Concept Note of the upcoming fourth session of the Medieval History Club

POLITICS AND TRADE IN EARLY MEDIEVAL SOUTH INDIA

(9^th-13^th centuries CE)

RANABIR CHAKRAVARTI

Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

The early medieval period in Indian history, usually referring to the phase spanning from c. 600 to 1300 CE, is marked by the presence of a large number of regional, supra-regional and local powers and the invisibility of a paramount power in north or south India (like the Guptas in north India during c. 335-550 CE). There were several formidable political entities both in north and south India, the ‘regional imperial kingdoms’ of Kulke, e.g. the Gurjara Pratiharas, the Palas, the Rashtrakutas, the Chalukyas (both Badami and Kalyani) and the Cholas. Significant shifts in political historiography are noticeable.

If nationalist historiography invariably looked for centralised, expansive empires, thereby negating the possibilities of changes beyond dynastic shifts, Marxist historiography stressed on the traits of decentralized, fragmented polity which itself spoke of some structural changes in political life from the scenario prevailing prior to c. 600 CE. The salient feature of Marxist approach is to identify the institution of landgrants – initially in favour of religious donees, but later to secular donees – as the principal agent of change, bringing in parcellised sovereignty which sought to explain the multiplicity of political powers in the absence of a handful number of centralized, imperial entities. In this perspective, early medieval polity is equated with feudal polity that emerged as a result of the breakdown of centralized polity.


The feudal model, largely constructed by using Puranic and epigraphic data pertaining to north India, was sharply criticized by the model of segmentary state, drawing from the anthropological researches on the east African Alur society and the vast body of Pallava and especially Chola inscriptions. Although the feudal and the segmentary models of polity were mutually critical of each other, there is a commonalty in their approaches. Both the explanatory models emphasized on the rampancy of political disintegration and therefore argued for political crises and ritual sovereignty. Both these positions have received major critiques from ‘non-aligned’ historians who have ably demonstrated the distinct elements of integrative polity. Integrative polity facilitated the emergence of state societies at local and supra-local levels as a result of local formation, developments from within, and not because of external stimuli like the perceived decline of long-distance trade and incursions from without.


Amidst these scholarly debates, which have immensely enriched the study of political history of early India, have also emerged a few points of convergence. The principal and pre-eminent empirical basis of the above formulations has been epigraphic records, including copper plate charters documenting transfer of landed properties. The other common point is the historians’ constructions of the linkages among i) agrarian expansion (particularly in hitherto uninhabited tracts), ii) increasing social stratification through the varna-jati institution, iii) growing popularity of the sectarian Bhakti cults and iv) absorption/ appropriation of ‘tribal’ cults into Brahmanical pantheon. The most significant outcome of the impact of these four factors on society and polity is the spread of the state society, proliferation of monarchical polity, the fading out of non-monarchical political institutions. Historians of the state in early medieval India have routinely explained the emergence of local, supra-local and regional powers in terms of a) agrarian spread that provided the most significant resource base for the monarchies and b) rulers’ affiliations to various sectarian Bhakti cults which offered the most important ideology to the state society.


