¹ SeeChattopadhyaya, B. D., ‘Political processes and structure of polity in early medieval India: problems of perspective’, presidential address to the Ancient India Section, Indian History Congress, 44th Session, Burdwan, 1983, for a cogent example of such dissatisfaction.Google Scholar My present argument is partly anticipated in my ‘The pre-colonial Indian state in history and epistemology: a reconstruction of societal formation in the Western Deccan.from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century’, in Claessen, H. J. M. and Skalnik, P. (eds), The Study of the Slate (The Hague, 1981), 275–302.Google ScholarBayly, C. A., Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar, is of obvious relevance to my argument but despite references in the notes had regrettably not been fully read at the time of writing this essay.

² Sen, S. N., Administrative System of the Marathas (1976 reprint of the 2nd edn, Calcutta, 1925), 372.Google Scholar

³ Gordon, S. N., ‘The slow conquest: administrative integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720–1760’, Modern Asian Studies, xi (1977), 1–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ The following comment is generally applicable: ‘It has been an assumption often repeated in scholarly writings that crafts have no history in India: i.e. that all the elementary tools, devices and practices were already in existence at the earliest imaginable times—earlier even than the immigration of the Aryans’, Habib, Irfan, ‘Notes on the Indian textile industry in the 17th century’, in De, Barun (ed.), Essays in Honour of Professor Susobhan Chandra Sarkar (New Delhi, 1976), 180Google Scholar, citing Sir George Birdwood and N. G. Mukerji.

⁵ I shall term the latter part of the immense period traditionally labelled ‘medieval’ in Indian history as ‘early modern’, partly for comparative purposes, partly because it needs to be distinguished from the earlier period and largely because I believe it to be more neutral of the loaded significance of applying the term ‘medieval’ to the period preceding colonialism.

⁶ Saletore, B. A., Social and Political Life in the Vijayanagara Empire (A.D. 1346–A.D. 1646), 2 vols (Madras, 1934).Google Scholar

⁷ Fukazawa, H., ‘The state and the economy: Maharashtra and the Deccan: a note’, in Raychaudhuri, Tapan and Habib, Irfan (eds), Cambridge Economic History of India, i, c. 1200–c. 1750 (Cambridge, 1982), 198–200.Google Scholar

⁸ See also B. D. Chattopadhyaya, ‘Political processes and structure of polity’, 21, nn. 3 and 4.

⁹ Gune, Vithal Trimbak, The Judicial System of the Marathas (Poona, 1953)Google Scholar, and Sharma, G. D., Rajput Polity: A Study of Politics and Administration of the State of Marwar, 1638–1749 (New Delhi, 1977).Google Scholar

¹⁰ The danger of oversimplification stated in the Preamble will seem most obvious in respect of these comments, and especially of Habib's views on change. His review of Marx's Pre-Capitalist Formations in ‘Problems of Marxist historical analysis’, Enquiry, new series, iii, 1969 (Monsoon), 52–67Google Scholar, his ‘The social distribution of landed property in pre-British India (a historical survey)’, in Sharma, R. S. and Jha, V. (eds), Indian Society: Historical Probings in Memory of D. D. Kosambi (New Delhi, 1974), 264–316Google Scholar and his treatment of land taxation in ‘Agrarian relations and land revenue: North India’, Cambridge Economic History of India [henceforth CEHI], i, 235–49Google Scholar, display an untypical conception of developmental (‘evolutionary’) change. Yet it seems to me that the bulk of his work, the methods of argument and use of evidence, contradict such sentiments, confirming my point. For example, his treatment of technology does not attempt to reconstruct the production line and its possible vicissitudes over time (arguably fruitful in a period of commercialization) but essentially to establish what India has or has not, in so far as the potential for industrialization is concerned. See also, Raychaudhuri, T., ‘The mid-eighteenth-century background’, in Kumar, Dharma and Desai, Meghnad (eds), CEHI, ii, c. 1757–c. 1970 (Cambridge, 1983), 18–20Google Scholar. My point is that at present we lack a method capable of testing the possibility of change in the fabric of society.

