Abstract
Way back in 1994, we were introduced to the early medieval period of Indian history by B.D. Chattopadhyaya’s seminal work The Making of Early Medieval India. Though there were several nomenclatures attached to the period between c. 600CE to 1300CE like post-Gupta, late-Ancient, proto-Medieval and the likes it was early medieval that became the most accepted term for historians. Historians are unanimous on the fact that this phase in Indian history had a distinct identity and as such differed from the preceding early historical and succeeding medieval. This in turn brings home the presence of the elements of change and continuity in Indian history. It is identified as a phase in the transition to the medieval. The perception of a unilinear and uniform pattern of historical development is challenged. One of the richest historical debates, that is, the feudalism debate, revolved around this period.
Exactly seventeen years after B.D. Chattopadhyaya’s The Making of Early Medieval India, we now have Rethinking Early Medieval India edited by Upinder Singh. In between there has been continuous research by scholars towards an understanding of this period and thus we have thirteen exceptional essays written by scholars of repute, collated by the editor for this volume.
The volume aims at understanding the period with fresh insights rather than clinging to the perception of looking at it from the perspective of feudal, segmentary or integrative models. The editor is fully aware of the fact that one cannot study early medieval India without the debates on feudalism or nature of state and therefore the first section of the book deals with Theoretical Models and Political Processes, but at the same time the need to go beyond this is felt and so the other three sections focus on Village, Town and Society; Religion and Culture, Within and Across Regions and finally Mapping Language, Ideas and Attitudes.
Before we open up the contents of the book to the readers, a few words on the introduction will be in order. The first thing that attracts one’s attention is that it is not burdened by pages and pages of introductory notes. Instead we have only thirty-six pages of a succinct write up that discusse issues like periodisation, the debates, Singh’s case for another round of rethinking early medieval, and a discussion on the essays selected, with her own understanding and critique, and finally the question of labelling a period. Her introduction ends with these words, ‘But while there is a need for many more histories of early medieval India, it may be also time to let go of the term “early medieval”. At the very least, we should not take the label too seriously, nor hesitate to transgress its boundaries’. It is true that simple use of chronological markers to define a period seems to be more rational. Romila Thapar in ‘Early India’ has demonstrated this.
The three essays that form the first section are (a) How Feudal was Indian Feudalism? by R.S. Sharma; (b) The Segmentary State: Interim Reflections by Burton Stein; and (c) The Early and the Imperial Kingdom: A Processual Model of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India by Hermann Kulke. Students of early Indian history are so well acquainted with these essays that a separate discussion here is unwarranted. But at the same time it is important to note that these essays evolved out of debates on earlier propositions and therefore it is interesting to watch and internalise the reflections of the historians on their own writings, their critique of others and sometimes the spirit of accommodation they transpired.
The first three essays of the second section relate to the geographical space, south of the Vindhyas while the last one takes us to extreme north-Kashmir. The section begins with Kesavan Veluthat’s essay ‘Land Rights and Social Stratification’. Those who are acquainted with Veluthat’s scholarship know how firmly grounded he is in using primary sources within a theoretical framework. In this particular piece he is vociferous in his critique of Stein—‘Stein is unabashedly indifferent to the rich data on the differentiation within the peasantry in making the assumption of a world of peasants without lords’. Veluthat traverses the domains of the Pallavas, Cheras and Pandyas tracing changes in each period and shows that the final crystallisation of the agrarian order happened in the Chola period. A very significant aspect of his essay is the discussion on Varna and Jati in the context of south India. He points out that the jati formula which articulated social stratification with Brahmanas as socially superior does not hold good here as the vellala caste, which is identified significantly as of the Sudra varna, is seen to be enjoying an almost equal status to that of the Brahmanas on account of the control of land they had. Thus economic power overpowered the varna hierarchy in this context.
Nagaram: Commerce and Towns AD 850–1350 is the next essay written by Noboru Karashima, Y. Subbarayalu and P. Shanmugam. When three stalwarts of south Indian history join together to write an article, we know the kind of scholarly stuff we will be encountering. They have used statistical analysis of published and unpublished inscriptions to understand the nature of the relation between the nagaram and the state, the merchant guild and the state and the nagaram and the merchant guilds. The map showing the distribution of nagaram centres is very useful. The changing character of nagarams in the three phases of Chola history is identified by them.
