Language, culture, and society can be studied from various points of view. Classical Indology and Indian anthropology have different points of departure, but deal sometimes with the same material; the difference in background has generally prevented close collaboration. Classical Indologists tend to look upon Indian anthropologists as mainly interested in almost inaccessible hill tribes, in village superstition, and sometimes in contemporary affairs; moreover a synchronistic bias in methodology has often limited the potential richness of their studies. Anthropologists who study India, on the other hand, are often inclined to view classical Indologists as busy with case endings and etymological derivations, or as discussing obscure and long-forgotten doctrines. Yet neither field has been able to dispense with concepts traditionally handled by the other; for instance, anthropologists talk about language, and classical Indologists about culture. A recent example is the concept of Sanskritization, introduced by anthropologists with obvious reference to Sanskrit, the language to which the main attention of classical Indologists has always been directed. As a student of Sanskrit and classical Indology, I offer some reflections on Sanskritization with the hope that I am not altogether blind to the problems occupying anthropologists.

On July 7, 1937 a handful of Chinese and Japanese soldiers exchanged rifle-fire in the vicinity of the Marco Polo Bridge about thirty miles from Peking. This, minor fracas precipitated a sequence of events that soon propelled Japan into full-scale hostilities on the mainland—a war that was significantly to influence the course of Japanese-American negotiation in the fateful months leading up to the Pacific War. Many historians have portrayed the China incident as the consequence of a conspiracy by the Japanese military and as a repetition of a pattern of aggression identical with that of the Mukden Incident of 1931. With this approach, the Sino-Japanese war presents little apparent difficulty to our ascertaining why the fighting at the Marco-Polo Bridge occasioned a major war. The culprit is the Japanese military.

Since the Communist Chinese take-over of Tibet, climaxed by the Tibetan revolt and the subsequent flight of the Dalai Lama, increased interest in that land and its culture has called attention to the meagerness of information concerning details of Tibetan daily life, economy, and politics. In a series of interviews widi members of the Sakya ruling house undertaken by the authors, it has been possible to secure considerable data concerning die administration of what is perhaps Tibet's most ambitious irrigation project, and the role the Sakya government played in that administration.