106

The monograph is faithful to its sources as it constructs these, and is

generally well-written although, in this reviewer’s opinion, much over-
stretched. The point Amin has made is an interesting one. It has been
made before in writings in and about different locales and outside the
subaltern ’school’ premises and deserves that it continues to be read
widely.
We might end this review for the discerning reader with academic savvy
by noting an academic error in the narrative strategy of the author’s own
’subject position’; he is critical-and rightly so-of earlier historians who
have got the date of Chauri Chaura wrong: 5 February instead of 4
February, 1922. But Amin himself gets the date of a book published
recently, in 1978, wrong when he refers to it as published in 1981. It is a
book whose author has been described as ’elitist’ in the opening volume of
the subaltern project published in 1982. Narrative strategies matter, there is
little doubt. So does an approver’s testimony (so creatively described by
Amin), in the locating of our historiographic past.
Majid Siddiqi
Jawaharlal Nehru University

BRAJADULAL CHATROPADHYAYA, The Making of Early Medieval India,

New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994.

This book consists of eight chapters that originally appeared in various

journals between 1974 and 1986, plus an entirely new Introduction that ties
the volume into a coherent and persuasive argument. In most of the
chapters, Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya uses inscriptional data for reconstruct-
ing India’s social, political, and economic history between the seventh and
thirteenth centuries, the period of the author’s special interest. Half of the
chapters treat Rajasthan during this period, covering such subjects as
irrigation, markets and merchants, early memorial stones, and the origin of
the Rajputs. The other chapters cover north Indian society generally,
focussing on trade and urban centres, political structures and processes,
and, in the volume’s only chapter using a literary source, religion in a royal
household.
Above all, the book demonstrates the great potential that epigraphic
evidence holds for historians of India. While Dr Chattopadhyaya is certainly
not the first to make use of the wealth of India’s inscriptional data, he has
used the data far more imaginatively than have most historians. Indeed,
the book’s central point is that, despite the many attempts by scholars to
reduce premodern India into some sort of static structure or ahistoric
model, Indian society was constantly subject to change, and the proof of
that change is seen in the rich, detailed, and very down-to-earth evidence

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found in inscriptional data. Through the author’s skillful use of these data,
each of the book’s chapters illuminates a different aspect of early medieval
Indian history. Thus the book provides a powerful counterweight to the
many studies of this age that have relied too heavily on contemporary
literary works, especially Brahamanical texts that tend to be normative in
nature. In passing, Chattopadhyaya urges his archaeologist colleagues to
follow his lead and turn their attention to the early medieval period, for he
feels that many of his hypotheses could be confirmed by archaeological
data.
Another major contribution of this volume is its attempt to rethink the
way in which historians periodise Indian history. Periodisation forms a
crucial part of the historian’s task, since the chronological periods into
which we divide the past reflects-if not dictates-how we think about the
past. For this reason, Chattopadhyaya wishes to do away entirely with the
old tripartite ’ancient-medieval-modern’ scheme of periodisation (itself a
gloss for the still older ’Hindu-Muslim-British’ scheme) and replace it with
a scheme whose earlier phases consist of proto-historic, early historic, and

early medieval, the latter corresponding to the seventh-thirteenth century.

Such a formulation has several advantages. First, the postulating of early
medieval India as a discreet period of Indian history plays down the sense
of disruption that is often associated with the abrupt passage from ’ancient
India’ to ’medieval India,’ that is, with the establishment of permanent rule
in northern India by Muslim Turks. Taking issue with Irfan Habib, who
sees a revival of urbanism occurring with the establishment of the Delhi

Sultanate, and hence a certain amount of discontinuity between the thir-

teenth century and the centuries that preceded it, Chattopadhyaya shows
from inscriptional evidence that India was already highly urbanised during
the several centuries preceding the Sultanate (p. 167).
Chattopadhyaya’s identification of early modern India as a distinct his-
torical age also permits a re-evaluation of a classical or ’Golden Age,’ and
the period of decay that would logically have followed such an age. Brah-
manical texts of the early centuries A.D. did indeed refer to a breakdown of
the civilisational matrix that had defined the Mauryan period; consequently,
they spoke in terms of a rupture with the past. But inscriptional data show
no such crisis or rupture. Rather, the author argues, what we find between
the third and the seventh centuries are interlinked processes of local state
formation, peasantisation of tribes, caste formation, and the appropriation
and integration of religious cults.
These processes continued and intensified during the seventh through
thirteenth centuries, Chattopadhyaya argues, such that this period, far
from being an age of stagnation or decline (as many histories continue to
see it), was an age of social, political, and cultural integrataion. This, the
author argues, was when sacred and temporal domains came to validate
each another, when the Puranic order crystallised in ways that permitted

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local cults to become identified with sacred centers, when kings acted as
agents of enshrined divinities, and when states expanded by building upon
pre-existing agrarian units (pp. 197-209). The sort of dynamic, socio-
political processes revealed by Chattopadhyaya’s epigraphic research also
refutes the static models of India’s premodern past propounded by a range
of Euro-American scholars, both Orientalist and post-Orientalist, who
have viewed the seventh to thirteenth centuries in terms of a ’dark period’
(Digby), of a ’traditional polity’ (Moore, Richards, Eisenstadt), of ’ritual
kingship’ (Inden), or of ’segmentary states’ (Stein, Fox, Heesterman)
(pp. 184, 186, 187, 202).
Finally, Chattopadhyaya’s use of epigraphical data enables him to con-
tribute to the much-debated thesis of Indian feudalism, which many his-
torians have argued was in full flower during the period of the author’s own
specialised study. The very existence of this phenomenon, he observes,
rests on the assumption that, between the seventh and thirteenth centuries,
India experienced a decline in trade and urban life. But inscriptional
evidence cited by the author shows that large and thriving cities flourished
all over north India at this time, a point that seems to be reinforced by
archaeological evidence. In the end, Chattopadhyaya concludes that the
notion of Indian ’feudalism’, as an analytical term, is quite useless. Having
become in effect a synonym for political fragmentation, he notes, the
feudalism thesis ’has in fact been shuttled back and forth in Indian history
to suit any period in which no &dquo;unitary empire&dquo; could be located on the
political horizon’ (p. 189).
This is an important volume that is full of fresh insights; it should be read
by all students of premodern Indian history.
Richard M. Eaton
University of Arizona

FATIMA DA SILVA GRACIAS, Health and Hygiene in Colonial Goa

(1510-1961), Concept Publishing Company, New Delhi, 1994, pp.

300, Rs. 450.

Reflecting a growing environmental concern, medico-social history has

emerged as an important sub-discipline of history, as more and more
scholars examine the deterioration of the urban and rural environment,
identify the reasons for outbreak of epidemics and spread of disease, and
calculate their social and economic costs. Somewhere, the historian hopes,
a greater awareness of the past will help illuminate the pressing problems
of the present and suggest ways to cope with them today. Somehow, the

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