D.N.Jha, ed.

, The Feudal Order: State, Society and Ideology in Early Medieval India,
(Delhi: Manohar, 2000), pp. xi+539, Rs. 750/-

This is a revised and enlarged version of another anthology of articles titled, Feudal
Social Formation in Early India, compiled by the same author and published in 1987. As
the title itself suggests, the book under review argues that it is possible to study the early
medieval Indian state, society, ideology and presumably economy, under the larger
conceptual construct of ‘The Feudal Order’. Accordingly, it is divided into three parts.
The first part deals with the transition to feudalism; the second discusses aspects of feudal
state and society in some detail; and the third part attempts to outline feudal ideology. In
a fairly detailed introduction, the editor examines the state of existing historiography in
the field from a perspective that is broadly shared by all the contributors to this book. It is
only to be expected then, that the book locates itself in the context of the ongoing debate
on whether there was a ‘feudal phase’ in Indian history. Lending their weight to the
argument are senior historians like R.S.Sharma, B.N.S.Yadav, Noboru Karashima,
K.M.Shrimali and Jha himself. All the articles included in this volume have been in print
earlier, except for two: one by Vishwa Mohan Jha, another by Vijay Nath.

The first Indian Marxist historian to have referred to the growth of feudalism in India was
B.N.Datta. D.D.Kosambi subsequently developed the idea and posited two stages
(‘feudalism from above’ and ‘feudalism from below’) in the evolution of feudal social
formation in early medieval India. However, it was only with the detailed and richly
documented theory of ‘Indian Feudalism’ by R.S.Sharma that the idea not only gained
popularity but also attracted staunch detractors. In the process, the early medieval Indian
historiography has tended to be divided among those who support this theory and those
who do not. Opposition and criticism notwithstanding, the feudal framework has come to
dominate the study of almost every aspect of early medieval India.

Central to the first formulations of the transition to feudal mode of production was the
decline of external trade, demonetization, and the consequent relapse to a self-sufficient
economy. Critics pointed out the theoretical inadequacy of the schema that explained

1
critical stages of change almost exclusively in terms of external factors. Sharma and
B.N.S. Yadav, not only accepted the critique with scholarly modesty but attended to the
problem with a renewed search for evidence that could explain the perceived changes in
terms of the internal dynamics of Indian history. Thus, the descriptions of Kali age in the
epics and the Puranic literature served as the pointer of a ‘deep social crisis’ that gripped
the Indian society in late third and early fourth centuries. The most significant element of
this crisis was the phenomenon of varnasamkara, literally, an intermixture of the varnas.
In a system where the vaisyas and the sudras were engaged in production and paid taxes,
argues Sharma, ‘varnasamkara would also imply the refusal of the peasants and traders,
called vaisyas, to pay taxes and would thus put in jeopardy the very fabric of society and
polity’ (p. 64). Thus, a new mechanism of surplus extraction had to be deployed: steadily
the state started assigning land revenue directly to priests, military chiefs, administrators,
etc. The first two papers (by Sharma and Yadav respectively) in the Part I, attempt to
elaborate on the theme of this crisis with detailed explication of the relevant passages
from the epics and the Purans and, in the case of Yadav, also partly from Jain literature.

As one critic pointed out, this framework assigned the state ‘the role of a prime mover in
the entire gamut of socio-political change, including even the curious decision to preside
over its own demise, by unleashing the processes of political fragmentation and
parcellization of sovereignty’. It is possible to argue that the prime mover is not state in
this scheme of analysis but the said social unrest and the consequent politico-fiscal crisis
to which the state responded. A greater problem, however, is to decide on a uniform
chronology for the alleged transition to feudalism. The very time-segments studied by the
individual contributors in the volume make this much clear. Thus, in his Introduction, Jha
rejects Chattopadhyay’s discovery of flourishing towns and market networks as
admissible evidence against the existence of feudal property relations. For, ‘all the
epigraphic references painstakingly collected by him…belong to the ninth and tenth
centuries’ (p 4). Yet, in one of the articles in the Part I (Transition to Feudalism),
Karashima studies late Cola inscriptions to point to the emergence of a new agrarian
order and the existence of social turmoil in the thirteenth century. One may as well note
that Vishwa Mohan Jha’s scrupulously researched paper on ‘Feudal Elements in the

