Fragmentation and Segmentation versus Integration? Reflections on the concepts of Indian feudalism and the segmentary state in Indian history (original) (raw)
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From Chiefdom to Kingdom and Empire: Trajectories of State in South India
Studies in History, 2018
This article seeks to trace the journey of the state in South India under the Cōļas. They begin as chiefs in a relatively undifferentiated society. It was the proximity of the kinsmen with the chiefs or otherwise that determined the relative status of different sections of society and not differentiation on account of unequal access to resources and surplus at this stage. However, changes in the means and relations of production, especially the introduction of non-kin labour for purposes of agricultural production, brought about major changes in the social order. This changed order required the institution of the state, and the emergence of the Cōļa kingdom in the Kāvēri valley can be shown as a response to this demand. Further elaboration and refinement enabled the Cōļa state to graduate to the level of an empire; but since the parts too were coming of age, this empire fell apart in about a century. By the close of the thirteenth century, the Cōļa kingdom fell prey to the Hoysala i...
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The Gupta Empire (fourth-fifth centuries ad) succeeded in subjugating a series of local forest chiefs and tribal territories. The Allahabad prashasti not only enumerates the conquests of the Gupta king Samudragupta, but also lays out the hierarchy of the kings equal in status and such as were subordinate to him, in his eyes. The political integration of dispersed political elements under the Guptas was linked with the changing contours of the Gupta authority in central India, on the one hand, and the process of transition from pre-state to state-society, on the other. This process is studied here mainly on the basis of epigraphic evidence.
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How has political diversity-and, first of all, administrative and institutional diversity-been handled within the succeeding polities that prevailed in the Indian subcontinent from 1200 to 1700? In order to provide the nonspecialist reader with a first insight into this complex question, the present article opens with a presentation of the sources available for reconstructing the administrative organisation and functioning of medieval and early modern Indian polities. Despite the fragmentary and biased nature of the information they provide, these sources (mainly epigraphic materials and narrative texts) have often been elevated to the rank of a solid substratum that allowed for the development of highly sophisticated yet antagonistic analyses of both the nature and the working of the Indian state in pre-British times. Besides a strong focus on the question of centralisation, most of these analyses have also long been marred by an implicit but ever-present Western point of comparison. From the middle of the 1980s, however, a number of voices have argued in favour of an alternative approach that would value both the processual character of state-and institution-building and its ideological dimension while stressing at the same time the need to take into account the diversity of the forms assumed by this process in the various regions that came to constitute a given polity and to pay more attention to the wide range of actors involved in state-formation and to the latter's political cultures. Taking its cue from these non-aligned or revisionist studies, as they are often termed, the last part of the essay shifts from the purely institutional perspective presiding over the first and largely historiographical section and proposes to examine instead the politics of
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.
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.
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 NORTH-INDIAN FEUDALISM DEBATE
ZOYA SIDDIQUI, LADY SHRI RAM COLLEGE FOR WOMEN, UNIVERSITY OF DELHI, 2020
The concept of feudalism comes from the European historiography. Feudalism is a kind of social and economic system which is characterized by the close relationship of the peasants with the land.Various historians have tried to implement this concept in early medieval India, which is further questioned by other historians; it has led to the feudalism debatein India. This debate is one of the richest historical debates in Indian historiography. We shall be pointing out the various approaches of different historians on this debate in North India specifically.