¹¹ Pearson, M. N., Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley, 1976).Google Scholar

¹² Saletore, Social and Political Life in the Vijayanagara Empire.

¹³ For instance, Habib, ‘Agrarian relations and land revenue: North India’, CEHI, i, 239, and also the tendency to juxtapose prices from widely separated places and types of context into a single series, as in the same author's ‘Monetary system and prices’, CEHI, i, 370.Google Scholar It is also responsible for a special type of study characterizing our historiography–articles on institutions or systems based upon a commentary on a single document, as in Gordon, S. N., ‘Forts and social control in the Maratha state’, Modern Asian Studies, xiii (1979), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kulkarni, A. R., ‘The deshmukh watan with special reference to Indapur’, Indian Historical Review, iii (1976), 105–13.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Thus Fukazawa, Hiroshi, ‘A study of the local administration of Adilshahi Sultanate (a.d. 1489–1686)’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics, iv (1963), 37–8Google Scholar, and ‘The state and the economy: Maharashtra and the Deccan: a note’, CEHI, i, 193Google Scholar, refers to this paucity of information. The first-mentioned essay is one of the few useful studies in this area. Existing documentation, published and unpublished, has yet to be fully exploited.

¹⁵ This is the brunt of interpretations of South Indian polity produced by what for convenience I refer to as the ‘American school’, represented by my collaborator Stein, Burton, as, for instance, in Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi, 1980).Google Scholar The focus of this school on (i) the sphere of ritual relationships and exchanges between royal courts and rural inhabitants, and (ii) the evidence for corporate types of interaction within local, rural institutions, has led to an emphasis on the negative character of contemporary states (‘deconstruction of the state’, ‘segmentary state’, an absence of fiscalization, class and other features central to the north Indian historiography). But this seems to me to substitute one unbalanced and inadequate view for another, in place of a more complex notion of state argued in this paper. In so far as the last pre-colonial centuries are concerned, Stein has begun to revise his interpretation as will be evident in Part I. But see note 23 for criticism with more general implications. For fiscality in the Vijayanagar Karnatak see Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, xxii, Dhárwár (Bombay, 1884), 439–41.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Duff, James Grant, History of the Marathas, 3 vols (Bombay, 1883/no. of edition not given), i, chs II and IIIGoogle Scholar, and Robertson, H. D., ‘“Revenue enclosure” in Mr. Chaplin's report, ist May 1820’, and ‘“Revenue enclosure” in Mr. Chaplin's report, 10th October 1821’, Selection of Papers from the Records of the East India House, iv (London, 1826), 399–436 and 524–97.Google Scholar Robertson returned to his exploration of these issues in a number of such reports.

¹⁷ From this focus on role and function follows the observation that the notion of individualism is weak or absent outside the capitalist west.

¹⁸ My ‘Extended class relations, rights and the problem of rural autonomy in the eighteenth century Maratha Deccan’, Journal of Peasant Studies, v (1978), 172–237Google Scholar (title updated), is largely devoted to demonstrating these alternative principles. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat, represents the more usual focus on functions and roles.

¹⁹ See, for instance, Patourel, John Le, ‘The Plantagenet Dominions’, History, 1 (1965), 307–8.Google Scholar

²⁰ Habib, , ‘Agrarian relations and land revenue: north India’, CEHI, i, 244–5Google Scholar, concerning vanta in Gujarat, but also the striking use of Munro's observations for the Deccan and Ceded Districts, op. cit., 248, text and n. 1. See also n. 5 above. What is important is the more general method which these examples seem to represent and which seem to me related to the function and continuity principles, although these often contradict explicit intentions. Like the village community (op. cit., 249) the historiography is rife with internal contradictions, on which see also n. 30.

