The Historiography of the Medieval in South Asia

DAUD ALI

Colonial scholars and administrators in the latter half of the nineteenth century were the
first to subject South Asia to modern historicist scrutiny. Using coins, inscriptions, and
chronicles, they determined the dates and identities of numerous kings and dynasties within
an apparently scrupulous empiricist framework. From the 1930s, with the widespread rise
of nationalist sentiment, South Asian scholars began to write about their own past. The
particular configurations of colonial and early nationalist historiography of South Asia have
proved immensely consequential for subsequent generations of historians.1 Not only did
this historiography value certain types of evidence, particularly Indic language epigraphy,
Persian chronicles, and archaeology (while at the same time devaluing others like literature
and religious texts), it set some of the enduring thematic and topical parameters which have
shaped the course of the field. The initial focus was on the careers and personalities of rulers
or the genius of races as the key causative forces in history, but eventually dynastic history
became the dominant mode of writing about the past.
To make sense of the myriad dynasties and lineages discovered in the sources, historians
made use of epochal and chronological divisions. Early on, Orientalists, company-
administrators and historians had divided the past either into civilisational ages, including
the concept of the ‘golden age’, or into the apparently more descriptive division of ‘Hindu’,
‘Muslim’, and ‘British’ periods. By the early decades of the twentieth century, both colonial
and nationalist historians had begun to map the tripartite scheme of ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, and
‘modern’ onto the latter framework. The rise of nationalist sentiment meant that a number
of complex ideological inflections came to bear on this periodisation. Among these was
a tendency to construct, drawing on earlier Orientalist scholarship, a ‘glorious age’ which
acted as an originary moment in historical narratives. While there were differences among
writers as to what empire or sub-period should hold this honour (typically the Mauryan or
Gupta empires), an inevitable corollary of this idea required a subsequent period of political,
economic, and cultural decline. For most, the Turkic conquests and establishment of the
Delhi Sultanate between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, seen in historiography to
herald a ‘Muslim’ or ‘medieval’ period, provided a convenient occasion for this decline.
Indeed, most nationalist writers saw this as a ‘dark’, ‘ominous’ or, at best, a euphemistically

1 Discussed at length in Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations (Delhi, 1978); idem.
Early India: from Origins to AD 1300 (Harmondsworth, 2002), pp. 1–36; and Ronald Inden, Imagining India
(Oxford,1990).

JRAS, Series 3, 22, 1 (2012), pp. 7–12 

C The Royal Asiatic Society 2012

doi:10.1017/S1356186311000861
8 Daud Ali

‘difficult’ period in India’s history. And even when, in post-independence India, religiously
marked periods were finally abandoned for the apparently secular terminology of ‘ancient,’
‘medieval,’ and ‘modern’ in university history departments, chronological divisions ensured
not only a persistent identification of ‘ancient’ with ‘Hindu-Buddhist’, and ‘medieval’ with
‘Muslim’, but a continued association of ancient India with Hindu glory and medieval India
with Muslim decline.
There were, of course, uncomfortable aspects of this periodisation which related to all
its elements, but most particularly its ‘medieval’ portion. The period between the Gupta
Empire (either its rise or fall, depending on how one saw it) and the establishment of the
Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century, for example — a period of potentially 900 years —
posed a serious problem, being at once ‘post-ancient’ and ‘pre-medieval’. As early as the 1920s
scholars had conceived of a ‘Hindu Medieval India’.2 There were geographical problems as
well. The model was seriously biased toward the north. For at the very onset of an apparently
Muslim dominated ‘medieval’ India, or alternatively, the nadir of ‘Hindu Medieval India’,
south India witnessed its day in the sun, with the powerful Hindu empires of the Cōlas
and Cāl.ukyas. The chronological and regional applicability of the idea of medieval India
was, as a consequence, fairly unstable. Yet even as these qualifications and refinements were
established, academic departments were consolidated in Indian universities around broad
divisions of ancient and medieval, implicitly understood as Buddhist/Hindu and Muslim.
Nevertheless, research continued on post-Gupta history using Sanskrit and other Indic
language sources, conceiving of itself as distinct from ‘ancient’ history even though it was
conducted from departments of ‘ancient’ history.
The late 1950s and 1960s, however, saw the rise of social history, as historians turned to new
sorts of evidence and new topics of historical research. The legal and documentary sections
of inscriptions were carefully scrutinised for information on state institutions, political
structures, revenue systems and agrarian relations, while archaeology and numismatics were
used to gauge levels of trade and economic activity. Marxist scholars led the way in this
innovation, proposing ‘mode of production’ and ‘social formation’ as analytical models.3
Those working on earlier sources elaborated a theory of ‘Indian feudalism’. These scholars
argued that the alienation of rights to land revenue from higher to lower levels of political
authority, through land grants, a process which began in Gupta times and accelerated
afterwards, led to a generally ‘feudalised’ polity. Archaeological evidence of the decline
of many major Gangetic cities was interpreted as de-urbanisation resulting from a decline
in international trade with the Mediterranean. Internal trade exchanges lessened due to
the increasing isolation and closure of the village economy in the context of feudalisation.
Economic exchanges were gradually de-monetised, as coins became scarce. In many ways,
Marxists developed a historical model of feudalism which was heavily influenced by particular
studies of European history like those of Henri Pirenne. One of the notable effects of the turn
to social history and the thesis of ‘Indian feudalism’ was to accentuate an already perceived

