448

presentation in the author’s thesis. There is much talk of ’villagers in this

region at the tip of India [who] shared with rustic folk worldwide the fate of
being relegated to obscurity and robbed of history by cosmopolitan intel-
lectuals,’ and a certain tendency to empty generalisations that characterise
the book’s title as well. One gets the feeling too that the author is spending
considerable time and energy destroying historiographical straw men.
To conclude, the study’s real value appears to lie in its careful pre-
sentation-in the early chapters-of the process of accretion of population
in the district, and the place of migration in the dynamics of rural society
over a long time-span. Too often, writings on agrarian political economy
have only one dimension-that of vertical tension, but the neglected hori-
zontal dimension of spatial mobility is only now coming to be recognised in
the Indian historiography. It is here that this monograph makes its real
contribution.

SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
Delhi School of Economics

DANIEL MILLER, Artefacts as Categories: A Study of Ceramic Variability in

Central India. (New Studies in Archaeology series). Cambridge University
Press, 1985, 253 pp., price not stated.

For most anthropologists, culture cannot be reduced to a set of tangible

objects but is, in fact, expressed through a whole network of interactions,
roles and behaviour. No wonder then that many studies these days attempt
to go into the entire process of the complex interplay of society and culture,
on the one hand, and the materials produced, on the other.
As early as 1966 Deetz’s Invitation to Archaeology (Natural History Press,
New York) dealt with these questions and almost legitimised the practice in
use today. However, the gap between cognitive types or what Miller calls

categories and analytical types remained unbridged for all practical purposes.
Daniel Miller’s book is an attempt to understand this gap and he goes deep
into the cultural process. The mechanism leading to the production of a
given material object, the uses to which these objects are put and the
explanations of its variability are studied in depth. For this he chooses
Dangwara, a predominantly Jat village near Ujjain and concentrates on
potters and pottery. A concise description of the village is followed by
attempts to form class gradations in terms of such selected dimensions as
caste, family size and wealth. This is followed by a more detailed account of
the potters and their households. Pottery variability in terms of morphology
and decoration and finally their distribution receive fairly detailed conside-
ration. A full chapter is devoted to the use of pottery over the life-cycle and
in annual cererionies (chapter 7). A general symbolic analysis links all these
attributes to the dominant principles of social organisation.

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The specific approach and treatment of data makes the present work
refreshing reading, albeit slightly heavy at points. At the same time, it is
perhaps for these reasons that one cannot consider this just another run-of-
the-mill ethno-archaeological attempt. In the wake of Marxian and structural
approaches ethno-archaeological in recent years has not escaped its share of
criticism. Miller’s attempt can happily escape these criticisms because he has
chosen a structural approach with a multiple ’frame’ strategy.
Finally, I must recommend chapters 8 (’A Symbolic Framework for the
Interpretation of Variability’) and 9 (Tottery as Categories’) specifically.
The other chapters are also well-written and this is surely one of the most
significant of recent publications in archaeology.
D.K. BHATTACHARYA
Department of Anthropology
University of Delhi

STEPHEN NEILL, A History of Christianity in India 1707-1858. London,

Cambridge University Press, 1985, XVII + 578 pp., £45.
Two years ago Bishop Stephen Neill published the first volume of his life
work on Christianity in India. It bore the subtitle, ’The Beginning to A.D.
1704,’ a volume with nearly the same number of pages. Meanwhile, old age
brought an end to his long life, but not before he could hand over the
manuscript of the volume under review to his publishers. Therefore, this I>
obviously the second volume, though this is not mentioned.
Stephen Neill was an Anglican of a rather evangelical persuasion. For
more than twenty years he worked in south Tamilnadu, first as a missionary,
then as a bishop, always as a member of the Church Missionary Society
(CMS). In many ways he was therefore well acquainted with Christianity as
it has existed in India, particularly in South India, for so many centuries.
In the present volume the author leads his reader from the time when the
first Lutheran mission was opened at Tranquebar, a small place on the
Coromandel coast, some 35 kms north of Nagapattinam, down to the great
revolt of 1857. Neill’s treatment combines chronological sequence with
topical analysis; the narrative falls into two parts, each being introduced by a
summary of the relevant political situation. There is a certain unevenness
between the first part that covers the eighteenth century in six chapters, and
the second part which has as many as eleven chapters, but covers only the
first half of the nineteenth century.
The real story begins with chapter 2 on the Lutheran movement in and
from Tranquebar. In the rest of the survey the Thomas Christians, both
Catholics and Orthodox, are given the place they deserve. He also sums up
well enough the fairly complicated developments of the Catholic Church in
India, not without expressing sometimes a kind of impatience towards
certain Catholic attitudes. I feel, however, that the story of the suppression

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