19 Early Medieval India Many Historians Indian And British

19 early medieval india many historians, indian and british, have tended to look at south asian history from the point of view of

19
Early Medieval India
Many historians, Indian and British, have tended to look at South
Asian history from the point of view of the north, and defined the
medieval period mainly in terms of the Muslim conquests and Islamic
institutions. These did not play a major role, however, until the l3th
century. Until the last 25 years, those that bothered to talk about
the previous seven hundred years between the fall of the Gupta
Emperors and l200 A.D. saw these centuries as a sort of preparation
for the Islamic governments which followed. So these years of the
early medieval period have been characterized as witnessing the
degradation of the culture of the classical Gupta period and its
political order. This northern-centered view dismisses the parts of
the subcontinent in the south where Islamic states never established
stable governments. But this view was oriented in the end more toward
justifying or condemning British Rule than it was in exploring the
actual historical experience of South Asia between 500 A.D. and 1200
A.D.
The focus here is on two major characteristics of the early medieval
period, the structure and scale of the political forms which evolved
and the gradual development of regional cultures and economies.
Some authors divide the subcontinent up into four major regions, or
megaregions: south, east, central and north India. Medievalist Burton
Stein has pointed to the existence of six major regions, the south,
the west (containing Maharashtra and Gujarat), the east, the north,
the central and the northwest (containing Punjab, Sind, and
Baluchistan). These divisions are relevant toStein’s discussion of the
kinds of states which appeared between 500 AD and 1700. He figured
that about 20 kingdoms succeeded in extending their sovereignty beyond
a single megaregion, if we count the megaregions as six in number. Two
thirds of these were ruled by Hindu dynasties, but the most durable of
these imperial states was the Muslim Mughal empire, from about the
middle of Akbar's reign, around l580, to the reign of Muhammad Shah in
1730. Dominance in more than one region by almost all of these states
was usually the accomplishment of a single ruler, a great conquering
warrior like Pulakesin II of the seventh century Chalukyan kingdom or
the mid-tenth century Krisna II of the Rashtrakutas, both of the
Deccan.
Besides these20 kingdoms which for a time at least spanned two or more
large regions, there were numerous others the scale of whose authority
was far more limited, but whose duration could nevertheless be
considerable. From inscriptions and literary sources we get
information on over 40 royal dynasties who endured for a period in the
megaregions. The chronicles of temples, royal genealogical texts, and
oral traditions tell of both wealthy kings and local chiefs who
attempted to achieve royal status.
The existence of so many rulers tells us that the early medieval
period witnessed the emergence of new state forms, compared to the
late Vedic and classical periods. There is, however, little agreement
among historians about the character of these states and their form.
However, the kingdom of Harsha is often taken as the typical state
when scholars talk of Indian feudalism.
Harsha ruled a realm nearly as large as the Gupta kingdom during the
first half of the seventh century. His capital was Kanauj, modern
Kanpur, in the fertile plain between the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers,
the doab. The capital had originally been at the old Mauryan capital
of Patalipurtra in the eastern Gangetic basin. Here there was rich
agricultural potential and the revenues from trade which entered the
Gangetic Plain at this point. However, with a shift to the west came
improved defence of the entire plain from the Hun tribesmen who had
preyed upon the Guptas.
A set of inscribed copper-plates of 632 AD provides insight into the
structure of Harsha's state. This inscription recorded a gift of land
to two Brahmins by a military officer in Harsha’s service.. Among the
protectors of the gift were a set of political personnages in whose
hands major elements of state power appeared to be vested. Some were
'great neighbors' of King Harsha, his mahasamantas. Others were 'great
kings' (maharajas) who acknowlegded Harsha's overlordship. Still
others served the chakravartin, as he styled himself, in various
capacities, including as soldiers. Lowest among the guarantors of
permanence of the gift were the local community, the 'janapada', where
the gifted lands were located. Donations to Brahmins, Buddhists and
Jainas before the time of Harsha had usually come from a royal prince
or a provincial governor. In these copper-plates, however, the first
of the dignitaries to be mentioned was the Mahasamanta who ruled a
territory adjoining the core tract of the king around Kanauj. This,
even though the donor of the land was a military servant of Harsha and
the executor of the grant was an accountant in the king's service.
