society before emigration.11) In relation to this, we must here remind ourselves that the form of nationalism claimed by the immigrants varies in each context. Same immigrant community can hold different forms of nationalism. For example, Sikhs immigrants in North America once claimed Indian nationalism as is seen in the Ghadar, but on another occasion claimed Sikh ethno-nationalism. Besides historical circum-stances, the ideological orientation of the supporter of nationalism deter-mined its form. Indeed, the Ghadar themselves "decided to prohibit the discussion on religion" and "there was hardly any evidence of their par-ticular concern with the promotion of Sikh religion". (pp. 33-34)
Lastly we must ascertain some features of nationalism coming out of migrants. N. Nagasaki, who also draws our attention to the movement of people dropping out of the homeland or the nation in its narrow sense, coined a term "diaspora nationalism", and adequately summarized its two characteristics as follows; 1) it tries to maintain or attain the indepen-dence of the homeland, 2) it tries to protect their rights and interests, political, economic and social, through consolidating the tie with the homeland.12) Here, probably, one of the interesting points is that such nationalism does not always put a primary stress or concern on the homeland as a nation, though it is, in a sense, natural as migrants are physically away from the homeland. Their nationalism seems to conceive not only their homeland in the geographical sense but also the whole area of their habitation in the world and even their network itself as the object
108 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
for defense. Nevertheless, the stresses themselves tend to be laid upon the former as in the case of the Ghadar and Khalistan movements. Pay-ing attention to the co-existence of these two stresses we must be more careful not to miss the social and economic concerns behind them.")
4. Migrant Society
Kuwajima's work also contains some important points in understand-ing the migrants' society. Colonial administration at that time left us the census survey and it offers us now a rather close image of the state of migrant society in Singapore. That is really useful to reconstruct the composition of elements of society, giving us the population of Indian origin in each decade, even the proportion of various linguistic groups inside it. (p. 4 and appendix 4) Moreover some other historiography teaches us the process of immigration of some major groups.14) However, it is not deniable that such information tends to emphasize the numerical factor. Compared with it, Kuwajima's narrative about the Mutiny in-cludes some new light on the state of migrant society.
First, the Mutiny tells us that even a regiment of army soldiers, though they must have been liable to be dropped from the census count-ing due to their irregular or abrupt stationcount-ing, and their actual number was so small compared with other labor or merchant migrants, could play a pivotal role in a historical process. Army soldiers might be re-garded as the outsider or as the detached from Singapore society, but they were not. Surely they could not frequent the ordinary city area compared with others, but they seem to have been visiting mosques for prayer or some other purposes. Indeed, the soldiers of the Mutiny "were in the habit of visiting the Kampong Java Mosque in Singapore where a well-known and most dangerous character, a pir or 'holy man' named
Nur Alam Shah held court and preached sedition against the Govern-ment ... ". (p. 36) This pir has not yet been proved as the real
seditionist, but there existed a place of contact between the soldiers and society such as this. Moreover the army camp itself was approached by the people in ordinary society such as the supplier of various goods. For example, Gurjit Singh was once the dairy supplier to the Sikh regiment in another city of Malaya. (p. 14)
Second, I was newly reminded of the high fluidity of migrant society. The wide-ranging mobility of migrants covering the Indian Ocean and
Book Review 109 even Pacific Ocean is well-known and not so surprising, but another sense of fluidity I mean here is the easy convertibility of profession. In fact, many of the passengers of the Komagatamaru from Hong Kong had been formerly serving in the British army there and its nearby area and had left it before sailing of (pp. 13, 25), which makes us confirm the link from the tragic Komagatamaru incident to the Mutiny.
Third, Kuwajima notices a network of information of overseas Indian migrants in the process where the news of the Komagatamaru incident spread and also in the form of Ghadar organization. Such a network was found to be based on the "mobility of their society" (p. 24), and espe-cially in the Ghadar case it was maintained by "their own system of `informal' communication by way of meetings in the Gurdwaras and other routes". (pp. 30-31) Indeed, the Ghadar Party had a central body, "but its style of activities was more fluid and 'informal' rather than orga -nizational." (p. 29) This analysis well corresponds to Sato's observation of Indian immigrant society in Thailand, where the role of religious institutions for prayer like Gurdwara has been maximized as the nucleus of group communication for each community, and the history of such an institution is almost the community history.15)
5. Japan's Penetration toward the South and the Critique of Im-perialism
As already mentioned in the beginning of this review, Kuwajima pays special attention to the role of Japan, especially the Japanese community in Singapore, in the Mutiny. As a matter of fact, the community at that time was just around 1800 in number, all of whom except the consul staff were ordinary non-government people. Many of them were connected with the trading of various goods such as cotton stuff and rubber, but there were rather many brothels, too.16) Nevertheless they are important in Kuwajima's work, since they were not the third party at all in the sense that they organized a volunteer corps within a couple of days after the breakout of the Mutiny under the admission of Japanese authorities and participated in arresting the mutineers. Kuwajima here sees a mechanism working where a treaty on a paper between the two coun-tries, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, was abruptly put into effect and con-trolled the ordinary Japanese people, eventually suppressing the muti-neers and finally perfecting the gear of imperialism. (pp. 80-93)
