Agriculture is a brute ecological
intervention that gives nature its identity and civility; and
which imparts personality to the land as people cut forests, divert
rivers, dam lakes, kill predators; tame, breed, and slaughter
animals; and burn, chop, and otherwise eliminate natural growth
to replace it with plants that people like. Civilised territory
needs poetry, ritual, architecture, outsiders, frontiers, myth,
borderlands, landmarks, families, and households -- by means of
which power and aesthetics culture the land. War is so prominent
in ancient poetry because making a homeland is always violent
business. In the long duree of agrarian history, many kinds of
hands and minds must combine to make nature into a natural environment.
Agrarian territory is thus like cuisine, which it fosters and
makes its own. Clearing the land and carving the fields create
a place for the nurture and collection of ingredients. Skilled
labour selects, cultivates, kills, dresses, chops, and grinds.
Using fuel, pots, knives, axes, hoes, mortar and pestle, and many
other implements, people cook, combine and spice daily meals and
special feasts to sustain work, family, and community. Any cuisine's
complexity and refinement develop within elaborate patterns of
exchange and specialisation, as materials, ideas, techniques,
and tastes come from many sources; but each cuisine emerges in
localities of accumulation and experimentation, where people experience
their place in the world as they make their own special ingredients
into appropriate foods for appropriate occasions.
Radiocarbon dates indicate that people were inventing agriculture
in various parts of South Asia by 7500 BCE.1
The Indus Valley civilisation appears abruptly in the third millennium
BCE at intersections of huge zones of farming and pastoralism
which left behind archaeological remains over a million square
miles from Iran to Awadh and Afghanistan to Gujarat. The oldest
ploughed field yet to be excavated dates to the early Harappan
period, circa 2600 BCE, and at this time, pastoral peoples
also moved routinely in the summer from the high mountains in
Baluchistan west into Iran and east into the valley of the Indus.
Pastoral encampments dominate early archaeological records in
the western plains and mountains. Evidence of permanent farming
increases during the Harappan period and clusters along the lower
Indus and the old Saraswati river. Painted grey ware sites indicate
the Saraswati retreated steadly and disappeared during the first
millennium BCE. Mohenjodaro was surrounded by small settlements
of farmers and herders along networks of trade and migration;
and in post-Harappa centuries, agro-pastoral societies expanded
their reach and impact. Today, in Saurashtra, earthen mounds rise
up on the land in open spaces between wealthy Gujarati farming
villages and contain evidence of agro-pastoral settlement and
circulation. Prehistoric herders moved their animals among watery
places as some dug in to farm the land and produced variously
stable farming communities here and there.
The regulation, extension, and elaboration of social power to
organise the interaction of farming and herding formed ancient
agrarian territories, which come into better view in the last
millennium BCE. Ritual was critical, as we can see at Harappa..
Vedic hymns indicate that around 1500 BCE, agro-pastoral people
who performed Vedic rituals were moving south from Haryana and
east down the Gangetic basin. We can imagine this movement as
an extensive pursuit of water and new farm land, but the hymns
also record the spread of Vedic rituals among different societies
of herders and farmers during an eastward expansion of agro-pastoralism,
which eventually moved into the eastern jungles, where it met
other social formations. The hymns tell of the fire god Agni burning
his way eastward under the patronage of a human lord of the sacrifice,
the jajman, who ruled and protected his people. Forty or
so generations of farmers must have burned and cut their away
into Gangetic forests, carving the rim land and the lowlands of
the basin, learning to use iron tools, and inventing a new cuisine
full of meat, rice, spices, and vegetables, before documented agrarian history begins in the
middle of the first millennium BCE, in the region of Magadha,
around the sites of Rajagrha and Pataliputra, in Bihar. It is
most probable that a spread of Vedic rituals among ancient peoples
occurred alongside migrations by Indo-Aryan language speakers
moving down the Ganga basin; but the ritual nexus would certainly
have embraced ever more diverse populations as the old rice-growing
cultures of the humid tropics in the east made their independent
contributions to the rise of agrarian culture in ancient Bihar.
As agro-pastoralism and warrior migrations connected the eastern
Ganga basin to Iran, Afghanistan, and the Indus-Saraswati cultural
complex, the people living in the eastern rain forests and the
riverine travellers among littoral sites around the Ganga delta
and Bay of Bengal must have contributed to the rise of rice-growing
farm societies in Magadha. By the end of the first millennium
BCE, Indo-Aryan linguistic evidence mingled with Dravidian and
other cultural forms in agrarian sites scattered from the Indus
to the Brahmaputra and south of the Vindhyas to Kanya Kumari.
A number of distinctive ritual and social complexes emerged, marked
by many regionally specific artefacts such as megaliths and burial
urns in the southernmost peninsula. The absorption of tribal peoples
into the ritual complex that slowly evolved from Vedic rites gave
rise to numerous animal deities and blood sacrifices which were
missing in the early Vedic texts.
When imagining the oldest periods of the agrarian past -- for
which empirical evidence is steadily increasing, forming a vast
puzzle with an unknown number of missing pieces -- we must contend
with the old view that ancient states evolved with the progress
of Aryan conquest, during Aryan elite differentiation, with the
incorporation of native peoples into an Aryan political and social
order, described in Sanskrit texts. Most scholars have discarded
this narrative but it still appears in many textbooks. There were
actually no Aryan people as such (defined either as a race
or as a linguistic or ethnic group). Rather, what we have is a
number of texts that reflect the linguistic elements that scholars
classify as "Indo-Aryan"; and these texts, spread over
many centuries and locations, convey a number of ritual, prescriptive,
descriptive, and narrative messages, whose authorship, audience,
influence, and cultural coherence remain debatable. Archaeological
evidence constitutes an increasing proportion of our evidence
on ancient sites, and indicates that a number of cultures were
developing separately in various parts of South Asia. Various
trajectories of historical change can be proposed using available
evidence; and various indigenous peoples with their own histories
in the eastern Gangetic basin, adjacent hills, nearby coastal
areas, and across the Bay of Bengal must have played a significant
part in the rise of ancient Magadha. Ancient India's many histories
intersected, diverged, and travelled independently, so that instead
of a linear trend connecting the RgVeda and the Mauryas, we can
generate many open-ended hypotheses to account for shifts among
various forms of socio-political order. Increasingly complex forms
of social organisation -- state institutions and imperial dynasties
-- did evolve in the last half of the first millennium BCE, but
the shift that Romila Thapar has called a movement from lineage
to state societies did not constitute a general or comprehensive
evolutionary shift toward state formation and away
from older forms of lineage society. Very old and very new forms
of social, political, and economic organisation coexisted and
interacted, as they would continue to do in agrarian history.
Ancient South Asia was a universe of small societies in which
some of the more powerful groups left us records to indicate some
prominent features. Famous ancient states arose in the eastern
flood plain at the intersection of trade routes, and territorial
markers in ancient texts indicate sites and peoples around them.
One continuity between the Indus Valley and the Mauryan empire
seems to be the importance of trade and migration among diverse
local sites in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean
basin.
In this context, agriculture expanded in named territories called
janapadas and mahajanapadas, whose names
appear in texts well into the medieval period, after 600 CE. In
ancient Magadha and the Maurya heartland, agriculture seems to
have been more intensive -- combining more labour and supporting
more non-farming elites per unit of land -- over a larger territory
than anywhere else in the subcontinent. Two lines of development
converged here. Technological change in metallurgy, irrigation,
plant breeding, and farming techniques facilitated more intensive
farming; and in this, the old rice cultures around the Bay of
Bengal and minerals from Chota Nagpur and Jharkhand would have
been significant. Alliances among warriors, traders, ritualists,
and farmers formed the state institutions that connected settlements
to one another, connected farms to sources of iron ore, and disciplined
labour (for farming, fighting, building, hauling, mining, smelting,
forest clearing, and other work) to produce an expanding agrarian
territory around the central urban sites of dynastic authority
in the eastern Ganga basin. Ancient material and social technologies
of agrarian power spread together. State authority and intensive
agricultural production moved together and depended upon one another.
Dynastic capitals rose along routes of trade and migration across
landscapes filled with many types of farming settlements, which
we can eventually see historically in all the agrarian landscapes
of South Asia. Kautilya's Arthasastra reflects a compilation
of elements that pertain to the Maurya core zone over a period
of about seven hundred years, down to the time of the Guptas,
and indicates that here state institutions did exert direct power
in agriculture. But not so much elsewhere. Most agrarian territories
that felt the fleeting impact of Maurya power were inhabited predominantly
by pastoralists, shifting cultivators, and small settled farming
communities. Agro-pastoral societies along the model of the post-Harappa
sites in Gujarat must have remained a typical form throughout
dry landscapes of the north, west, and central peninsula well
into the first millennium CE. In most janapadas, the Mauryan
empire seems to have consisted of strategic urban sites on routes
of trade and conquest, connected loosely to vast hinterlands.
Independent
but connected agrarian histories were underway in many areas during
Mauryan times; this is indicated by the many new centres of power
that enter the historical record in the first centuries of the
Common Era. In Maurya times, Sri Lanka and Cambodia would have
formed an outer rim of inter-connected, rice-growing territories.
Puskalavati, Taxila, and Gandhara arose along the upper Indus
and Kabul Rivers, along overland trade routes in the north-west.
Satavahana inscriptions show new state authorities rising in the
peninsula, around Pratisthana in Berar, Girinagara in Saurashtra,
Amaravati in the Krishna-Godavari delta, and Vanavasi in the southern
Deccan. In the far south, Sangam literature reflects another emerging
agrarian culture. Buddhist and Jain texts depict many pre-Gupta
urban sites along old trade routes from north to south, which
like Kanchipuram thrived in agricultural settings; and by the
second century CE, we can see Buddhist sites in most riverine
and coastal areas in which medieval dynasties would later thrive.
In the fourth century CE, when the Guptas sought to extend their
own empire into their historical environment, they faced stiff
opposition, and they never did conquer the Vakatakas, who succeeded
the Satavahanas in the north Deccan.
The Gupta empire produced a new kind of articulation between state
institutions and social power in agriculture. The Mauryas had
thrown impressive land bridges across many janapadas, among
islands of farming in the sea of pastoralism, and they concentrated
their power in urban sites along extensive routes of trade and
transport. Gupta imperium launched a conquest of the janapadas
by farming. Mauryas travelled a more extensive empire. Guptas
were more down to earth. A Gupta core zone of intensive agriculture
expanded westward to include not only Maghada and
adjacent Vaisali and Videha but also janapadas
around Prayaga (near Allahabad) and Ayodhya (Kasi and
Kosala). Gupta agrarian power also expanded north and south
toward the hills on both sides of the Ganga basin as it embraced
a larger number and diversity of farming peoples. Gupta rituals
sanctified agrarian kingship. State-sponsored religious institutions
(temples), elites (Brahmans), and sacred texts sanctified land
as they incorporated local community leaders. Historians have
shown how the Gupta system empowered rising elites outside the
imperial court in a ritualised state which had expansive capacities
for political inclusion. Gupta ritual techniques for alliance
building were adopted widely and adapted to many local conditions
from the third century onward. Saiva, Vaishnava, and Buddhist
cult institutions combined with state authority to create powerful
but flexible agrarian alliances among farmers, warriors, merchants,
ritualists, kings, and literati.
Sanctification constituted real social power with tangible benefits
for its participants, and its social production and meaning changed
over the centuries as sanctity attached to more and more land
in culturally distinct, interconnected territories. With scattered
evidence from literary sources, we can dimly see how Vedic rituals
helped to organise agrarian power in a world of agro-pastoralism.
Vedic ritual pacified conflict between nomadic pastoralists and
sedentary farmers and formed stable structures of alliance by
sanctifying the performance of ritual and the social composition
of community. Ancient myth depicts battles between herders and
farmers as being supernatural struggles between devas and
asuras; and ritualistic gambling -- performed with the
injunction, "Play the cow for rice!" -- may represent
"a sacrificial contest [that] could also be put to work to
regulate and sanction conquest, tribute levying, overlordship
and generally, state formation."2
Expanding the scope of agrarian territoriality involved the elaboration
and adaptation of ritual negotiations in countless new competitive
settings in each agrarian landscape. Rituals spread and changed
form as they proved effective in creating stable alliances in
a world in which communities of settled farmers were certainly
a minority.
Pastoralism occupied much of the subcontinent until later medieval
times. When Indus valley urbanism disappeared, its culture dispersed
into mostly pastoral surroundings. Rgvedic society was pastoral.
The Mahabharata depicts a society full of pastoralism.
Krishna was born among Yadava cattle herders and many gods have
similar origins among hunters and pastoral people. Sangam poetry
describes five ecological regions and only one is sedentary. The
ancient Tamil mountain, forest, wasteland, and seashore regions
were the home of tribes, hunters, gatherers, nomads, and travellers.