Mahasamantas, or as they often also called themselves, mahasamantaraja,
were independent rulers of realms near the core tracts of an overlord
and might have paid tribute to the latter as well as providing
military service. In most cases they were territorial magnates in
their own rights, either by inheritance or conquest. Among them would
also have been some who served kings like Harsha and were given lands
to support their official duties in a manner similar to a feudal grant
in Europe.
Titles and land grants were the means that higher lords expressed ties
to lesser rulers in a massing of followerships. The great kingships of
early medieval India were constituted by such followings. Rulers of
this time spoke of their samantachakra, their circle of subordinates:
the large the circle, the greater the lord. A lord gained a high royal
rank with a large following of minor rulers who served him in some
fashion and honored him in political ritual. Both superior and
inferior lords enhanced their security by such arrangements. Whether
Harsha's kingdom was actually less centralized than the Guptas is
uncertain, but the pattern of political agreements was different.
What is clearly different between the polity of Harsha and that of the
Guptas is that the Guptas had few formidable opponents within northern
India and, until quite late in the dynasty, not very formidable
enemies without. The contrast with Harsha could not have been greater.
He was humbled by the Chalukyan king Pulakeshin II when he sought to
extend his authority southward into the Deccan. Harsha's successor was
immediately crushed by the king of Bengal. This opened an era of
incessant conflict covering several centuries and centering on Kanauj
and Harsha's rich patrimony there. During that time warlords from
every direction--from Bengal, from the Deccan, from Rajasthan in the
west and from Kashmir in the north--strove to hold Kanauj. Central
Asian Muslims finally ended their conflicts by imposing their rule
over the whole of the Gangetic region.
Elsewhere in India the centralization of the Mauryan and Gupta regimes
is wholly absent. There is no question but that the states in Deccan
and the south did not have administrations as describe in the
arthasastra. First notice of these states came in Ashoka's edict
speaking of the kingdoms to which he sent Buddhist missionaries. Here
the kings of the Cholas and the Pandyans in the far south are
mentioned, along with kings of Syra, Macedonia, Epirus on the Ionian
coast and Cyrene in north Africa. By the early centuries of the first
millenium, next to the ancient Cholas and Pandyas were the Chera kings
of the south-west coast of Kerala, the Satavahanas over the entire
Deccan plateau, and the Chedi rulers of Kalinga on the north-east
coast of modern Orissa. Some of the minor ruling houses of the fourth
century were to attain very considerably greater sovereignty by 500 AD
when Guptas still ruled their core Gangetic territory: Pallava and
Kadamba kings ruled over eastern and western Deccan tracts, Vakatakas
over the central and northern Deccan and a set of small kingdoms were
found along the Orissan coast: eastern Gangas, Nalas, Mahakantaras. By
the early seventh century, when Harsha's kingdom flourished in the
central Ganges, the far south had come under Pallava kings of
Kanchipuram and much of the central and eastern Deccan was under the
Chalukyas of Badami, Pulakesin's line.
Where did these peninsular kingdoms come from? We have mentioned the
impact of the Mauryan Empire on state formation--here we will
elaborate on that.
The earliest peninsular kingdoms date from around the turn of the
present era and appear to contain some Mauryan institutions which had
emerged in two peripheral parts of Ashoka's realm. A king Kharavela
established an extensive state centered on Kalinga. This you may
remember as the area which Ashoka had brought into his empire with a
military campaign that was so bloody that he announced that he would
renounce violence. Kharavela was a Jain and though he should
accordingly, it seems, have adopted the non-violence principle of that
faith (ahimsa), he proved to be a masterful soldier. His conquests to
the north and south brought him enormous wealth. Trade also added to
the wealth of his state, whose coast was mentioned by Pliny the Elder,
a Roman writer, in his work Natural History.
Evidence suggests, in fact, that Buddhist and Jaina monasteries
consituted nodal points on a far-flung trade system linking coastal
Kalinga to the interior. Kharavela had no successor, so that kingdom
ceased with his death, but further south the Satavahana kingdom
sprawled across the whole of the peninsula, connecting the interior
centres of trade and metal production (which had emerged during the
period of Ashoka) with both trade coasts. The Saravahanas proved a
longer-lived kingdom owing partly to a series of able rulers and also
to the offer of more political scope to local magnates than seemed
available under the Mauryas, who had appointed governors to these
distant places. Trade between both of the coasts of the realm remained
important according to the first century writings of the
Greco-Egyptian geographer Ptolemy. And, as in the case of Kalinga
earlier, Buddhist and Jaina monastic establishments were supported by
royal endowments even though its rulers were Hindu. These attracted
crowds of pilgrim-consumers making these institutions nodes in an
extensive trade network. Trade, then, was an important basis of
penninsula kingdoms and that in close association with Jaina and
Buddhist institutions.
