Now it is the interest of Spirit that external conditions should become internal ones; that the natural and the spiritual world should be recognized in the subjective aspect belonging to intelligence; by which process the unity of subjectivity and (positive) Being generally—or the Idealism of Existence—is established. This Idealism, then, is found in India, but only as an Idealism of imagination, without distinct conceptions;—one which does indeed free existence from Beginning and Matter (liberates it from temporal limitations and gross materiality), but changes everything into the merely Imaginative; for although the latter appears interwoven with definite conceptions and Thought presents itself as an occasional concomitant, this happens only through accidental combination. Since, however, it is the abstract and absolute Thought itself that enters into these dreams as their material, we may say that Absolute Being is presented here as in the ecstatic state of a dreaming condition (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 139).

This paper briefly charts the progress and findings of European scholars approaching the issues of caste and sect in the Jain community over the last two centuries. Other authors have already discussed the European interest in Jain textual and philosophical issues, and while I touch on these briefly, my main concern is to outline Jain social organization, with particular reference to Swetambar communities in the north.

On 3 May 1945, British—Indian forces landed in Rangoon. The Japanese had pulled out. The city was liberated. On 16 June there was a victory parade, though the final victory over Japan was still distant and most of their conquests were intact. Admiral Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, took the salute while detachments representing the one million men under his command passed by in massed array. Famous regiments from Britain, India and Nepal; the Royal Navy; the Royal Air Force; men from the United States Air Force. It was an impressive sight, though the ceremony took place in pouring rain. Amongst them all was a somewhat ragged band representing the Burma National Army which, having been raised by the Japanese, had fought for three months alongside the British. Watching the parade from the central dais was a young man dressed in the uniform of a Japanese Major-General, though he also wore an arm-band with a conspicuous red star. The outfit was incongruously crowned by a pith sun-helmet—a topi. Probably most foreigners present assumed he was a Chinese officer. He was actually Bogyoke Aung San, commander of the BNA.

The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom … respect the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live, and they wish to see sovereign rights restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.

One of the paradoxes of the history of Islam in the twentieth century is that many of the first Muslim socialists were men who at earlier stages in their lives had been devout Muslims, often passionately involved in the fate of Islam throughout the world. In Russia, socialists emerged from various silsila of the Naqshbandi sufi order, most notably the Vaisites of Kazan who fought alongside workers and soldiers in 1917 and 1918. In Indonesia, many sufi shaikhs became Communist party activitsts in the midst of the Sarekat Islam's great pan-Islamic protest of the early 1920S.In India, Muslim socialists came from those who, concerned to defend Islam wherever it was threatened and in particular the institution of the Khilafat, had come to oppose their British masters. These champions of Islam sought help against the British from Muslims outside India; they supported Britain's enemies. A few actually left India in order to join other Muslims in their fight against the British. Their experiences in Afghanistan and Central Asia brought disillusionment. They discovered that others did not share their faith in the brotherhood of Islam; they began to consider other ideologies. Some were convinced by the Bolsheviks, who supported Muslim peoples and opposed the imperialism of the West, that socialism might offer the key to success in their struggle against the British. In the process they discovered similarities between Islamic and Bolshevik ideology, which eased their transition to socialism.

One of the principal difficulties in arriving at a constitutional settlement in India during the 1940s stemmed from the inherent conflict between Congress's emphasis upon the principle of majority rule and fluid political alignments and the Muslim League's commitment to the Islamic conviction that numerical configurations were irrelevant to politics and that what mattered was the rigid ideological divide between Muslims and non-Muslims.

In 1941–42 Japan destroyed the empire of the British in Southeast Asia. They were determined to return and, with the assistance of the US, they were able to do so in 1945. The plans they developed in preparation for their return were unrealistic. Rightly they took account of some of the weaknesses of their prewar régimes in Burma, in Malaya, in Borneo. But the policies they developed for dealing with them required an assumption of authority that, with their comparatively diminished power and their devastated economy, the British were unable to sustain in the immediate postwar years, and took too little account of the changes that had taken place since they left. They adjusted their policies with some success. Their essential aims were security and stability, the conditions for economic revival. The re-establishment of colonial régimes was one means to such ends: other means might have to serve. If Burma's leaving the Commonwealth promised stability more than attempts to keep it in, then that course could be accepted. If a Malayan Union seemed to promise division rather than consensus, greater weakness rather than greater strength, it must be replaced by Federation. The choices may still not have been right: Burma virtually collapsed; the Emergency began. But they were the only ways the British could perceive of achieving their aims in the circumstances in which they found themselves.