This paper provides an analysis of the semantic function of < V-ne-vala hona>, which is said to be the periphrastic future construction in Hindi. The construction is formed by attaching a grammatical element -vala, which makes adjective/noun phrases, to the oblique infinitive (V-ne) followed by a form of the copula verb hona. In most preceding studies, < V-ne-vala hona> is described as denoting the proximate future, but through the examination of actual examples, it is revealed that this construction can also be used for the remote future in case of an event having a high probability of realization.
This paper argues that this construction is not an expression that refers to the future but an expression that describes a state at the time of reference as a pre-determined schedule by considering the following facts : (i) in some cases < V-ne-vana hona> is not equivalent to the future tense form. (ii) the copula verb bond can take the past tense form and in that case the construction usually denotes that an event was not realized.
<V-ne-vala hona> is used to describe not only a scheduled event but also an imminent one, or a future event that the speaker strongly believes will take place. This paper clarifies the semantic and syntactic characteristics of these three kinds of usages of < V-ne-vala hona> and considers the last one (the speaker's strong belief) as epistemic modality according to the definition of Palmer (2001). The final section makes an observation on the grammaticalization of <V-ne-vala hona>.

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During the 13th to 15th century, many Muslim artists played an active role in the North Indian music scene. They brought about drastic innovations to the music style, from which the North Indian music (Hindustani music) as practiced today arose. This article deals with the descriptions of musical duels recorded in musical treatises written in Sanskrit and Persian. In these duels held in court, Muslim musicians and Hindu musicians fought against each other to seek the favor of the king. One episode is told in the Jaina-Rajatarangini, Shrivara's chronicle of Kashmir (15th Cent.). The other is the famous story of Amir Khusrou (13th Cent.), contained in Faqirullah's Risale-i-Ragdarpan (17th Cent.). By contrasting the two different ways in which the duels were described, we can clearly observe a shift taking place in the aesthetic views held during this period.

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This study aims to clarify the concept of “child” in Bangladesh rural society by focusing on the process by which the children gradually change their behavior, relationship ties and social standing within their community as they grow. Within this, the undeniable connection between the society's image of the child' and the children's own daily practices caught my attention, leading me to the new concept of the “child-sphere”.
In Jamalpur, where I had conducted my fieldwork, the people have multiple words that mean “child” and differentiate them according to the stages of a child's growth. Moreover, children are often assumed to bhuji-nai (“simply not understand”) and are consequently excused or forgiven for not observing social manners and rules. On the other hand when we focus on the children's practices, their behavior or levels of understanding can be described to separate into stages that roughly correlate to the adults' expectations. Their freedom to bhuji-nai decreases in accordance with an increase in the number of expected roles they must fulfill for their families.
Thus, the children establish behavioral patterns within their freedom from social rules allowed by their bhuji-nai, and as they learn social regulations through their interactions with people in their community, their “child-sphere” gradually contracts. Eventually the “child-sphere” disappears for the child, which is effectively the end of their “days of child.”

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This paper describes cultural politics on the concept of “Environmental Conservation” in contemporary Bhutan through a case study of a pastoral village within a national park, where the practice of forest-based cattle grazing and migratory livestock farming has been restrained for the last few years by the government in the name of environmental conservation. On the one hand, the government has put restrictions on the people's forest resource use, and on the other, it has encouraged villagers to decrease the number of their cattle and transform their lifestyle from one centered on migratory livestock farming to a sedentary one. Since there is no efficient way to reduce the number of cattle except through slaughter, the government policy implies that people will, albeit indirectly, be forced to send their cattle to the slaughterhouse. Currently the people of this pastoral village face the difficult situation of having to choose whether to be a better Buddhist by not killing cattle or a better environmentalist by sending their cattle to slaughter. In contemporary Bhutan, although the government has insisted that environmental ethics are intrinsically included in the thought of Mahayana Buddhism and cannot be separated, actual conservation policies do not allow them to be ideal Buddhists. This case study shows us the possibility of multiple interpretations of “environmental conservation”, and highlights the people's attempts to reevaluate and reconstitute their own self-portraits based on the government's ideal of “being a good Bhutanese citizen”, in which the country's Buddhist tradition and environmental concerns coexist.