These enjoyed high prestige and prominent positions in many parts of
India during the early centuries of the first millenium, but no where
so much as in the Pala kingdom of Bengal during the ninth century.
Hinduism had experience a comeback and further development in the
emerging centers of regional culture in south India, in the Deccan and
in many parts of northern India, but not in Bengal. Its Pala kings
gave massive support to Buddhists of the Mahayana sect, giving it the
flavor of the Tantric tradition of Bengali religious practice. From
Bengal this variant was carried by missionaries to Tibet where it
shaped the Buddhism there. The Bengali city Nalanda was the major
centre of Buddhist learning in the eastern Gangetic region, and its
educative functions were supported by income from hundreds of villages
granted by Pala rulers. Buddhist scholars from South-east Asia were
drawn there for instruction in Mahayana doctrines and practices.
Nalanda and the contemporary center of high learning at Taxila, on the
opposite side of the subcontinent, trained many of the monks that
served Buddhist institutions in and beyond India. Thus, these
monastaries along with Jain monastaries, were involved in state and
community formation and the major commercial develoopments that were
taking place in the last half of the first millenium AD. The
repressions of Jains and Buddhists in the early medieval period may
have resulted partly from the deep involvement of both sects in
secular activities. By l000 AD both sects had been rendered marginal
by the Hindu sects which were expanding in the new regional cultures
of the subcontinent.
As mentioned earlier, a major characteristic of the early medieval
period was the development of regional societies. The regional
kingdoms had fluid boundaries. They were polities defined less by
administration and alliance than by language, sectarian affiliations
and temples. Within the limited regions defined by the distribution of
any king's shifting suzerainty, new political, linguistic and literary
and social histories took a shape that remain recognizable even in
contemporary modern India. Religion was at the heart of this
regionalizing process: gods, temples, inspired poets and philosophers.
Expanding trade may have set off political processes with new patterns
of competition, but religious doctrinal and institutional developments
affected patterns of state formation and the political institutions
which emerged.
Buddhism and Jainism were displaced from their towering positions
after Mauryan times with considerable difficulty in some places. Only
with the Islamic conquests of the 12th century, when Muslims destroyed
many of their sacred places, were Buddhists in Bengal overwhelmed, as
Bengalis either converted to Islam or were recruited to the worship of
the Hindu god, Vishnu.
More characteristic in some ways was the experience of the Tamil
Country, which proved the model for the southern penninsula. It was
the Tamil variant of Hindu culture which spread as well to South-east
Asia.
Religious change inevitably merged in a variety of ways with both
linguistic and political development: all shaped the regionalisation
process. Driving the Tamil cultural process was a deadly struggle
between a new sort of Hindu worship and the religious hegemony of
Buddhists and Jains, their doctrines, and the political support they
had from some rulers of TAmils around the sixth century. Little is
known about these kings. We have mostly hostile commentators who
describe them as 'evil', but they may have been hill chiefs that
extended political control over the plains of Tamil Country and
patronized Buddhist and Jain institutions and teachers. Even when
these so-called 'usurpers' were driven off by kings such as the
Pallavas, the latter followed and supported Jainism until persuaded
otherwise by teachers of a new devotional faith. The Pallava
Mahendravarman (d. 630 AD) renounced his Jain affiliation and became a
worshipper of Shiva, turning against and prosecuting Jains. Other
Tamil rulers did the same then and later as the Shiva cult armed
itself with a power theology to compete against that of Buddhist and
Jains.
A major formulator of that Hindu theology was a Brahmin named Shankara
(788-820 AD), who combined philosophical thinking with impressive
administrative skill. To defeat the Jains and Buddhists and to brand
them as heterodoxies, Shankara returned to the ancient Upanishads from
which the Buddhist doctrines had evolved. Shankara offered newe
explanations of salvation and of knowledge equal to those of the
powerful non-Hindu sects of his time. Besides incorporating and
surpassing Buddhism's doctrines, Shankara copied their institutions by
establishing monastaries in many places. Four which were famous as
missionary centres became especially important and their leaders
became known as Shankaracharyas.
