SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF ART IN EARLY INDIA 5 assessment of the past frees us from certain ahistorical assumptions seen in the early writings on the everlasting norms and unchanging values of Indian art, and on the idealization of the relationship of the artist and the patron. Ancient Indian society was not static, but there were periods of change which influenced social institutions as well as other aspects of life,14 including art. Prof. R.S. Sharma's outline15 of broad phases of economic change in ancient India helps us in relating changes in art activity to changes in socio-economic conditions. His significant finding on the decay of towns from about AD 300 onwards, based on the survey of more than 130 excavated sites in the country,16 and gradual changes in the agrarian system and the beginning of feudal tendencies also from about this time calls our attention to a new social formation and to major changes in life around this period.17 In the 4th-7th centuries ancient Indian society was in a stage of transformation. Urban centres began to decline from the close of the 3rd century and finally were deserted towards the close of the 5th and 6th centuries AD. Pointing to the shrinkage in the trade net-work which coincided with the decline of urban centres from the post-Kushana through the Gupta period, B.D. Chattopadhyaya also says. The decline was geographically widely distributed, and since this observation is based on a study of archaeological sequences at a number of early historical sites, both of northern and southern India, the chronology decline of this urban phase is not a matter of speculation.'18 R.N. Nandi has made an interesting observation, based on epigraphical sources, on the migration of brahmanas from the towns, which archaeologists find in a state of decay in the 3rd-4th century AD, and the same places declared as tirthas by the Puranic writers of the early medieval period. He finds 'the three processes of decay, migration and sanctification' simultaneously observed in case of Mathura, Vaishali, Ayodhya, Gaya and other ancient towns, which turned into tirthas19 The socio-economic pattern gradually changed from the commodity production and market-conditioned economy of towns of the previous period (i.e. c. 6th century BC-AD 300) towards feudal mode of production from about AD 300. As Romila Thapar puts it: 'The Gupta period (fourth and fifth centuries AD) marked the beginning of a major change in the agrarian system with the assignment of land grants and revenue grants to both religious and secular assignees resulting in a new politico-economic structure in many parts of the sub-continent.'20 The new economy was marked by urban contraction and agrarian expansion and its impact was felt more from the end of the 6th century. B.N.S. Yadava says, 'The samanta system or the feudal complex which comes into clearer view in the sixth and seventh centuries, and later revealed more than one phase of development, was the most outstanding phenomenon of early Middle Ages.'21