Contents:
Section 1:
1. The Rgveda: Encapsulating social change by Romila Thapar;
2. Aryanization of the Indus civilization by Suraj Bhan;
3. Feudal social formation in Indian history by Osamu Kondo;

Section 2:
4. Muskets in Mawas: Instruments of peasant resisance by Iqtidar Alam Khan;
5. Witnessing transition: Views on the end of the Akbari dispensation by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam;
6. Levelling or differentiation? Production and appropriation relations in Mughal India by J. Mohan Rao;
7. Rural and urban caste structure in eighteenth-nineteenth century India: The Deccan and Gujarat by Hiroyuki Kotani;
8. Palashi: The inside story of a betrayal by Biplab Dasgupta;

Section 3:
9. Pre-capitalist economic formations and differential agricultural productivity: A tentative hypothesis by Terence J. Byres;
10. Workers and the historians' burden by Amiya Kumar Bagchi;
11. The Indian economic experience 1600-1900: A quantitative study by Shireen Moosvi;
12. New estimates of eighteenth-century British trade and their relation to transfers from tropical colonies by Utsa Patnaik;

Section 4
13. Modernity and its philosophic visions by Javeed Alam;
14. Postmodernism in History by Aijaz Ahmad;
15. Realism and the syntax of difference: Narratives of the Bengal famine by Mihir Bhattacharya;
16. Archaeology and nationalism: The case of medieval Gaur by Ratnabali Chatterjee;
17. The rural artist and secular culture in the Era of globalization by Malini Bhattacharya;

Section 5:
18. Culture, nationalism and communal politics by K. N. Panikkar;
19. India's partition revisited by Mushirul Hasan;
20. Class, clientelism and communal politics in contemporary Bangladesh by Mushtaq H. Khan;
21. Ayodhya: A review of the archaeological evidence by K.M. Shrimali;

Section 6:
22. State enterprise reform and the political economy of transition by C.P. Chandrasekhar;
23. A simple model of an imaginary socialist economy by Prabhat Patnaik.
Contributors;
Irfan Habib: A list of publications.