Hero stones across the peninsula record the pre-eminence of cattle
raiding as a political activity in the first millennium. Old Tamil
society was probably conquered from the peninsular steppe by nomads
called Kalabhras in the fourth century. South Asia is in fact
part of a vast larger historical space in which pastoralism is
very prominent -- stretching from Mongolia across Central Asia,
Syria and Egypt to the Maghreb and Sahel. In this wider world
of arid climates, pastoralism has historically surrounded and
permeated agrarian landscapes in which farms cluster around water
sources along trade routes. South Asia is a borderland between
this world of pastoralism and humid Southeast Asia, where dense
forest and intensive agriculture exclude nomads herding large
flocks. In the wet lands, rice typifies agriculture, natural forest
is dense, large domestic animals are scarce (when farm land is
surrounded by tigers), and nomads are rare. But in the west, north-west,
and the peninsular interior, dry agrarian space is more like south-west
and central Asia, where millets and wheat dominate field crops,
thirst and drought preoccupy society, lowland forests are predominantly
scrub, herds abound, and nomads pervade agrarian history. Ancient
states in South Asia arose at the intersection of these two different
worlds of agrarian ecology.
In the first millennium, the creation of landscapes of settled
agriculture moved ahead more rapidly, as agrarian institutions
promoted ritual negotiations to solve conflicts among farmers,
pastoralists, warriors, merchants, forest dwellers, and many others.
Agrarian territories expanded when conflicts could be resolved
routinely under stable institutions of social power and authority.
War could destroy the social routines that stabilised territory
and thus allow the jungle and wild animals to invade farm land
that nurtured piety and nobility. Farming communities became increasingly
populous and complex as agrarian territories evolved which could
embrace larger and larger populations of people on the move. Among
institutions for negotiating competing interests, war was always
important, and preventing war from destroying structures of agrarian
stability was a secret of success. In the sixteenth century, the
A'in-i Akbari and other sources support speculation that
nearly twenty percent of the population depended on fighting for
their livelihood, which of course meant travelling much of the
time. Armies would pillage some farms to provision warriors who
returned with their loot to their own farms when battles were
done. The dry season was always a time for fighting; drought sent
villages out to fight for food; and armies subsisted in turn on
pillaging drought-stricken villages, causing communities to flee
to fortress towns or to go out in search of new land. Migrations
by whole communities were common and many agricultural sites have
thus been settled and resettled, historically, over and over again.
Herders heading to the hills in the summer and back down to the
lowlands with the monsoon, seasonal worker migrations, people
fleeing war and drought, army suppliers and camp followers, artisans
moving from town to town, farmers moving into new settlements
looking for new land, traders, nomads, shifting cultivators, hunters,
pilgrims, and transporters would have added up to perhaps half
the total population at most any point in most regions during
centuries before 1800. What we call "sedentary agriculture,"
therefore, was not really sedentary. Reigning social powers settled,
inhabited, identified with, and controlled territories of agricultural
investment and political order, but farmers worked within institutions
that embraced many conflicting social forces, many of which were
constantly on the move.
Gupta-era institutions developed new capacities to control territory
by sanctifying the land and by establishing rules of dharma
that disciplined labour for the co-ordinated performance of
all the activities of agriculture. In Sri Lanka, Anuradhapura
was the centre of a Buddhist empire of irrigated agriculture that
expanded across the dry north of the island in the first millennium,
at the same as the Guptas began seriously to sedentarise Bharat.
Maurya conquest had first defined the territory of Bharat
as a triangle with its apex in the eastern Ganga, in the sacred
precincts of Maghada, Kasi, and Kosala, and with its base in the
fertile parts of Rajasthan. The northern leg of the triangle ran
west-north-west up across submontane Punjab and the Khyber pass;
and its southern leg ran west-south-west down the Narmada into
Gujarat. The western frontiers of ancient Bharat thus ran
north-south; and at the base of the triangle lay Gandhara in the
north and Nasika in the south. The Gupta's version of Bharat
was concentrated in the agrarian lowlands. Samudragupta's fourth
century Allahabad inscription divides Gupta conquests into four
categories, which correspond roughly with the literary geography
found in the Puranas. In the territory called Aryavarta,
the inscription says, rulers were subdued and territories brought
under Gupta administration -- in the Ganga plain, Naga domains
(Bundelkhand and Malwa), Kota territory (around Delhi and Bulandshahr),
Pundravardhana and Vanga (in Bengal) -- territories of direct
Gupta power. These became Puranic desa. Here, Gupta cities
-- Prayag (Allahabad), Benares, and Pataliputra (Patna) -- provided
ideological reference points for the sacred geography of Bharat.
The sanctity of Bharat would bolster agrarian power in
many medieval territories. But Puranic desa did not explicitly
include the highlands around the Ganga basin, nor the Indus valley,
Punjab, and western Rajasthan. Puranas describe the desa
of Bharat as Purva-desa, Madhya-desa, and
Aparanta desa, which embraced the Ganga lowlands, north Bengal,
the Brahmaputra valley, Avanti (Malwa), Gujarat, Konkan, and the
Deccan around Nasik. Old janapadas which lay outside the
land of the desa would have been frontiers and peripheries
of the Gupta regime. The western plains, Punjab, high mountains,
central mountains, and coast and interior peninsula outside Nasika-Konkana
are not called desa in Puranas, but rather asreya,
patha, and pristha.3
Gupta imperium fell apart in the late fifth century as new dynasties
detached Saurashtra, Malwa, Bundelkhand, and Baghelkhand; as Vakatakas
expanded from the northern Deccan into Dakshina Kosala, Baghelkhand,
and Malwa; and as Hunas conquered the lowlands along routes running
south and east from the north-western highlands. Puranic authors
called this Kali Yuga, but the idea that a classical age
collapsed with the fall of the Guptas pertains at best to Gupta
core regions and their ruling elites. Many historians describe
the second half of the first millennium as an age of political
fragmentation and regionalization, but this imagery fits only
janapadas in Bharat and Puranic desa in
Aryavarta. Gupta centres may have been the wealthiest in the
subcontinent but most people lived outside Gupta territory. In
fact, agrarian history outside Bharat comes into much better
focus after the Guptas, as social powers disperse and develop
which had been nurtured in the Gupta realm. Many new regimes now
took up the project of protecting dharma and formed a cultural
basis for medieval dynasties. As regimes of royalty and ritual
multiplied after the fall of the Guptas, they produced new historical
documentation. Inscriptions on stone and copper provide raw material
for medieval historiography and their interpretation continues
to be filled with unresolved debates. Two debates are most important
here. One concerns "the Indian state" in medieval centuries.
Should it should be understood as bureaucratic, feudal, segmentary,
patrimonial, or something else? The other concerns the mode of
production and specifically whether European models of feudalism
or Marx's model of the Asiatic mode of production apply in South
Asia. Both debates hinge on the effort to reconstruct typical
or characteristic institutional forms in medieval South Asia.
But instead of looking for "the medieval state," we
can examine the range of institutions that organised social power
during the expansion and intensification of agriculture. Instead
of describing "the mode of production," we can try to
outline the working of social power in agriculture, keeping in
view the great diversity of agrarian conditions.
Peasantry
Most information for medieval history comes from inscriptions
that record donations of land, animals, and other assets to Brahmans
and to temples to support Vedic knowledge, dharma, and rituals
for Puranic deities. Donations typically come from named, titled
individuals, acting under dynastic authority; and they typically
name donors, recipients, protectors, and asset holders who are
often members of farming communities. Donative inscriptions often
depict the transfer of land entitlements to Brahmans in the name
of -- or at the behest of -- a king. They represent a transactional
nexus that involves dynastic royalty (warrior-kings and their
families, officials, and retainers), Brahmans (individually and
in groups, Vedic scholars, ritualists, and temple administrators)
and agricultural communities (farmers, herders, artisans, and
merchants). Brahmans are pivotal figures and the most obvious
beneficiaries, and in other ways, also, the agrarian power of
Brahmans is very apparent in the second half of the first millennium.
As farm territory multiplied and expanded, Brahmans produced more
agricultural literature. One elusive persona, Kasyapa -- perhaps
a mythical authority rather than a single author -- wrote that
" ... for pleasing the gods and protecting the people, the
king should take keen interest in agriculture," and further
he said, "Agriculture should be practised by priests, Brahmanas
and ministers particularly." He tells the king to mine "iron,
copper, gold, [and] silver," to have agricultural implements
made by "expert iron smiths, cutters, and goldsmiths in villages
and cities," and to "distribute these among the village
people."4
The role of the good king in linking together various agricultural
activities is clear in these injunctions, and kings in Sri Lanka,
Nepal, and many places in medieval South Asia seem to have followed
this advice. Dozens of dynasties emerged from the sixth century,
complete with growing centres of production and rising aggregate
farm yields where Brahmans recorded, created, and propagated agricultural
knowledge.
Krisiparasara, Kamba Ramayana, Krisisukti,
Vriksa Ayurveda, and Paryayamuktavali are
among the texts that describe irrigated tracts in the south, east,
and north. The distribution of inscriptions also leads to the
conclusion that in the early medieval period, the organised social
effort to build agrarian territories was concentrated spatially
in irrigated tracts in the lowlands, near river beds throughout
the northern basins, the coastal plains, and the Deccan, Maharashtra,
Gujarat, Malwa, and Rajasthan. Inscriptions record investments
in fixed assets -- irrigation tanks, dams, wells, channels, paddy
fields, temples, towns, markets, and cities -- and transactions
in networks of exchange, marriage, ritual, and dynastic authority,
which connected settlements to one another. Inscriptions describe
a world of kings, Brahmans, and temple deities that constituted
medieval agrarian territory physically, socially, morally, and
mythologically. Inscriptional prasastis (preambles) narrate
dynastic genealogies (vamsavali) and map royalty into social
territory, and devotional poetry and temples likewise brought
the gods into the farming landscape. Medieval Tamil poems like
the Tevaram depict a sacred geography of Shiva temples
that sanctified the land much more extensively and intensively
than did the Sangam poetic accounts of Murugan cult sites in Tirumurugattruppadai
or post-Sangam accounts of Buddhist centres in the Manimekalai
(in the Gupta age). Territorial power and symbolism are more definitely
documented in early medieval literature and inscriptions; and
intensive, sedentary farming -- particularly using irrigation
-- required more control over land and labour, as farms advanced
forcefully into space inhabited by pastoralists, nomads, forest
people, hunters, wild animals, and malevolent spirits. Building
agrarian territory was difficult and contested. It was not peaceful.
Farms carved up nature, enclosed open land, and commandeered the
physical world to constitute civilisation on frontiers of farming.
Taming the landscape meant displacing forms of land use and forms
social life other than that represented by kings and gods, who
spread the rule of dharma. Agrarian territory involved disciplining
workers, co-ordinating their activities, and reorganising the
allocation of resources. Medieval inscriptions recorded events
in this process -- as a technology-of-record -- in compact agrarian
territories.
Many types of agrarian societies came into being. A general contrast
emerged between the wetter eastern landscapes and the coastal
plains, on the one hand, and the drier west and interior peninsula,
on the other, which was based on broad differences between wet
and dry cultivation. In the humid wetlands, wild animals, disease,
dense jungle, forest people, and floods posed the worst obstacles
to the expansion of permanent field cultivation. In semi-arid
regions, by contrast, the worst battles were waged against pastoral
people and warrior nomads, whose income was readily enhanced by
raids on farming villages; whose grazing lands were being converted
into farmland, their herds, captured and domesticated. In the
drier landscapes, settlements were more scattered and pastoral
nomad warriors, more prominent. Walled towns were more common,
and long distance trade was more visible in dynastic core settlements
where military activity was a permanent adjunct to farming. In
the wetter landscapes, farmers needed more labour to carve out
fields from jungle; the higher nutritional output of paddy fields
also sustained denser populations and a higher proportion of non-cultivating
elites. Dry regions grew millets, and in the north, wheat; their
population was thinner and elites depended on trade and wide systems
of exchange and expropriation. Wet, dry, agro-pastoral, forest,
fishing, and other kinds of settlements were generally mixed together
in agrarian territories, which would have at their centre a central
place of power and authority. Inscriptions often reflect a cultural
hierarchy that distinguished the more cultivated central settlements
from surrounding hamlets that were part of the territory but less
cultured and privileged.
The medieval states that produced inscriptions had a basic commitment
to the expansion of permanent field cultivation as the foundation
of their power, and dharma was the moral code that stabilised
their territory. The weakness of agrarian territorialism and thus
of the rule of dharma is apparent throughout the first millennium,
when many wars recorded in the inscriptions no doubt reflect a
breakdown of territorial institutions during violent conflicts
among sedentary farmers, pastoralists, shifting cultivators, hunters,
warriors, and forest dwellers. Pastoral and tribal polities often
opposed the rule of dharma successfully. But pastoral and tribal
peoples also became powerful in lowland territories of settled
cultivation and their role was particularly pronounced in the
western plains, central mountains, Punjab, western Gangetic basin,
and the interior peninsula. Rajput rulers came to recognise Bhil
chiefs as allies, for instance, and an 1890 account depicts the
central role of Bhil chiefs in Rajput coronation ceremonies.5 As permanent field
cultivation conquered agrarian landscapes, farm by farm; pastoralism,
nomadism, and forest cultivators were increasingly pushed to the
margins, and many herders, hunters, nomads, and tribal people
also entered agrarian society, becoming labourers, farmers, craft
producers, animal breeders and keepers, transporters, dairy producers,
soldiers, traders, warriors, sorcerers, and kings. This transformation
of the land involved very long transitions and subtle changes
in social identity, which further differentiated agrarian societies.
