In the making of this book, we have benefited immensely from our long-term interaction with and support of our colleagues at the Centre for Historical Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Many friends—Mohit Sen, Kewal Varma, V.P. Dutt, Barun De, Girish Mathur, Girish Mishra, Gopi Arora, S. Gopal, Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, V.N. Datta, Ravinder Kumar, C.P. Bhambri, Darshan and Shiela Bhalla, Amit Bhaduri, Arjun Sengupta, Shireen Moosvi, Arun Kumar, Arjun Dev, K.P. Jain, G.M. Telang, Swadesh Mahajan, Madhu Kishwar, Shekhar Singh, Shantha Sinha, Narinder Bedi Amrita Patel and Bodh Prakash—have over the years helped us grapple with the contemporary world, often through a great deal of polemics and many heated discussions and disagreements.
A large number of colleagues and students—D.N. Gupta, Mohinder Singh, Sucheta Mahajan, Visalakshi Menon, Antony Thomas, Sudhir Mathur, Neerja Singh, Salil Mishra, Rakesh Batabyal, Bikash Chandra, Vikram Menon, Gyanesh Kudaisya, John Zavos, Amit Mishra, Tulika Sharan, Dipa Sinha, Himangshu, Bhuvan Jha, Kalyani and Amman Madan—have contributed to evolving our ideas and have also been of assistance in several other ways, and have helped us keep our optimism alive.
The Japan Foundation enabled us (Aditya Mukherjee and Mridula Mukherjee) to be at the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, for a year since March 1999. A considerable part of the drafting and research for the book was done in Japan. Professor Asis Datta, Vice Chancellor, JNU, very kindly made it possible for us to avail of this opportunity to complete our book. A large number of friends and colleagues made our visit in Japan extremely fruitful intellectually and otherwise. They include Professors Nariaki Nakazato, Haruka Yanagisawa, Tsukasa Mizushima, Shingo Einoo, Toru Matsui, Nobuko Nagasaki, Takako Hirose, Hiroko Hara, Shigeru Akita, Fumiko Oshikawa, Mr Takashi Oishi, Dr Shuji Uchikawa, Mr Shusaku Matsumoto, Professor and Mrs Hisashi Nakamura, Mrs Emiko Kothari, Dr Kyoko Inoue, Umesh and Ruby Pawankar, Dr Malavika Karlekar, Chieko Mizushima, Dr Jaishankar and Professor B.R. Tomlinson, Mr Shin’ichiro Horie of the Japan Foundation, Tokyo, enabled us to take time off from Japan and present many aspects of this book in several universities in the US. Manuela Albuquerque, Catherine Harned, Abha and Anil Pandya, Mohan Sood, Tom Metcalfe, Vasudha Dalmia, Blair Kling, Arjun Appadurai, Bernard Cohn and Carol Breckenridge were critical in making the US visit very rewarding.
We would like to thank the staff of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Jawaharlal Nehru University Library and the India International Centre Library in New Delhi and the Institute of Oriental Culture Library and Institute of Developing Economies Library in Tokyo.
Luxmi and Om Prakash shared a great deal of the burden of typing a large part of the manuscript. Colleagues at the Academic Staff College, JNU, particularly Savitri Bisht, Ajay Sharma and S.C. Sharma, went beyond the call of duty to help the authors write the book situated thousands of miles from each other, using information technology.
As usual Usha Chandra has contributed in multiple ways to the making of this book.
We are very thankful to Raj Kamini Mahadevan of Penguin India for undertaking the arduous task of editing the manuscript and thus vastly improving it and also for seeing to it that we didn’t fall too far behind schedule. We are also very thankful to David Davidar for encouraging us to undertake the writing of this work and then giving us great deal of latitude in terms of time.
For the revised edition we are particularly grateful to Ravi Singh and Avanija Sundaramurti for persuading us to work on the revisions and additions and then patiently egging us on till we completed the project.