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Hindu nationalist organizations have pursued their activities not only in India but also overseas, and have established various networks across national borders. This article examines the political relationship between the Hindu nationalist party in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its affiliated organization overseas, the Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP).
The article first analyzes the Indian diaspora policy of the BJP-led alliance government. It argues that the BJP supported the Hindu nationalist movement overseas through this policy. While in power, the BJP had to consider its relationship with its allied parties and the acquisition of extensive support from the constituency. Therefore, the BJP could not crystallize its ideology-oriented policies in India, such as the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. On the other hand, the Hindu nationalist organizations in India, its strongest support base, severely blamed the BJP for its passive ideological stance. Under these circumstances, the BJP looked for a new political strategy overseas and incorporated various demands of the OFBJP into government policies, such as the dual citizenship and the appointment of the person involved with these organizations as ambassador in charge of Indian diaspora affairs. The OFBJP, on the other hand, strengthened its supporting activities for the BJP in Indian diaspora society.
Despite such political support, however, the BJP had to face strong criticisms on the ideological line of the BJP from the OFBJP after its debacle in the 2004 election. The OFBJP, as an organization more strongly committed to the Hindu nationalist movement, expressed its dissatisfaction with the ideological stance and the political strategy of the BJP and demanded that the party correct them. For instance, the BJP and the OFBJP have expressed different views on the significant role of the Hindu nationalism in national and state elections. According to the OFBJP, the victory of the BJP in elections was the result of the electorate supporting its ideology.
Thus the OFBJP imposes pressures on the BJP both directly and through Hindu nationalist organizations in India which the BJP cannot afford to ignore. Otherwise the BJP will have to suffer isolation from Hindu nationalist organizations in India and overseas. Consequently, the BJP has no choice but to commit to its ideology.

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The 1930s in Indian history saw the emergence of a new category, 'Kisan', with the popularization of national movements and a vitalization of the peasant movement. This article attempts to analyze the socio-historical context of this phenomenon by concentrating on the Kisan Sabha movement that evolved in Colonial Bihar. The most important and immediate tradition related to this movement can be traced back to social mobility movements by certain middle-ranking agricultural castes such as Yadav and Kurmi since the beginning of 20^th century, whose central goals were to reconstruct their identity in order for their castes to move upwards in their social hierarchy.
Their actions, which often invited violent clashes with the opposing upper-castes, provided them with experiences of concerted assertion through an organization of caste sabha. These experiences also highlighted agrarian issues shared by many in the agricultural castes, and thereby made it possible for them to unite under common agrarian issues, providing them with a broader platform. Thus the Kisan Sabha movement of the 1930s in Bihar provided momentum for this phenomenon and produced a new category of Kisan, under which people from various socioeconomic origins were loosely encapsulated. Under the leadership of the Kisan Sabha, the Kisan put forward common demands and fought against large-scale landlords.
The emergence of this new category can be seen as a process of class formation. This very loosely united body of people is a product of their common experiences of inter-caste conflicts, which provide a common platform for behaving as a class while consisting of groups living in different material conditions. However, there is a strong presence of particular castes in major Kisan struggles, and they consequently took on significant roles in organizing and mobilizing people in the Kisan. Eventually, this continuity from previous caste sabhas and the newly formed Kisan Sabha gradually began to undermine the loosely united class toward the 1940s, when the class of Kisan was being eroded while rifts were widening between caste lines.

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The so-called “department of Indian philosophy” in a Japanese university covers not only Indian (philological) studies but also Buddhist studies. Junjiro Takakusu came back from Oxford University and was appointed the first Chair of the Sanskrit Department at the University of Tokyo in 1901. It is, however, hasty to conclude that Indian and Buddhist studies in Japan were mere imports from the West. In the beginning the main focus was on the doctrinal aspects of Buddhism. Such early studies were oriented towards the apologetics of Buddhist doctrine that “reached a climax in Japan”. Buddhist texts in classical Chinese were compared with Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan sources through the western philological method. This comparative method, which is most typically observed in the works by Hakuju Ui, was followed by his successors as one of the most promising paths for Japanese scholarship. Essentially, “Indian philosophy” in Japan consisted (and still consists) of Indology, Tibetology and Sinology/Japanology. In 1943, Hajime Nakamura was appointed to the chair of Indian philosophy at the University of Tokyo. Unlike his predecessors and colleagues in the department, he was not a Buddhist monk. His appointment clearly marks a new era. Diversification of topics and methods are plainly visible in his works. In addition to philology, linguistics and philosophy, which had been the core of “Indian philosophy” in Japan, other perspectives such as historical study, anthropology, art history, archaeology and religious studies were introduced into the field. In Kyoto, the influence of French Indology was particularly salient. Susumu Yamaguchi (Otani University), who studied under Sylvain Levi, also taught at Kyoto University as a lecturer. His style was inherited by Gadjin M. Nagao. The famous “three Munis” in Kyoto University-Yutaka Ojihara, Masaaki Hattori and Yuichi Kajiyama-educated many scholars who sustain Japanese Indology today. Many of them studied in and attained their degrees in western universities. Ojihara's dream of “participating in western Indology on equal footing” is a reality today. However, whereas rigid philology and specialization in each topic has led to international fame in the Academy, interest in contemporary India as well as the urge to return scholarly fruits to society and other disciplinary areas seem to have diminished among Japanese indologists. This has been particularly true after the deaths of Hajime Nakamura (1999), Katsuhiko Kamimura (2003) and other prominent scholars.

