Author: Hermann Kulke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 1997/2004
Language: English
Pages: 367
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195642678
Description
This volume outlines and expands all the major discourses on India's various state forms, and will be of interest to every scholar of ancient, medieval and modern India..
Since the 1940s, reevaluations of the nature of the State have been a major occupation among historians worldwide. There has been a debate on the extent to which the State is independent of the interests of the ruling class. Sociologists and anthropologists interested in this issue have investigated State-formation, the relationship between kinship and pre-modern States, and the relation of State power with religious practices..
Pre-colonial India provides a unique testing ground for such debates, for it provides examples of State forms which vary enormously. Yet serious consideration of the nature of State forms in India was often overwhelmed by a focus on 'caste' and 'brahminism'. Now however, as Professor Kulke demonstrates in his introduction to this book - which consists of all the major essays on this important theme - several basic forms of the State can be isolated. .
Although the notion of 'centralized empire' still dominates the historiography, alternative models such as 'the segmentary state' and the 'patrimonial state' have given rise to productive debates.
Contents
General Editors' Preface
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER I
Introduction : The Study of the State In Pre-modern India
CHAPTER II
How Feudal was Indian Feudalism? (revised and updated, 1992)
CHAPTER III
Was There Feudalism in Indian History?
CHAPTER IV
The Segmentary State : Interim Reflections
CHAPTER V
State formations in South India, 850 - 1280
CHAPTER VI
Political Processes and the Structure of Polity in Early Medieval India
CHAPTER VII
The Early and the Imperial Kingdom : A Processural
Model of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India
CHAPTER IX
Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire
CHAPTER X
The Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire of the Mughals
CHAPTER XI
State Formation and Rajput Myth in Tribal Central India
Annotated Bibliography
Select Bibliography (compiled by Georg Berkemer)