THE MEDIEVAL STATE IN ASSAM 71 examined below. I On the question of continuity and change, I have been misunderstood. Did I not say that "in the 13th century, the Indo-Aryan culture still dominated the lives of the major section of the population of the central plains of the Brahmaputra Valley", that "the Ahom migrants did not come to a politically void region" and that "the political heritage of ancient Kamarupa had not left Upper Assam totally untouched" (emphasis added, p. 10) ? I had even argued in the same context: "the fragmented political structures incorporating that tradition still loomed large in the form of petty chiefdoms (bhuyan raj) in the vicinity. It was under such circumstances that the Ahoms started building a state system of their own in the easternmost extremity of the Brahmaputra Valley. They had therefore some building blocks even there to pick up and start with. Later, as they expanded southward and westward, they became increasingly exposed to this heritage..." (emphasis added, ibid). Their almost simultaneous northward expansion towards the Hinduized Chutiya Kingdom had also the same effect. Not much details of the aforementioned initial building blocks of the interaction could however be pinpointed in the absence of concrete evidence. It is not clear to me why the idea of a lapse into "retarded conditions"—that too only in the context of a remote southeastern corner of the Valley—should appear so "mystifying" to Lahirt Such local variations were indeed possible because of differences in topography and ethnicity, as is evident from the medieval sources and early British accounts of the region.3 I had argued not for a general retardation taking place in 'many parts of Assam', nor had I qualified it as 'sudden9, as is attributed to me. Were the pre-13th century political and socio-economic conditions really the same, as Lahiri believes, for both upper and lower Brahmaputra Valleys ? If so, one could have safely talked of such a general retardation,—even a 'sudden' one—taking place in Upper Assam, on the basis of information available for medieval Assam. However, contrary to her belief, it is more likely that the Indo-Aryan penetration was, in general, relatively shallower in the upper than in the lower valley, particularly south of the Brahmaputra. In any case, the, degree of Indo-Aryanization was visibly less in the former in our own times. Alternatively, if pre-Ahom conditions are assumed to have remained uneven in the two parts of Assam, it follows that this unevenness Con-3, See my "Geography behind history: An introduction to the socio-economic study of northeast India", in Professor D.D. Kosambi Memorial Volume Science and Human Progress (Bombay, 1979), pp. 87-116.