ABSTRACT
The invitation to provide an Afterword for this collection arrives as an opportunity wrapped in difficulties. The opportunity is the chance to engage an assemblage of intriguing investigations. The difficulties are several. One is that I lack the expertise to engage these chapters on anything like an equal footing. And this same constraint likewise precludes my using these pieces to mount anything approaching a systematic comparison of India and America. Then too, another obstacle is that as a historian with only limited prior exposure to subaltern studies my comments are scarcely guaranteed to be directly useful to those immersed in this branch of scholarship.