More-110 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
over, he finds an exceptionally tight character in the relationship between ordinary migrant people and their homeland government, compared with other migrant communities' cases. (p. 83) However, on the other hand, ordinary Japanese people themselves who joined the volunteer corps tend not to be conscious of their actual role and the realities sur-rounding them, thus being awfully innocent. (p. 76) His standpoint in describing this part of story is, probably well-consciously, in the legacy of criticism of the postwar generation like Masao Maruyama, where fra-gility of individualism was questioned in connection with the establish-ment of the modern Emperor system after the Meiji Restoration.17)
In addition to this, historical circumstances of the Japanese southward penetration are important in understanding the Japanese in the Mutiny. Shortly saying, I mean that Japan's southward penetration was on the verge of a decisive reformation through the First World War, and such circumstances were manifested in the Mutiny. It is well-known that the War made a vacuum of power in Asia by diverting the Powers' attention
to Europe, and Japan snatched some islands from Germany in the south Pacific Ocean. Moreover, Japan also filled the economic vacuum of Southeast Asia by increasing economic relations with it . Thus the age of unofficial penetration based on the presence of migrants of a voluntary commercial concern began to give way to the age of official penetration under the state encouragement or armed attack.18) Kuwajima notices that the events during the Mutiny, especially the organization of giyutai with the consul's encouragement, turned out to bring about the solidarity of Japanese migrant society, and it manifested itself as the establishment of the Japanese Association (nihonjin-kai) in September 1915. (pp. 8, 87) This can also be interpreted as a change in the more dynamic shift about the quality of the Japanese presence in Southeast Asia mentioned above. I repeat that the value of Kuwajima's contribution lies in its pioneer character furnished with comprehensive attention and analysis, without which the whole context and the meaning of the Singapore Mutiny can-not be properly realized. More works are expected to explore the related problems and academic fields, some of which are also introduced in this review.
Notes
Book Review 111 an Indian Revolutionary. (Bombay: Lakshmi, 1950); Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist. (Arizona: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1975); Uma Mukherjee, Two Great Indian Revolutionaries. (Calcutta: 1966); Nobuko Nagasaki, "Rash Behari Bose k" (in Japanese
, A review on the life of Rash Behari Bose), in Hiroshi Tanaka (ed.) Nihon Gunsei to Ajia no Minzoku-undo (Japanese Militarism and the Nationalist Movement in Asia). (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Econo-mies, hereafter IDE, 1983); A. C. Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 1905-1922. (Patna: Bharati Bhawan 1972) ; Tilak Raj Sareen, Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad (1905-1920). (New Delhi: Sterling, 1979); Harish K. Puri, Ghadar Move-ment: Ideology, Organization and Strategy. (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev Univ., 1983).
2) Previous works which focused on the Mutiny are: Nicholas Tarling, "The Singapore Mutiny, 1915", Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. LV, Part 2, 1982; R.W.E. Harper and Harry Miller, Singapore Mu-tiny. (Singapore: 1984); R. W. Morsbergen, "The Sepoy Rebellion•\A History of the Singapore Mutiny, 1915". (Unpublished thesis, University of Malaya, 1954). 3) Emily C. Brown, op. cit., chap. 4. ; Sho Kuwajima, Indian Mutiny in Singapore
(1915), pp. 29-30.
4) Examples of such a personality can be partially observed in Jawala Singh and Pandit Kanshiram, seen respectively in Emily C. Brown, op. cit., pp. 127-129 and pp. 137-138.
5) Peter van der Veer(ed.), Nation and Migration: Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora. (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), introduction by the
editor, esp. pp. 6-7.
6) E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. (New York: Pantheon, 1987) cited in Ibid, p. 7.
7) Benedict Anderson, "The New World Disorder", New Left Review, no. 193, May/ June 1992, esp. pp. 12-13. Also its Japanese translation by Masami Sekine as
"Enkakuchi -Nationalism no shutsugen", Sekai. no. 586. September 1993. (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1993).
8) Hiroshi Sato, Thai no Indo-jin Shakai (in Japanese, Society of South Asian Immi-grants in Thailand), (Tokyo: IDE, 1995), pp. 50-51.
9) Nobuko Nagasaki, " Tonan-ajia to Indo-Kokumin-gun : diaspora(risan) national-ism no hokai", (in Japanese, Southeast Asia and Indian National Army: Collapse of the Diaspora-Nationalism) in Shinoo Oe et al. (ed.), Bocho suru Teikoku no Jinryii
(in Japanese, Expansion of Human Stream in the Empire), in the 5th volume of a series titled Kindai Nihon to Shokuminchi (Modern Japan and its Colonies). (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1993).
10) Peter van der Veer, op. cit., pp. 5-6. 11) Sato, op. cit., pp. 50-56.
12) Nobuko Nagasaki, "Tonan-ajia to Indo-Kokumin-Gun", esp. p. 156. 13) In the case of the demand of the Khalistan in Canada, where, under the state-policy
of multiculturalism, recognition as a community with proper cultural unity and background is indispensable, Dusenbery finds the intention of "the creation a pub-licly recognized 'country of origin', from which Sikhs may legitimately make claim
112 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
to their own political voice and to the perquisites of public support for cultural diversity in their country of residence". See, Verne A. Dusenbery, "A Sikh Diaspora? Contested Identities and Constructed Realities", in Peter van der Veer, op. cit. pp. 30-34.