Thus, Shankara's influence was not wholly intellectual. In addition to
incorporating Buddhist and Jain models for faith and organization, he
also incorporated popular worship of lord Shiva, particularly songs of
praise. These hymns of devotion – of overwhelming love for Shiva or
Visnu – became the foundation for the new and popular cult of Hinduism
that has endured until the present throughout India. Called bhakti,
this form of religious devotionalism began in Tamil country during the
sixth century. There had been earlier forms of devotionalism, in
particular that found in the Bhagavadgita, devotional poetry to the
god Krishna. This had been composed abourt the first century AD and
was incorporated into the Mahabharatha about a century prior to
Shankara.
Further developments of bhakti religion among Tamils were the work of
poet devotees and other theologians. Between the sixth and tenth
century 63 Shiva and 12 Vishnu-worshipping poets created a large
corpus of Tamil devotional songs and all are revered as saints by
Tamils. Theological works of doctrines for worship of both Siva and
and Vishnu followed shortly as Brahmins took advantage of the
intellectual base which Shankara had provided. This work protected
Brahminical leadership role in religious affairs.
Here are examples of some bhakti devotional songs from this period in
the Tamil Country. By the poet Nammalvar, referring to Vishnu in his
incarnation as Krishna as a mischievous child:
For his devoted servants
he’s easy to reach,
but for everyone else
he’s a mysterious sage:
our elusive lord,
who kindled passion in the goddess born from a lotus,
was caught in the act
stealing butter from the churn.
How could he bear his shame
when they bound his waist
and tied him fast to a mortar?
A poem to Shiva by Shaivite Manikkavacakar:
Dog that I am,
I turned all my thoughts to you,
I filled my eyes with the image
of your feet, bright as flowers
and bowed before them,
I surrendered my voice to your bell-like words,
then you came to me,
and all my five senses rejoiced,
O wonder-worker who comes inside of me
and rule me,
great ocean of nectar,
lord tall as the mountains
with body bright as a red-lotus forest,
you gave yourself
to this lonely man
who has no place in this world
or in any other.
Here is a song to Shiva by the woman, Karaikkal Ammaiyar:
She has shriveled breasts
and bulging veins,
in place of white teeth
empty cavitires gape.
With ruddy hair on her belly,
a pair of fangs, knobby andles and long shins
the demon-woman wails at the desolate cremation ground
where our lord
whose hanging matted hair
blows in all eight directions,
dances among the flames
and refeshes his limbs.
His home is Alankatu
This popular religious development spurred the development of first
Tamil and then other languages between 1000 and 1300 AD. In the 12th
century bhakti hymns were composed in Bengal by the saint Jayadev, and
in Mathura by Nimbarka. The latter was a south Indian Brahmin whose
devotion of the god Krishna led to a missionary call that helped to
make Mathura the center of the Krishna cult. Literary works along with
such technical aids as grammars and dictionaries could be found in
Marathi, Bengali, and several other languages. Two other literary
projects were expecially important besides the bhakti songs. One genre
preserved or invented temple myths about the gods sheltered in
temples, gods who were the objects of bhakti songs and devotional
theology. Temples gave institutional focus to this reformed Hinduism.
The other stimulous to the literature of the early medeival age were
chronicles of ruling families of the period.
Temples and kings were decisive shapers of regional cultures; both
institutions had the further effect of stimulating urbanization.
Looking to Tamil Country for examples, we find that the Shiva temples
of the sacred places of Chidambaram and Madurai became the chapel
shrines of the Chola and Pandya kings respectively. Both ruling
families lavished treasure for adorning the dieties and attracted a
large permanent population of priests at each temples and throngs of
pilgrims whose needs created the foundations for substantial urban
centres. We know this from documents inscribed on the stone basements
and walls of both temples and from the chronicles (mahatmya) praising
the god in each. These inscriptions show how each diety was
transformed from being a local protecting divinity by stories which
assimilated them to Shiva legends found in Sanskrit puranas or earlier
literature.
This process is sometimes called Sanskritization and illustrates one
way the values and symbols of the Gangetic Plain spread throughout the
subcontinent. Former territorial spirits were redefined to be great
gods with cosmic powers. At the same time as Sanskritization was going
on, however, royalization was also taking place. Chiefs who wanted the
power and status of kings found that one way to legitimize their
claims as chakravartins was to transform their guardian divinities
into Shiva or Vishnu, deities worthy of the adoration and devotion of
would-be emperors.
