Editorial Note READERS may have noticed that Social Scientist issues are increasingly falling into two distinct categories. Some arc specific theme-oriented issues in the sense that each such issue is organised around a particular theme and contains articles more or less exclusively concerned With this theme; others however are agglomerations of articles and notes dealing with diverse themes. A journal like ours cannot, and perhaps < should not, attempt to become exclusively theme-oriented; a mix of both types of issues is what we shall continue to strive for. Within this "mix"^ however, our current plans are to have approximately six issues, i.e. hgtf of the total number of issues, in a year devoted to discussions of specific themes. With this object in view we are planning to bring out in the near future the following five issues, each dealing with a specific theme on the Chinese economy; on the significance of the current changer in India's economic policy; on the agrarian question in India; on issues concerning women and on micro-studies of the impact of colonialism in particular regions. "Portmanteau" issues however will be interpersed between these five theme-oriented issues as well as on either side of them. The current issue of Social Scientist is decidedly a "Portmanteau" issue with articles dealing with diverse themes. We publish as the lead article of the current number the presidential address by Professor RD. Chattopadhyaya delivered some time ago to the Acient India section of the Indian Histoly Congress, in which the author develops a framework for the sstudy of early Medieval Indian polity. He is critical of the "segmentary state" approach to early medieval polity, currently fashionable among a number of Western Indologists which sees "ritual sovereignty" rather than '•political sovereignty" as the major integrative factor in the state-structure; he is also critical of attempts to trace the genesis of early medieval polity characterised by the samanta feudatory system, to the creation/row above of basis of power through the system of land-grants. Rather he sees the early medieval polity as essentially an "integrative polity" thrown up by the exigencies of the greater penetration of state society into local agrarian and peripheral levels. It thus constitutes in his view an intermediate stage between the territorially limited state society of the early historical period and the state society of the medieval period characterised by the exercise