It also involved a lot of violence, which can be seen refracted
in mythical stories about the conquest of demons by gods. Many
vamcavalis depict battles against tribal peoples who are
viewed as enemies of civilised society. The Ramayana was
reproduced in many forms, attesting to the wide relevance of its
central theme, the struggle and triumph of civilisation in a land
of demons and mlecchas. The Mughals would take special
precautions to protect farmers against hill tribes as they pushed
farming into the higher valleys. As agricultural territories expanded
and multiplied, they came to include more diverse populations,
not only many different kinds of farmers (including families who
worked their own plots and families who used others to cultivate
their fields) but also non-farming groups whose work and assets
were essential for farming (artisans, cattle herders, hunters,
transporters, traders, collectors of forest produce, well-diggers,
priests, engineers, architects, healers, astrologers, and mercenaries).
Many people who came to work in agricultural sites came from lands
that were being newly incorporated into agrarian territory. Without
the skills, assets, and labour of erstwhile outsiders, agricultural
expansion could not proceed, and their incorporation was a major
social project. Open spaces around all farming settlements also
provided plenty of opportunity for groups to set out on their
own to establish independent communities.
Medieval agrarian space came to consist of (1) hundreds of small
agrarian territories with permanent field cultivation, diverse,
changing populations, and dynastic core sites, (2) thousands of
scattered settlements of farming families in the hills and plains,
on the outskirts or margins of dynastic territory, and (3) vast
interstitial areas in which farms were absent or temporary, covered
with dry scrub-forest or dense tropical jungle and filled with
tribal societies and polities. Almost all of our documentation
pertains to the dynastic territories of agrarian expansion. This
land was endowed with the best supplies of everything needed for
agriculture. It was prize territory and required the most intense
internal controls and protection. Medieval kings concentrated
on controlling this land, to protect their people and their prosperity,
which involved coercion as well as cultural powers to inculcate
deep beliefs in principles and values that sustained agrarian
order. Around core dynastic sites swirled all the activity of
territorial expansion; and as populations in core sites increased
in number, some of their number would strike out to expand agrarian
power. They formed scattered settlements that became new dynastic
centres, conquered other farming communities, and fought for land
and labour with pastoral and forest peoples. Non-farming populations
in the hills and plains often settled down to farming in the lowlands,
forming their own distinctive communities. A separate agrarian
history unfolded in the high mountains, of which we have little
record.
In this diversity of agrarian social forms, a "peasantry"
is hard to define. Unlike Europe, South Asia contained tropical
conditions suitable for intensive paddy cultivation, expanses
of arid and semi-arid plains, high-quality soils that could produce
nutritious millets with relatively small labour inputs, vast tropical
mountains and jungles, and large areas dominated by pastoralism
-- all of which sustained very different types of agricultural
expansion and intensification, leading to various configurations
of agrarian society. In South Asia, there was no analogue to the
Roman Empire or Catholic Church under which a feudal nobility
could establish itself and define the peasantry as a category
of subordinate subject. Unlike China, agrarian states in South
Asia evolved significantly within, among, and out of pastoral
cultures and they integrated pastoral and forest people into forms
of agrarian society that were not embraced by the classificatory
system of a single imperial (and ethnic, Han) heritage. Modern
images of the peasant that come from western and eastern Eurasia
-- which describe a rude rustic living under the jurisdiction
of urban elites who embody high culture and civilisation -- do
not fit medieval South Asia.
The term "peasant" can be useful to refer in a general
sense to family farmers, but the theory of the peasant family
farm -- developed by A.V.Chayanov, in the 1920s, to counter V.I.Lenin's
theory of capitalist development in Russia -- is not implied by
its usage here. Rather, the role of kinship in organising agricultural
work and agrarian assets is being highlighted, and as we see in
this chapter, elaborations of kinship organised much of medieval
agrarian space in lineages, clans, jati, sect, and varna
groupings, which included both farmers and kings. The peasant
as a family farmer has no fixed class status. Class divisions
between peasants and lords took many forms and medieval farmers
were encumbered by many types and degrees of subordination, ranging
from mere tax or rent obligations for land entitlements to intimate
personal servitude. Institutions of control and subordination
are the subject of the remainder of this chapter. The most intense
subordination of farm families appears to have arisen where very
low sudra and untouchable caste (jati) groups worked under
Brahman and kshatriya domination in the rice-growing Gupta core
territories and in early medieval lowlands along the coastal plains.
But this is not a general pattern. Farm families enter the ranks
of local ruling elites in many regions of militant peasant colonisation.
In agro-pastoral and tribal settings, family farming was a communal
enterprise which included military control over mobile resources
and shifting farm territories.
The term "peasant" makes the most sense when agrarian
social strata are clearly defined by states and when status depends
upon strictly ranked entitlements to land. This situation became
more common in the second millennium. It began earlier in territories
of warrior colonisation, for example, by Gurjara-Pratiharas, when
conquest formalised the ranks of lord and peasant. After 1500,
social ranks in some parts of South Asia came increasingly to
resemble Europe, and after 1820, European categories came into
vogue under British rule. In the twentieth century, many political
activists call themselves "peasants," modelling their
usage on revolutionary Russia and China. As we see in Chapter
Four, this usage appears primarily in tenant struggles against
zamindari landlordism, where ranked entitlements to land
are at issue. Here the term is ideological and normative, rather
than being accurately descriptive. As a translation of kisan,
"peasant" has been deployed where "landholder,"
"farmer," "village petite bourgeoisie," or
even "tribal" could also apply; and it is usually more
accurate to refer to so-called peasant groups by the ethnic or
jati terms that they use to refer to themselves. Raiyat,
which might also translate as "peasant," attaches
to people with various types of entitlements and class positions,
as we will see. No term translates strictly as "peasant,"
with precisely the same cultural connotations, in any South Asian
language. In this context, we can aptly consider the rise of the
utility of the category of "peasant" in South
Asia as a product and component of modernity and use this term
to discuss the power position of small farmers and tenants in
opposition to landlords and states.
The term "gentry" is not widely used in South Asia but
it does have utility. Multi-caste agrarian farming elites were
formed by the interaction of state elites and local patriarchies
in many places, by expanding family alliances, upward mobility,
and the imposition of state-enforced, ranked entitlements to land.
The term "gentry" has had no place in official terminology
in South Asia, as it has had in China, but an important sector
of the village farming population in South Asia more resembles
Chinese gentry than European peasants. I consider the gentry to
consist of relatively high status local land owning groups that
marry their own kind and form alliances with other high status
families to expand their horizons as they retain ties to the land.
Gentry families are privileged as mediators with state authorities;
and because of their land holding, education, and urban connections,
they are active in commercial networks. This agrarian status elite
is always open to new recruits. It is rural and urban, economic
and cultural, social and political. A gentry first arose in the
context of Gupta state rituals, which produced dominant caste
alliances that came to control agrarian assets of all sorts, including
the labour of subordinate jatis. The idea of a locally dominant
caste cluster maps with rough equivalence onto my sense of what
a gentry is; though a gentry does not need caste ideology. Other
status formations and technologies can serve the same purpose.
Dharma
Inscriptions indicate
that royal Gupta lineages had settled down in all the regions
of the Gupta realm and may have been settling the frontiers of
Aryavarta in the sixth century. Ambitious lineage leaders
may have loosened their ties to the capital as they moved farther
afield, carrying with them the apparatus of Gupta power. In frontier
regions, they would have needed local allies, who may have undermined
their attachment to the Gupta dynasty. Gifts of land by kings
and their officers to temples and Brahmans -- to sustain classical
learning, the rule of dharma, and the worship of Puranic deities
-- became a hallmark of new dynasties at the end of Gupta hegemony,
from the sixth century onward. The Maukharis appear in the western
reaches of the Gupta heartland, around Kanyakubja (Kanauj), in
what would later become Awadh, and Pusyabutis emerged in the western
Yamuna basin and Haryana. Dynastic core sites thus moved still
farther west from ancient heartland of Bharat and so did
land grants to Brahmans, which multiplied with the founding of
new regimes and capital cities. In the seventh century, it is
said, Harsha moved the Pusyabuti capital to Kanyakubja to better
defend the plains against the Hunas, but his move also signalled
the rise of the western parts of the Ganga basin as a new agrarian
core for his dynasty. This event was marked by a land grant to
two Brahmans. The grant was made by a soldier serving Harsha and
protected by the janapadas in Harsha's realm, to represent
the support of local community leaders. New dynasties and donative
inscriptions also multiplied in territories very far from Gupta
lands. On the northern Tamil coast, the Pallavas of Kanchipuram
stepped up their donations during the Gupta decline. Many new
dynasties marked territories in sites of intensive cultivation:
in Kashmir, the Karkotas of Srinagar; in Bengal, Later Guptas,
Sasankas of Karnasuvarana, and Palas of Gauda (at the top of the
delta); in Malwa, the Paramaras of Ujjain; in Malwa and adjacent
Deccan and Gujarat, the Kalacuris of Mahismati; in Berar (Vidarbha),
the Rashtrakutas of Acalapura; in the Krishna-Tungabadra doab
in the south Deccan, the Calukyas of Vatapi; and on the south
Tamil coast, the Pandyas of Madurai and Cholas of Tanjavur.
At least forty new dynastic lineages were proclaimed during and
soon after the sixth century, and from the seventh century on,
they typically construct elaborate genealogies for themselves
to trace their origins to mythical progenitors. Migrations of
Brahmans, Gupta princes, and Gupta generals may have influenced
these early-medieval trends, but most new dynasties sprang up
outside Aryavarta, and even peoples who had repulsed the
Guptas later adapted technologies of power which the Guptas had
developed. Between 550 and 1250, the interactive expansion of
agricultural and dynastic territories produced the basis for all
the major agrarian regions of modern South Asia. This is the crucial
formative period for agrarian history in the subcontinent. Though
agricultural conditions, techniques and social relations varied
across regions, and though trends in the high mountains, western
plains, and central mountains are not well documented, some basic
elements which pertain to many if not most agrarian territories
in this period appear in data from places where major dynasties
were firmly established. We know most about elements that form
the explicit subject matter of the inscriptions: kingship, Brahman
settlements, and temples.
The ritual and architectural complex now called "the Hindu
temple" emerged in full form in the later Gupta period and
its elaboration and spread from the sixth to the fourteenth century
provide us with dramatic medieval remains, from Mahabalipuram
to Khajuraho. Medieval inscriptional records appear predominantly
in temple precincts, which were central nodes for the accumulation
of power in early medieval kingdoms. By the tenth century, old
theories and practices of kingship had been widely adapted in
many new medieval territories. As in Rama's mythical realm in
the epic Ramayana, protection and prosperity were signs
of a good king; and piety, chastity, and wealth all came together
under kings who nurturedfs dharma. This theme forms a continuity
with very old ideas about kingship, as Kasyapa's advice that "the
king should take keen interest in agriculture," resonates
with a Tamil poet's advice to a Pandya king, probably in the first
centuries CE. Many medieval kings followed this advice, most spectacularly
in Sri Lanka.
Water and ritual were critical for medieval kingship. So were
innovation and adaptation. The kings who built medieval temples
nurtured forms of dharma with distinctively medieval substance.
In contrast to ancient prescriptions, medieval texts do not insist
that a king be a kshatriya, and in much of the subcontinent, medieval
caste ( jati) ranking developed without the presence of
all four varnas. Rajadharma still meant protecting
dharma, but sastras now prescribed that kings protect local
customs, so that kings could enshrine as dharma virtually any
form of social power and style of social ranking. Land grants
to temples and Brahmans confirm the adaptation of cosmic law for
local purposes, by bringing Brahman powers of ritual sanction
to bear in new agrarian territories to sanctify patterns of social
power in Puranic temple worship. Temples were ritual and also
political institutions. They incorporated many different groups
who were clearing and planting the land, building towns, and contracting
transactional alliances, which are recorded in the inscriptions.
The Manusmriti says that dharma includes a sacred right
of first possession for the people who clear the land, even if
they have taken use of the land away from others -- for example,
hunters and pastoralists -- which would often have been the case.