Cynthia Talbot’s ‘The Society of Kakatiya Andhra’ is taken from her much-acclaimed book Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra. As rightly pointed out by Singh, Talbot’s study is refreshing because in spite of being firmly grounded to epigraphic evidences, she talks about the limitations of and silences in epigraphic data. Talbot’s study relates to the inscriptions of the Kakatiya period (1175–1324 CE). It will be worthwhile to mention here that a study of the epigraphic data between 500 CE and 1000 CE suggests that in some cases the ideas that were germinating in this period actually found expression during Kakatiya period. Her study shows that social identities were not expressed in terms of varna and jati. On the basis of the titles used by men, she argues that the titles represented earned statuses rather than ascribed ranks. The physical mobility of the population helped in the social mobility.
The final essay of this section is Devika Rangachari’s ‘Women and Power in Early Medieval Kashmir’. From epigraphical data we are now introduced to textual analysis and this essay is based on three very important texts representing different genres of work—Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, Kshemendra’s Samayamatrika and the Nilamatapurana. While reading this essay one is reminded of Kumkum Roy’s study of gender relations in the Rajatarangini. Roy felt that the richness of Kalhana’s documentation opens up possibilities of reinterpretation, of rehabilitating the archetypal wicked queen Didda. Devika Rangachary however notices a kind of ambivalence in Kalhana. Rangachary through her study brings to focus women’s participation in the political sphere and talks of the perpetual neglect by earlier scholars regarding exercise of power by women rulers. Her earlier study on the coins issued by queens of Kashmir is worth noting in this context. Her treatment of the Samaymatrika is highly instructive. The study of the Nilamatapurana shows that it corroborated Kalhana’s picture of the power wielded by courtesans. Thus a gendered perspective of early medieval Kashmir is presented to us.
The third section is devoted to religion and culture and the curtain raiser here is Leslie C. Orr’s ‘Domesticity and Difference/Women and Men: Religious life in medieval Tamilnadu’. Cultural history is presently a celebrated domain of research and we have now interesting readings into cultural history not to mention religious practices, art and architecture. Here I am tempted to cite Daud Ali’s monograph on Courtly Culture in early medieval India and feel that some extract from Ali’s book would have enriched this section further. This period is also marked by major religious developments. There was burgeoning of mathas and viharas and these institutions received lavish patronage from the rulers. Religion was entwined with Bhakti. Taking recourse to thousands of inscriptions from Tamilnadu between the ninth and thirteenth century, Leslie Orr looks at piety and patronage in Tamilnadu within a gendered framework. Her study of inscriptions leads her to opine that ‘inscriptions demonstrate again and again that the religious act has antecedents, meanings and consequences that spill over into other realm’.
The next essay by Kunal Chakrabarti is entitled ‘Cult Region: the Puranas and the Making of the Cultural Territory of Bengal’. Kunal Chakrabarti’s book on Religious Process has now become a major reference for any student of religious history. In this essay Chakrabarti argues that Bengal was a region which deserved to be qualified as a cult region though not in the sense of a pilgrimage site like Pandharpur, where the cult of Vithoba evolved. In fact the regional identity of Bengal was reinforced through the cult of the regional goddesses which were conceived and promoted by the Bengal Puranas. Here, he studies the process through which the popular local goddess Mangala was transformed into the Pauranic Mangalacandi. This process was socially integrative and the worship of these regional goddesses was a shared responsibility of the entire village community. The set of texts he uses are the Upapuranas which were first comprehensively studied by R.C. Hazra.
With the third essay we enter into the domain of aesthetics. Kapila Vatsyayan’s ‘The Flying Messenger’ studies a particular motif called Vrishchika karana which was portrayed and depicted in the sculptural mural and fresco traditions of South-east Asia. Though the essay in the initial stage might look a little technical for non-performers or non-specialists, yet gradually the ideas sink in and you are exposed to a different world of art and aesthetics which unravels regular exchanges between Asiatic cultures. Various examples from sculptural representations of South and Southeast Asia are cited by her, which point to intense interaction between the art traditions of South and Southeast Asia.