14) Kernial Singh Sandhu, "Indian Immigration and Settlement in Singapore", and A Mani, "Indians in Singapore Society", both in K.S.Sandhu & A. Mani (ed.), In-dian Communities in Southeast Asia. (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Stud-ies, 1993); Shigehisa Sawa, "Singapore Minami-ajia-kei jamin kyojubunpu no henka" (in Japanese, Change of Residential Distribution among the South Asian Immigrants in Singapore), in Masao Naito (ed.), Studies on South Asian Communi-ties Abroad•\With Special Reference to Commonwealth Countries. (Tokyo: ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 1996).
15) Sato, op. cit., pp. 26-50.
16) Sho Kuwajima, op. cit., pp. 5-9; Hujio Hara, Eiryo Malaya no Nihon-jin (in Japa-nese, Japanese People in the British Malaya), (Tokyo: IDE, 1986).; Hajime Shimizu, "Senzenki Singapore Malaya ni okeru hojin keizai-shinshutsu no keitai" (in Japanese, Patterns of Prewar Japanese Economic Advance into Singapore and British Malaya.), Ajia Keizai, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Tokyo: IDE, 1985).
17) A representative work on this point is: Masao Maruyama, "Nihon ni okeru Nation-alism: sono siso-teki haikei to tenbo", Chuo-koron, Jan. 1951 issue, now compiled in Maruyama Masao-shu, Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1995). Its English translation is also available: David Titus (tr.), "Nationalism in Japan: Its Theoretical Back-ground and Prospects", in Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. by Ivan Morris. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1969).
18) Hajime Shimizu, "ibid", pp. 13-15.; Id., "Nihon-shihonshugi to nanyo" (in Japa-nese, Japanese Capitalism and the South Seas), pp. 92-97, in Toru Yano (ed.),
Tonan-ajia to Nihon (Southeast Asia and Japan). (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1991). ; Id., "Nanshin
-ron: Its Turning Point in World War I", The Developing Economies, Vol. XXV, No. 4, December 1987.
Takashi Oishi Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
113
■Book Review■
YANAGISAWA
Haruka, A Century of Change: Caste and
Irrigated Lands in Tamilnadu, 1860s-1970s
Delhi: Manohar 1996, xii + 323pp. Rs. 450.
On the brink of the twenty-first century, the economy of South Asia
remains heavily agrarian in character. In India some 60 per cent of the
labour force is still principally employed in agriculture, and about
one-third of the GNP is still generated by that sector. Furthermore, a
deci-sive three-quarters of the world's largest electorate (over 600 million
voters) reside in the countryside. For all these reasons, the nature and
direction of agrarian change is of vital interest to social scientists of every
description, and has generated a large literature. Research in this area
began a century ago, in the colonial era, in part as a consequence of
controversies among officials over appropriate policies in India. From
the late nineteenth century, as colonial rule began to be challenged by
Indian nationalism, the dominant issue was the effect of British rule on
the agrarian sector. With the dissemination of Marxist thought after the
Russian Revolution, the question of the emergence of capitalism in
agri-culture was also placed on the agenda •\ an issue that remained alive
through to the 1960s and 1970s in the famous 'mode of production
de-bate' that raged in those decades. Parallel to, but detached from these
'strictly economic'
debates was the discussion of social oppression and
political power •\ an issue of great significance in the politics of southern
India from the early decades of the present century. Only a few scholars
attempted to link these two problems •\ the most notable being Gail
Omvedt who wrote on Western India. Dharma Kumar's study of
Ma-dras explicitly made the connection between social status and economic
position, but she confined herself to demonstrating that, even before the
intensification of commodity production and trade under the British, the
caste system had ensured the existence of a sizable force of landless
114 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
affirmative action have also moved to the forefront of national politics in
India.
The work under review has something to offer scholars interested in
all these problems. It begins with a careful discussion of conditions at the
commencement of British rule, and confirms Dharma Kumar's thesis
regarding the high incidence of landlessness among the lower castes in
the irrigated areas of Tamilnadu, and especially in the Kaveri delta.
