4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST are tempted to see Indian society as essentially changeless. If there is no social change to explain, there is no real conflict between synchrony and diachrony—that favourite bugbear of philosophers of history and historians with a philosophical bent. All that then remains is to construct and reconstruct different versions of the same story. For all stories are then cyclical, and the same actors simply appear, disappear and reapper in the same tattered garments in an endless, boring sequence. The quest for a cause or a confluence of causes in then foredoomed ab initio. It all depends on which particular stretch of the sequence is observed and on the angle of observation of the bored spectator. The study of history does then become an incompetent variant of the writing of fiction. A purely formalist stance follows as a -natural sequel: the attraction of the particular history lies entirely in the style, in the narrative structure, in the use of language for achieving particular effects. The content of history becomes analogous to the attempt to establish the relative truthfulness of the different chronologies of Suryavamsa and Chandravamsa which are obligatory opening sequences in our epics and Ruranas. What happens if we admit that in some significant sense Indian society has changed at least between the eighteenth century and today ? Then we have to grasp the crux of the problem of conceptualization of Indian society, and its change. Many historians, sociologists and political activists, following in the footsteps of James Tod1'and using European analogies, have viewed the India that the British conquered as a feudal society. According to this view, there was the same kind of personal link based on loyalty and the reciprocal grant of fiefs or rights to the use of land between the king, his vassals and a dependent or servile peasantry; there was the same predominance of direct methods of surplus extraction without a necessary intermediation of the market; there was the same rigidly hierarchical ordering of society with little mobility between the different classes or estates. This view has been challenged by many historians ofmodenv India,2 but the opinion that many of the methods of exploitation can be fruitfully compared with those which were characteristic of European feudalism in its most developed form survives among many economists and historians. For another group of social scientists, any European analogy for Indian social development is anathema. According to them, Indian society is something j^f^^i^n.y. It is a hierarchical, but at the same time, segmented society. The logic of hierarchy and of segmentation is provided by one and the same ideology and a deeply ingrained institutional structure supporting that ideology, namely, the caste system. In fact, according to the formulation of the most famous theorist of the caste system in modem time, caste is "a state of mind, a state of mind which is expressed by the emergence, in various situations, of groups of various orders, generally called 'castes' ".3 It is symptomatic of this type of formulation that here society is supposed to have a view of itself collectively. The theory of the caste system, in this view, is not