Significantly enough, a few historians—without minimizing the importance of agriculture as the principal material basis of emergent state societies—have also been alive to the contribution of the non-agrarian sector of the economy to the making of the state. Although the majority of such works relate mostly to the north Indian scenario (e.g. Chattopadhyaya and V.K. Jain), Champakalakshmi, Hall and Abraham have highlighted vibrant artisanal productions, commercial exchanges and urban formations (cf. Chattopadhyaya’s ‘Third Urbanization’) in south Indian experience. Both Champakalakshmi and Abraham took into account the stellar role played by several mercantile organizations in south India. Taking the cue from them, two of the foremost experts on south Indian state and society, viz. Karashima and Subbarayalu, have drawn our attention to the importance of maritime commerce in the making of the state and economy in south India during the early medieval times. Both the historians have so far been primarily focusing on agrarian history and rural society as integral components of south Indian polity. Their principal data base remains inscriptions which are staple sources for political and agrarian history. Yet, by bringing into light and recognition many known and unknown inscriptions, directly related to the numerous mercantile bodies, they have established how south Indian inscriptions offer a wonderful spectacle of commerce and merchants. As the peninsular India opens out to long coastal stretches, it is hardly surprising that they have also given due attention to maritime trade, especially in the Bay of Bengal arena which provides crucial commercial and cultural connections with both mainland and maritime south-east Asia. In this context, the sustained Chola interests in the matters maritime have been revisited by Kulke, Karashima, Subbarayalu and Tansen Sen. That the Chola aggressive and diplomatic designs were not merely manifestations of the digvijaya model, nor symptomatic of the segmentary polity, nor prompted by plunder dynamics, but largely because of their lively interests in and admirable awareness of the Indian Ocean world, now looms large in the current trends of research. At this juncture the Chola maritime expeditions in the Bay of Bengal area require a re-look, which is why this exercise should be undertaken here.

A Select Reading List:

K.A. Nilakantha Sastri, The Colas (esp. chapters on Rajaraja, Rajendra), 1955

K.R. Hall, Trade and Statecraft in the Age of the Cholas, 1980

R. Chamapakalakshmi, Trade, Ideology and Urbanization: South India c. 300 BC—AD 1300, 1996

------ ‘State and Economy: South India, c. AD 400-1200’ in Romila Thapar ed., Recent Perspectives of Early Indian History, 1996

B.D. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India, 1994

N. Karashima ed., Ancient and Medieval Commerce in the Indian Ocean: Evidence of Inscriptions and Ceramic Sherds. 2002

Meera Abraham, Two Medieval Merchants Guilds in South India, 1988

H. Kulke ed., The State in India 1000-1700 (esp. Introduction and Annotated Bibliography), 1994

H. Kulke and others eds., From Nagapattinam to Suwarnadwipa, 2010

Ranabir Chakravarti ed., Trade in Early India (introduction, annotated bibliography and Champakalakshmi’s article therein), 2005

Ranabir Chakravarti, Exploring Early India, 2010 (especially, ch. VII)

Ronald Inden, Daud Ali and Jonathan Walters, Querying Medieval India, 2003 (particularly Daud Ali’s paper).

Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India (last chapter), 2008

Romila Thapar, Early India from the Origins to c. AD 1300, 2002 (two chapters on south Indian situation during 600-1300)


Photo: King Rajaraja Chola (right) and guru Karuvurar, fresco in Brihadesvara temple, Tamil Nadu, 11th century.

Third Session of the Club

ROLE OF CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN MEDIEVAL HISTORY is the theme of the Third Session. Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian will be leading the discussion. We shall be reading and discussing two travel accounts of Abd-ur-Razzaq and Nicolo Conti, both of whom visited parts of south Asia during the 15th century. Razzaq was a Persian scholar and as the ambassador of Mirza Shah Rukh, son of Timur, visited parts of south India. Conti on the other hand was a Venetian merchant who visited south and south-east Asia and possibly China. Both of them have left candid accounts of the cultures and polities that they encountered during their travels. We shall read these texts in conjunction with a book by Joan-Pau Rubies, which shows how to read and treat such medieval travel accounts and also demonstrates how these foreign travellers viewed whatever they saw in India, how they developed opinions, perceptions and stereotypes about them and shaped those of their readers.


The Third Session will be held at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), Baishnabghata-Patuli, Calcutta at 10 am-2 pm on Saturday, 12 February, 2011. 

Rethinking the Medieval in World History

Very much like the modern discipline of history itself, the notion of a medieval period, or as it was called earlier, the Middle Ages, has its origin in the Western European collective memory and historical experience. This notion spread in Europe gradually in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries and was linked with the association of the contemporary rediscovery of the ancient Greco-Latin civilisation as a cultural renaissance (re-awakening) after a long period of darkness and dormancy. With the rise of professional history-writing in the eighteenth century, this understanding crystallized into a tripartite periodisation between a celebration-worthy ancient, a gloomy medieval and a re-awakened modern.