However, unlike Kumar, Yanagisawa emphasises the social and political
processes by which this situation was maintained, and shows how the
early colonial administration acquiesced in this by duly recording the
non-cultivating landlords as the owners of the land, and also largely
supporting their claim to control the disposal of uncultivated village
lands: thus ensuring the presence of a subservient class of tenants and
labourers •\ many of them permanently attached to their employers. I
would suggest that one objective reason for this preference was that the
Madras Board of Revenue was desperately trying to collect a heavy land
tax in the midst of an agrarian depression c. 1825-55 •\ so they needed to
maintain a class of wealthy 'ryots' capable of paying regularly in cash. Asa
consequence, in the middle of the nineteenth century, upper-caste
non-cultivating landowners dominated the wet zones, and only a small area
was owner-cultivated. This was also true of the study area (Lalgudi
sub-division of Tiruchirapalli district) when the first Settlement Register was
compiled in 1865. The careful analysis of every entry in this register, as
also in subsequent ones prepared in 1895 and 1925, provides some of the
richest material in this book. It also enables a more solidly grounded
ex-amination of the nature of changes in the ownership and use of land than
has hitherto been possible. It also goes a long way towards resolving
controversies regarding the direction of rural economic change under
British rule, at least in the area of study. So, for example, while Yanagisawa
agrees with Dharma Kumar as regards the presence of a large landless
population at the commencement of colonial rule, he also shows how the
character of tenancy was changing, and how economic processes and
market-related instability were expropriating small upper-caste
owner-farmers who then cultivated as tenants. He also points out, however, how
lower-caste agricultural labourers were sometimes able to move up the
agrarian hierarchy by taking land on rent from village landowners •\ in
Book Review 115
There were thus two paths to tenant status •\ one involving upward
social mobility, and the other, a downward one. Consequently, he is able
to both explain how the defenders of British rule and their nationalist
critics could find evidence in support of their respective hypotheses, and
to integrate the rival theories into a balanced synthesis. His discussion of
whether inequality in landownership increased or decreased over the
colonial period is particularly interesting, as he is able to shift the focus
from aggregate measures of inequality among all landowners •\ a
mea-sure which ignores the landless •\ to trends in landownership among
social groups, such as Brahmans, the new rich, and the previously
land-less labourer castes. The overall picture is then found to include land
alienation by Brahmans, acquisition by moneyed outsiders,
differentia-tion among traditional Sudra cultivating castes, and the acquisition of
some small plots of land by the 'Depressed castes.' The last phenomenon
accounted for the number of landowners increasing well ahead of
popu-lation growth in the period 1865-1925.
The changes in tenancy and ownership, Yanagisawa feels, were
them-selves moulding the agrarian economy to the needs of a new, more
inten-sive agriculture, with expanded double-cropping through more efficient
and careful management of water and fertilizer resources. Such
manage-ment, he argues, was difficult to introduce on large farms, and was best
suited to the family labour farm. This is based, in large measure, on the
work of Raghavaiyengar, which however, was definitely compiled with
the intention of demonstrating the 'Progress .of the Madras Presidency'
1852-90, and may have ignored evidence to the contrary. In the 1850s
the scientific survey had not covered most districts of the Presidency,
and so the land records were very imperfect. It is likely that some of the
increase in well-irrigated land was simply a consequence of better
records. Again, the single-cropping of rice may have been because the
heavy demands for land-tax as a share of gross produce made raising a
second crop unprofitable. Furthermore, at the inception of the ryotwari
system, cultivators were forced to hold large areas (especially of inferior
land) in order to prevent any reduction in the tax revenue •\ torture was
then employed to enforce collections. Such practices only ended with the
new surveys after 1855, and some of the improved cultivation practices
may simply have been the result of the removal of the disincentives
de-116 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
gree, therefore, the apparent intensification of the later nineteenth
cen-tury may simply represent a return to earlier standards of farming.
Furthermore, this intensification does not seem to have increased the
yield levels of the staple crop •\ rice. In the Tiruchirapalli district, the
Settlement officer was able to secure the results of output measurements
made between 1834-35 and 1840-41; their reliability was attested by the
entry that "no individual interests were at stake in their preparation..."
The average of the seven years was 637 Madras Measures per acre in the
wet villages of Lalgudi and Musiri talukas. Yanagisawa believes that crop
cuttings tended to be made on better soils •\ but here the entire output
of all the wet villages was measured. In 1860, settlement experiments
found an yield of 634 M. M., and in 1944-49 the sample surveys of the
I CAR found the yield to be 1051 lbs. of rice, or say 606 M. M. of paddy.
The three sets of yields are almost identical: however, the 1901 and 1911
revised estimates were well above these. We must, then, either assume
that yields rose over the period 1840-1910, and then fell off by an equal
amount, or accept the likelier hypothesis that the 1901-11 yields were
exaggerated, and that there was a secular stagnation in yield. This is also
suggested by a comparison of official rice yields for the Madras
Presi-dency as a whole as given in C. R.Srinivasan's Report of the Rice
Produc-tion and Trade in the Madras Presidency which also cross-checked this
with consumption and imports. In this source the median yield of paddy
per acre between 1918-19 and 1932-33 is shown as 1549 lbs./ac.,
equiva-lent to about 1000 lbs. of rice; while between 1947-48 and 1950-51 the
median crop-cutting yield was only 966 lbs. and the highest 974 lbs. It is
therefore much more probable that the revised official yields of 1901-17
exaggerated output by about 50%, and the true levels had not improved
since the nineteenth century.
Yanagisawa does, in fact, consider the possibility that some of the
measures of intensification were in fact responses to the loss of soil
fertil-ity, etc., which would account for the stagnation of yield in the face of
apparently rising inputs.
