THE FEUDALISM DEBATE A debate began in 1979 with Harbans Mukhia's Presidential Address to the Medieval India Section of the Indian History Congress, where he questioned R.S. Sharma's idea that early medieval India (c. AD 600-c AD 1200) was a feudal society. There had been other critiques of Indian feudalism, but none of such conceptual depth, just as Sharma's exposition had been the most detailed and discussed one. The importance of Mukhia's piece was almost immediately recognized on all sides, but its publication in 1981 in the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) was something of a seismic disturbance. TJ. Byres, the person at the epicentre, was quick to sight the emerging groundswell in distant historical zones and came out with a special issue of JPS in 1985, assisted by Mukhia as co-editor, that recorded responses to Mukhia's piece (henceforth Mukhia) from an array of distinguished historians: R.S. Sharma, Irfan Habib, Burton Stein, Frank Perlin, Chris Wickham, and Arif Dirlik. The debate was set in perspective in an introductory essay by Byres, and ended with Mukhia's reply (henceforth Mukhia A) to the responses. The same year it was brought out as a book, Feudalism and Non-European Societies, edited by Byres and Mukhia (Frank Cass, London), with the obvious purpose of making the debate available' to a wider audience. Unfortunately, the purpose could only partially be served in India, where the book remained unavailable to a large number of people. That was perhaps the main reason why Mukhia and the Manohar Publishers and Distributors took it upon themselves to bring out an Indian edition, entitled The Feudalism Debate, the one under review here; its translation in Hindi was undertaken for the same reason. But it is also a new edition, and includes two articles - one by Halil Berktay and another by Ashok Rudra - that appeared in JPS after 1985. These were considered to be more easily comprehensible and to have more value for space than the earlier contribution by Frank Perlin which 'unfortunately ...had to be dropped because of [its] extreme linguistic complexity and inordinate length' (12). We also have some other thoughts of Mukhia on the idea of feudalism in his 'Prologue: The Feudalism Debate and After' (henceforth Mukhia B). Here he refrains from responding to Berktay's and Rudra's pieces, presumably because he wants to 'emphasize exploration rather than agreement' (12). It is to this exploration that we must turn now. It is an exploration into the meaning of feudalisnvas an economic category, as distinct from the other important usage of the term for a