This book is the translation and the analysis of the Paglayonan manuscript of ten folios from the collections of the Newberry Library. The document is a compilation of official deeds from the Laguna town of Lilíw, Philippines. They report two events that took place in the Seventeenth Century: the one concerns the genteel Paglayúnan family, the other the making of an altarpiece for the church of San Juan-Bautista de Lilio by Chinese craftsmen from Sinilúan, another Laguna town. Both give insights into provincial life during the Early Spanish Period. The most striking feature is that the Tagalogs who wrote these texts used the term hárì, generally translated as 'king', to refer to their parish priest.

This volume is a festschrift for Damodar Ramaji SarDesai (b. 1931), Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where all of the contributors received their Ph.D as did SarDesai himself. His work for over fifty years at UCLA has been an inspiration to generations of students, and he has made major contributions to the world of learning, and in his chosen areas of specialization of India, especially its foreign policy with regard to Southeast Asia, imperialism and the history of the modern European empires; and Southeast Asia. He has served as Chair of the History Department at UCLA as well as Bombay University and President of the Asiatic Society of Bombay. The volume includes a biographical introduction and a bibliographic essay on SarDesai’s major writings and contains new and cutting-edge essays on the design of imperial Vijayanagara; famine policy in colonial India and how European imperialist policies created, or exacerbated the impact of, famines; the relatively unknown chapter of ‘Chinese Gordon’s’ brief Indian career; reflections on the Tamil humanist A. Madhaviah, a man ahead of his time; nationalism and the career of industrialist G.D. Birla, Gandhi’s friend; the ‘Chindia Problematic’—India and China relations; the state of Philippine historiography and its nationalist impulses; the role of Vietnamese highlanders in the Vietnamese nationalist struggle and their recent plight; early Malayan nationalism; and the efforts of American administrators to protect Philippine highland natives from being forced to participate in international exhibitions as curiosities from the American colony.

No doubt this book will meet the demand of historians, linguists, mathematicians, numismatists, philippinologists and tagalists as well as all the readers interested in the unusual. Like the 1992 article on which it is based, this book is the first one in English to broach the difficult subject of numeral expressions in Old Tagalog and the various concepts and measures associated with them. The book is about ten times as long as the article because it comprises a lexicon that deals with gold, money, taxes, usury, units of measurement, etc. Examples are numerous and generally drawn from such classics as the grammar of San Joseph (1610), Pinpin's manual (1610), the dictionaries of San Buenaventura (1613) and Noceda & Sanlucar (1754, 1860). Differently from the majority of publications on Tagalog, all the terms and examples are fully accented according to a precise system developed by the author, and explained in an appendix.

This book is the list of printed documents I have collected about the Philippines in general and the Tagalog language in particular. The entries are followed by an index of the themes involved.

When the Spaniards conquered the Philippines (Cebu 1565, Manila 1571), they noticed several of its nations had a writing system of their own, called Baybáyin in Tagalog. It was a king of short-hand that did not make it possible to record closing consonants; thus i-lu in Baybáyin could represent í-log "river", i-lóng "nose" or it-lóg "egg", so much so that, while easy to write, it was difficult to read. Because of this shortcoming, it gave way to the Latin alphabet in the course of the 17th century. Nowadays Filipino graphic artists are reviving Baybáyin to express their philippineness.

Tagalog transcription and English translation of Ayer MS 1748 at the Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill., by Jean-Paul G. Potet. The ms. is a certified copy, completed and signed on Dec. 2, 1809, of a compilation of older documents, certified and signed on Nov. 6, 1753. The documents describe events which took place in the mountain town of Lilíw (Lilio), in Laguna province, Philippines, between 1601 and 1608: the stabbing assault on Alderman Don Fabián Paglayonán by Don Gaspar Kahupâ, and Kahupâ's subsequent punishment, and the making of a church altarpiece.