Labour is a vital input in backward agriculture, and this book also
presents a penetrating analysis of the changing nature of labour relations
in the countryside, and takes a broad synoptic view of political and
eco-nomic changes. It points out how the experience of migration, either
Book Review 117 dependence of agricultural labourers on their masters. Furthermore, the rise of nationalism led the colonial government to belatedly think of ameliorating the condition of the 'Depressed Classes' and some of them acquired little plots of land as a consequence. The government also saw this as making them into 'better' workers. Yanagisawa also makes an important link between changes in popular consumption and the move-ment for social emancipation. In the Lalgudi area, tenants and labourers were also able to make some gains with the arrival of the Dravidian political movements in the 1940s and 50s. The period after Indepen-dence is studies in a concluding chapter. Intensification and diversifica-tion now seem to pay off in terms of increased growth, and many of the residents of the village selected for study, (including some from the Scheduled Castes) benefited from the new economic opportunities, agrarian and industrial. However, inequality in landownership appears to have increased over the 1970s, and only 27 per cent of the land of the sample village was owned by its residents. The wage rates of both at-tached and casual agricultual labourers showed only marginal improve-ment down to 1980, but they now had a variety of other employimprove-ment open to them. All these changes were similar to those found in other Tamil villages.
Apart from addressing various issues that have engaged analysts of South Asia, this book also offers a stimulating comparison of the re-corded changes in Tamilnadu with those occurring in Japan from the seventeenth century onward. In both cases there was, Yanagisawa ar-gues, a trend to the breakup of large farming units using servile labour, and their replacement with small farms worked by family labour. The driving force behind this was the internal tendency of rice agriculture to intensive production which could "be more efficiently managed by small peasant families . . . " (p. 190) Thus Yanagisawa moves from the pains-taking and exact analysis of one agrarian region to formulate a bold and interesting hypothesis encompassing both social, economic and technical changes over several centuries in a number of Asian countries.
We may, perhaps, attempt to refine it by suggesting that the internal dynamic of rice farming could be either facilitated or frustrated, depend-ing on external economic and institutional forces. Thus, while it is likely that the small owner or tenant was the best farmer, Tamil farming, unlike the East Asian kind, was characterised by the presence of a large
118 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
agricultural proletariat, so that the landlord could try to reduce the
ten-ants' return to the bare labour wage, or deny him any return for
manage-rial skill. So the Report of the Special Officer on Land Tenures... 1947
cited a 1910 report from Coimbatore: "In some places, the competition
for leases is such that the tenant becomes practically a coolie paid by
results, provided by the landlord with seed and manure, and left to meet
the other expenses out of one-fifth of the grain and the straw... " The
tenant might then deploy his managerial skill not in production but in
seeking to defraud the landlord. So C. R. Srinivasan's Report noted that
the tenant's share in the Kaveri delta was smaller than elsewhere, so the
landlord had to be present at harvest to secure his share. By rigorous
supervision, the landlord might exact his share of the harvest, but might
also destroy tenant incentives to increase production. Social relations
characterised by contempt, hostility and distrust would also make
col-laboration between landlord, tenant and labourer difficult, while the
pe-rennial tendency to invest surplus capital in land would keep land prices
at a level that made the conversion of tenants into owners unlikely.
Fi-nally, as Yanagisawa notes, the Japanese countryside had seen the
vigor-ous development of rural by-employments that absorbed surplus
labour •\ something lacking in Tamilnadu before the 1950s. One also
wonders whether Japan did not enter the nineteenth century with a
so-cially more homogenous peasant estate than existed in South Asia, a
homogeneity generated by the Tokugawa policy of discouraging tenancy,
disarming the peasantry, and checking status aspirations by such means
as preventing the use of family names. A consequence would be to stifle
the growth of complex hierarchies akin to caste, except with respect to
the buraku-min. Thus I would modify Yanagisawa's argument to suggest
that, before Independence, institutional and political forces largely
frus-trated the tendency to intensive agriculture in south India, resulting in
that long-term stagnation of yields that I have discussed above; and that
a partial breakthrough occurred after the end of colonial rule.
A Note on the Size of the Madras Measure
Information on agricultural output over exceptionally long periods of
time is available for Southern India, and this has encouraged studies of a
type rarely possible in other regions of South Asia. However, almost all
Book Review 119 difficult to interpret because of the multiplicity of local measures of land and grain used in the sources. These measures not only varied between localities, but even between transactions: so for example, down to the 1970s a smaller measure, the 'coolie marakkal' was used in payments to agricultural labourers in some localities.
Local knowledge of local measures might also be used by landowners to try and reduce the burden of taxation, or (as the colonial government saw it) evade taxes. As a consequence, the Madras government sought to standardise these variable units in terms of the Madras Measure and the Harris kalam of 24 such Measures. An early record of these efforts is in W. H. Bayley Memorandum on Weights and Measures in the Madras Presidency (1857). Bayley recorded that the old trade measure was usu-ally 93.75 cu. inches in capacity, and if the measurer levelled the grain at the top (`struck measure') it would hold 105 tolas of rice so that the
'
garce' of 3200 measures would be about 4200 seers or 8400 lbs.