It is important to point out that Shiva and Vishnu were seen also as
kings, as ruling gods. The human king in a region ruled on their
behalf. As Kulke and Rothermund relate, the divine gods held court
surrounded in their temples by sub-regional gods. These were the
family gods of the human king's samantas. The sub-regional gods again
rallied the village gods around them during festivals, just as headmen
were occasionally invited to attend the court of a prince. The
legitimacy of a human ruler was enhanced in this way. The more "royal"
the cult of the territorial god, the more legitimate the claim of a
king to rule that territory on behalf of the god. The bhakti cults
contributed to this devotion to gods and kings in medieval India.
Temples played a major role in royal politics not only because the
ruling aspect of the diety was emphasised, but because of the nature
of temple ritual. Temple administrators, acting for the god, honored
the men and women who endowed worships at a temple, giving gifts of
land, produce or jewels. The greater the gift, the greater the honor
which was given/shown as part of the ritual of worship.
The major texts outlining the ritual of temple worship are called the
Agamas, the oldest of which were written in Sanskrit between the 3th
and 7th centuries. Worship, called puja, was to be performed three to
six times a day. It was done daily, but there were special pujas for
special occasions and for the expiation of sins to aleviate a great
problem. These rites were rites of adoration of the diety during which
food was offered to him or her. Arccanai were rituals done just for
the beneit of the worshipper. Puja was costly, involving washing the
icon in special substances like milk and clarified butter, giving
food, providing dancing to entertain the diety, dressing the icon in
flowers, cloth and jewels, offering incense and making a sacrifice.
The honors could be costly as well, ranging from giving a donor the
food and water left over from the puja to the silk turban worn by the
diety when he went in procession.
Not just kings, but all donors received honors in the court of the
god. Thus they came to share the god's sovereignty in the same way as
did those men who took part in rituals organized in the courts of
human kings. Donors competed for these honors in temples, as they did
for honors in the courts of princes. Thus we can see how the expansion
of temple worship implied also the expansion of royal values, or royal
ideologies.
In the early medieval times, the kings' temples were also palaces
where royal business was conducted and royal ritual enacted. The word
for temple in Tamil, for example, also means palace. Royal capitals
thus became or were temple-centers. Many of these capitals became the
major temples of the time. Each was not only a sacred place for the
royal deity, but also the place where the kings lived. Both god and
king attracted subjects and devotees in large number. The care of both
kinds of pilgrims and the objects of their adoration, human and
divine, made each capital city an economic centre as well. To that
spur to urbanization was added the imitations of the subordinates of
kings, those magnates to whom the title samanta applied, who
maintained smaller courts in the scores of kingdoms of the early
medieval age. During this time, then another of India's historic urban
phases took place, the third urbanization, after the first of the
Indus Valley and the second of the Gangetic Plain in pre-Mauryan
times.
Rich and powerful associations of urban-based corporate trade bodies
in south India conducted their commerce over the whole of the
peninsula and beyond to South-east Asia. The most famous of them took
its name from a capital of one of the earliest of the medieval
kingdoms, the Chalukyas. During the heyday of their rule over the
Deccan in the seventh and eighth centuries Chalukyan kings had
capitals at several places in Karnataka, including Ayyavole (modern
Aihole). Taking as their name 'the 500 svamis (lords) of Ayyavole' in
hundreds of stone inscriptions, partly in Sanskrit, partly in one of
the southern languages, these prestigious traveling traders flourished
from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. Their inscriptions dot the
entire southern peninsula, tracing an inter-regional and international
trade nexus of merchants. These trade groups provided one of the
conduits for translating Dravidian culture from India to South-east
Asia, a spill-over and extension beyond the subcontinent of early
medieval urbanization.
That the formation of cultures and states in South-east Asia was
deeply influenced by India has long been recognized. Different
theories give founding roles to the conquests of Indian warriors or to
missionary activities of Brahmin scholars or to the penetration of
Indian merchants. Each of these explanations can be supported by some
evidence, but the most likely major shaper of contact between
southeastern India and south-eastern Asia were the efforts of
South-east Asian rulers. They discovered in India the means for
creating great kingships of their own, as a result of contacts with
Indian soldiers, merchants and Brahmins. The major source of this
Indian modelling was Tamil country, along with others from
south-eastern India. There are several indications of this. The script
adopted for the earliest of inscriptions in insular and peninsular
south-east Asia was the sort that prevailed in Pallava inscriptions.
