4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST partiular social form of labour with a mode of production. Specifically referring to Maurice Dobb's use of the phenomenon of serfdom as the only hallmark of a feudal order, Habib emphasised that the process of distribution (the fief) and the "entire fabric of vassalage" represented the other key elements of feudalism. Characterising a society which possessed only one of these three features as feudal, implying therefore that the laws of motion as elucidated vis-a-vis Western European feudalism were by and large valid in the Indian context, would, according to Habib, push historical research onto a wrong track. Referring to the distinction that Marx drew between Indian society and European feudalism, Habib pointed out that although some of Marx's formulations could well be revised in the light of subsequent historical evidence, tlie distinction made between these two societies remained valid in a very fundamental sense. Marx had seen the entire "village community'' as subjected in common by the state, which was also the 'landlord' in the sense that rent and tax were coincidental here; this prevented individual forms of subjection, such as slavery and serfdom, from becoming dominant forms. In addition to this collective subjection, there also existed of course individual subjection in various forms, along with a fair degree of stratification within the "village community", a consequence of individual petty production; but this, according to Habib, far from invalidated Marx's basic contention. Moreover, Marx's insight that the extensively developed system of commodity circulation rested on the agrarian surplus, the "village community" itself lying outside the sphere of commodity circulation, was correct, although he did overlook the fact that the entire surplus did not devolve to the state and its nominees; there was a whole strata of hereditary claimants who were interposed between the "village community" and the state. However, Habib said, Marx's relegation of the Indian society to a vast Asiatic system characterised as a despotic and changeless system, was not quite acceptable. The features of Indian society—the predominance of individual agriculture, the state's claim to rent and the growth of commodity relations based on the extraction of the surplus—were all indicative of a process of transition from earlier, more primitive and communal formations. Habib referred to D D Kosambi and R S Sharma, who have posited the existence of an economic formation which could be called "Indian feudalism". 7'he principal features, namely, a process of political decentralisation accompanied by the sovereign's alienation of fiscal resources through hereditary, religious and secular grants and the decline of money and commerce leading upto the isolation of the self-sufficient village, while analogous to the developments in early medieval Europe, are sufficiently antithetical to the strong centralised state and extensive commodity circulation of post-13th century medieval India, to merit the demarcation of the latter from the former in terms