2 See for example, C. V. Vaidya History of Mediaeval Hindu India: being a history of India from 600 to 1200 A.D, 3
vols. (Poona, 1921–26), and H. C. Ray, The Dynastic History of Northern India, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1931–36).
3 D. D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay, 1956); Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System
of Mughal India (Delhi, 1963); R. S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism (Calcutta, 1965).
 The Historiography of the Medieval in South Asia 9

distinction between pre- and post-Gupta India. The idea of an ‘early’ or ‘pre’ medieval
period, from the Gupta Empire to the Sultanate, was slowly gaining ground.
The propositions of Indian ‘feudalism’ were widely discussed, debated and refined in
historical journals during the 1960s and 70s. By the late 1970s debates over ‘modes of
production’, partly driven by the moment of high-theory in Marxist social science, climaxed
in heated discussions regarding the relevance of ‘feudalism’ to Indian history.4 By the
1980s, some fundamental assumptions of the feudalist model had been undermined.
These evidentiary challenges included a dispute over the interpretation of the land-grants
and the supposed urban decay and decline in trade and coinage. It was pointed out early
on that the numerous land-grants which the feudalists took to represent the alienation of state
revenues to political subordinates were, in fact, usually gifts to religious functionaries, and
thus did not contribute to a feudalisation of political authority.5 The theory of urban decay
was complicated by the suggestion that the decline of ancient urban centres was accompanied
by the expansion of new urban settlements which were different in nature.6 Whereas the
great cities of ancient India were linked ‘horizontally’ in a ‘thin’, but geographically dispersed
network of regular exchange, urban centres of post-Gupta India seem to have been more
rooted in regional context and local exchange networks. The number and density of urban
settlements in early medieval India seems to have increased, a point which has seriously
undermined any notion of a countryside composed of economically isolated villages. And
finally, economic historians, using methods different from those of numismatists argued that
coinage in post-Gupta India, while not constituting a great variety of types distinguished
by issuing authorities, nevertheless increased in numbers, indicating that the volume of
exchange transactions between 600–1000 ce was comparable to that of other periods in
north Indian history.7
The effect of these criticisms was largely to discredit feudalism as an historical model, but
not Marxist or social scientific approaches as such. By the 1980s, historians had begun to
introduce new methodologies and theories inspired by anthropology and sociology as much
as Marxist frameworks. While the central concern of this literature remained an analysis
of the state, historical focus shifted from ‘feudal polity and society’ to ‘state formation’.
Anthropological models were introduced to explain the apparent lack of a centralised
bureaucratic structure in early states as imagined by colonialist and nationalist scholarship. In
South India, Burton Stein drew on Aidan Southall’s study of acephelous societies in Africa
to propose a ‘segmentary model’ for the Cōla Empire and Nicholas Dirks explored the
changing role of kingship and caste as the ‘little kingdom’ of the ancien régime was gradually
hollowed out by the colonial regime.8

