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The recent approaches to the study of early

medieval Indian history and how it
challenges the hypothesis of Indian
Feudalism.
Huberttu Francis Siby

10 October 2022

The post-Gupta period ranging from about the sixth to the thirteenth century
has been seen to constitute the early medieval period in Indian history. It is seen as
a stage anticipating the transition to medieval times. Serious efforts at defining the
early medieval period can be dated to the later part of the 1950s onwards. The
multiplicity of regional powers and the absence of a paramount power of pan-Indian
structure during this period has been explained by Marxist historians by the concept
of Indian feudalism and inaugurated a trend that focused on the interrelationship
between economy, society, and polity which distinguished the early history from the
early medieval and equated the latter with feudalism.

This essay will be looking at the different approaches to the study of early
medieval Indian history from the 1950s to the latest by looking at the ideas and
concepts put forward by historians like D.D. Kosambi, R. S. Sharma, B. N. S.
Yadava, D.C. Sircar, Harbans Mukhia, D.N. Jha, Burton Stein, B.D.
Chattopadhyaya, and Irfan Habib and how it changed over time.

The first assimilation of feudalism in the Indian context occurred at the hands
of Col. James Todd, the celebrated compiler of the annals of Rajasthan’s history in
the early part of the nineteenth century. For Todd, as for most European historians
of his time in Europe, the lord-vassal relationship constituted the core of feudalism
and for him, the pattern of a lord-vassal relationship was replicated in Rajasthan.

D.D. Kosmabi gave feudalism a significant place in the context of socio-

economic history. He conceptualized the growth of feudalism in Indian history as a
two-way process: from above and from below in his landmark book, “An
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Introduction to the Study of Indian History”, first published in 1956. From above the
feudal structure was created during the early centuries of the Common Era, the kings
began to grant land rights to officials and Brahmans which reached an advanced
stage of development during the period of the Guptas and Harsha; from below many
individuals and small groups rose from the village levels of power to become
landlords and vassals of the kings. This view of a two-stage development was
criticized by many scholars.

R.S. Sharma says that feudalism in India began with the land grants made to
Brahmans, temples, and monasteries for which we have inscriptional evidence from
the Satavahana period, which multiplied by the Gupta period. The economic essence
of Indian feudalism lay in the rise of landed intermediaries leading to the enserfment
of the peasantry through restrictions on peasant mobility and freedom, increasing
obligation to perform forced labor or vishti, mounting tax burdens, and the evils of
subinfeudation. R.S. Sharma also says that certain broad features of feudalism are
noticeable from the Gupta and post-Gupta periods onwards, like the grant of both
virgin and cultivated land, the transfer of peasants, the extension of forced labor, the
restriction on the movements of the peasants, artisans, and merchants, etc. He
visualized the decline of India’s long-distance trade with various parts of the world
after the fall of the Guptas; urbanization also suffered as a consequence, resulting in
the economy’s ruralization.

The wide-ranging inter-village cooperation and rural interactions as well as

the complexities of rural life have been highlighted and that brings us to the theory
of the Kaliyuga crisis. The concept of the Kali Age was linked with the medieval
social transition by B.N.S. Yadava, an eminent proponent of the Indian feudalism
thesis, who drew attention to the Huna invasions of India which shattered the Gupta
empire and resulted in the rise of feudalism. R.S. Sharma first suggested the Kali
crisis in his work Sudras in Ancient India in 1958. Then he elaborated on it in an
article in 1982, which he further refined in 2001. It has been unmistakably
demonstrated that the alleged crisis was not a historical crisis. It was at most a crisis
of confidence on the part of the Brahmanas, related to the issue of patronage in a
situation of competition from the ‘heretical’ sects or an ingenious invention of the
Brahmanas to make people conform to Brahmanical ideological norms in an age
characterized by economic growth, social change, and the spread of state societies
within the Brahmanical framework outside Gangetic north India.

The feudal formulation was based on land grants alone and any such
formulation is open to question. Thus, it has been effectively questioned whether the
transfer of revenue to the donee would at all amount to the corrosion of the ruler’s
economic liberty. D.C. Sircar criticized the Marxist historians for their inability to
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distinguish landlordism and tenancy in India from feudalism and he uses the concept
of landlordism to describe the situation of early medieval India.

Harbans Mukhia, a committed practitioner of Marxist history writing in an

address entitled “Was There Feudalism in Indian History?” questioned the Indian
feudalism thesis at the theoretical plane and then at the empirical level by comparing
the medieval Indian scenario with medieval Europe. Mukhia says that European
feudalism developed as a result of changes at the base of society, in India, the
establishment of feudalism is attributed to state action. Mukhia questions whether
such complex social structures can be established through administrative and legal
procedures. Mukhia suggested that the medieval Indian economy was characterized
by the high fertility of the land, the low subsistence needs of the peasants, and the
peasants’ freedom of control over their process of production. Mukhia emphasizes
free peasant production as the characteristic feature of the medieval Indian economy.
He also argues to move away from Euro-centrism in the study of history. With this
intervention, the debate was no longer confined to the feudalism/trade dichotomy.

While the debate critically examined the theoretical proposition of the

universality of the concept of feudalism or otherwise – with each historian taking his
independent position – on the question of Indian historical evidence, R S Sharma,
who was chiefly under attack, reconsidered some of his earlier positions and greatly
refined his thesis of Indian feudalism, even as he defended it vigorously and
elegantly in a paper titled, “How Feudal was Indian Feudalism?”, he suggested that
feudalism has to be seen as a mode of the distribution of the means of production
and the appropriation of the surplus. He says that feudalism appears in a
predominantly agrarian economy which is characterized by a class of landlords and
a class of servile peasantry. In this system, the landlords extract surplus through
extra-economic methods like social, religious, or political methods.

