REVIEW ARTICLE / KISHORE KUMAR SINGH* Changing Landscape of Rural Settlements in Early Medieval India B.D. Chattopadhyaya, Aspects of Rural Settlements and Rural Society in Early Medieval India, S.G Deuskar Lectures on Indian History and Culture, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 1990. The notion of a passive and unchanging 'village community* was first visualised by the orientalists and the colonial historians of the late 18th and 19th centuries. This perception of the ancient village society as fossilised, isolated units which paid tax to despotic monarchs was in sense taken over in Marx's formulation of the 'Asiatic Mode of Production* which underlined the self-sufficient nature of the village economy with each village meeting its own agricultural needs and the manufacturing of artisanal goods. From this viewpoint each isolated village was a unit of production, distribution and consumption of rural resources. The villages thus lacked surplus for exchange after paying of revenue to the king. These factors, in the formulations, restricted the mobility of the rural society in ancient India. Indian historical writings in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries too reiterated the stereotypes of village communities and despotic rulers. Henry Maine's writing on ancient law and on early village communities in India identified the institution of caste as the major factor contributing to the imi nobility of traditional rural society.1 More recently, for the French sociologist Louis Dumont the hierarchical relationships of caste 'encompass' all contradictions or 'complementarities' within it; hence, 'there can be no development in dialectical terms, for what the dialectical movement should produce was already there from the outset, and everything forever contained within it'.2 Marxist historians D.D. Kosambi,3 R.S. Sharma,4 Irfan Habib5 and others have been critical of Marx's postulations about the Asiatic * Department of History, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Social Scientist, Vol. 21, Nos. 7-8, July-August, 1993