Rethinking Early Medieval India By Upinder Singh Pdf Download

This book is a collection of essays conceived of as a"Reader" that the editor, Upinder Singh, feels constitutes a"rethinking" of what has come to be called "earlymedieval" India. It brings together thirteen essays, written over aperiod of approximately the last twenty years, on a variety of subjects andregions, all relating to the period, approximately, of 600 to 1350 or so C.E.As the editor points out in her introduction, this period was traditionallyunderstood as one of political disarray, social stagnation, and culturaldecline--an image that post Independence scholars of a Marxist persuasionpartly accepted, but which since the 1980s has been steadily revised, as thefield of "early medieval" studies has come into its own. The essaysare divided into four sections. In the first, -Theoretical Models andPolitical Processes," we are presented with well-known essays by R. S.Sharma, Burton Stein, and Hermann KuIke, representing feudalist, segmentary,and processualist theories of state (de)formation, respectively. In thesecond section, entitled "Village, Town and Society," we face amore varied list of contributors--Kesavan Veluthat on land rights in Kerala,Noboru Karashima, Y. Subbarayalu, and P. Shanmugam on commerce and towns inTamil South India, Cynthia Talbot on medieval Andhra, and Devika Rangacharion women in medieval Kashmir. In the third section, on "Religion andCulture: Within and Across Regions," the editor presents essays byLeslie On on women in medieval Tamil Nadu, Kunal Chakrabaiti on the Puranasand Bengal, and Kapila Vatsyayan on the dissemination of a bodily motif inIndian dance and sculpture. The final section, "Mapping Language, Ideasand Attitudes," includes essays by Sheldon Pollock on the Sanskrit"cosmopolis," the editor Upinder Singh herself onKarnandalca's Nitisli ra, and B. D. Chattopadhyaya on the representationof Muslim and Hindu kings in Sanskrit sources.

There is no space here for (nor would there be much point in)summarizing the diverse arguments of each of the essays contained in thisvolume. They are all worth reading, though they remain mixed between thosethat speak well to one another and stand-alone essays that introduce newtopics or cover otherwise neglected areas. Some of the essays in the firsttwo sections come from a Marxist perspective, while others take onanthropological or other social scientific models. There is a basic dividebetween the former and latter two sections of the book. The first twosections contain essays on the traditional "staple" subjects ofearly medieval historiography--state structure, state formation,urbanization, agrarian exploitation, and social mobility, with the refreshingaddition of an essay on gender. The latter two sections of the book, bycontrast, take up themes that have traditionally been neglected or treatedcursorily by historians until recently--religion, art, culture, language, and"ideas."

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The first half of the book is, generally speaking, on solidground, though in a collection claiming to "rethink" early medievalIndia one wonders why relatively more recent innovative work has beenexcluded. The absence of the ground-breaking perspective taken in JamesHeitzman's challenging monograph Gifts of Power (Oxford 1997) publishedseveral years after the essays on state formation included in this volume(which are misleadingly dated from later anthologies) is problematic, giventhe volume's title, and limits its presentation on state formation. Theomission of the work of younger scholars like Ryosuke Furui, or scholarsworking on topics like littoral societies, pastoralist communities, trade,and the environment is unfortunate. The volume's selection of essays onthe subjects of the latter two sections, relating to cultural, religious, andintellectual/literary history, is more obviously uneven. The collection onceagain includes several path-breaking essays (including the editor's owncontribution), but also has many omissions. Nor does the introduction providea clear historiographical roadmap in discussing the topics of the lastsections of the book and thus lacks a justification for the works chosen andomitted. Absence of any discussion of the works of R. Inden and M. Willis onreligion and royal ritual, a host of junior scholars like Whitney Cox andYigal Bronner on language and literature, or the work of Barry Flood, to namea few, loom large. Flood's work, for example, suggests a profoundre-orientation of northern India with western Asia and the Indian Ocean in anera that historians have generally considered hermetically sealed. Overall,the selections in the final parts of the book cannot but leave the impressionof somewhat arbitrary criteria. As a volume purporting to rethink the earlymedieval, this collection, then, gets a mixed review. While it contains sometruly exceptional and influential essays, it inexplicably leaves out others.As a teaching resource for what is new in early medieval history, what itsfuture directions might be, and how the field has arrived where it is today.this volume, despite its highlights, is for this reader not as useful as onewould have hoped. e24fc04721