Protecting this right was a bedrock of royal authority. But beyond
this, a king's ambition extended over his neighbours (samantas),
as the Pandyan poet says. Homage, tribute, and services from subordinate
rulers (rajas) were prizes for kings who took titles like
Maharajadhiraja (Great King of Kings) and Paramesvara
(Supreme Lord). In the methodology of medieval kingship, gifts
to Brahmans and temples measured and dramatised royal power. In
Sri Lanka, the same method channelled massive patronage to Buddhist
monks and monasteries from the second century BCE. Irrigation,
paddy cultivation, and monastic property expanded together until
the fourteenth century. Like monasteries, temples managed by Brahmans
often owned tracts of irrigated land, and individual Brahmans
and Brahman settlements (brahmadeyas) often received grants
that comprised royal investments in irrigation. Like monks, Brahmans
meant prosperity. They attracted people to agrarian sites who
had skills and assets needed for expansion. A proliferation of
texts on agriculture, astrology, medicine, and related sciences,
and on temples and irrigation in the lowland areas that were most
favoured for Brahman settlement indicate that a Brahman intelligentsia
was busily working in many fields other than ritual and Vedic
studies. Even esoteric learning could be useful in constructing
an agrarian order. Shankaracharya's philosophy, for instance,
concerns the disputation of sacred authority. Intellectual innovations
in doctrine and ritual enabled local cults to be woven together
into expanding Puranic traditions. Great temples multiplied with
royal patronage. So did their poetic publicity. The greatness
of the gods enhanced the glamour of royal patrons. Rich centres
of temple worship combined in their precincts many of the technical
skills -- controlled by Brahmans -- that were needed to develop
agrarian territories, from architecture and engineering to law
and financial management. Building a great temple or monastery
attracted Brahmans and monks and provided a theatre of royal grandeur;
here a king could make alliances and enjoy dramatic displays of
submission. Great kings built great temples and commanded the
services of the most learned Brahmans.
A donation to Brahmans, monasteries, monks, or temples represented
an investment in agrarian territoriality. Inscriptions, typically
carved on a temple wall, served as contracts and advertisements.
The more popular a place of worship became -- the more praised
in song, and the more attractive for pilgrims -- the greater became
the value of its patronage. The rise of bhakti devotional
movements enhanced the virtue of pilgrimage, increased the number
of worshippers, and raised the value of temple donations. Making
donations became increasingly popular among aspiring groups as
a means of social mobility, as temples became commercial centres,
landowners, employers, and investors. The rising value of temple
assets increased the value of membership in communities of worship.
Increasing participation in temple rituals made them more effective
sites for social ranking: temple honours were distributed according
to rank, and all worshippers were positioned in ranked proximity
to the deity. Rulers came first. Popular bhakti devotional movements
generated more popular religious participation, more ritual power
for dominant local groups, and more glory for kings (even when
temple were not centres for royal cults, which they sometimes
were). Devotionalism produced a populist ideology for alliances
among dominant agricultural lineages and warrior kings, and formed
communities of sentiment among disparate groups involved in agricultural
expansion.
Temples were divine sites for enacting social rank among devotees
who protected dharma and sustained ritual; and like kingship,
rituals changed as people brought gods into changing agrarian
contexts. A wide diversity of rituals brought rain, secured crops,
drove away disease, delivered healthy babies and bolstered dynasties;
but among all the rituals -- by all kinds of spiritualists and
officiates, from all kinds of social backgrounds, in all manner
of locations -- those by Brahman priests for Shiva, Vishnu, and
their relatives produced most surviving documentation, because
of their lasting, widespread influence. Impressive temples came
to mark agricultural territory, towering over the land as sacred
landmarks. For many centuries, Brahmanic rituals had evolved as
a potent force in social ranking and alliance building, and specifically
for ranking dominant groups in relation to royalty; and it appears
that with the expansion of temple worship and popular devotionalism,
principles and practices of ritual inclusion and participation
provided a template and methodology for the construction of social
power in agrarian territories where the most powerful people traced
their sacred genealogies to the gods of the Vedas.
Ritual powers which had been confined to Vedic ritual space were
generalised within farming households, communities, and kingdoms.
Brahman communities spread and Brahman models of social order
spread with the influence of temples and temple patrons. In communities
of temple worship, the roles and terms of Vedic ritual assumed
new, mundane meanings. It seems, for instance, that the Vedic
jajman was transformed into a person who controls the resources
needed for temple ritual, which came to include not only food
and animals but also the services of workers. Hence a jajman would
be the pivot of power in circuits of redistribution, and in what
would be called "the jajmani system," in which village
land-owning elite families receive labour and assets from subordinates
throughout the agricultural year and distribute produce from their
land to workers at harvest time. Inscriptions also support the
inference that agrarian territory became bounded by dharma as
ritually ranked circles of marriage and kinship evolved into ranked
caste groups (jatis). Coercion was certainly involved in the creation
of caste societies, but the practice of ranking jati groups according
to the principles of varna would also have been attractive for
many groups. The adoption and enforcement of caste norms consolidated
and expanded caste social space as it organised agriculture and
sustained agrarian states.
Religious rituals of social ranking enabled families to form political
alliances by providing measures of their respective status within
agrarian territory. The labour, land, and assets of low-ranking
jatis were organised for production by being subordinated to the
power of dominant caste families who carved out territories in
strategic transactions with Brahmans, gods, and kings. Dominant
caste alliances thus formed medieval agrarian territories at the
intersection of kingship and local communities. The expansion
of caste society appears to have been be a top-down process, which
included but did not necessarily depend upon everyday coercion.
It might be best characterised as an evolving caste hegemony,
in which the coercive features of social power were hidden by
an ideology of dharma that became widely accepted because it provided
everyone a place in the ranks of agrarian entitlement. Inscriptions
further support the proposition that jati ranking was propelled
by strategies of alliance among rising powers in agrarian society.
New dynastic realms and agrarian territories were places for social
mobility where the building of ranking systems made good sense.
Dynastic lineage leaders and Brahmans were critical actors in
creating these systems of social difference, status, rank, and
power, which enabled powerful non-Brahman families to become gentry.
Temples and Brahman settlements were sites of honour around which
to form ranks of privilege. Like kings, Brahmans acquired their
rank in society historically. Building dynastic territory was
a complicated process that involved innovation, risk, improvisation,
and experiment; and the wide open spaces of medieval times enabled
people to become Brahmans as well as Rajputs, kshatriyas, Marathas,
and sat-sudra gentry. To become Brahman meant to be accepted as
Brahman, patronised as Brahman, respected as Brahman; thus one
came to command the skills, social status, and kinship of Brahmans.
Controls over access to Brahman status were strict, so that entering
Brahman ranks would have been difficult. But the widespread establishment
of new Brahman settlements -- duly recorded in the inscriptions
-- provided many opportunities for new Brahman lineages and clans
to be formed. Founders and protectors of Brahman settlements,
builders of temples, and donors who financed temple rituals were
the moving force behind the Brahmanisation of agrarian territories.
Land grants to temples and Brahmans are therefore less an indication
of traditional Brahman power or peasant subordination than a reflection
of alliance-building by aspiring agrarian elites, who used ritual
ranking to lift themselves over competitors, and institutionalised
their status by patronising gods and Brahmans.
Giving land increased the status of a donor and allied "protectors"
of the grant, who are also often named in inscriptions; and by
extension, these donations elevated all their kin. As kinship
circles formed around the lineages that fed gods and Brahmans,
whole sets of kin groups, forming as high-status, non-Brahman
jatis, elevated themselves above others in temple ritual and agrarian
society. This may explain why leaders of janapadas in Harsha's
realm protected a gift of land to Brahmans, and why one of his
generals made the gift under Harsha's authority. In the open spaces
of Rashtrakuta power, one inscription records a gift of 8,000
measures of land to 1,000 Brahmans, and 4,000 measures to a single
Brahman. Similar generosity is evident in many places in the medieval
period. In each specific context, an inscription of this kind
appears to mark an effort by a non-Brahman power block to enhance
its own status and that of its local allies. Such gambits were
not without risk and opposition. Raising the status of some groups
lowered others, and Brahman settlements created ranked entitlements
in everyday social transactions. Brahmans did not usually farm
land themselves and they were entitled by grants to receive the
produce of farms, including taxes; so they became a significant
social force, protected by state power, and also a landed elite
whose well-being depended upon the control of other people's land
and labour. Brahman lords of land established a model for other
elites. Brahmanisation sustained the rise of landed elites and
aspiring royalty, whose superior claims to land and labour were
legitimated by their patronage and protection of Brahmans.
A small but significant set of inscriptions records opposition
to Brahman settlements, to their collection of taxes, and to their
claims on local resources like pastures, often contained in grants.
Most opposition seems to come from leading members of local farming
communities. The authority of kings who patronised Brahmans was
clearly not accepted by everyone in medieval societies; and the
authority of Brahmanical kingship spread slowly -- often violently
-- into the vast spaces that lay outside its reach in early medieval
centuries. In many instances, land grants appear to mark frontiers
of royal power, and here the most resistance might be expected.
Even where local society did accept the ritual and social status
of Brahmans, fierce competitive struggles might flare up over
land grants. Some opposition to Brahman settlements certainly
came from local competitors who were fighting against the families
who sought to elevate themselves by patronising Brahmans with
land grants. In the ninth century, local conflicts of this kind
accompanied new Brahman settlements on the Tamil coast, where
they were an old and widely accepted feature of agrarian territoriality.
The open spaces of Rashtrakuta ambition were another matter. Inscriptions
from the northern peninsula warn that violence and curses will
be heaped upon opponents of Brahman land grants, and texts proclaim
that people who murder Brahmans will be punished harshly, which
implies that such murders did in fact occur. But striving lineages
also had options other than revolt, for as Bhisma says in the
Mahabharata, "If the king disregards agriculturists,
they become lost to him, and abandoning his dominions, [they]
betake themselves to the woods."7
Territories of permanent cultivation, irrigation, worship, pilgrimage,
dynastic authority, temple wealth, jati ranking, caste dominance,
and Brahman influence grew together. Inscriptions depict idioms
of territoriality as they pinpoint the location of a royal donor,
the ranks of officials involved in a grant, the status of local
protectors, and the names of religious personnel and institutions.
Power relations in agricultural expansion were thus more complex
than we can see using a simple division of the agrarian world
between the state and society. There was more at work in the medieval
political economy than interaction between kings and peasants
or dynasties and villages. The most important social forces within
medieval states worked the middle ground between rulers and farmers,
where leaders of locally prominent families made strategic alliances
that constituted dynastic territory. An agrarian gentry thus emerged
as a constituent of royal authority. The constant rhetorical and
ritual elevation of the king above all others mirrored and mobilised
social ranking; it served the cause of gentry mobility. The superiority
of rulers served all subordinates by elevating them above lower
orders in their relative proximity to the king. When an aspiring
warrior family elevated itself by declaring a new dynasty, it
benefited the whole clan and their home locality. Inviting Brahmans
to live in its territory, generating for itself a cosmic lineage,
building temples, and adopting royal titles and rituals, the new
king would pursue allies. In this pursuit, recognition by an established,
superior king could be a boon. Kings would thus extend their domains
by forming unequal alliances with samantas whose subordination
would raise their local status. Subordinate rulers could then
support or protect a grant in the great king's name, to further
enhance their status. A rising dynasty would then accumulate its
own subordinate samantas on the periphery of its core territory,
while subordinate rulers on the frontier would improve their position
at the same time. Core regions of agrarian expansion would expand
as emerging leaders allied in regional dynasties, and leaders
on frontiers of several royal territories shifted loyalties or
combined them. A successful samanta might seek to overturn his
master, so the advice of King Lalitadiya of Kashmir (in the eighth
century) makes good sense: "Do not allow the villagers to
accumulate more than they need for bare subsistence, lest they
revolt."
The early medieval period -- from the sixth to thirteenth century
-- lay foundations for later agrarian history in many respects.
New forms of social life emerged in many places at the same time.
What M.N.Srinivas called "Sanskritisation" evokes part
of the process, because social groups and institutions were being
formed around models of behaviour, identity, aesthetics, and patronage
codified in Sanskrit texts. Brahmans were key people because they
sanctified social rank and political alliance. Rising families
wanted to hire Brahman genealogists and court poets, patronise
Brahman and temples, endow feeding places for mendicants and pilgrimages,
stage festivals, feed saints, and join the activities that united
gods, priests, kings, and farmers. All this occurred as farm land
was expanding and as peasant farmers, nomads, pastoralists, hunters,
and forest tribes were slowly changing the substance of their
social identity, over many generations, as people became high
caste land owners, kings, protectors of dharma, kshatriyas, vaisyas,
superior sudras, inferior sudras, untouchables, and aliens beyond
the pale. Such transformations obscure the ancient identity of
the people who propelled medieval agrarian history, but the result
was that gentry castes filled the ranks of landowners and ruling
lineages. Many of these groups remain powerful in their regions
in modern times. They became Kunbi, Vellala, Velama, Reddy, Kapu,
Kamma, Nayar, and other landed castes. The ancient social background
of some dynasties can also be dimly perceived. Hoysalas came from
Melapas, hill chiefs in the Soseyur forests. Udaiyar and Yadava
dynasties descended from herders. Tevar kings descended from Marava
and Kallar hunters. Many Marathas had ancestors in the hills.
Gurjaras certainly had a pastoral past. Rajputs did not have one
original identity but emerged from histories of warrior ranking
and mythology, and many had ancient pastoral and tribal roots.
All these transformations are entangled in the politics of religious
leadership, devotion, and loyalty; and every state in the history
of South Asia has afforded special privileges -- including tax
exemptions -- to religious institutions and religious leaders.
Many social movements that moderns might call "religious"
might be better understood perhaps in the context of agrarian
territorialism, as we will see in Chapter Four.