²¹ Gune, Judicial System of the Marathas; for South India see among many works Dikshit, G. S., Local Self-government in Mediaeval Karnataka (Dharwar, 1964)Google Scholar, Saletore, Social and Political life in the Vijayanagara Empire, and Stein, Peasant State and Society. The latter gives a useful list of references to earlier work on the subject.

²² See note 15 above.

²³ For similar responses see Béteille, André (review of Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge)Google Scholar), Indian Economic and Social History Review [IESHR], xix (1982), 213–14Google Scholar, Richards, J. F. (review of Stein, Peasant state and society), Journal of Asian Studies, xlii (1983), 1005–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Champakalakshmi, R., ‘Peasant state and society in medieval South India: a review article’, IESHR, xviii (1981), 411–26.Google Scholar

²⁴ Chattopadhyaya, ‘Political processes and structure of polity’, 6, makes a similar point: ‘In fact, in no state system, however centralized, there can be a single focus or level of power, and the specificity of the differential distribution of power in early medieval polity may be an issue more complex than it has hitherto been assumed’ (sic). See n. 113 for further references.

²⁵ See my ‘Proto-industrialization and pre-colonial South Asia’, Past and Present, xcviii (1983)Google Scholar, section VII; Stein, , ‘The state and the economy: the South’, CEHI, i, 203–4Google Scholar, makes a similar point concerning perceptions of the ‘three centuries [which] separate the high point of Vijayanagar authority and the establishment of undisputed British rule in South India.’

²⁶ This section summarizes an argument I am currently developing and have discussed in shortened form in ‘Exchange economy and culture in late pre-colonial India: an alternative model’, to appear with the collected papers of the South Asia Regional Seminar 1983/84: Merchants, Capital and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania.

²⁷ For example, Wilson, B. R. (ed.), Rationality (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar, and the excellent volume of Hollis, M. and Lukes, S. (eds), Rationality and Relativism (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar. Cohen, G. A., Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (Oxford, 1978), ch. VIIGoogle Scholar, is useful, while Giddens, Anthony, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (London, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Intro, and ch. I, is important for its multi-disciplinary range. Holton, Gerald, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973)Google Scholar, Intro, (e.g. 15), makes the same type of distinction in the development of scientific thought.

²⁸ Balzac, neatly captures this position in ‘Perseverance in Love’, Droll Stories (Bombay, 1969 edn), 327Google Scholar: ‘“Because, monseigneur,” replied the priest, “all rights are knit together like the pieces of a coat of mail, and if one makes default, all fail.”’

²⁹ At least, this is my reading of remarks in Thompson, E. P., ‘The grid of inheritance: a comment’, in Goody, Jack, Thirsk, Joan and Thompson, E. P. (eds), Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800 (London, 1976), 328–60Google Scholar; see also the critical comments of Medick, Hans, ‘Plebeian culture in the transition to capitalism’, in Samuel, R. and Jones, G. Stedman (eds), Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (London, 1983), 87–9.Google Scholar

³⁰ The ‘contradictions’ seem therefore to be those characterizing our organization of knowledge about the state. See, for example, Habib, , ‘Agrarian relations and land revenue: North India’, CEHI, i, 239–40Google Scholar. But this is not to say that the concept of contradiction is either invalid or unimportant.

³¹ For example, Dumont, Louis, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications (London, 1970)Google Scholar, ch. IV, ‘The division of labour’, and Raychaudhuri, , ‘Non-agricultural production: Mughal India’, CEHI, i, 279–81.Google Scholar Jocelyn de Jongh, in his address to the Lewis Morgan Centenary Seminar, University of Leiden, 25 November 1983, nicely refers to this syndrome in anthropology as the spurious creation of a ‘normative past’. Habib's, self-criticism in ‘Agrarian relations and land revenue: North India, CEHI, i, 248Google Scholar, is refreshing in this respect.

³² Duby, Georges, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago and London, 1980)Google Scholar; Ali, M. Athar, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (Bombay, 1968).Google Scholar

³³ In this text, I use ‘contemporary’ to refer to events occurring in the social context forming the object of the sentence (now or in the past); ‘modern’ refers always to events in the writer's present.