avoirdu-pois; however, since the practice was to include the conical heap of grain that protruded from the container the actual weight of the 'garce' was 9256.5 lbs.; a statement which agrees with W. Milburn Oriental Com-merce (1812 pp. 7-10). After an attempt to introduce a measure of 100 cu. inches, the government finally settled for a measure of 104 cu. inches. So, he wrote when
the term Madras Measure is used in the Provincial Statements... it means... 104 cubic inches, holding 117 tolas weight of rice when struck and 120 when filled to running over; and 128 when liberally heaped. (pp. 31, 57-8)
There can be little doubt that the Settlement Reports of the Madras Presidency would have used this official measure in their reports, and not the various local measures that they might have encountered; hence the problem posed by Yanagisawa (p. 290) is substantially simplified if one is using the Settlement records as officials made, or indicated, the adjust-ments needed. So for example, in the 'Chellumbrum and Manargoody' sub-divisions of South Arcot the report noted that 8 Royajee cullums were equal to 6 Harris cullums, and a note to the yield statement added that the measures given needed to be reduced by one-eighth to "convert them to regular Harris cullums." (pp. 101,119)
Determining the capacity of the measure still does not tell us if it was a heaped or struck measure, but the Rerort for Tiruchirapalli (p. 69)
120 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
speaks of the "usual heaped measure" being 113 cu. inches with a
mea-sure of 104 cu. inches. We are, however, still faced with the problem of
converting from volume to weight. Here we may draw on the careful
investigations made by compilers of the Report on the Marketing of Rice
in India and Burma (Govt. of India 1941). They found the Madras
Mea-sure to contain 3.1 lbs. of rice or 2.6 lbs. of paddy; 3.1 lbs. of rice is 121
tolas, or practically the same as the 120 tolas that Bayley observed in
1857. It follows then that we may safely take 2.6 lbs. as the weight of
paddy in an unstruck Madras Measure over c. 1850-1950.
Sumit Guha Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta
■Book Review■
TACHIKAWA
Musashi, An Introduction to the Philosophy
of Nagarjuna (translated by Rolf W. Giebel)
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997, iv + 213 pp. Rs. 200.
I. Introduction
The Middle Stanzas (Mulamadhyamakakezrika) of Nagarjuna (A.D. 150-250 or 100-200) undoubtedly gives readers the impression that it represents a logic transcending logic, or that Nagarjuna set a positive value in the argument on logical contradiction and paradox. A reader encountering the following passages will have the same impression:
"Things are born neither from self
, nor from another, nor from both, nor without cause." (p. 134, Middle Stanzas, I. 1)
"That which has been tra
versed is not being traversed, nor is that which has not been traversed being traversed; That which is being traversed, such as is other than that which has been traversed and that which has not been traversed, is not being traversed or is not known." (p. 54, Middle Stanzas, II. 1)
Book Review 121
It has often been said, on the contrary, that Nagarjuna bestowed logic
upon the world of emptiness espoused in the Prajriaparamita scriptures.
These two aspects (logic and something transcending logic) of the
Middle Stanzas have long troubled readers who want to understand the
Middle Stanzas in a consistent way. For this reason, although Nagarjuna
is said to have exerted a great influence on later Buddhism, the structure
of his philosophy and the characteristics of his logical operations are not
necessarily made clear in the Middle Stanzas. The present book is an
attempt to achieve "as accurate as possible an understanding of
Nagarjuna's intention" (p. iii) and to interpret his text consistently.
This book is an English translation of a revised version of the Japanese
book entitled Ku no kozo (The Structure of Emptiness, Tokyo: Daisan
Bunmeisha, 1986). The main body of the tenth chapter of the present
book comes from Gensh5 sekai no seika •\ Churon ni okeru engi
("Sancti-fication of the Phenomenal World: on pralityasamutpada in the
Madhyamakakarikas, Chapter 26," Buddhist Seminar 35, 1982, pp.
73-88). The author, Musashi Tachikawa, adds a final chapter which is also
an English translation of his Japanese article entitled Kibyfironshoha
("The Prasarigika School," Mahayana Buddhism vol. 7: Madhyamika,
Tokyo: Shunjusha, 1982, pp. 117-145).
The author's method in interpreting the Middle Stanzas is to
intro-duce the two 'poles' of the sacred and the profane and to conduct a
logical analysis of Nagarjuna's argument. The sacred and the profane are
scholarly concepts that have been proposed by Otto, Eliade, Caillois,
Mauss, etc., to facilitate an understanding of religion (pp. 6-8).
Tachikawa has claimed that after the vectors between the sacred and the
profane are taken into account, the contradiction between negative
ex-pressions such as "things do not arise" and affirmative expressions such
as "things arise by dependent co-arising" in the Middle Stanzas ceases.
In other words, Nagarjuna's negative statements indicate the vector
pointing from the profane to the sacred, while his affirmative ones
indi-cate the vector pointing from the profane to the sacred.
II. Content of the Present Book
The thirteen chapters of the present book can be divided into five
parts: (1) chapters one to three concerning the sacred and the profane,
state-122 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
ments in the Middle Stanzas, (3) chapters nine and ten relating 'negative' and 'affirmative' statements to the sacred and the profane, (4) chapters eleven and twelve concerning the tetralemmas in the Middle Stanzas, and (5) chapter thirteen dealing with the history of the Madhyamika school with particular reference to Buddhapalita, Bhavaviveka, and Candrakirti from the viewpoint of the increasing significance of the pro-fane.