Geographically, early medieval territories seem to concentrate
in riverine lowlands. Here the influence of Brahmans and medieval
Sanskritisation was most compelling. In scattered rice-growing
and irrigated lowlands, aspiring elite families patronised Brahmans
and Puranic deities as they fought to control prime farm land
and to creating sacred rights of first possession. Mapping agrarian
space with inscriptional data is not easy at present because each
transaction occurs within a moving constellation of dynastic donations
and inscriptional sites themselves have not been mapped comprehensively.
Territory was not defined by fixed boundaries but rather by the
reach of individual transactions. Transactional territoriality
remains in place only as long as the social relations formed in
transactions, and inscriptional territory was defined by transactions
among dominant social or ethnic groups and families. This kind
of territoriality did not disappear. In the nineteenth century,
a local official reported from the old Gupta core region in Saran
District, Bihar, that "Brahmans, Rajputs, and Bhumihars were
the only castes that figured in the `actual life' of the district."8 In early-medieval
times, such groups were coming into existence, their social identities
were being produced transactionally, and carved inscriptions were
clearly intended to perpetuate their reputations.
Medieval kingdoms were also transactional. They did not contain
bureaucratic institutions of a sort that would define a fixed
territory of revenue or judicial administration. In the 1950s,
K.A.Nilakanta Shastri argued that the Cholas had built an "almost
Byzantine royalty," and since the 1960s, R.S.Sharma has argued
that post-Gupta states in general represent a form of feudalism.
Historians have developed alternatives to these models, but they
have not replaced them, and today there is no consensus concerning
the nature of medieval states. But inside dynastic domains, inscriptions
indicate that agrarian territories were small, consisting of settlements
linked together by locally dominant caste power. Inscriptional
terms mark transactional space by using titles for individuals
and groups and by using place names attached to the people in
transactions -- terms like nadu or padi. The nadu
in modern "Tamil Nadu" is a territorial marker from
medieval inscriptions which designated a tiny region that was
defined by its ritual, land, water, kinship, and royal transactions.
The term appears most often in references to leaders of the nadu
who engaged in donative transactions with temples and Brahmans.
In later centuries, it acquired more expansive meanings; but medieval
nadus along the Tamil coast were composed of core
settlements along routes of drainage, where Brahmans and temples
received land grants, and they were connected to one another by
donative transactions and surrounded by vast tracts of land which
was not controlled by dominant groups in core nadu sites.
Where inscriptional sites of agrarian power have been mapped,
they cluster along rivers, so it appears that the nexus of power
that they reflect concentrated on the control of riverine farm
land. Over time, Brahman influence spread widely, and Brahmans
and allied gentry and service castes became mobile state elites.
Locally, gentry caste power dug in, and expanded steadily. Based
in prime locations along rivers and trade routes with clusters
of temple towns and old dynastic capitals, caste communities incorporated
tribal, hunting, pastoral, and nomadic groups into the lower echelons
of society, where the new entrants retained much of their character,
redefined in caste terms. Tribal deities entered the Puranic pantheon,
adding cultural complexity and expressing the richness of agrarian
territories. The social and cultural character of agrarian regions
emerged in later centuries, but medieval territoriality left its
traces and imparted distinctive qualities to localities by giving
special importance to Brahmans, temples, and high caste gentry.
Where we do not find medieval donative inscriptions -- as in Punjab,
in Jat territories in the western Ganga plains, and in the mountains
-- the population and cultural importance of Brahmans remains
comparatively small in agrarian societies today. Inscriptional
territories concentrate in eastern and central Uttar Pradesh,
West Bengal, Gujarat, western Maharashtra, and along the coastal
plains. Brahmanism seems is less deeply rooted in other areas,
where other types of social power were more prominent in the later
formation of agrarian territories.
Conquest
One Candella inscription announces
that Anand, brother of Trailokyavarman, reduced to submission
"wild tribes of Bhillas, Sabaras and Pulindas."9
Conquering tribes and expelling them from the land is a major
theme in genealogy and epigraphy. Warrior lineages expanded in
number and influence after the Guptas, creating and conquering
agricultural territories; and preserving their victories in inscriptions,
epic poetry, folklore, and hagiography. From the eighth to the
eleventh century, Gurjara-Pratiharas conquered along western plains
and northern basins, moving into the central mountains and high
mountain valleys. Along the coast of the southern peninsula, Pandya,
Chera, and Chola lineages repeatedly conquered each others' territory.
Many warriors planted settlements of warrior-farmers along routes
of conquest. From the eighth to tenth century, Rashtrakutas migrated
and conquered territories all across the north Deccan, Gujarat,
and Orissa. The Vakatakas emulated earlier Satavahanas and expanded
outward from Vidarbha (Berar); they split into four branches with
shifting capitals spread from Chhattisgarh across the Deccan to
the upper reaches of the Bhima river basin. In the sixth century,
Kalacuris appeared in the north Deccan territories of the Vakatakas;
in the eighth, inscriptions show them in Tripura, near head of
the Narmada River; and as late as the thirteenth century, they
appear in Bengal. Chola armies conquered northern Sri Lanka, leaving
a population of colonists behind. Calukya lineages had bases in
Vatapi along the upper Tungabhadra River in the seventh and eighth
century, and in Kalyani, well to the north, in the eleventh and
twelfth. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, Vijayanagar
dynasties expanded from the vicinity of old Vatapi across the
southern Deccan and eastern plains; and they shifted their capitals
into coastal lowlands as they broke up into smaller dynasties
in sixteenth and seventeenth century. Under Vijayanagar, Telugu
warrior clans conquered territory all along the south-eastern
coastal plain.
This is only the start of a list of medieval conquests and barely
begins to indicate how widely they influenced agrarian territoriality.
Conquest colonisation exerted its influence quite separately from
territorial dharma, but together they produced agrarian territories
that expanded to become agrarian regions. Conquering colonists
knitted together many small-scale domains of localised, dominant
caste power; they connected new frontiers and old dynastic sites.
Activities depicted in Harsha's seventh century inscription are
typical of many events in this process. Many donative inscriptions
reflect similar activity by subordinate officers and local leaders,
for whom gifts to Brahmans and temples represent incorporation
into conquest territories. Conquest created ranks of warriors
above the locally dominant castes; and superior entitlements created
by conquest moved agricultural wealth along trade routes of warrior
power in the form of tribute and temple endowment. Warriors used
agrarian wealth from one location to support conquest in others;
and traders, pastoralists, and warrior-farmers moved agrarian
wealth among sites. These transfers of wealth employed monetary
instruments and commercial intermediation, which are most visible
in the inscriptional evidence as they pertain to temple endowments.
Conquest and trade went hand-in-hand with religious endowments
and investments in farming.
Warriors created territories of authority in which their officers
could establish local roots within communities, where they distributed
local entitlements to kin, allies, and subordinates. Distant localities
were connected to one another by the social networks that formed
along routes of conquest and routes for the extension of conquering
clans. Local caste elites were assimilated into extensive realms
of clan power as subordinates, dependants, and rising stars. Some
warrior clans created a non-farming nobility living high in fortress-towns,
looking down on farm communities; these became landmarks on agricultural
landscapes, as prominent as temples and other sacred places. Warrior
competition among siblings in each successive generation would
send another wave of fighters out to conquer new territory, and
in this enterprise, clans faced one another on the battlefield,
so that battles among warriors became a dominant motif in hagiographies,
genealogies, and local lore about the land. The exploits of great
men became material for epics, rumours, gossip, and popular songs,
landmarks in local history.
Two broad geographical zones of warrior influence can be roughly
discerned. One was formed by clans that became Rajputs -- Gurjaras,
Cahamanas (Chauhans), Paramaras (Pawars), Guhilas (Sisodias),
and Caulukyas (Solankis) -- who conquered from the eighth century
onward across the western plains, northern basins, adjacent high
mountain valleys, and central mountains. Local leaders rose up
to ally with and to join the ranks of conquering clans, by imitation,
alliance, genealogical invention, inter-marriage, and combinations
of these strategies. Rajput rulers protected dharma and
became ideal kshatriyas. Brahman settlements and temple rituals
were not as important for Rajput royalty as warfare, genealogies,
hagiographies, and court ceremonies. Their lineages measured their
status in victories, alliances, marriages, and accumulations of
tribute in their palaces, forts, and market towns -- including
Brahmans and temples. Nobles endowed temples and employed Brahmans
as ritualists and servants, but it was more their devotion to
battle, to their own clan, and to the rules of martial kingship
that measured their devotion to dharma. In warrior territory,
the ritual ranking of agrarian society followed the logic of warrior
lineages, stressing military alliance, victory, service, and publicly
demonstrated powers of physical command and subjugation. Agrarian
social power concentrated much less in a local landed gentry and
much more in warrior lineages. Genealogies became records of rank
and they proliferated across the entire span of the medieval epoch
to mark the expanding area of Rajput influence. Surajit Sinha
has shown that "state formation in the tribal belt of Central
India is very largely a story of the Rajputisation of the tribes."10 The interaction
of expansive Rajput lineages with locally powerful Jat clans produced
a militarist pattern of agrarian development in the western frontiers
of old Bharat, where agrarian power focused on fortified
villages and strategic hill towns.
A second warrior zone lay south of the Vindhyas in Khandesh, Berar,
Maharashtra, central mountain valleys, and the interior peninsula,
where warriors were attached to agricultural communities and concentrated
power in their own hands but followed no single dominant model
like that of the Rajputs. Instead -- from the time of the Satavahanas,
Vakatakas, and Rashtrakutas, to that of the Yadavas, Chalukyas,
Hoysalas, Kakatiyas of Warangal, Sultans of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur,
Udaiyars and Sultans of Mysore, and the Marathas -- dominant social
powers in agriculture arose from and mingled with the evolution
of peoples living in and drawn from pastoral, hunting, and mountain
populations. Standing to fighting became part of farming. Running
off to war became part of the agricultural routine. In the interior
peninsula, extensive tracts of dry land were open for cultivation
for the people who could fight to keep it; and throughout medieval
centuries, cattle, manpower, centres of trade, strategic positions,
and places with good water and access to valuable forests were
more valuable assets for aspiring warrior lineages than most farmland,
except in the stretches deep black soil along the big rivers that
were perpetual sites of warrior-peasant competition. The dominant
agrarian castes were both warriors and cultivators. In the Maratha
Deccan, for instance, expanses of open land that were available
in the sixteenth and seventeenth century allowed many warrior-farming
lineages to carve out local territory for themselves. A lineage
leader would become patel (headman); and by combining his
military power with alliances with regional rulers, he could become
the deshmukh for a circle of villages, and thus a player
in regional politics. In such contexts, there was little scope
for the rise of an agrarian gentry except when warrior-farmers
could control an area long enough to build up an agrarian elite,
which eventually did occur later in the medieval period in Maratha
core areas, as well as among Vakkaligas and Boyas in Karnataka,
and among Reddy and other locally dominant Telugu castes in Telangana.
In the eleventh century, warriors came on horseback from Afghanistan
and Central Asia to engage warriors in the lowlands and they swept
across the subcontinent to connect the zones of warrior colonisation
north and south of the Vindhyas, which had been until then quite
separate. They pushed into historical spaces of conquest colonisation
that were many centuries old. The military competition that ensued
increased the influence of conquest colonisation on agriculture
as a whole by increasing the number and force of warriors. Because
temples, cities, and irrigation represented authority and prosperity,
they were natural targets in war.11
Warriors often dislocated farming communities when they attacked
their enemies. The great eleventh-century irrigation builder,
the Paramara Raja Bhoj, built a wall to form a huge irrigation
reservoir at Bhojpur, near Bhopal, and armies of the Sultan of
Mandi, Hoshang Shah, cut a dam to destroy the lake, killing the
irrigation. This kind of warfare discouraged heavy investments
by farmers in fixed agricultural assets like irrigation works,
unless they could be protected by local arms, and wells could
be, which helps to explain their popularity in all the regions
of conquest colonisation. A militarisation of farming occurred
in all the dry regions where wells are most important. By the
fifteenth century, professional armies had established their military
superiority over the local hordes of warrior-peasants, but no
state could destroy the independent warrior lineages which had
fought successfully to control local territories. In wide fields
of warrior-farming, lineages expanded their cultivation and coercive
power at the same time, under medieval dynasties. Warrior Jats
colonised Punjab and the western Ganga basin and formed agrarian
mini-polities which became regional states in the eighteenth century.
Stable centres of professional military power emerged in many
territories in the interior peninsula, some, as on the Mysore
plateau, with old formations of caste dominance, endowed with
all the institutional traditions of royalty and Brahman patronage.
Conquest colonisation made much of agrarian space into a battleground,
and the careers of the Vijayanagar and Maratha empires reflect
important features of agarian history. In a region of Telugu conquest,
Vijayanagar, "the city of victory," was built in the
fourteenth century, in old agricultural territory near the old
Chalukya centre of Vatapi, along the upper Tungabhadra River.