4 See the collection of essays included in Harbans Mukhia (ed.) The Feudalism Debate (Delhi, 1999).
5 See D. C. Sircar, “Indian Landlordism and European Feudalism,” in Studies in the Political and Administrative
Systems of Ancient and Medieval India (Delhi, 1974), pp. 13–32.
6 B. D. Chattopadhyaya, “Urban Centres in Early Medieval India: An Overview,” in S. Bhattacharyya and
Romila Thapar (eds.) Situating Indian History (Delhi, 1986).
7 See Richard Deyell, Living without Silver: The Monetary History of Early Medieval North India (Delhi, 1990).
More recently, D. Kennet, “The Transition from Early Historic to Early Medieval in the Vakataka Realm”, in The
Vakataka Heritage: Indian Culture at the Crossroads, edited by Hans T. Bakker (Groningen, 2004), pp. 11–17.
8 Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi, 1980); Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown:
Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge, 1987).
10 Daud Ali

By the end of the 1980s, however, the dominant approach to the state in medieval
historiography, led by B. D. Chattopadhyaya and Hermann Kulke, came to be known as the
‘integrative’ or ‘processural’ model.9 It stressed agrarian expansion, urban transformation,
localisation and regional state formation as productive rather than regressive or fragmenting
developments during the putative period of ‘Indian feudalism’. The medieval state in these
formulations was seen neither as a pre-given entity as in nationalist scholarship, nor the result
of political fragmentation as in feudalist historiography, but instead as having developed in a
‘continuous process from below’. More generally, Chattopadhyaya argued that the transition
to ‘early medieval’ India should not be seen primarily as a ‘cessation’, ‘fragmentation’,
or ‘decline’ of existing structures, but instead as positive development of new social
phenomena.10 The purported political fragmentation of post-Gupta India was explained
as a proliferation rather than a devolution of ‘state structures’. Integral to such a perspective
was the re-evaluation of the early or classical ‘state’ (the Gupta and Mauryan), from the
centralised bureaucratic entity of nationalist and, to a certain extent, Marxist historiography
to a more nodal and loosely structured entity.11 This meant that the emergence of polities in
the nodal zones of former Mauryan polity, for example, could be seen as new and onward
developments rather than the devolving fragments of central authority.
The fallout of the all of this historiographical foment beginning in the 1960s was to
firmly place economy and society (rather than dynastic- or personality-based narratives) at
the centre of historical concern. The structure, organisation, and formation of the regional
state was henceforth a topic of intrinsic and enduring interest. The turn to this sort of
social history weakened the established periodisation. The religious associations often closely
imbricated with the framework of ancient, medieval and modern were called into question
while narratives of social formation, state typology and modes of production failed to
align neatly with these divisions.12 Preoccupations with a golden age of political unity and
economic prosperity, usually associated with the ancient empires, were largely abandoned.13
Chattopadhyaya’s work influentially enunciated what had been long in the making, that
of a refined periodisation of ‘early medieval’ India. Notably, unlike earlier applications
of the ‘medieval’ simply transposed onto Indian history, this idea emerged after sustained
consideration of actual social, economic and political developments.
Later ‘medieval’ history in South Asia, on the other hand, experienced even greater
change. The Mughal Empire had surely formed the most active field of research in pre-
colonial Indian history since its inception. It was endowed with colonialist and nationalist
histories, and from the 1960s with a prolific Marxist historiography centered at Aligarh

9 B. D. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi, 1994); Hermann Kulke, “The Early and
Imperial Kingdom: A Processural Model of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India”, in The State in
India 1000–1700, edited by Hermann Kulke (Delhi, 1995).
10 B. D. Chattopadhyaya, “Introduction,” in Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India, pp. 34–36.
11 Romila Thapar, The Mauryas Revisited (Calcutta, 1987). See also G. Fussman, “Control and Provincial
Administration in Ancient India: The Problem of the Mauryan Empire,” Indian Historical Review 14. 1–2 (1987–88),
pp. 43–72.
12 Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipin Chandra, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (Dehli,
1969).
13 See Thapar, Mauryas Revisited and David Lorenzen, “Historians and the Gupta Empire,” in Reappraising Gupta
History: for S. R. Goyal, edited by B. C. Chhabra, et al. (Delhi, 1992), pp. 47–60.
 The Historiography of the Medieval in South Asia 11

