4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
mcntalized history. After all, the study of polity essentially involves analysis of the nature, organization and distribution of power, and in state society in which the contours of inequality are sharp, relations of power encompass relations at other levels in some form or the other 5 Even the seemingly bewildering variety of details of the political history of early medieval India—the absurdly long genealogies, the inflated records of achievements of microscopic kingdoms, the rapidity of the rise and fall of centres of power—are ultimately manifestations of the way polity evolved in the period and hence worthy, not so much of cataloguing, but of serious analysis. I may make an additional point in justification of my plea for the study of political history by saying that an occasional comparison of notes with the historiography of medieval Indi^ would hdp» bjec^use medieval histdrians, instead of increasingly building up a prejudice against political history, have in fact continued to enrich its historiography and have made it an essential part of our understanding of that period.6
I
The relevant approaches to the study of early medieval polity will be taken up for further discussion later; let me start with a brief reference to the basic opposition between two broad strands of assumptions that bear upon the study of Indian polity. In one assumption, polity in pre-modem India is variously characterized as 'traditional'7 or 'Oriental Despotic'8;
in fact, it has been considered possible by different individual authors— all apparently subscribing to the assumption of "traditional polity"—to view political ideas and structures of disparate periods of Indian history in terms of a model of pro-State polity.9 It would of course be too simplistic to lump a wide variety of writings on traditional pre-modern polity together because both in their empirical and theoretical contents such contributions vary substantially, but basically the broad assumption underlying most of them remains that traditional polity was essentially changeless : 'a continual kalaeidoscopic reorientation of a given political and social content'10 Opposed to this view of "traditional" polity within which what we call "e^rly medieval' does not stand clearly demarcated is the other which envisages possibilities of change and, curiously, it is within this view that most empirical studies on early medieval India can be located. Here too views on change or on mechanisms of change are not identical; the majority of works on early medieval political history and institutions in fact contain generalizations which are mutually contradictory. The king in all the monarchical states is the source of absolute power and wields control through bureaucracy; there i$ thus nothing much to distinguish hilp from the 'absolute despot' despite bis benevolent disposition: and yet, the malqjse of polity is generated by tendencies of feudalism.11 Change, expressed mostly in terms 6f dynastic shifts, becomes, in the eady irodicvai ?ontext» ^ copccrp wer the we ^eftheea^ pcror's territory; imperial rulers down to tfie time of tfarsa endeavour to