Social System and Ideology in South India Michelguglielmo Torri RECENTLY, most of those scholars belonging to the so-called Cambridge school who contributed to the by now famous Volume VII (1973) of Modem Asian Studies,1 have expanded their original contributions to it in full- length books. One of these works is D A Washbrook's "The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency 1870-1920".2 This extreme ly important book represents the at tempt to build a model explaining the structural reasons of that extraordi nary change in Indian politics which became apparent in the years from 1917 to 1920, when the "history of the British in India becomes the history of a retreat ... [and the] road along which India would march to Independence and Partition was opened..." (p 8).
