Dynasty, State and the 'medieval' (original) (raw)
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Presently, varied schemes of periodization of history are prevalent in historical studies, the most common being the tripartite scheme of ancient-medieval-modern periods. In European history, ancient, medieval and modern eras have remained the dominant standard epochal frontiers since the eighteenth century. In the wake of colonial rule, this scheme was applied by the European historians and orientalists to the colonized regions in Africa and Asia, including India, for historiographical purposes. The concept of medieval period in Indian history is not without problems and limitations. First, not only there are conceptual intricacies involved in it, the whole process of periodization has been politicized. Moreover, the chronological frontiers of medieval India have become conceptual barriers, which restrict historical imagination. Secondly, the medieval period in Indian history, as in European history, is often referred to as the 'Middle Ages'. It is understood as a post-classical age denoting a radical shift from ancient or classical period. Moreover, there seems to be an inherent bias in it, as it implies decline and degeneration in medieval times as opposed to the splendor and glory of the ancient era. Thirdly, despite its common usage, there is no consensus among historians as to what constitute medieval India, though the construction of ancient and modern India is also controversial. As for the ancient India, almost all historians begin it with an account of the prehistoric times followed by the Aryan invasion and the Vedic age, but the problem arises where to bring ancient India to a close and
Presently, varied schemes of periodization of history are prevalent in historical studies, the most common being the tripartite scheme of ancient-medieval-modern periods. In European history, ancient, medieval and modern eras have remained the dominant standard epochal frontiers since the eighteenth century. In the wake of colonial rule, this scheme was applied by the European historians and orientalists to the colonized regions in Africa and Asia, including India, for historiographical purposes.
How far is it appropriate to characterize the Early India as Feudal?
Use of the term feudalism to describe India applies a concept of medieval European origin, according to which the landed nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection. Feudalism is most likely introduced to India when the Kushan Dynasty from Central Asia invaded India and introduced new policies of their own. The term Indian feudalism is used to describe taluqdar, zamindar, jagirdar, ghatwals, mulraiyats, sardar, mankari, deshmukh, chaudhary and samanta. Most of these systems were abolished after the independence of India and the rest of the subcontinent. D. D. Kosambi and R. S. Sharma, together with Daniel Thorner, brought peasants into the study of Indian history for the first time. In this paper, we will try to find out how far it is correct to term Early India as Feudal.
The process of state formation and contestations over the term medieval- R. Datta
Medieval History Journal, 2019
The paper aims to present the contestation over the relevance of the dynasty in state formation. This has been elaborated through two major case studies of state formation in the State of Mewar and Seemandhra. This would also bring forward other factors that are responsible in the state formation.
Termine / CFP: The Modern Invention of Dynasty: A Global Intellectual History, 1500–2000
2016
Ilya Afanasyev (BRIHC, University of Birmingham) : ‘Dynasty’: Does the History of the Word Matter? Milinda Banerjee (LMU Munich/Presidency University, Kolkata) : The Spread of the Sovereign State Model as a ‘Motor’ for Dynasticization of Political Concepts and Practices in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Global History Dina Gusejnova (University of Sheffield) : Four Concepts of Dynasty in German Intellectual History ca. 1900
isara solutions, 2021
The feudalism debate once play a major role in any medieval researchers, but now it's long gone, still then it relevant for any medieval scholars to understand, as it is the essence of every aspect as it related to urbanisation, trade, land grant and so on. The notion of an 'Indian feudalism' has predominated in the recent historiography of pre-colonial India. Early medieval India has been described by historian, largely as a dark phase of Indian history characterised only by political fragmentation and culture. Such a characterisation being assigned to it, this period remained by and large a neglected one in terms of historical research. We owe it completely in new research in the recent decades to have brought to light the many important and interesting aspects of this period. Fresh studies have contributed to the removal of the notion of 'dark age' attached to this period by offering fresh perspectives. Indeed the every absence of political unity that was considered a negative attribute by earlier scholars in now seen as a factor that had made possible the emergence of rich cultures of the medieval period.
The State in Premodern South Asia
On the morning of December 28, 1979, members of the Indian History Congress settled in for the start of the second day of their fortieth annual gathering. It was to be a day focused on 'medieval' India, a term and periodization whose coherency for the South Asian context was increasingly in question. The conference had over the past decade gradually drifted southwards from its usual north Indian circuit and this year found itself amidst the aging coastal colonial campus of Andhra's Waltair enclave. Harbans Mukhia was set to deliver the morning's opening presidential address. Mukhia had spent the past decade at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University leading a course on medieval India that toed the dominant post-1950s historiographic line which, in a manner Daud Ali would later characterize as a "checklist" approach, sought to verify the authentically feudal nature of post-Gupta South Asian society. 1 Mukhia's address that morning verbalized years of frustration-shared by an increasingly large number of Indian scholars in the late 1970s-at the perceived gross inadequacy of the feudal model for the South Asian context. Bringing his broadside to a climatic end, Mukhia urged a move away from the "straitjackets" of both feudalism and the Asiatic Mode of Production-Marx's vague disqualification of pre-modern Asia that likely fueled the initial desire amongst Indian historians of the 1950s to prove the applicability of the feudal model for medieval India 2 . For Mukhia, these were non-universal models born of European experience and bias. What was needed instead was a renewed search for "a typology more specific to pre-British India". 3 Much of the historiographic conversation in the decades since Mukhia's Waltair address can be seen as a search for "typologies" better suited to the historical evidence from South Asia. This debate has largely centered around the nature and evolution of the political state. The following is an analysis of this conversation in three parts. We will survey key moments in pre-and postfeudalist historiography of the South Asian state, take up the particular case of the Mughal state as a bellwether for past and present trends in the field, before a brief final consideration of future directions. The concept of the state as a unitary entity has been increasingly unraveled, decentered, and passed over in favor of analyses of the entanglement of culture and power. While this is a necessary corrective to a long legacy of ahistorical projections of the premodern Indian state, it has a led to overly fragmented and abstracted scholarly discourse on precolonial power formations. I argue for an approach that better synthesizes cultural, material, and institutional histories of the state.