The final section, Mapping Language, Ideas, and Attitudes begins with Sheldon Pollock’s ‘The Sanskrit Cosmopolis and the Vernacular Revolution’. This is a part of his introduction of one of the most widely read books of the decade, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Here Pollock talks about the way local intersected with the trans-local. He also introduces us to the phrase ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’ and makes us aware of its implication, the foremost according to me being the role of Sanskrit in producing the forms of culture and political expression that underwrote this cosmopolitan order. Pollock also underlines the process through which the Sanskrit cosmopolis came into being, a slow and tentative development which was not linked with the development of Sanskrit language. Pollock’s statement that Sanskrit was a sacred language restricted to religious practice prior to the beginning of the Common Era has received criticism. A section of his essay deals with the vernacular for in his words, ‘without this contrastive category, and the contrastive reality of both cultural and political self understanding toward which it points, the cosmopolitan has no conceptual purchase’. The distinctiveness of cosmopolitan and vernacular practices needs to be figured out.
The next essay ‘Politics, Violence, and War in Kamandaka’s Nitisara’ by Upinder Singh makes an interesting read. In her introduction Singh underlines that this essay is a ‘reaction against the sidelining of the history of Ideas in Indian history, and also a critique of the unnuanced way in which historians have often treated texts’. Her essay is divided into several sections with interesting sub-headings which are linked with the text itself. Of these the section called The King, The Forest, and The Hunt is very important as very few historians writing on the perceptions of the forest or the forest people in early India have used this text. Kamandaka’s concern for the well being of the ruler is reflected in the text. Another important aspect addressed by her is political violence and how early Indian society dealt with it. This is a less-explored area and she has successfully highlighted the various strands and showed that Kautilya and Kamandaka differed on the issues of political violence. She rightly argues that a political treatise could have many implications and so a text should be studied in its entirety.
Rethinking Early Medieval India ends with B.D. Chattopadhyaya’s ‘Images of Raiders and Rulers’. An initial browsing of the contents of this book had led this reviewer to wonder why this particular essay was chosen when we have many other seminal writings by Chattopadhyaya on early medieval India. This feeling was however dispelled by Singh’s introductory comment, ‘B.D. Chattopadhyaya’s prolific and thought provoking writings could easily have found their way into any or all of the sections of this book. However, the essay included here has been chosen because it draws attention to a very specific problem…namely the chasm between histories of the Delhi Sultanate and pre-sultanate/non-Sultanate histories’. One cannot but agree to the choice. This essay is an extract from the renowned monograph Representing the Other? Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims. A large number of Sanskrit inscriptions and literary texts are examined for their representations of people whom we would today describe as Muslim. Thus we are introduced to a range of terms to refer to the Muslims like Parasika, Tajika, Turushka, Saka, Yavana and Mlechchha. Chattopadhyaya shows that these terms should be studied in their specific context. Complexities of inter-community interactions are wonderfully addressed by Chattopadhyaya. Another interesting aspect of this essay is also the representation of the Delhi Sultanate in non-royal Sanskrit inscriptions, mostly from the merchant families. This piece by Chattopadhyaya is crucial to the understanding and re-inventing of early medieval India.
From the foregoing brief discussions on each essay it is perhaps clear that the volume provides an intelligible perspective of the early medieval period of Indian history. The essays relate to wide range of historical issues. The reviewer only feels that an essay on the Indian Ocean network would have enriched the volume further. We all know that early medieval India witnessed large scale interaction and exchange in the Indian Ocean. The vitality of the period to some extent also depended on trade and so regular interactions between merchants both in the eastern and western Indian Ocean perhaps cannot be lost sight of.
The choice of the essays demonstrate Upinder Singh’s penchant for studies which are empirically strong with due attention to theoretical and methodological issues. In her thought-provoking introduction she harps on greater attentiveness towards the perspectives and voices of texts, inscriptions, artefacts and images. This book is indeed a welcome addition to historical studies and I am sure it will raise new questions and encourage young researchers to take up this period for their enquiry.