Endowed with magnificent irrigation, the city accumulated so much
warrior wealth that Portuguese visitors took it be richer than
Paris, with its great temples, royal cult, and vassals arriving
at festival time with mountains of tribute. Fighters called nayakas
spread Vijayanagar's dominion outward in waves of conquest colonisation,
creating the first empire to embrace all the land south of the
Krishna. Telugu warrior-peasants opened up new land for dry farming
along the eastern coast -- in dry stretches filled with deep black
cotton soil between old riverine clusters -- and these colonies
would sustain a vast expansion of cloth manufacture for world
markets in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when Nayakas
became kings. Vijayanagar itself was destroyed, however, by sultans
at Bijapur, another site in the old Chalukya realm. The city of
victory had disappeared completely by the end of the seventeenth
century.
In 1640, Shivaji was married in Bangalore at the court of the
Bijapur sultan, whom his father, Shahji, served as a general.
Shahji's jagir of revenue villages, near Pune, became Shivaji's
patrimony and base for later military expansion. In his day, good
rainy seasons and peaceful times saw farmers expanding cultivation,
though even in good years, they would go off to war during dry
months. Building in one place accompanied destruction elsewhere.
Droughts would routinely drive more farmers out to fight, loot,
and colonise. The great fortresses that became great cities --
like Vijayanagar -- could disappear without a trace, because their
ruling lineages and urban populations would move overnight to
other sites. New cities and towns rose on ruins everyday in the
world of warrior-peasants and military entrepreneurs. One story
goes that in the seventeenth century, on the fringes of Maratha
power, in the southern Deccan,
Doda Mastee and Chikka Mastee, two brothers with their families and cattle, came from the north and built two houses. They cleared the jungle around and maintained themselves by cultivating the soil. They invited inhabitants from other parts, advancing them money to increase the cultivation. The brothers next built a fort and gave their village the name Halla Goudennahally .... In time the brothers quarrelled because the younger brother Chikka Mastee made a tank which endangered the village. Doda Mastee being displeased with his brother's folly removed and built north of the first village another village called Goudennahally and all the inhabitants moved to the new village ... Halla Goudennahally was in the meantime inundated by the water of the tank.
Building and breaking, moving and
settling -- old themes -- but the story elides a suspicion that
Doda Mastee broke the tank of his younger brother to force the
villagers into his new settlement. Building a new settlement often
entailed violence, much like planting new fields meant cutting
down the jungle. In 1630, when villages in his revenue territory
(jagir) lay waste from famine, Shivaji's guardian, Dadaji
Kondev, "set about repopulating and developing the jagir,"
for which purpose, "Deshpandes were seized and taken in hand,
[and] the refractory among them were put to death."12
From the eighth century onward, conquest colonisation is well
enough documented to allow us to distinguish different types which
can be identified by association with specific groups. (1) Some
professional warrior lineages emerged from ancient roots at the
margins of old agricultural societies, from pastoral and hunter
peoples for whom extensive mobility and killing were ancient skills.
These warrior specialists conquered agricultural communities and
formed a nobility. For simplicity, we can call this the Rajput
pattern, with its various spin-offs and variants that arose with
emulation and alliance-building among other warrior groups. (2)
Some warrior lineages came from the ranks of dominant caste farmers
who had formed a military force and allied with professional warriors,
even serving under them. Conquering widely, these fighting peasants
would retain their local agrarian base. If successful, they could
spread their power by alliance and conquest across territories
dominated by allies in similar warrior-peasant castes. This is
the outline of the Maratha pattern, which had a long history in
the Deccan before the rise of Shivaji. (3) A warrior lineage could
split off from a dynastic authority, using symbols and alliances
derived from that dynasty to lead fighting colonists into new
territories, to conquer, displace, and/or assimilate local tribes
and others, and thus to form new agricultural communities and
new agrarian territories. This pattern, exemplified by the Mastee
brothers, also typified Telugu colonists in the black soil tracts
of the Tamil country. (4) Warrior-farmers could simply conquer
and settle new territory, dividing the land among the lineages.
The conquering group itself would form the bulk of the agrarian
population in this territory. Kings would rise within it and clans
would differentiate over time into many ranks. Groups would splinter
off for new colonisation. This pattern may be the most common
of all and probably dominated the hills and valleys of the central
mountains, for instance, in Gondwana, Chhattisgarh, and other
areas of tribal Rajputisation. It also typifies lowland warrior-farming
groups like the Maravars and Kallars in southern Tamil country,
including the Piramalai Kallar studied by Louis Dumont.
Late medieval warrior lineages -- from the Ghorids to the Mughals
-- followed the Rajput model, which was prevalent in various forms
in Central and West Asia.. As they subsumed other warriors under
their authority, they increased the power of subordinates like
Shivaji who could form local alliances with warrior-peasant lineages.
Sultans had less interest even than Rajputs in farming themselves,
living among farmers, or tinkering with production locally. They
conquered warriors who already ruled over agrarian territories.
They lived in fortress towns and their movements connected all
the old fort-centres of warrior colonisation not only to one another
but also to urban centres across inland corridors of southern
Asia from Dhaka to Istanbul. Like their predecessors, the sultans
brought retinues from their homelands and new technologies of
power, and they encouraged migrants from their home territories
to settle in their new dominions, primarily in the established
urban centres, but also on agricultural frontiers, where like
the Brahman settlements of the early-medieval period, ulema
and Sufis provided erudition and leadership for agricultural expansion
in the Indus Valley, Punjab, the western Gangetic plain, the Deccan,
and eastern Bengal. Again, new skills and productive powers came
into agrarian territories with new ruling elites. This was like
the dispersion of productive powers that followed the end of the
Gupta empire, but at a much greater scale, with more dramatic
consequences, and more detailed documentation. With warriors sultans
from the western reaches of southern Asia came architects, accountants,
scholars, genealogists, bureaucrats, poets, scientists, merchants,
bankers, musicians and the entire cultural heritage of Persia.
The centre of gravity in Persian cultural history moved into South
Asia, where a Persian lexicon and technologies of power organised
a widespread reintegration of agrarian territories. New strata
of non-farming elites were formed by grants from sultans of entitlements
to revenues from the land. Again, royal patronage fed the rise
of agrarian elites.
Sultanic regimes continued and reinforced long historical trends
in conquest colonisation. Muslim rulers did not dramatise political
alliances in temple ritual, but they sustained temple authority
in agrarian territory. Old land grants to temples remained in
place. New royal donations were added in the form of the tax remissions.
Victorious sultans defeated old defenders of dharma, and this
again brought Kali Yuga to mind for some Brahmans; some fled into
mountain valleys and into rapidly expanding agrarian territories
around Kathmandu. Sultans brought superior military technology
into the field, which altered the competitive environment of conquest
colonisation. Defeated warriors launched new waves of conquest,
extending warrior power from the Deccan and the Ganga basin into
deltaic and coastal regions. But imperial expansion still depended
upon unequal alliances with subordinate rulers, who increased
their own status by hitching their fortune to victorious sultans.
Sultanic regimes developed institutions of military bureaucracy
that focused authority on the emperor's family, relatives, and
his highest ranking allies, who formed the imperial nobility;
and from the time of Akbar's marriage alliance with Rajputs, the
imperial wedding became a ritual of the highest statecraft. Rajput,
Maratha, and other protectors of dharma formed a new nobility
under the umbrella of sultanic regimes and increased their investments in
temples; so that temple ritual and Hindu court culture flourished
under the sultans. Akbar's and Dara Shuko's experiments in religion
reflect a continuing effort to articulate political alliance-building
with philosophical speculation; and rituals of theological disputation
at Akbar's court remind us of the medieval innovations in religious
thought and performance which accompanied the incorporation of
new groups into agrarian regimes. Outside the court, eclectic
mysticism and devotionalism expanded their reach. Brahmans were
in high demand in the apparatus of imperial taxation and law,
and their occupational horizons expanded. More than ever, building
accompany destruction under the sultans, in the expansion of urbanism
and in the expansion of agriculture. When Akbar's troops marched
into Bengal, they brought in train tools and men to clear the
jungles to expand cultivation. Sufis came into the eastern delta
to open the jungles to farming. To protect strategic mountain
routes of trade, Mughal armies conquered and settled many sites
of agrarian expansion, including Kashmir. Aurangzeb began his
famous 1665 farman on administration with words that echo
Kasyapa and the Pandyan poet: "the entire elevated attention
and desires of the Emperor are devoted to the increase in the
population and cultivation of the Empire and the welfare of the
whole peasantry and the entire people." Aurangzeb reiterated
the Manusmriti on the sacred right of first possession
when he declared that, "whoever turns (wasteland) into cultivable
land should be recognised as the (owner) malik and should not
be deprived (of land)."13
Patriarchy
Families passed the right
of first possession from one generation to the next. At the base
of medieval states and at the apex of early-modern empires, family
formed a core of social power and experience. In agrarian territory,
kinship formed basic entitlements to means of production. Kin
groups joined together to clear land, build fields, dig wells,
and cultivate. Settlements and communities formed around collections
of kin. Marriage networks connected villages. Families pushed
the frontiers of farming and fought for control of agrarian space
within realms of ritual and conquest. Kinship underlay class and
caste; and in state institutions, market networks, and community
organisation, kin formed the most powerful bonds of alliance,
allegiance, loyalty, and solidarity. The Ramayana and Mahabharata
are fundamentally family dramas and the Manusmriti is obsessed
with the implications of marriage for caste ranking. During medieval
centuries, family histories, emotions, rituals, intrigues, conflicts,
and loyalties permeated agrarian life and territoriality, from
family farm to imperial court. Family suffused all the institutions
of entitlement. On the Tamil coast, for instance, the word pangu,
meaning "share," came to refer both to an individual's
share in family property and to a family's share of village assets,
so that pangali referred to relatives and also to share-holding
landed gentry families in a farming community. The term kulam
likewise referred to a household, lineage, clan, and local caste
group (jati); and nadu meant an agrarian space (as opposed
to kadu, forest) defined as the domain of authority of
its prominent most family leaders (nattar). The inscriptional
corpus is substantially the record of transactions among the heads
of families who built agrarian territory, built dynasties, and
travelled in search of new land to conquer and farm.
Kin followed the lead of earlier generations to create expansive
domains of kinship which became localities, kingdoms, and empires.
Along riverine tracts of irrigated agriculture where medieval
inscriptions were most densely distributed, families sought control
over expanses of farm land, grazing land, forest, and water supplies.
Succeeding generations spread their power from one bit of cultivated
ground to the next and prominent gentry families and an expanding
set of kin folk produced small, compact, domains of dominance.
Marriages formed dense links among dominant families in adjacent
settlements which became related to one another in patterns that
resembled the patchwork of paddy fields. In such settings, the
norms and practices of kinship strongly stressed local alliances
among families and they formed intricately graded ranks within
gentry strata of society. Marriage also marked divisions between
local elites and groups who were barred from owning land, who
served the gentry as dependent servants and farm workers. These
distinctions took many forms within the idiom of caste society.
But in general the formation of solid traditions of local gentry
and rural elite dominance entailed the reproduction of a genealogical
connection to celestial and royal authorities who were the fount
of their patrimony.
In this context, agriculture became a deeply patriarchal enterprise.
Senior men ruled junior men and senior women lorded over their
inferiors. Family ranking elevated all members of higher families,
men and women, according to their lineage, clan, jati,
varna, wealth, sect, office, or other mark of status rank.
Patriarchy is a kind of power -- never absolute, uncontested, or unaffected
by other kinds of power -- wielded by men in virtue of their rank
in society, and agrarian patriarchy defined agricultural territory
as a domain of ranks, entitlements, leading families, and family
heads. In the ancient text, Milindapanho, Nagasena explains
to King Menander that the people he calls "villagers"
(gamika) are in fact the patriarchs who head the village
families:
Now when the lord, oh king, is thus
summoning all the heads of houses (kutipurush), he issues
his order to all the villagers but it is not they who assemble
in obedience to the order; it is the heads of the houses. There
are many who do not come: women and men, slave girls and slaves,
hired workmen, servants, peasants (gamika), sick people,
oxen, buffaloes, sheep and goats and dogs -- but all those do
not count.14
Many men and women did not come. Only the "heads" or
the leaders of families. Such scenes have been re-enacted millions
of times. Of course, the lord, the king, and the sultan are also
heads of families, men of superior rank among kinsfolk and subordinates.
Many medieval inscriptions depict the ranks of patriarchs being
formed and reformed among men who head families at various levels
of power. Family rank came to entail entitlements which became glossed
as "property rights," but property in practice amounted
to power over assets substantiated by and reflected in family
rank. Property was also parcelled out within families to members
according to rank. Agrarian territory came to be composed of proprietary
units formed among families led by their senior men. From early
medieval times, inscriptions indicate that property entitlements
were often individualised and transferred in market and political
transactions; but property was also defined and protected by social
powers in communities and territories. The inscriptional authority
of the local protectors of grants to Brahmans and temples indicates
that powers of entitlement depended upon recognised leadership
in janapada, nadu, pati, desa, grama,
ur, and other named territories. Dynasties were established
as patriarchies at the apex of territorial ranking systems; and
states were thus composed of nested, ranked sets of family entitlements,
defined by transactions among patriarchs in systems of ranking
which are depicted in the inscriptions.