2
Caulukya State’ in the Part II (titled ‘Feudal State and Society’) also deals with the period
from tenth to thirteenth centuries. The problem could partly be resolved if the votaries of
the feudal thesis were willing to allow for more than superficial and some fundamentally
differential trajectories of development in different regions. To be sure, B.N.S.Yadav
admits that ‘the tendencies and phenomenon…could not have emerged to the same
degree everywhere’. He is quick to add, however, that the accounts of developments of
feudalism ‘give a generalized picture bringing out the main aspects and the essence of the
social situation’ (p. 102, emphasis added). What remains a desideratum, then, is only a
study of regional and chronological ‘variations’.

This brings us to another argument against the feudal mode, among others by
B.D.Chottopadhyay. What is of interest to him in the early medieval India is the uneven
nature of historical developments that defies any attempt at a search for their ‘essence’.
Offering an alternative mode of analysis, Chattopadhyay notes a ‘complex synthesis of
different societies and cultures at different stages of development’. As another historian
notes rather interestingly, ‘it is the perspective from the regions [that] acquire the
necessary centrality’ in this framework.

It is often forgotten that what is at stake in the debate around the feudal question is not (or
at least should not be) so much the use of the term, ‘feudalism’ per se as the differing
perceptions of the substance of political and property relations. This often leads to a lot of
confusion. Vishwa Mohan Jha discusses the confusion with remarkable clarity and adds
an epistemological dimension to the controversy (pp. 240-41). In one of the essays in the
Part II, B.N.S.Yadav imaginatively utilizes contemporary astronomical texts to illuminate
aspects of peasant’s predicament. One may disagree with his conclusions, but the essay
underlines the need on the part of historians to widen the net for historical sources.
K.M.Shrimali’s article on Konkan under the Silharas is pithy, focussed and richly
documented, and attempts to show the limited, and in all possibility rather
inconsequential, nature of monetization in the coastal economy.

3
R.N.Nandi’s paper titled, ‘Agrarian Growth and Social Conflict in Early India’
disappointingly begins with the assumption that ‘the relapse of a market economy of
towns into a subsistence economy of agriculture, which followed a widespread decay and
desertion of towns after the third Christian century seems to be the key factor in the
origins of feudalism’ (p. 303). Although the essay provides rich data on the state of rural
economy of south India and the internal contradictions therein in the period between the
eighth and twelfth century, its conclusions tend to be simplistic and stretched particularly
where the dynamics of change is concerned.

The third part dealing with ‘Feudal Ideology’ is probably the weakest. The essay by
M.G.S.Narayanan and K.Veluthat begins on a promising note of uncovering the socio-
economic context of bhakti movement in south India but it fails to explore the possible
dialectics between the material and the metaphysical. Moreover, it unnecessarily burdens
itself with imminently objectionable assumptions like, ‘By the tenth century, the
movement had already come into fruition realizing its early social objectives’; or
expressions like, ‘the more advanced civilization of the Ganga valley’. The fact that the
first reference to the term ‘Hindu’, in an indigenous source in the subcontinent is to be
found only in the fourteenth century does not stop the authors from using the expression
in the context of peninsular India prior to tenth century. R.S.Sharma’s piece on ‘The
Feudal Mind’, is neatly fleshed out. Yet at times, his conclusions also tend to be rather
uncomfortably linear and deterministic. This is probably because he assumes religion to
be merely a ‘super-structural element’ that is determined by developments in the ‘base’
of the material life.

A compilation of articles that share broadly common ideological ground on a

4
5