³⁴ Polanyi, Karl, ‘Aristotle discovers the economy’, in Polanyi, K., Arensberg, C. and Pearson, H. W. (eds), Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory (Glencoe, Illinois, 1957)Google Scholar, and for a case study, ‘Archaic economic institutions: cowrie money’, in Dalton, George (ed.), Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (Boston, 1968), 280–305Google Scholar, which forms part of his Dahomey and the Slave Trade (Seattle, 1966)Google Scholar; Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘Structuralism and the theory of sociological knowledge’, Social Research, xxxv (1968), 682–706.Google Scholar Bourdieu was criticizing method and theory in 20th century sociology and attempting to describe its forms and consequences. Polanyi's ‘substantivism’ would be a case in point, as would also be the regime-centric literature treated in the text above. Polanyi considered some societies to be 'substantivist’ (bounded, interiorized, exchanging according to non-economic criteria, for example); Bourdieu, by contrast, firmly refers such substantivist characteristics back to our particular ways of thinking about social relationships and other ‘societies’. Now, my view put forward in the text, conforms to Bourdieu rather than Polanyi (which is to say that ‘substantivism’ is firstly an epistemological problem, and secondly one of method and theory). However, if Bourdieu's observations are correct, they are so in the sense of referring to characteristics in all social contexts. As in 20th century France, past social orders in Europe, Asia and elsewhere were also characterized by this disparity between substantivist tendencies (system-making, and so forth) and non-substantivist contexts and aspects (the dimension of events, sequences of events, agency and career, consequences and change).

³⁵ For the present, see my ‘Exchange economy and culture in late pre-colonial India’ for further elucidation, and Ernest Gellner, ‘Relativism and universals’, in Hollis and Lukes, Rationality and Relativism, 181–200, for the popular dichotomy between western and non-western societies. In contrast, both Marx and Plekhanov made the same type of distinction as that formulated in this essay, although with reference to 19th century capitalism; thus see Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, ch. VIII. According to Marx. ‘In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life …’. ‘Preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy’, 1859, in Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works in One Volume (London, 1968), 183Google Scholar; or in Plekhanov's brief remark, ‘after all, right is right, and economy is economy, and the two conceptions should not be mixed up’, Plekhanov, G. V., The Development of the Monist view of History (Moscow, 1956), 35.Google Scholar

³⁶ Raychaudhuri, , ‘The state and the economy: the Mughal empire’, CEHI, i, ch. VII, 184Google Scholar, where with conscious irony the author characterizes the peace and security within the Mughal empire in much the same way as colonial historians have traditionally treated colonial rule and its benefits. To be fair, these and other critical references in these notes should be set off against quite different views in the same chapters, especially to some excellent passages in parts of his ‘The mid-eighteenth century background’, ii, 3–35.

³⁷ Dirks, Nicholas B., ‘The structure and meaning of political relations in a South Indian little kingdom’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, new series, xiii (1979)Google Scholar, and for comparison Goody, Jack, ‘The over-kingdom of Gonja’, in Forde, D. and Kaberry, P. M. (eds), West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1967), 179–205.Google Scholar Much of the evidence used by Dirks concerns the nineteenth century and thus begs some of the questions raised in my argument.

³⁸ It cannot be overemphasized that ‘contradiction’, in a strict sense, is not the same as ‘conflict’; see, for example, Giddens, Anthony, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, i, Power, Property and the State (Berkeley, 1981), 230–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the term combines both functional and conflictual principles in the relationships to which it applies (as in section G (b) 2 below).

³⁹ In my ‘Exchange economy and culture in late pre-colonial India’, I provisionally term this other dimension ‘instrumental’, but have strongly resisted the temptation to burden the present text with yet more jargon and theoretical treatment. Instead the discussion below is intended to reconstruct certain aspects of the instrumental sphere and to give a sense of its problematic relationship with the substantive.