Patriarchy formed a dynamic, productive power which connected
intimate family life with wide historical trends. Family is most
often assumed to be a cultural constant within the realm of tradition.
Scholars tend to think of kinship as a durable structure that
is reproduced innocuously in private life. But family is an engine
of change in politics and in struggles over resource control at
every level of society. Marriage decisions, rituals, and alliances
became politically important in ancient times as lineage leaders
began building early state institutions. Elite matrimony became
a political event of the first order. Competition among sons generated
expansive political domains as younger sons went out in search
of new territories, and in early medieval centuries, dispersions
of ranked lineages created wide nets of alliance and competition.
Medieval inscriptions record transactions among patriarchs, articulate
ranks among them, and thus encode episodes in family history which
formed agrarian territory and dynastic genealogies. Temple rituals
articulate alliance, loyalty, devotion, and competition among
units of patriarchal power and kinship. Many if not most groups
with collective identities in South Asia use some form of genealogical
reckoning to expressfamily feelings and histories. Ancestral patriarchs
and mythical progenitors populate origin stories. In the dense
forest of north Bihar, in the eighteenth century, a Kayasth named
Dullah Ram founded the village of Changel, and local lore preserves
the story that he obeyed a dream and found a horde of gold coins
near the temple to the mother goddess, which he duly dug up "and
his descendants lived happily ever after"; whereas the more
prosaic truth is that Dullah Ram and his kinsfolk founded the
village by usurping the land and subjugating the labor of the
local tribal population that worshipped the mother goddess there.15 Landless Buinhya
workers in south Bihar recount the victories of their heroic progenitor,
whose valiant exertions clearing and turning the jungle into farm
land dignify their subservient labour today.16
Vellala gentry on the north Tamil coast trace their origins to
a royal Chola ancestor who migrated north with 48,000 Vellala
families, conquering Kurumba hunters. Genealogies from Mysore
and Andhra begin with great patriarchs. So do family histories
among Rajputs and other royal families across the northern basins.
A group that calls itself "rulers of the hills" (Malaiyalis)
traces its descent from ancestors who migrated up from the Tamil
lowlands with their gods in hand at the sharp end of enemy spears.
Countless genealogies depict patriarchs as founding fathers who
begin the chain of succession and entitlement that runs down over
generations. Ancestral personalities become icons of group identity.
Their exploits become collective accomplishments. "Our history"
for many groups became a story of family feelings forged by lore
and worship, beginning with great patriarchs whose offspring populated
the land. As if to replicate earth in heaven, the Puranic pantheon
filled up with marriages and families of gods. Earthly kings became
descendants of Vedic divinities. Cosmic and mundane genealogies
together defined social identities around powers and sentiments
that linked families to one another in territories of divinity
and heritage. Temples embodied the cosmic power of gods in the
territory of patriarchs.
Caste -- jati -- defined units and idioms of family alliance and
ranking within varna ideologies, but patriarchy also transcended
caste and escaped the rule of dharma. Warrior kings connected
disparate, distant territories to one another, and the rule of
dharma could organise only parts of these expansive territories.
In the sixth century, groups outside the ranks of caste society
comprised the bulk of the population and though dharma did
subsequently expanded its reach by various means, people outside
caste society -- whether beneath the lowest of the low or outside
the pale altogether -- remained numerous. Though excluded from
temples and other rituals in respectable gentry communities, low
castes and non-castes lived in agricultural territory. Because
the power of caste society expanded downward from the top ranks
and outward from centres of ritual and conquest, groups at the
lowest ranks and on the margins of dominant caste control comprised
a moving borderland between caste society and its surroundings.
Outsiders in and around localities of high caste control were
critically important for the vitality of every agrarian locality,
and many did enter into the rituals of dharma in various ways,
but many also remained outsiders. Such people continued to arrive
in every agrarian territory with new waves of migration and conquest
colonisation throughout the first and second millennium. Idioms
and practices of patriarchal alliance allowed for the loose inclusion
of countless groups within transactional territories formed by
systems of market exchange and political ranking. Lineage and
clan leaders among tribal groups, merchant patriarchs from distant
places, travelling artisan headmen, nomadic chiefs, and military
commanders from virtually any background could form alliances
with locally dominant caste patriarchs based not on their caste
ritual rank but rather on the mutual recognition of their respective
patriarchal powers. Heads of households and heads of state could
negotiate as patriarchs because they could rely on one another
to command the labour and allegiance, assets and loyalty, of their
kin folk. This produced trust, confidence, and stability in transactions
that relied upon payments in the future for promises in the present,
whether loans, contracts, or agreements to pay taxes in return
for entitlements to land.
Patrimonial entitlements thus defined property rights and powers
over labour independently of the rituals of caste and temple worship;
and transactions that formed proprietary entitlements also produced
state revenues as well as profits and capital for the market economy.
Medieval inscriptions depict very complex market transactions,
and in many cases, temple donations represent tribute. In payments
of tribute, conquers, kings, and financiers took payments from
local patriarchs in transactions that constituted ranks of patriarchal
entitlement. Routines of tribute collection became systems of
taxation as they became routinised and acquired ideological legitimacy
in agrarian cultures as instruments for transactional ranking
and entitlement. Within the rituals of taxation, dharma, markets,
and conquest, patrimonial property became securely established
as a foundation for agrarian authority.
As disparate groups with different backgrounds settled in agrarian
territory and worked with one another over generations, they developed
complex etiquettes of rank, deference, and residential segregation,
expressed in housing, personal habits, marriage, clothing, language,
ritual, literature, and cuisine. Agrarian societies were not conceptualised
by their participants as
being composed of jatis working within a unified ritual order
of caste ranking or dharma; so there is no "caste system"
described in the records of medieval agrarian communities. Creating
a system of ranks to include all participants in any local society
was actually beyond the scope of dharma. The adaptive and inclusive
capacities of temple and caste ritual could not keep pace with
the expansive diversity of agrarian social space. Local societies
came to include not only Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, Muslims, Christians,
and tribals; but also many groups who did puja but were excluded
from temples, who did observe ritual ranks among themselves but
were excluded from the territories controlled by dominant agrarian
castes. Vast open space and towns sprouting up here and there
allowed many groups to establish settlements with their own local
rules of ranking and alliance, within which they lived and from
which they engaged in social relations of great importance to
their livelihoods with groups elsewhere who followed different
rules of ranking. Settlements of people who followed mutually
incompatible systems of ranking could not relate to one another
on the basis of either ranking system; and transactions among
such groups included barter, exchange, employment, patronage,
alliance, conquest and subordination. Dharma could not define
this kind of transactional territory, but patriarchs could always
represent their own people in relations with others. Genealogies
that begin with founding patriarchs produced legitimate authority
for the head men of prominent families, community leaders, village
elders, and family heads who were members of the panchayat,
shalish, and village councils. Thousands of little social
groups occupied and partitioned agrarian space and acquired names
and genealogical histories as they interacted with one another.
Some became part of a caste structure in agricultural settlements,
but many stood apart. Many hunters, tree cultivators, herders,
fisher folk, harvesters of the forest, merchants, artisans, miners,
diggers of tanks and wells, tribal groups, and peasants formed
their own little ethnic communities outside territories of dominant
caste authority. Their headman patriarchs represented these groups
in their relations with one another and received recognition and
entitlements as the natural leaders of their communities.
The politics of patriarchy also propelled a medieval transition
that came with the second millennium. From the eighth to the thirteenth
century, patrilineal warrior clans with backgrounds in pastoral
nomadism conquered farming communities all across south, central,
and south-west Asia. In the vast territories of the warrior clans,
competition by junior members and collateral branches propelled
expansion and conflict. Marriage formed ranks and alliances among
all the warrior lineages, and when warriors did marry into agrarian
communities, they formed new ranks in which the sons of kings
remained superior to the sons of the soil. In the early centuries
of the second millennium, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Khaljis, and Tughluqs
expanded into lowland territories of military competition among
Yadavas, Calukyas, Paramaras, Sisodias and others. These specialised,
warrior groups had much in common. They unified their own forces
by kinship and ritual practices that formed extensive family ties.
They made alliances by marriage. They conquered farming groups
to rule and protect them. They lived in fortress towns and formed
an elite strata ranked above the kin networks of farmers. They
formed hierarchical alliances among superior and inferior families,
lineages, and clans. Their family ranks within military hierarchies
allowed for strategic calculations in political hypergamy. They
gave "subaltern" a distinctive meaning: subalterns among
warrior clans were junior patriarchs in the ranks of lineages
and dynasties. A son born to a ranking lineage member inherited
a family position that provided a specific set of options for
the ranking of his own family, as the son became a patriarch himself.
Alliances gave subaltern families leverage in their struggles
to maintain and to improve their position. Becoming a subordinate
ruler raised the subordinate family's rank in relation to peers
and competitors. Accumulating subordinate patriarchs (samantas)
under one's own authority was the very definition of a king. Among
the warrior clans, daughters married up -- to express the subordination
of a patriarch and to seek upward mobility for the family -- and
sons married down, to express the superiority of a patriarch by
the stature of his allied subalterns. Patriarchal polygamy expanded
the possibilities of subordinate alliance building, as women became
hostages to fortune and some became the mothers of kings. In these
settings, pardah and sati became auspicious expressions
of female purity, piety, devotion, and heroism. Strength and sacrifice
sustained one another. In the political institutions formed by
competitive alliances among warrior patriarchs, subordination
was a moment of power in which all alliances were built upon measurable
inequalities of rank. Dominance rested upon extensive alliances
with subalterns whose movement up in the ranks often meant challenging
superiors in war. War and marriage, militarism and family ties,
rank and alliance, negotiation and resistance -- all together
formed patriarchal power in the warrior clans.
Dharma could not produce stable alliances among these groups,
because warring medieval patriarchs invoked the names of many
different gods in prayer and the rituals of war gave losers the
option of moving out to look for other farmers and warriors to
conquer. Moving out from Central Asia, Turk and Afghan warrior
clans pushed Rajputs down the Ganga basin, into high mountain
valleys, and into the central mountains; and they pushed Telugus
up the Tungabhadra basin toward Vijayanagar and Telugu Nayakas
into the Tamil country. In all the regions of later medieval warrior
competition, marital and martial techniques of social ranking
provided a cultural basis for new, sultanic regimes. Rathore Rajputs
married daughters to sultans before Akbar's time, and almost all
the great Rajput patriarchs would marry into the Mughal nobility,
strengthening Mughal power and opening wide avenues for mobility
and advancement for Rajput clans, and at the same time opening
a status division between rising Rajput nobility and lesser Rajput
and Thakur lineages. One Rathore princess married Prince Salim.
He became Jahangir and she bore a son who became Shah Jahan, as
lesser Rajputs lineages declined. In the eighteenth century, Qazi
Muhammad Ala said that ordinary chiefs (rausa) "are
now called zamindars."17
In late medieval times, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century,
new institutions of patriarchal ranking evolved; they formed a
cultural context of sultanic secularism, which contained many
kinds of canon, idioms of ritual, and moral systems under the
umbrella of sultanic authority. Sultans rose above all patriarchs.
Their regimes compiled the small agrarian territories of the early
medieval period into regional forms with distinctively early modern
characteristics. By the seventeenth century -- most dramatically
in Maharashtra and Punjab -- alliances among imperial, military,
fiscal, and agrarian patriarchs produced regional patriarchies.
Great patriarchs like Shivaji and Guru Nanak formed the basis
for regional identities of a new kind. Rights of first possession
expanded metaphorically to include collective rights for all the
people of the dominant castes assembled under a great patriarch
to rule their homeland. This early formation of territorial and
ethnic nationality emerged from the expansive powers of patriarchal
authority produced under sultanic regimes as it absorbed the intense
attachments to the land among dominant caste farm families and
local conquest regimes.
When Rajputs and Mughals married, they tied together two traditions
of patriarchal power which though expressed in different spiritual
idioms had basic commonalities that formed a coherent logic of
ranking, competition, and alliance. Mughal sultans became apical
agents and icons of ranking for all patriarchs below. In the Mughal
regime, mosque, temple, or church could mark communities of sentiment;
sacred genealogies could be reckoned from Rome, Palestine, Arabia,
or Aryavarta; because the Mughal institutions of patriarchal power
-- within which patriarchs ranked one another and held patrimonial
entitlements -- superseded and encompassed the ideology of dharma.
No religion constrained a sultan's power to confer rank on subordinates.
A sultan's status arose from rituals of conquest and entitlement
whose authority went back to the days of the Gurjara-Pratiharas.
Sultanic power reached its height under the Mughal, Safavid, and
Ottoman dynasties, but its logic was not contained by Islam. Hindu
practitioners included not only the Rajputs but also the Rayas
of Vijayanagar, who were effectively sultans of the south. The
English East India Company used sultanic authority for its own
Christian imperialism. Thus the expansion of Muslim dynastic power
in South Asia should not be conflated with the expansion of Islam:
the Mughal imperial system set itself apart from all its predecessors
by making the rituals and conditions of patriarchal entitlement
more agnostic than ever before.
