Readings in Early Indian History: Land System and Rural Society in Early India

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Land System and Rural Society in Early India highlights the growth and changing contours of historiography with regard to the agrarian history in early India. As such it incorporates some significant early writings as well as contributions which represent research still very much in progress. The patterns of regional socio-economic transformation in the context of wider historical developments come through in many of these essays.

The introduction analyses historiographical trends and focuses on problems and issues, and flowing from it the areas and nature of controversies as well as on related themes.

The articles included here deal with aspects of rural settlements, the concept of village community, the problem of the ownership of land, agrarian change, the structure of rural society and rural unrest.

The other volume in the series Readings in Early Indian History relates to women in early India.

General Editor

B.D. Chattopadhyaya retired as Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Editor

Bhairabi Prasad Sahu is Professor of History at the University of Delhi. His publications include From Hunters to Breeders (Faunal Background of Early India) (1988); The Changing Gaze: Regions and the Construction of Early India (2013) and Interrogating Political Systems: Integrative Processes and States in Pre-Modern India (2015; edited, with Hermann Kulke).

Contributors

Sibesh Battacharya • K.K. Gopal • Lallanji Gopal • Rajan Gurukkal • Irfan Habib • G.R. Kuppuswamy • Nayanjot Lahiri • T.V. Mahalingam • B.P. Mazumdar • R.N. Mishra • M.G.S. Narayanan • Marlene Njammasch • K.V. Raman • Y. Gopal Reddy • P. Shanmugam • R.S. Sharma • Y. Subbarayalu Kesavan Veluthat • Guyla Wojtilla • B.N.S. Yadava.

Land System and Rural Society in Early India, edited by Dr B.P. Sahu, is the first in the series: Readings in Early Indian History. The series is designed to make available to students, researchers, teachers and interested general readers significant contributions, in the form of select published essays or parts of monographs, relating to what may be considered important themes in early Indian history. Not all contributions are recent; their selection is guided principally by the criterion of how each has contributed meaningfully, through the wealth of empirical evidence and the quality of analysis, to our understanding of an area of history .and of its relation to other areas. Historiography is an important perspective expected to be present throughout the series, to an extent as a reminder that whatever is new is not necessarily final. The anthology of selected readings, the Editor's 'Introduction' and the 'Bibliography', which is intended to be a guide to further and more intensive readings on the theme, are all expected to reflect this perspective.

In editing the present volume Dr Sahu has been careful to draw his material from a wide range of publications, representing varieties of source material and approach. The broad area of agrarian history includes various sub-themes, and although historical writings so far available are very much unevenly distributed between the themes, Dr Sahu has tried to ensure widest coverage for the volume. His 'Introduction' too has attempted to be comprehensive both with reference to different aspects of the theme of the volume and to the significant debates which researchers on early Indian agrarian history have been generating.

In the past thirty years there has been a vast outpouring of literature on landownership, revenue system and such aspects of rural society as the lords, peasants and their world, with the agrarian history of early India being the central concern of the scholarly research community. History is, as it has been said, 'the record of what one age finds worthy in another'. Thus, the changing concerns and the shifts in methods and approaches since the later part of the 1950s explains scholarly interest in the rural way of life, the tiller of the soil and village society.' The most celebrated works of historians on early India can be situated in this context. Among the many fascinating studies on agrarian history one may mention D.D. Kosambi's perceptive studies and R.S. Sharma's wide-ranging examination of aspects of land and rural society, for these are pioneering efforts and set the agenda for writing alternative histories.' As for studies of earlier historians the works of Bandyopadhyaya, KM. Gupta, Pran Nath, U.N. Ghoshal and A.N. Bose, among others, may be mentioned.' These scholars essentially compiled the incidental material in the corpus of early Indian literature, sporadically supplementing it with inscriptional evidence, with varying degrees of success.