The following are the titles and contents of the thirteen chapters taken up in the above parts. (1) Chapter one, "The Historical Position of
Nagarjuna's Thought", describes the relation between his thought and the Prajiiaparamita scriptures. Chapter two, "The Religious Position of the Middle Stanzas (Mulamadhyamakakarika)", introduces the poles of the sacred and the profane and applies these poles in the analysis of religions in general and Indian religions in particular. Chapter three, "The Conventional and Ultimate Truths in Nagarjuna's Thought"
, ap-plies the two poles in the analysis of the Middle Stanzas. Tachikawa has maintained that the profane is the phenomenal world, whereas the sa-cred, i.e., ultimate truth, is not explicitly described. Hence, he has as-sumed that the sacred indwells in the profane in the case of the Middle Stanzas. These three chapters reveal Tachikawa's deep understanding of the structure of the Middle Stanzas and his position in considering this text as a religious work. This does not mean, however, that we can neglect the importance of the logical operations implemented in the Middle Stanzas.
(2) Tachikawa begins with a logical analysis of Nagarjuna's argument in chapter four entitled "Statements to Be Treated in the Middle Stan-zas: the Structure of the Profane." He has claimed that Nagarjuna's logical operations are directed to the purpose of negating the reality of the phenomenal world, the profane. This chapter presents a list of all the sets of two factors which are described as interdependently related in the propositions in the Middle Stanzas (pp. 37-45). It is an excellent view
that "When two •\ and sometimes three or more •\ terms are
incorpo-rated in a single proposition by means of a syntactical connection, these
two or more factors become in the Middle Stanzas a subject of
examina-tion as entities standing in a relationship of dependent co-arising to one
another" (p. 52). Chapter five, "A Survey of Nagarjuna's Arguments: An
typi-Book Review 123 cal method of argument to implement the negation of the profane. Tachikawa points out that there are three patterns of negation in Chapter II of the Middle Stanzas and that the first is the most common: the procedure of "Distributing one of two intrinsically interrelated entities so as to cover all possible instances, expressing the relationship between, the two in the form of a proposition, and concluding all such proposi-tions with a negation" (pp. 56-57). Chapter six, "Complementary Rela-tionship in the Middle Stanzas: The Negation of the Profane (1)," eluci-dates this first pattern. That is to say, "After having given expression in the form of a single proposition to two factors standing in an interdepen-dent relationship, Nagarjuna distributes either or both of the two factors, or the relationship itself, into two complementary parts such that the sum of both parts is equivalent to the whole. Either or both of the two factors, or the relationship between them, is established as the fixed locus of the discussion, and this locus is in turn distributed in such a manner that there remains no sphere that is left untouched by Nagarjuna's argu-ment" (p. 61). This chapter classifies cases of complementary distribu-tion into five types and provides a complete list of the passages related to each type (p. 64).
Chapter seven, "Syntactical Relationship in the Middle Stanzas: The Negation of the Profane (2)," discusses the syntactical characteristics of the propositions describing factors which have been subjected to comple-mentary distribution. The author also provides a list of all the instances of these factors in the Middle Stanzas (pp. 76-87). Chapter eight, "The Negation of a Term and the Negation of a Proposition: The Negation of the Profane (3)," explains two types of negation with the help of transfor-mational grammar and tree diagrams: implicative negation (paryudasa) and absolute negation (prasajya-pratisedha). Tachikawa has clarified that the complementary distribution concerns the former negation, while the question of the truth of a proposition concerns the latter, and that Nagarjuna was fully conscious of the distinction between them. It is of interest that Tachikawa has connected the meaning of prapanca (a phe-nomenal world, the literal meanings of which is extension or dichotomy), ultimately to be negated, with the characteristics of a proposition: "a
division into two factors, into two cases, and into a noun phrase and a verb phrase" (p. 104).
Pro-124 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
fane to the Sacred," shows that Nagarjuna uses the term 'own-being' (svabhava) in two senses: something eternal and immutable, and every-thing existent, and points out that Nagarjuna says that change (or birth-and-death) in the phenomenal world is negated regardless of the exis-tence or non-exisexis-tence of own-being and on the other hand that there is change. This 'contradiction' leads Tachikawa to consider that Nagarjuna has a change in perspective: the vector from the profane to the sacred and the vector from the sacred to the profane. Chapter ten, "The Affirmation
of the Phenomenal World: From the Sacred to the Profane," evaluates two points regarding Nagarjuna's doctrine of dependent co-arising: "In the first place, he extended the sphere of the members interrelated through dependent co-arising, and secondly he linked dependent co-arising and emptiness" (p. 116). In the Middle Stanzas, dependent co-arising described in negative terms indicates the vector from the profane to the sacred, while dependent co-arising described in affirmative terms indicates the vector from the sacred to the profane.