Muslim University.14 By the 1980s, however, enough research had accumulated on the
regional dynamics of the Mughal Empire to complicate the ‘military-fiscalist’ model of
the Aligarh school. In addition, new non-state centered histories of social communities
and dynamic labour markets grew considerably.15 Building on these critiques and new
approaches, a number of scholars sought to place the Mughal empire within a more global
and trans-regional framework. This trend also took account of an emergent scholarship
which emphasised South Asian mercantile linkages in the Indian Ocean from the 1500s, of
calls for greater understanding of shared historical trajectories of the Mughal Empire with
its Safavid and Ottoman neighbours, and of a vigorous reinterpretation of the eighteenth
century (the last century of Mughal rule), which posited dynamic rather than failing regional
economies across northern and central India.16
These developments in Mughal history, combined with increasing work in Indian Ocean
studies and a vibrant historiography of South India conspired, unevenly but perhaps
fortuitously, to create what has now been widely called an ‘early modern’ period of
Indian history. The most salient feature of this historiography has been to link India
from the sixteenth century not only with the world of the Indian Ocean and greater
‘Eurasia’, but also with a global historical paradigm. For while the category of medieval has
gradually been evacuated of any definitive substance in most national historiographies, in
favour of a sort of cacophony of regional isolates simply holding the fort until the cavalry
arrives, the ‘early modern’, contrastingly, has been an epoch of bold attributes. While the
‘early medieval’ framework developed by scholars working on earlier periods was largely
a descriptor, attempting to clear the way for historians to develop theories of society and
change through a close analysis of the sources, the ‘early modern’ framework as practiced
by many historians was endowed with definitive attributes and accepted teleologies (much
like, ironically, the feudalist historiography so disparaged by its proponents). Its well-known
features include the widespread existence of global trade markets, the rise to power of
merchant capitalists distinguished from the older land-based nobility, partly bureaucratised
and centralised monarchic states with large armies which made use of firearms and, finally, a
series of cultural developments anticipating ‘modernity’. While there has been a recognition
that not all of these features apply to South Asia, and even critiques of the overall model
of ‘early modern’,17 this model has nevertheless gained a surprisingly tenacious currency

14 See the very influential works of Irfan Habib, including his path-breaking early study, The Agrarian System
of Mughal India, his remarkable An Atlas of the Mughal Empire (Delhi, 1986) and later essays collected in Essays in
Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception (Delhi, 1995). See also the works of M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility
under Aurangzeb, 2nd rev. ed. (Dehli, 2001) and The Apparatus of Empire: The Award of Ranks, Titles and Offices to
the Mughal Nobility (Delhi, 1985), and Irfan Habib (ed.) Medieval India: Researches in the History of India 1200–1750
(Delhi, 1999).
15 See for example, the important study by Dirk Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military
Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge, 1990).
16 For a review and analysis of Mughal historiography which advances a critique of the military fiscalist model
of the Aligarh school with a call for opening up Mughal studies to wider fields of Ottoman and Safavid studies,
see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, L’État moghol et sa fiscalité (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1994). On
the historiography of Indian maritime trade and during Mughal times, see Subrahmanyam in A. Das Gupta, The
World of the Indian Ocean Merchant (Oxford, 2001). For reviews of the debates on the eighteenth century, see the
introductory essays in the edited collections by Seema Alavi, The Eighteenth Century in India (Delhi, 2002) and P. J.
Marshall, The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? (Delhi, 2003).
17 See for example, Jack Goldstone, “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World,” Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 41. 3 (1998), pp. 249–284.
12 Daud Ali

among historians, particularly in studies of the regions at the periphery of, or beyond, the
Mughal empire. As might be expected, the concept of early modern has often been invested
with a heavy sense of teleology. Given the colonial arguments for the exogenous origins
of historical change in South Asia, it has been in vogue to argue that various elements
of ‘modernity’ may be found in ‘indigenous’ cultural forms between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries.18 The arguments for ‘early modernism’ or ‘early modernity’ in South
Asia however, have often relied, rather ironically, on the very tropes of the ‘medieval’ once
used to consign the Mughal Empire itself to a backward ‘medieval period’. At this level, early
modern historiography has not so much rectified images of medieval stagnation as simply
pushed back their boundaries to pre-Mughal times.
The future of the ‘medieval’ as a category in South Asian historical writing will be
tied to how the debates about the ‘early modern’ are played out. While the interest in
‘early modern’ history has surely challenged the present myopia of much modern South
Asian historiography, its protagonists have sometimes sadly breathed new ideological life
into historical writings which have traditionally hampered the study of medieval societies.
Daud Ali
University of Pennsylvania

18 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (Ann Arbor, 2001) and
Velchuru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South
India, 1600–1800 (Delhi, 2003).