4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The first and the most ancient of plans of government, according to Morgan, was "a social organization founded upon gentes, phratries and tribes"; the second and the latest in time, "a political organization founded upon territory and upon property".1 Why and how, and at what point of time did the custom-enforced tribal social organisation gave way to a coercive authority that was separated from and placed above the society? This is precisely the question to be answered. The considerable time-lag found in every society between the first appearance of properly and the emergence of a special type of organisation, which could be called a state, needs to be adequately explained. The other question is as to how, once brought into existence, this authority gradually matured into full statehood. In fact, anthropologists have come across many tribes like the Apatanis of Arunachal, who had developed a degree of private property rights, even in the means of production, but yet had no special organisation as such that could straightway be called a state. Segmentary-type primitive societies in the pre-state situation (the 'gentile5 constitution of Morgan and Engels) were not transformed into states overnight even by the magic touch of property. It is necessary, therefore, to identify the retarding or accelerating factors, if any, in the corresponding ecology and economy of these societies. No tribe leaped to statehood while it was still at its pristine stage, when it still lacked a sedentary agricultural population, a degree of division of labour and social stratification. Statehood emerged only when a community was either itself capable of producing a surplus sufficient for the maintenance of a non-producing public authority, or of systematically appropriating as tribute the requisite surplus from a subject community or both. Smaller the surplus, less elaborate was its public authority structure. In north-east India, tribal state formations, early or medieval, were made possible by the generation of the requisite surplus from either their own or other people's wet rice cultivation. Rain-fed or irrigated, such wet rice farming was again technically made possible by the use of cattle-powered ploughs and, in some cases, even hoes. However, in India it was mostly the plough that ensured a relatively large surplus and, therefore, also a higher form of political organisation. Larger the surplus, more developed was the state. But why should a surplus-producing community, at some point of time, be necessarily transformed into or adapted to statehood unless there were also other compelling circumstances? In fact, this transformation took place when the leading families, who had the customary monopoly of supplying important public functionaries, began to realise that their public capacities could also be utilised to promote their own specific economic interests. In other words, a process of state formation started when they began to realise that they formed an interest-group—-a class in the making. At the borderline of statehood, two forms of property coexisted side by side — communal property in some form or other and private