As the European scheme of periodisation spread to different societies as a result of European colonisation, the notion of a middling period between a glorious past and a progressive and civilised present gradually came to be imagined and conceived almost everywhere. In case of the Indian subcontinent, the conception of the Middle Ages was intertwined with British imperial justification of empire and their vision of progress in history. In the British narratives of Indian history, the medieval period, which followed a glorious ancient Hindu past, represented a dark age of religious conversion, unremitting conquests and cultural sterility, from which only the British could lead the Indian people to a civilised modernity. In a similar fashion, the construction of the medieval, with its historical link with the notion of darkness and dormancy, had its different political agenda in different societies.

In the next session of the Medieval History Club, we rethink this very notion of the medieval, not only in the context of Indian history, but that of different societies of the world at large. The readings for the session will explore the complex processes of conceptualising the medieval in lands as diverse as Europe, India, the Arab countries, Iran, China and Japan. The basic questions that we have to engage with while reading and discussing these pieces may include some of the following.

1. What temporal span is signaled as the medieval in a particular society?

2. What are the characteristics of this medieval ?

3. What are the politics behind the branding of this period as medieval ?

4. When and in what historical situation did the notion of a medieval emerge in the society concerned?

5. How, if at all, does the nature of the medieval of a non-European society differ with that of the European Middle Ages?

It is, obviously, not essential to address all of these questions for every single article. The purpose of providing this set of questions is merely to suggest some directions of thinking about and questioning the notion of the medieval. The collective reading of these articles in our Second Session, we believe, will help us rethink what we understand as medieval in the context of India in particular and different parts of the world at large.

Reading List for the First Session

The following is the complete reading list for the first session of the Medieval History Club. Of these, under-graduate students will be discussing the first seven, pertaining to the history of the Indian subcontinent. The last five readings, concerned with periodisation of history outside India, will be presented by post-graduate and research students. The discussions on these readings will be preceeded by introduction of the theme to the students by professors Shireen Maswood and Uttara Chakraborty.

1.  Javed Majeed, James Mill’s ‘History of British India’ and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 1990, pp. 209-224.

2.  Romila Thapar, ‘Interpretations of Ancient Indian History’, History and Theory, vol. 7, no. 3, 1968, pp. 318-335. 

3.  R.S. Sharma, ‘Problem of Transition from Ancient to Medieval in Indian History’, Indian Historical Journal, vol. 1, 1974, pp. 1-9.

4.  Brajadulal Chattopadhyay, ‘Introduction: The Making of Early Medieval India’, in Brajadulal Chattopadhyay, The Making of Early Medieval India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 1-37.

5.  M. Athar Ali, ‘Encounter and Efflorescence: Genesis of the Medieval Civilization’, Social Scientist, vol. 18, no. 1/2, 1990, pp. 13-28; reprinted in M. Athar Ali, Mughal India: Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society and Culture, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 12-30.

6.  Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: A Note towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 1997, pp. 735-762.

7.  John F. Richards, ‘Early Modern India and World History’, Journal of World History, vol. 8, no. 2, 1997, pp. 197-209.

8.  Meribeth E. Cameron, ‘The Periodisation of Chinese History’, Pacific Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 1946, pp. 171-177.

9.  Nicola Di Cosmo, ‘State-Formation and Periodization in Inner Asian History’, Journal of World History, vol. 10, no. 1, 1999, pp. 1-40.

10. S.D. Goitein, ‘A Plea for the Periodization of Islamic History’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 88, no. 2, 1968, pp. 224-228.

11. Dietrich Gerhard, ‘Periodization in European History’, The American Historical Review, vol. 61, no. 4, 1956, pp. 900-913.

12. William A. Green, ‘Periodization in European and World History’, Journal of World History, vol. 3, no. 1, 1992, pp. 13-53.