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This article reviews empirical research on the impact of economic institutions and policies in South Asia. This is a topic which has been intensively analyzed by Japanese social scientists since the early 1960s, based on detailed field surveys and careful examination of various data. These studies in Japan are contrasted with studies published in recently emerging literature in development economics, which use program evaluation methodologies in microeconometrics. In recent literature, due attention is paid to the endogeneity of institutions and policies in order to derive causal inference (e.g., the inference that policy A causes economic outcome B to increase/decrease, not the observation that policy A is correlated with outcome B). To control for the endogeneity bias, a useful methodology is the “difference in difference” (DID), which can be especially effective in the Indian context of “Unity in Diversity”. Because of their federal political system and rich regional histories, individual regions within India experienced heterogeneous impacts when a policy was changed at the national level. We can therefore find several interesting examples of natural experiments. Although the Japanese social scientists shared this perspective, they rarely presented it in a rigorous way using key words such as DID or natural experiments. By explicitly employing these key words and paying more attention to causal inference, studies by Japanese social scientists could contribute more to the emerging empirical literature on South Asian economies. Another area in which Japanese studies have a potential advantage is the careful investigation of whether a seemingly “natural” experiment in South Asia was indeed associated with exogenous variations in policies or institutions. Using the detailed knowledge based on fieldwork that characterizes the Japanese studies, we may be able to show that some of the natural experiments analyzed in the existing literature were not so good as to be regarded as “exogenous”.Finally, the tradition of field-based analysis in Japan could contribute to the analysis of the endogenous formation of economic policies and institutions. Existing recent literature on the causal impact of policies/institutions has a tendency to control the endogeneity of policies and institutions by throwing the endogenous process into a black box. This is a serious problem which should be overcome through future studies.

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India's economic and strategic position in the international community has changed markedly in recent years. As a result, many political scientists seem to study Indian politics mainly in terms of subjects such as international relations and security. On the other hand, they seem to have relatively little interest in domestic political matters in India. However, it is hard to find “pure” domestic politics or “pure” international politics in India today. Almost every policy making process and political event in India involves the interactions of multiple political spheres from the international to the local.
Therefore, in order to understand politics in India today, we must analyze “comprehensively” those multilevel political processes and socio-economic circumstances both within and outside India. It also requires knowledge of various academic disciplines such as economics and anthropology in addition to political science. To this end, it is practical to conduct cooperative research by a number of scholars. In order to study the politics of the huge country of India, which has a complicated society and culture, it is of course important to advance our research in a specific field of study or within a specific geographic area in India. However, at the same time, it is also important to establish a system of interdisciplinary cooperative research in which a number of scholars participate.

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The first half covers a retrospective summary of the historical study of South Asia in Japan. The historiography of India was initially inseparable from the inquiry of identity for Japanese historians, who faced the “modernizing” and “hegemonic” West as compared with colonized Asia. The historiography entailing such inquiry was inevitably exposed to contemporary political environments. It was only after the Second World War that a substantial historical enquiry based on primary sources was launched along with socioeconomic analyses. Until the early 1970s, “stages of social development” based on historical materialism was dominant, with the main concern being the supposed stagnation of Indian society and land-centered feudalism. However, it was thereafter replaced by a more balanced view, which tried to capture the historical dynamism under market forces as well as non-material powers such as religion and royalty.
The late 1980s saw a rise of new historical inquiry under the impact of new ideas such as Orientalism and “invention of tradition”. Among others it caused the re-interpretation of the colonial rule's impact, thereby deriving the deconstruction of 'Indianness' or existing framework of nations. This strain of thought still influences current historical research by urging new focuses such as subaltern and other marginalized people, public spheres, and the ecological environment. The second half of the article is reserved for the future prospects of South Asian historical research, which the author has also been engaged in. So far, cohesive organization and institutionalization of a particular area has been the major parameter in analyzing the society or particular polities. The author instead proposes the fragmented state of agencies as a possible base for regional order and economic development. Moreover, expansion as well as circulation of such agencies can be further explored to focus on the hitherto neglected dynamism of regions, which should not necessarily be framed within a geographically visible state. Some concrete examples of such agencies and focuses are taken from the author's recent works on Muslim merchants and their networks, as well as the economies of particular commodities that they handle, such as matches.

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This article reviews research on South Asian societies by Japanese scholars and discusses the transformations in perception and emergence of new agendas. Japanese studies on South Asian societies in the post-war period can be understood in a broader intellectual context in Japan in which there were attempts to re-evaluate the position of Asia in the world-politics of nationalism, democracy and development. However, anthropology, a discipline which conducted pioneering studies on South Asian societies, tended to pay attention to the importance of local society, ethnicity and civilization beyond the framework of nation-states. From the 1960s, many Japanese researchers began to conduct longterm field work in South Asia through which they produced significant monographs that reflected the complexity of South Asian society. Recent transformation of studies in South Asian sociology/anthropology in Japan can be summarized as change from attempts to grasp the essence of South Asia in terms of structural form to understanding the dynamics of social 'becoming'-the process of emergence and transformation-of social patterns and relationships. This article pays attention to the role of human agency which works upon social relationships and system of meaning in which these agents are embedded. Present day South Asian societies are in the process of moving beyond the colonial dichotomy of community/state, religion/rationality, traditional/modern, etc. through the workings of agency which functions to mediate the colonial dichotomy and create a new dynamism towards a post-postcolonial condition.

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