Book review: Manu V. Devadevan,The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India

More than a quarter of a century ago, B.D. Chattopadhyaya wrote about the making of early medieval India. His illustrious student, in the book under review, writes about the early medieval making of India. Devadevan shows that the beginnings of nearly all aspects of the Indian past that both popular imagination and scholarly discourses recognise as essential features of ‘Indian civilisation’ can be located in what is now described as the early medieval period. These include the areas of the caste system, sectarian identities, regional self-consciousness and vernacular languages, which were products of this age. So also, it is the form of state that came into existence in this period. The temple was an early medieval innovation. So also, philosophical systems such as Vedānta and Mīmāṃsa, the ideals of bhakti devotionalism, cosmologies of the Purāṇas, and forms of worship and rituals embodied in the Āgamas and the Tantras originated in these centuries as did traditions of temple architecture patronised by the dynasts of this period and described in canonical texts such as Mānasāra, Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa, Kāmikāgama, etc. Again, conventions of literature, theatre and poetics that got entrenched in the country had their beginnings in this period. The Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata were not secular kāvyas and itihāsas anymore and evolved into sectarian testimonies of the Vaiṣṇavas in this period. And the greatest discovery that India is credited with, namely, zero as a numeral, was made in the early medieval period.

‘Indian civilisation’ being a romantic idea, which Devadevan rightly thinks is as ahistorical as it is contentious and patronising, he chooses to speak in terms of the ideas of India that inform and animate popular imagination as well as learned judgements. In instituting his case, he begins by tracing how there is a clear rupture between the early historical and early medieval phases of Indian history in the domain of popular memory. The book offers an explanation of this rupture not only by following aspects of the received wisdom in existing historiography but also by taking up individual cases in the 12 essays grouped under the three heads of institutions, ideas and identities and an Introduction which binds them together.

The development of regimes based on the control of agricultural land gave the historical processes of the early medieval period a sound and lasting economic base as well as political structure that survived the uncertainties of the market or the turmoil caused by recurrent wars and political upheavals. A strong indicator for the centrality of the new surplus regime is the opportunities that it brought in its train for political control. In the period after 300 AD, states and chieftaincies sprang up in great numbers. In terms of geographical reach, these were limited to small pockets in various riparian belts across the subcontinent. These polities were based securely on the new agrarian economy where the control lay largely in the hands of peasant proprietors. Devadevan gives us a list of as many as 90 of them that came up in the early medieval period (Table 1.1), and that list does not include ‘dynasties’ which did not graduate as rulers of kingdoms but remained only as sāmantas and subordinates.

According to Devadevan, predictable certitudes as an overarching ideological principle governed forms of secular knowledge that rose into prominence in the early medieval period. The old system of expounding knowledge in the form of aphorisms (sūtras) did continue but on a grossly reduced scale. Such aphorism-based texts also often carried notes and commentaries in the form of vṛttis and bhāṣyas. A more preferred mode of knowledge production that emerged in the early medieval centuries was commenting on canonical texts. Even when, for example, Gauḍapāda and Ṡaṇkara were saying things that were never said before, they insisted, with more design than innocence, that all of it was already prefigured in the texts they were commenting on. Devadevan believes that the praxis of knowledge production was now also secured with the shield of predeterminism.

The four essays included in the first part, ‘Institutions’, are related to state, land and temple. The first of these, ‘State Formation and Its Structural Foundations’, though not strictly confined to the early medieval period of Indian history, is a competent historiographical overview of the process in different parts of the subcontinent with some in-depth study of certain cases. The chapter on the transformation of Pallava statecraft, which follows, is an insightful analysis of the inscriptions to delineate the patterns of structural changes. However, the observation that the transformation can be described as one from the cult of chivalry to that of personality is apt to raise the eyebrows of some. A meticulous examination of the inscriptions of the Cera Perumāḷs, by no means very copious in comparison with those of their contemporaries in the neighbouring regions of South India, enables Devadevan to put forward a convincing explanation of the changes in the nature of the Cera state. This is certainly an improvement upon the work of earlier scholars in the field, including the present reviewer. And the article on Puri takes the discussion beyond the now somewhat hackneyed idea of integration, looking at the firm foundation that it had on territory and agricultural land.

In the next section on ‘Ideology’ are four essays that deal with some intangible aspects of the ‘civilisation’ that the early medieval brought into being. The character of Svayaṃbuddha figuring in the Pūrvapurāṇa of Jinasēna II is summoned to testify to Devadevan’s suggestion that time in Bhartṛhari’s scheme of things is neither ontological nor epistemological, but cognitive, dependent on the intellect and given to experience. While there could be equivocation in accepting this in the case of Bhartṛhari, there can be little of it in the case of Jinasena. In the list of authorities thought to authenticate knowledge such as pratykṣa, anumāna, etc., the past, for the latter, has a truth-value that is epistemological and will serve as a means to demonstrate and establish dharma. A clear message is about the way in which knowledge itself was produced. In another essay, he takes up a brilliant analysis of the Kirātārjunīya of Bhāravi (whom he dates to the fifth century instead of the generally accepted date of sixth–seventh century), and shows how ‘Bhāravi’s text was the harbinger of a new paradigm in literature that invoked values and ideals to represent the very same values and ideals in personified forms’.

The chapter that follows in this section, ‘Knowing and Being: The Semantic Universe of the Kuḍiyāṭṭaṃ Theatre’, is a less inspiring discussion of the ‘oldest surviving Sanskrit theatre’ taking issue with many myths that have grown around it.

Devadevan takes up the question of the now celebrated ‘Kerala school’ of mathematics and shows that the picture is somewhat overdrawn. Still a few questions remain. How is it that certain regions of India contributed more to certain aspects of intellectual activities than certain other regions? Like Kashmir in the matter of rhetoric and prosody, or Deccan in the case of kāvya literature, or mathematics in the case of Kerala. Devadevan would have done well in placing this last question against the background also of the maritime tradition of west coast, what with the record of such navigational skills linked to astronomy and trigonometry, brought up through the Rahmani and preserved by the mālumis of Lakshdweep to this day.

The last section on ‘Identities’ has four articles in it, each of them fairly successful in showing how the identities of India that were crafted in the early medieval period were not only distinct but also going to last for times to come.