Despite supporting the Indian feudalism theory, D.N. Jha criticized R.S.
Sharma for relying too heavily on the absence of long-distance external trade as the
cause of the rise of feudalism in India. In an edited volume, “The Feudal Order”,
D.N. Jha has included papers exploring the cultural and ideological dimensions of
what he calls the feudal order. One of the major dimensions he explores is that of
religion, especially the popular religion of Bhakti, both in the north and South India,
and the growth of India’s regional cultures and languages.

The model of the Segmentary state was first constructed by Aidan Southall to
explain the Alur society in East Africa. This anthropological model is based on the
idea of pyramidal segmentation. Burton Stein adapted this model to the South Indian
states from the Pallava to the Vijayanagara period and questions the inadequacy of
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the feudal model as a tool to explain the prevailing polity in south India. The
Segmentary theory views the king as having enjoyed only limited territorial
sovereignty. The element of centrality existed only in the core area even where the
presence of quasi-autonomous foci of administration was tolerated by the Cholas.
The real foci of power are suggested to have been the locality-level centers or Nadus.
Stein distinguishes sharply between actual political control on one side and ritual
sovereignty on the other.

Hermann Kulke has also questioned Stein’s concept of ritual sovereignty.

According to him in a traditional society, particularly in India, ritual sovereignty
seems to be an integral part and sometimes even a pacemaker of political power. A
key element of the segmentary state theory was also the so-called Brahman-peasant
alliance at the Nadu. The peasant was always exploited by the Brahman and
Kshatriya combination. The model was originally proposed to explain the tribal
situation and was not suited to a stratified society. In the view of “non-aligned
historians” by Hermann Kulke, the early medieval polity is perceived as an
“integrative polity”.

The integrative paradigm in the 1980s itself met with some constructive
criticisms. However, from the middle of the 1990s onwards, it began to emerge as a
serious alternative, especially with the publication of B.D. Chattopadhyay’s The
Making of Early Medieval India. From an integrationist perspective,
Chattopadhyaya sees a fundamental difference in understanding the terms
'parcelized' and 'shared' sovereignty. He gives examples of various states, including
the Mauryan state, and suggests that states do not necessarily collapse, but that
power only shifts to the peripheries and later rises from there. Among the criticisms
there are broadly three kinds of reservations: first, that the economic dimensions
need to be addressed, secondly that it is essentially a narrative of regionalism, and
finally that one does not get very much about the structural features of the state
apparatus.

Irfan Habib has also questioned the validity of the concepts of feudalism in
Indian history. Habib’s ideas are mainly dealing with medieval society and
economy. He suggests certain characteristics of the Indian medieval economy like,
the predominance of peasant production in the context of a stratified agrarian
economy, The growing impoverishment of the peasantry was owing to the increased
demand of the ruling class for revenue which prevented technological advancement
ensuring an abundance of artisan labor supply at low cost and Since the
establishment of Delhi Sultanate, increasing pressure was exerted by the state to
collect the bulk of peasants surplus and revenue was collected in cash. He also
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suggested the use of a neutral term, ‘the Indian medieval economy’ or the ‘medieval
Indian system’

The debate surrounding the characterizing of early medieval India over the
last thirty years has enriched our understanding of the times. From D.D. Kosmabi
conceptualized the growth of feudalism in Indian history as a two-way process and
R.S. Sharma who first did a systematic study of Indian feudalism and Harbans
Mukhia stated that feudalism was not a worldwide applicable system and B.D.
Chattopadhyay made a differential understanding of notions of ‘parcelized’ and
‘shared’ sovereignty and Irfan Habib suggested the neutral term of ‘the Indian
medieval economy’ through this, he made a new take over the debate and thus he
questioned the validity of the concepts of feudalism in Indian history. Today it is
agreed that it was the formative period in the making of regional societies and
through these debates, it has been made clear that these centuries were marked by
agrarian growth and spread of the peasant frontier, integration of the tribes,
emergence of new social groups and their placement within the Varna/Jati
framework, local state formation and the extension of state-society into pre-state
areas, and the integration of local indigenous deities into Hinduism is also evident.
Throughout this essay, we have seen the different takes by historians on early
medieval India and how it evolved and challenged the hypothesis of Indian
feudalism.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Chattopadhyaya, B.D. “Political Processes and the Structure of Polity in Early

Medieval India: Problems of Perspective.” Presidential Address, Ancient
India Section, Indian History Congress, 44 the Session; reproduced in The
State in India, 1000-1700, ed., H.Kulke, Delhi, Oxford University Press,
1997, pp. 195-232.
 Jha, D.N. “Introduction”, The Feudal Order: State, Society, and Ideology in
Early Medieval India,(ed.). Delhi, Manohar,2000, pp.1-60.
 Kulke, Hermann. “The Early and the Imperial Kingdom: A Processural Model
of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India.” The State in India,
1000-1700, ed., Kulke, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 233-
262.
 Mukhia, H. “Was there Feudalism in Indian History?” The Journal of Peasant
Studies, vol.8, New Delhi, 1981, pp.273-310.
 Mukhia, H. “Was there Feudalism in Indian History?” The State in
India,1000-1700, ed., H.Kulke, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1995,
pp. 86-133.
 Sharma, R.S. Indian Feudalism, c.300-1200. Delhi, Macmillian,1980, pp. 63-
90.
 Sharma, R.S. “Origins of Feudalism in India.”Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient, vol 1, 1958, pp. 297-328.
 Sharma, R.S. “The Kali Age: A Period of Social Crisis.” The Feudal Order:
State, Society, and Ideology in Early Medieval India, ed., D.N.Jha, Delhi,
Manohar,1982, pp. 61-77.