RS Sharma’s book on Indian Feudalism in 1965 represented a whiff of fresh air in the world of Indian history writing. Much of the epigraphic information had been available for over a century until he read them in a radically different fashion. He stitched this information from different parts of the subcontinent into the grand narrative of Indian Feudalism. Though scholars like Ghoshal and Ray had talked about ‘Early Medieval India’ in the 1950s and even used terms like ‘feudalism’, their narratives treated the disintegration of large, centralized kingdoms and revenue systems as disparate facts. Sharma wove the political, economic and religious histories into a coherent narrative that spawned a new world of scholarship.
KM Shrimali’s book is very much in the RS Sharma tradition. This voluminous tract is, in fact, two books. The first is a reprint of a book published in 1987. The next examines new materials for studying the economic history of the areas controlled by the Vakatakas and Silaharas. The conclusion revisits debates about feudalism. With three sets of bibliographies and two indexes, the book is not particularly reader friendly.
The 1987 book explored the economic history of Central India under the Vakatakas. By mapping the find-spots of inscriptions, and analysing the connotation of place names, Shrimali tried to understand the type of settlement. He also analysed whether the lands granted were located in forests or in old agricultural areas. His careful study of inscriptions showed the emergence of new agricultural settlements and decline of urban centres in the Vakatakas’ domains. Shrimali showed that land-grants were not simply forms of royal religiosity but mechanisms of dynamic agricultural expansion. The magnificent study also highlighted the presence of dependent labour that could be classified as serfs of the feudal system.
The second book begins as chapter three. The author revisits the interventions in the feudalism debate. He analyses fresh inscriptional material and excavation reports to support the assertions in the previous book. Further, he makes a convincing case for the paucity of coins and the general decline of urban centres. He also provides prints and readings of a large number of inscriptions which might help researchers in the future.
The chapter bearing the title ‘Taking Plough to Atavika Kshetras’ is probably the finest in the book. With his enviable control over epigraphic material, Shrimali interrogates the issue of the expansion of cultivation to forest areas that seems to combine with the process of Sanskritization. He shows this through the fascinating case of a series of land grants near Bagh where the first donor is a chieftain with a non-Sanskritic name, but whose descendants have Sanskrit names.
The two chapters that follow explore the history of agriculture and the circulation of money in the Konkan coast under the Silaharas (circa 850-1250 CE). His careful analysis shows that money had limited circulation and that a large segment of the economy functioned without money. He agrees that coins came back into circulation from late ninth century. Crucially, he has compiled, from varied sources, a large list of goods that were traded over long distances. However, he contends that despite the revival of coastal trade, spurt in agricultural activities, growing tendencies of urbanization, and the multiplication of exchange centres, India remained a feudal socio-economic formation. We need to remember David Graeber’s caution about exaggerating the role of money in modern historical analyses of the past. While it is true that coinage was primarily used by the elite, it did play an important role in long-distance trade and the emergence of moneylenders. Shrimali himself points out that big traders and moneylenders were powerful enough to secure important tax concessions from kings, and sometimes even collected taxes. Similarly, they were important enough to be mentioned as witnesses in land grant charters.
While Shrimali excels in reconstructing the economic histories of the areas controlled by the Vakatakas and Silaharas, his global generalizations about feudalism are problematic. In RS Sharma’s scheme, the emergence of Indian feudalism around the fourth century is related to the Hun invasions which led to the collapse of long-distance trade, the consequent decay of urban centres and disappearance of coinage, which in turn led to a situation where officials were paid their salaries through grants of land. This led, further, to disintegration of large kingdoms. Shrimali, while following Sharma’s formulations closely, pushes the beginnings of feudalism to circa 100 CE. This timeline removes Sharma’s key causative factor, i.e., the Hun invasions, from the frame of analysis because these took place only around the fourth-fifth century. This leads to the situation of a solution emerging about four hundred years before the crisis. Secondly, the early centuries of the Common Era are associated with the high point of international trade. Shrimali airbrushes both anachronisms by saying, ‘…the rise of the toiling, subject and immobile peasantry and artisans…are the hallmark of the feudal apparatus…’ (p. 427). If agrarian relations alone were to define the nature of society, pre-civil war USA would have to be called a slave society and not a capitalist one! Even in 2003, India had over nine crore agricultural labourers apart from many other kinds of ‘toiling’ peasants (Arjun Sengupta Report). Given the caste divisions and deprivations in our countryside today, one wonders why Shrimali stops his story of feudalism in 1300. While Sharma defined feudalism as a range of human activities that affected economy, politics, religion and society, Shrimali is beholden to agrarian relations to a degree that everything else becomes non-material.
If one gave up global generalizations and tried a non-epicentric way of understanding the past, things would make better sense. BD Chattopadhyaya showed the emergence of urban centres in Rajasthan and the Ganga Valley from the eighth century onwards. These could be pilgrimage centres, market towns, temple towns, or administrative centres. R Champaklakshmi discussed the emergence of temple-centred urban economies in the deep south from the sixth century. Ranabir Chakravarti has shown that coastal trade in western and eastern India flourished in the period of ‘urban decay’ in the Ganga Valley. After all, Fa Xian (fifth century) and Xuanzang (seventh century) described Tamralipti in Bengal as a very large city active in international trade and commerce. India in the early medieval period was a multitude of realities. Perhaps, we need to move past the filters created by the cow-belt and acknowledge this diversity.
Shrimali’s is a work of history, but it too has a history. While the first book was written with clear Marxist assumptions, the second book has been written after a distinct shift has taken place and some of the axial assumptions of Marxism have been challenged. Shrimali rages against environmental history, cultural history, and all varieties of history that have emerged in the wake of postmodernism. We need, however, to be careful in our dismissals. I can think of three books (there are many more): Thapar’s Shakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories, Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men and Chattopadhyaya’s Representing the Other: Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims. These books would fall in Shrimali’s category of cultural history and postmodernist reading of the past. But Indian history writing would be poorer without them.
PK Basant is former Professor, Department of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. Besides his academic work, he has also authored books for children.