POLITICAL PROCESSES AND STRUCTURE 5 stem the tide of disintegration and fragmentation, which is seen as a disastrous change from the ideal imperial pattern and which is invariably assessed against the ultimate failure to ratain what used to be called— and I fear many of our much used text books continue to call—the Hindu political order.12 Concern with failure of the early medieval political order—a concern not only noticeable in works on political history13 but a starting point in serious monographs on social and economic history14 as well—has logically led to value-judgements on the structure of polity; a single quote from a widely-read text book on polity, out of many such available, will serve to illustrate the sentiment common to most historians of early medieval India: '(the) ideal of federal-feudal empire, with full liberty to each constituent state to strive for the imperial status but without permission to forge a unitary empire after the conquest thus produced a state of continuous instability in ancient India'15. I have chosen this quote to underline the kind of ambivalence ^hich permeates the writings even of those who tend tg think in terms of change; there is dichotomy between 'constituent state' and 'unitary empire', the dichotomy deriving in the present case from adherence to the model provided by ancient polittical thinkers; the dichotomy is not timeless because its emergence i? located in the fourth century A.D. and yet it 'produced a state of continuous instability in ancient India', instability being change from the norm i.e., the centralized State. Whatever be the merit of the terminologies used in these writings, historiographically the interesting correlation is between change in polity and feudalism 'Feudalism' is thus not a new historiographical convention; its use, limited to the political plane, has been as a synonym for political fragmentation and the term has in fact been shuttled back and forth in Indian history to suit any period in which no 'unitary empire' could be located on the political horizon 16 We all know that a major breakthrough in the application of this term to the Indian context came in the form of a new genre of empirical works from the fifties;17 here for the first time 'feudal polity' is not an entity-in-itself; through a reasoned argument—irrespective of whether we accept the argument or not—'feudal polity' is shown to be a stage which represents a structural change in the Indian social and economic order; it envisages the emergence of a hierarchical structure of society in pl^ce of the binarily opposed entities of the State and the peasantry, and it is basically this hierarchical structure with its different tiers of intermediaries which explains the mechanism of exploitation and coercion of the early medieval state. The distinctive contribution of 'Indian feudalism', from the perspective of the problem I have in view, consists in the attempt to plug in the gap between polity and society. tn concluding this brief review of various stands of opinions on early Indfen polfty, which tend to be organized into two opposite sets, I feel tha^ the 6p^fosition catnnot be pushed to any extreme limits. -If the feeling rep^ettts a curious c6ntjra3tetion, the contradiction is embedded in avail-