The sculptural tradition of south-east Asian Buddhists was adopted
from Amaravati in coastal Andhra during the fifth century AD. The
temple architecture in Java and Cambodia was drawn from Pallava and
Chola prototypes. Later south-east Asians took models of excellence
from north-east India, during trips to Nalanda. South-east Asian monks
visiting Bengal induced Bengali Buddhists, like the monk Kumara Ghose,
to travel to the courts of South-east Asian kings.
Not all of the culture contact between south and south-east Asia was
peaceful. The Chola king Rajendra claims in some of his inscriptions
to have made conquests in the Malayan peninsula. Some historians have
suggested that he was attempting to establish commercial dominance.
The later introduction of Islam into Malaya, Java and Sumatra came
also from south-east India.
Muslims were present in India from the time of the founding of Islam.
India's west coast knew Muslims and others from western Asia as part
of the commercial expansion of the early medieval period. Arab and
Jewish merchants not only journeyed along this coast on the Arabian
Sea, but some were granted special protection for their religions and
were even freed of tax obligations. This is known from inscriptions
such a one of the eighth century on copper-plates granted to the
Jewish merchant-elder Joseph Rabin, at the port of Cochin. A small
Jewish community continues still to live there. At about the same time
another sort of Muslim presence is recorded in the form of an Arab
army which conquered Sind, the ancient heartland of the Indus cities,
and parts of Punjab to the east. India's Islamic period might have
begun at this early time rather that in 1200 AD, except for the
resistence to Arab invaders by the various kings of Kanauj such as
Yasovaram around 736 and later Rajput chiefs and kings like the
Gujara-Pratiharas who held Kanuauj and most of northern India until
around 950 AD. Not long after that however, in the year 1000 AD,
incursions began from other Muslim fighters who were not Arabs but
steppe-fighters from Central Asia.
Looking back over the period 500 to 1200 we are able to see only dimly
the heritage of the Gupta golden age. The early medieval period was a
distinct departure in many ways and it was the pattern for future
development. The regionalization of culture, of religion and of
politics was the critically significant process of the early medieval
age. This involved two sorts of subordinate processes. One was the
extension and transformation of Sanskritic forms dating from Gupta
times. Many forms, however, were adapted to local values and were
brought into localized culture through modification. Simultaneously as
well, local and even folk cultural elements were given Sankritic
meanings. An instance of this was the 'marriage' of the protecting
goddess Minakshi at Madurai in Tamil Country to Shiva. She was in a
sense turned into Siva's Sanskritic wife Parvati in a temple ritual
sponsored by the Pandyan kings. This sort of synthesizing of
political, religious and cultural elements was a central feature of
the regional process and assured that whatever unity is assumed about
the classical Gupta age was forever dissolved in later times. As to
which of the components of the regionalizing processes may have been
the more important, or determining--political or religious or
cultural--that is very difficult to decide. One can say that the
ambition of local chiefs to become kings gave a boost to the
royalisation of the gods and construction of temples. But if a
powerful desire to worship the gods had not existed--in the bhakti
movement--poeple would not have attended temple worship. We can say,
too, that expanded trade and Jain and Buddhist religious activities
during and after the Mauryan period gave impulses to state formation.
Taxing trade gave chiefs and kings extra income.
Ambitious chiefs tried to legitimize their enlarged claims through
their utilization of Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu ritual. This
utilization became a process of regionalisation in that it was
necessary to mix northern symbols of divinity with local ones, since
the gods of the Hindu pantheon were distant from the experience of
ordinary people.
At the same time, Buddhist values supported impulses among Hindus of
devotion toward dieties who were brought into the everyday life of
ordinary people. The north Indian Shiva and Vishnu were joined by a
relative recent addition to the Sanskritic pantheon, Krishna, and all
three became the object of devotion of people who were part of the
culture of the immanence of the divine. Influence from the indigenous
culture of South Asia, the pre-Vedic culture, contributed to the
religious change which saw the great gods inhabiting stone and metal
idols in temples, making them more accessible. The worship of these
idols through song and myth contributed to the popularity of
literature in regional languages and to the growth of regional
languages. The association of royal establishments with these temples
enhanced the status of both gods and human rulers.