Social ranks defined by Mughal imperial titles inflected the idioms
of social rank almost everywhere in South Asia, influencing group
identity subtly and pervasively. From village and caste headmen
to hill chiefs, to merchants and bankers and artisans; and from
Rajputs, zamindars, nayakas, chaudhuris, ray chaudhuris,
jagirdars, palaiyakkarar (Poligars), and rajas to
all kinds of tax farmers; positions of leadership, authority,
and political mediation in state institutions became focal points
for social identity formation. Mughal entitlements and modes of
patriarchal ranking entered family strategies of marriage alliance
and thus influenced kin-group formation at many levels of society.
In the Mughal system, patrimonial entitlements depended upon personal
recognition by a superior patriarch under the authority of the
sultan. In families, occupational groups, sectarian organisations,
and caste and tribal societies, an officially recognised headman
had to attain his status -- at a price -- in rituals of state.
The darbar became a centre of transactions that defined agrarian
territories, locally and regionally, in the ranks of all the patriarchs.
Moving down the ranks, superiors granted honours, titles, and
entitlements to those below. Moving up the ranks, inferiors paid
tribute, service, and allegiance to those above. State revenues
were collected in return for honours and titles conferred by state
authorities; and the increasing value of these revenues accumulated
at the higher ranks as they fed the evolution of early modern
states. At the lowest echelons, peasant patriarchs paid for titles
to land.
From 1500 onward, the agrarian utility and spread of money also
increased along with supplies of precious metals and sultanic
currencies. Money could buy a wider variety of entitlements to
resources within disparate agrarian territories connected by systems
of sultanic ranking that were open to participants of all sorts.
Aggressive patriarchs bought and fought their way into positions
of power in agrarian territories; they became military officers
and revenue intermediaries entitled to collect local revenues
from local head men. A diffusion of imperial titles and ranks
facilitated a broader commercialisation of the agrarian economy
that was also propelled by the military integration of ecologically
diverse agricultural territories and by increasing state demand
for cash payments, as we will see in the next chapter. Buying
titles and official positions of rank became a basic patriarchal
strategy. This further accelerated a broad shift away from dharma,
caste, and Brahman ritualism as the most prominent means to secure
assets in agrarian territories, though technologies of temple
ritual also expanded their territorial reach under sultanic regimes.
The pace of temple building and temple endowment accelerated steadily
after 1500, as patriarchs with state entitlements and commercial
assets sought additional resources through investments in temples.
Politically and socially, any group could be defined by its representation
at court. Though temple and caste rituals extended their reach,
darbari dramas had wider powers of incorporation and entitlement.
Transactions that defined agrarian territory came increasingly
to focus on key people who provided states with revenue. Mughal
revenues fattened the nobility and fuelled the war machinery,
and like other acts of submission, paying revenue constituted
entitlements for patriarchs who paid to secure positions of power.
Because revenue payments secured patrimonial property at every
rank -- right down to the lowest levels of the peasantry -- it
is understandable that a myth emerged among Europeans that the
sultan owned all the land in India: who would counter this claim
when all patriarchs held their property rights by submission to
the Emperor? In this political culture, acts of resistance and
rebellion were also acts of negotiation and strategic positioning.
Patriarchs faced opposition all around -- in the land, unruly
nature; in the home, unruly women; in the fields, unruly workers;
in the villages, unruly peasants; in the forests, unruly tribes;
in the provinces, unruly zamindars and rajas -- and negotiations
among patriarchs always had to take into account resistance from
below and demands from above. Patriarchal expectations for obedience
and loyalty often met frustration. Many new, assertive identities
formed around rebellious patriarchs who like Shivaji had official
entitlements to represent "their people" in transactions
with higher authorities.
The Mughal regime brought more kinship groups under one system
of ranking and military alliance than any before. All its constituent
groups became designated by terminologies that effectively formed
an ethnic typology. Ethnic identities, based on combinations of
language, religion, and region, emerged dramatically among Rajputs,
Marathas, and Sikhs, but also in many other places at lower registers.
Competitive alliance formation raised the most powerful agrarian
patriarchs up into the status of regional leaders. Shivaji inherited
a jagir that his father obtained under Ahmadnagar and he continued
the project of constructing a multi-jati Maratha warrior-farming
elite by acquiring titles from other sultans in the Deccan. Over
several generations, in a long process of competitive alliance
building, conquest, and institutional formation, Marathas built
a state that became deeply involved in the enforcement of family
ranking and in regulating female behaviour, as warrior patriarchs
set about defining Maratha territory and identity. The subsequent
preoccupation of Maratha hagiographers with Shivaji as the ideal
ruler not only reflects the capacity Muslim states to nurture
Hindu leadership, but more importantly, it represents the creation
of a semi-deified patriarchal icon around which new collective
identities were formed, combining ethnicity, language, and religion.
The long
term interaction of family and statecraft produced geographical
patterns in regional styles of kinship within agrarian territories.
Irawati Karve once argued that more extensive and intensive kinship
territories typified the northern plains and southern peninsula,
respectively, with Maharashtra being a bridge between the two,18 but Bina Agarwal's
more detailed analysis of kinship practices and women's land rights
reveals three broad zones of kinship in South Asia. In each zone,
kin groups form distinctive types of territory, and regions are
characterised by the prevalence of the kinship strategies pursued
by prominent land owning groups, most importantly, dominant castes.
The position of women is a critical feature of these kinship and
territorial regimes.
(1) The north-east high mountains, the southern peninsula, Sri
Lanka, and Nepal: "In all of these, women marry either in
their natal villages or in nearby ones, and close-kin marriages
are preferred. There is no adherence to purdah, and the overall
control of female sexuality is less than in other parts of the
subcontinent. Women's labour force participation varies between
medium and very high."
(2) The western plains and northern
basins: In Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan, "village
endogamy is typically forbidden, marriages are often at some distance
from the natal village (especially among the upper-caste land
owning communities), close-kin marriages are usually taboo, purdah
is practised, control over female sexuality is strict, and women's
labour force participation rates are low." Though in Pakistan
and Bangladesh, "village endogamy and close-kin marriages
are permitted, and women's inheritance rights are endorsed by
Islam .... female seclusion practices negate these advantages
to a significant degree...."
(3) The central mountains, Maharashtra, and West Bengal: "Village
endogamy is not common but neither is it usually forbidden, and
women in many communities do marry within the village or nearby
villages. Some communities do allow close-kin marriages. Purdah
is practised in some communities and not others." 19
Agarwal stresses that tribal kinship patterns, most prevalent
today in the mountains, differ significantly from those in the
agrarian lowlands, especially in the amount sexual activity allowed
for women outside marriage. Historically, groups called "tribes"
are by definition those which have been relatively isolated
from lowland agrarian states in modern times and therefore distant
from the enforcers of dharma. Tribal groups interact with caste
societies and economies but they have also been kept apart, especially
in the tropical high mountains in the north-east. Agarwal notes
that the prevalence of tribal communities in the central mountains
and their territorial admixture with non-tribal communities creates
the mixed character of her third kinship zone.
The broad division portrayed by Karve and Agarwal is between extensive
and intensive strategies of kinship alliance, which appear to
predominate according to the respective influence of warrior colonisation
and territorial dharma in pre-modern centuries. There is also
an overlap between forms of kinship territoriality and the prominence
of irrigated agriculture, rice cultivation, medieval inscriptions,
and pastoral nomadism. In general, when we move from low lying
riverine tracts of the early medieval gentry, where older inscriptions
cluster, into drier areas dominated by warrior-farmers, we see
a transition from more intensive to more extensive kinship practices.
In this same transition, we see a shift in gendered substance
of patriarchal power. Matrilineal descent was prevalent only in
Agarwal's first zone, which also contains territories of intensive
kinship where women live within a small circle of kin for their
whole lives. By contrast, in extensive kinship regimes, women
pass between distant kin groups as icons of family honour and
agents in marital alliances. Maharashtra contains both kinds of
kinship territory, and also transitions not only between tribal
hills and caste lowlands but between coastal regions of more intensive
medieval wet-farming and interior regions of more extensive dry-farming.
So Maharashtra is not so much a transition zone between cultures
of the north and south, described by Karve, as a mix of practices
that characterise different types of agrarian territory. A separation
of irrigated lowlands from dry uplands also divides coastal Andhra
from its interior and the Kaveri basin in southern Karnataka from
the Deccan; and more intensive kinship patterns usually pertain
in the wetter regions. In general, the distribution of more intensive
forms of kinship even today coincides with that of more intensive
farming in pre-modern centuries. Extensive regimes, like warrior
power, spread widely over time. Extensive kinship strategies concentrate
today in territories which have more pastoral nomadism and warrior
colonisation in their agrarian history. In Maharashtra, Bihar,
Bengal, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, extensive warrior patterns
of kinship were imposed upon more intensive local strategies,
creating elite alliances and models of status which diffused downward
like the powers of dharma. Extensive kinship patterns would have
helped to extend the agricultural frontier in the east, and more
intensive kinship forms perhaps developed in old pastoral areas
that became characterised in modern times by more intensive irrigated
farming, especially in Punjab. A mixing of kinship forms occurred
everywhere with the rampant migratory resettlements of the early
modern period. In the Tamil country, Telugu warriors settled tracts
between river valleys and some have retained extensive kinship
strategies and even observed pardah until recently.
Despite all the imperfections in the fit between old farming regimes
and kinship, we can see that intensive kinship alliance-building
is a good strategy for protecting family property in local communities
and territories. Family alliances that formed the local gentry
also produced the funds and controlled the labour which built
up early medieval irrigation and paddy cultivation. Patriarchs
sought to control contiguous territories for the expansion of
succeeding generations. Marriages formed dense links among dominant
families who became related to one another like their paddy fields,
as sustenance flowed from one family to another and from one generation
to the next. Families partitioned social space into contiguous
kinship territories, which became more diverse by the inclusion
of new groups into jatis and by the fissioning of lineages, but
retained an intricately kin flavour. In riverine lowlands, kinship
stressed local alliances among families and formed intricately
graded ranks within gentry strata. Families maintained a genealogical
sense of descent from medieval kings, but domestic patriarchy
concentrated on markers of status within local communities. The
marriage of sons and daughters was normatively contrived within
finely graded social strata, within close proximity to the natal
village, and within an existing nexus of family ties. Agricultural
communities and regions were organised around webs of intensive,
intersecting family alliances. On the Tamil coast, it would not
be uncommon for people to be related to one another in several
ways at once, as a result of cross-cousin marriages over generations.
The language of family permeated all the institutions of agrarian
patrimony, as the meanings of pangu, pangali, kulam,
nadu, and nattar attest. Institutionalised among
dominant castes, the intensive pattern of kinship and its idioms
of village share holding also became typical among agricultural
workers and other groups in irrigated regions of the medieval
era. In this setting, appropriate female decorum is a community
as well as a family concern. Husband and wife are most often reckoned
as kin from birth, sharing the same agrarian home-space. A wife's
devotion to her husband does not need to conflict with loyalty
to her father; and though she leaves her father's house at marriage,
she effectively never leaves home. Migration brought similar types
of family networks into being in nested agglomerations of family
ties that came to characterise the paddy-growing lowlands.
In the dry territories of nomadism and in domains of conquest
colonisation, by contrast, and particularly among warrior colonisers
like the Rajputs and Jats, a woman's transition from daughter
to wife came to mean moving into the household of a stranger whose
superiority to her father was dramatised in the marriage itself.
Patriarchal strategies of marriage alliance designed for upward
mobility put women in a difficult, intermediary position, as marriage
helped to extend lineage power out over territory in a pattern
like that of the banyan tree. Expressions of family power focused
on the wife as the icon of her family's honour and rank. Multiple
marriages expanded the power of a great patriarch, his wives being
ranked as a representative of their fathers. A woman's devotion
to her in-laws always conflicted in principle with loyalty to
her parents and siblings. Personal, intimate, ritualised expressions
of devotion to her husband as opposed to her father were built
into the disciplinary activities particularly of her mother-in-law,
who had survived this same transition. But the status of wife
and mother in a superior family could also open up new opportunities
for her natal kin and their offspring; so that serving her husband
would most likely be her father's most fervent desire, because
pleasing her husband would be the best way to improve her natal
family's prospects. In these settings, pardah and sati became
auspicious expressions of female purity, sacrificial devotion,
sacred heroism, and divine power. Extreme controls over female
sexuality enhanced family honour in a culture of heroic sacrifice
and harsh discipline. Sati became divine at landmarks of heroism
which marked warrior territory. Forts and palaces enshrine the
valour of great men. Perched high above Ajmer on a rocky mountain
ledge, Prithvi Raj Chauhan's fort has today become a icon of militant
Hindu nationalism. At Mandu, it is said, hundreds of palace women
became sati as the sultan marched his troops to death in battle.
At Mandore, in 1459, Rao Jodha "took an extreme step to ensure
that the new site proved auspicious" by burying alive one
Rajiya Bambi in the foundations of the new fort, promising that
"his family and descendants would be looked after by the
Rathores."20