(4) Chapter eleven, "Tetralemmas in the Middle Stanzas," represents a new interpretation of the tetralemmas. To surmount the defects of the previous symbolic representation of each case of the tetralemmas, Tachikawa has interpreted each case as indicating a division of the uni-verse of discourse, a sum of divisions, or no uniuni-verse of discourse. To support his interpretation, he gives a list of the types of tetralemmas (p. 136) and classifies all the tetralemmas by the criteria of affirmative or negative, and conjunctive or disjunctive (p. 137). He proves in this chap-ter that the tetralemmas in the Middle Stanzas observes the laws of contradiction and the excluded middle. Chapter twelve, "Nagarjuna's Tetralemma in Comparison with that of the Hua-yen School in China," points out a difference between tetralemmas used in the Middle Stanzas and in the Hua-yen wu-chiao chang (華厳 五教 章), and concludes that the
latter, unlike the former, does not include radical negation of the profane. Tachikawa's statement on the negation implemented in these two texts is very interesting: "The emptiness of the Middle Stanzas represents 're-birth' that follows on from total negation. In the Wu-chiao chang, etc., on the other hand, the 'remnants' of the profane negatee form the world of provisional designation. This way of thinking, which was absent in Early Buddhism and the early Madhyamika school, was later to gradually de-velop in the Yogacdra school, Tathagatagarbha thought, Tantrism and
Book Review 125 the Hua-yen and Tien-t'ai school in China" (p. 167).
(5) Chapter thirteen, "Later Interpretations of 'Dependent Co-aris-ing': The Significance of the Profane," tries to reinterpret the difference between the standpoints of Bhavaviveka making much of Dignaga's logi-cal system and of Candrakirti attaching much significance to reductio ad absurdum in the framework of the sacred and the profane.
III. Comments
The most important aspect of this book is that the author has con-stantly succeeded in interpreting Nagarjuna's thought represented in the Middle Stanzas from the perspective of the sacred and the profane. The use of these scholarly concepts may cause some readers to think that the author's analysis of the text is rough and inaccurate. However, the logical analysis presented in chapters four to eight of the present book eliminates all such doubt. Moreover, Tachikawa has stated that Nagarjuna's logical operations aim to negate the reality of the profane and as a result mani-fest the sacred. He has shed light upon Nagarjuna's most common method of argument as quoted (pp. 56-57, 61) in the previous section of the present review. His logical analysis confirms our belief in the validity of using those concepts. His interpretation of the tetralemmas in the Middle Stanzas is also logical and effectively removes the ambiguity concerning the interrelation of their cases in past research. The four tables inserted in the present book (pp. 37-45, 64, 76-87, 136-137) cover all the cases and support the validity of his analysis. The fact that he has proved that Nagarjuna observes basic rules of logic such as the laws of contradiction and the excluded middle is also an important achievement.
Tachikawa's use of the concepts of the sacred and the profane has paved the way for a connection of Nagarjuna's perspective in the Middle Stanzas to religion. He seems to claim that this text is an object not only of Buddhist studies but also of religious studies. If Tachikawa had aimed simply at understanding Nagarjuna's religious perspective, Nagarjuna's own terms 'ultimate truth' and 'conventional truth' would have been sufficient to bring about that purpose. By applying these two scholarly concepts, Tachikawa has claimed that we can interpret Nagarjuna's per-spective in the framework of religion. Chapter two of his book, in par-ticular, reveals his view about the nature of religion. This book will undoubtedly attract the attention of persons interested in religious studies.
126 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 9, 1997
It is noteworthy that Tachikawa has demonstrated the interpretation of the tetralemmas made by the Hua-yen school, its difference from Nagarjuna's intention, and the influence of this difference on the Yogacara school, Tantrism, etc. In this sense, the present book will cer-tainly be of value not only to those interested in the Madhyamika school, but also to those interested in Buddhism in general.
Nagarjuna examines propositions describing the relationship among philosophical concepts such as action, its agent, and a locus where the action takes place, cause and effect, and so forth, and eventually proves that these propositions are false. The method of his criticism is reductio ad absurdum. Tachikawa's logical analysis of Nagarjuna's argument will undoubtedly interest readers of philosophy in general.
I would like to pose a few questions here. (1) When he inquires into the meaning of 'own-being,' Tachikawa claims that "As in the case of the
'similar effect'
and 'dissimilar effect' in IV. 6, 'effects that are really
exis-tent by their own-being' and 'effects that are not really existent by their own-being' do not signify two spheres that together constitute the entire realm of all 'effects', instead they actually refer merely to two types of effects far removed from one another, one effects that are eternal and immutable entities and the other effects that are without any shadow of existence and are equivalent to nothing" (p. 109). He continues that "In the case of the former, 'own-being' (svabhava) refers to something eter-nal and immutable, whereas in the case of the latter it signifies not only something eternal and immutable, but everything existent, including that which is subject to change." However, it is not clear why 'own-being' signifies everything existent when effects that are without any shadow of existence are referred to in verse 21ab, XX: Would a cause produce an effect that is not really existent by its own-being? (phalam svabhaveisadbhiitamkimhetur janayisyati). In this verse also, 'own-being' seems to mean something eternal and immutable. Tachikawa's claim may be correct, but he should have elucidated the case in more detail.
(2) It is understandable that the two poles of the sacred and the pro-fane are an effective means to interpret the Middle Stanzas, but I wonder how much they facilitate our understanding of other religions and what the connection with other scholarly concepts such as impurity is. This issue, of course, is beyond Tachikawa's scope, and hence he did not need to address it in his book. However, since he explains religious activities