This period of political and cultural creativity coincided with the
rapid development of commodity production, the manufacturing by hand
of goods which made India's reputation in these early times as a land
of fabulous wealth and elegance. This reputation attracted people to
the subcontinent, feeding further the vitality of commerce within and
beyond South Asia. It is often observed that Jain and Buddhist
ideologies lingered so long in India because they provided a moral
coloration to the practical values of merchants and moneyed men. They
may also have provided an institutional framework that linked Buddhist
and Jain monasteries with the high commerce of the age. Hindu temples
would eventually assume that role.
Another aspect of the political and cultural development of the age
was the widespread acceptance of caste as a way to incorporate
disparate groups into the new states and the new links between
urbanization, commerce and manufacturing. Elites in areas of fertile
agriculture patronized Brahmin families, granting them rich villages
and lands, in return for priestly services which would legitimize the
elite, landed status. Brahmins were not only necessary to would-be
kings over expanded domains; they were also interesting to the lords
of villages as a way of strengthening their authority over the low
status laborers who worked their rice fields. In dry land areas, where
hunters and pastoralist and dry land agriculturalists held sway,
Brahminical influence was not so powerful and caste had a milder
impact on social formations.
Though Buddhist and Jain institutions were ultimately made marginal by
first, devotional Hinduism and then by iconoclastic Islam, much in
their ideologies and many of their institutions enjoyed a long life in
parts of the subcontinent--as Buddhism did in Bengal and Jainism in
Karnataka. The heritage of their principles lived on the reformed
Hinduism of Shankara's teachings. But more impressively, Buddhism
experienced a full rebirth outside of India--in Tibet and China and in
South-east Asia--as a result of the work of missionaries from India,
as well as the interest of travelers at the Buddhist universities at
Takshisilla and Nalanda.
States and their formation in this era remains a problem because of
differences among historians about whether the pre-Islamic era was,
like that of Europe, feudal. How are these monarchies to be
characterized? There is wide spread agreement now that none of these
monarchies were centralized. There is also some agreement among
historians that the samanta was an important identifying institution
of politics. Samantas are first known in the fifth century AD Gupta
kingdom of Samudragupta. Here they were military, possibly
tribute-paying subordinates who, nevertheless, were also independent
rulers of tracts adjoining the often modest core realm of a
'world-conquoring' chakravartin. Later the same term was extended to
include military servants of kings who attained a high degree of
independence on lands granted for their services, hence a kind of
feudalization.
If the exact characterization of the state is elusive, there are other
aspects of early medieval politics about which there is more
certainty. One has to do with the extent and importance of
urbanizatioin. This was another of the intensive urban phases in
India's development. And it gives reason to be sceptical of speaking
about an Indian feudalism. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way
that the city of Kanauj in the western Gangetic plain was the focus of
north Indian politics for several centuries during which competing
conquerors from the north, south, east and west strove to seize and
hold it, because the city had become the emblem of the chakravartin.
But, all over the subcontinent other cities were created as the
centres of other lordships. We have evidence in, among other sources,
impressive and large ruins. The study of these remains has made
historical archaeology a major intellectual enterprise in modern
India. The pronounced urban character of the early medieval
age--produced by a combination of religious and political
causes--accounts in part for the attraction of India as a permanent
homeland for the Turkic steppe fighters. Cities could be dominated so
as to provide the means to sustain the new institutions of Islam and a
new elite of Muslim fighters and rulers.
Of the new medieval epoch that begins around 1200 AD modern Indian
historians continue in the main to insist that the establishment of
permanent Muslim rule over the Gangetic plain was as violent a change
as the founding of British sovereighty during the middle of the
eighteenth century. This interpretation, however, stems more from a
focus on the modern era and its problems, than an unprejudiced look at
historical sources.
The medieval age which began about 1200 AD was made possible by the
sheer multiplicity of states in the subcontinent. Each was centered
upon a city to be conquered and hinterlands to be ruled by Muslim
horsemen of central Asia. However, even if political forms in South
Asia made such conquests possible, the forces which provoked the
invasions lay outside the subcontinent. It was contradictions in the
wider world of Islam itself that changed the course of the Indian
middle age.