2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
between the State, technological innovations, and the formation of the so-called comparative advantage* that underlies export capabilities, a question which is at the heart of the current debate on economic policy.
The remaining papers are concerned with Akbar's philosophy, ideology and religious policy, all of which reflected his spirt of inquisitiveness and tolerance, and the response they evoked. Iqtidar Alam Khan discusses the formative influences on Akbar's thought and the vicissitudes in the career of the philosophy of sulh-i-kul which he evolved. He notices a short passing phase during which Akbar adopted a suppressive attitude towards Islam. He himself however recognised this attitude as negating sulh-i-kul and gave it up during the last four years of his regime. Savitri Chandra compares sulh-i-kul with the concepts developed by two of Akbar's contemporaries, Maryada of Tuisi and Nipakh of Dadu. Both Tuisi and Akbar had a hierarchical concept of society, which was in sharp contradiction with the concept of Nipakh. Dadu moreover, in opposition to Tuisi, rejected the scriptures and distrusted established religious leaders, a point on which Akbar's stand was ambivalent. Athar All's paper throws light on Akbar's grand project of translating into Persian several of the classical Sanskrit texts, the most important of which of course was the Mahabharata. The project was a difficult one; the translators were not always equal to the task; and the translations were often not direct but done through the intermediation of Hindi. Nonetheless the project was pursued with vigour at Akbar's personal insistence which is a testimony to the loftiness of his vision. Finally we have two pieces, by B.L Bhadani and Shirin Mehta which discuss respectively the characterisation of Akbar in contemporary Rajasthani literature and Jain literature in Gujarat.
Apart from these papers, we publish a note by Partha Mukherji and Bhupati Sahoo which suggests a framework for analysing rural struggles in terms of enmeshed structures of asymmetry (exploitation/discrimination) and the possibility of shifts and oscillations in the location of the primary contradiction across different structures of asymmetry.