⁴⁰ Sen, , Administrative System of the Marathas, 47.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Fukazawa, , ‘The state and the economy: Maharashtra and the Deccan: a note’, CEHI, i, 195.Google Scholar

⁴² Habib, , ‘The social distribution of landed property in pre-British India’, is most illuminating on this question.Google Scholar

⁴³ Ziegler, Norman P., ‘Some notes on Rajput loyalties during the Mughal period’, in Richards, J. F. (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Madison, 1978), 215–51Google Scholar; see also G. D. Sharma, Rajput Polity.

⁴⁴ Fukazawa, ‘A study of local administration of Adilshahi Sultanate’; but see also the invaluable tables put together by Tamaskar, B. G., The life and Work of Malik Ambar (Delhi, 1978), 117–23.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ The conflict between More and Bhosle treated in the ‘More Bakhar’ and excerpted in Patwardhan, R. P. and Rawlinson, H. G. (eds), Source Book of Maratha History (reprint Calcutta, 1978)Google Scholar (pagination different from original), Book II, ch. II, ‘The conquest of Javli’, provides a remarkable window onto such differences and their social and political contexts.

⁴⁶ See also my ‘The pre-colonial Indian state’, 282, for this point and the changes discussed below (based upon Habib, ‘The social distribution of landed property in pre-British India’, 291, for the Delhi Sultanate and Mughals; Forbes, Alexander Kinloch, Râs Mâlâ, or Hindoo Annals of the Province of Goozerat, in Western India (London, 1856), ii, 272Google Scholar, for the Gujarat Sultanate; my ‘Extended class relations, rights and the problem of rural autonomy’, for the 18th century Marathas; the map reproduced in Moosvi, Shireen, ‘The magnitude of the land-revenue demand and the income of the Mughal ruling class under Akbar’, Medieval India: A Miscellany, iv (1977), 104–5Google Scholar, ‘Uttar Pradesh: extent of gross cultivation in 1595’, for the focus of most dense cultivation around Agra).

⁴⁷ My ‘The pre-colonial Indian state’, 279.

⁴⁸ Sen, , Administrative System of the Marathas, for example Book I, ch. II, and Book IV, chs I and II.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ The documentation is found in the respective rumals for the two towns, kept in the Pune Archives (Peshva Daftar): Pune Jamav, Rumal 473, and Satara Jamav, Rumal 359 (all future references to documentation in the various sections of the Jamav records will omit mention of the archive).

⁵⁰ A major collection of such private papers is kept in the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal in Pune, although for the most part uncatalogued and unresearched. Various ‘daftars’ of this kind are kept in the Maharashtra State Archives in Bombay, smaller collections are found in a variety of locations such as the History Department of Marathwada University, Aurangabad, while many still remain in the ancestral houses of the descendants of the old families.

⁵¹ But see Leonard, Karen, The Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley, 1979)Google Scholar, and a mercurial remark in Guha, Amalendu, ‘More about Parsi Seths: their roots, entrepreneurship and comprador role, 1650–1918’, Economicand Political Weekly, xix, no. 3 (21 01 1984), 118.Google Scholar The remarks of a contemporary Bhimsen about 1720, in Khobrekar, V. G. (ed.), Tarikh-i-Dilkasha (Memoirs of Bhimsen relating to Aurangzeb's Deccan Campaigns) (Bombay, 1972), 232Google Scholar, concerning recruitment of large numbers of ‘non-professional’ scribe-accountants, are especially symptomatic of this growth (also cited by Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 164).

⁵² Giddens, , A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, 5–6, similarly associates storage of information with authority, fiscalism and surveillance (qua. Foucault, for which see n. 115) in non-capitalist states, but in terms of Mumford's notion of the city as ‘storage container’. However, I am attempting to construct a notion of information storage and usage of a far more dispersed, dense and spontaneous kind, located in numerous centres and kinds of activity, in which towns and courts have a vital generative and organizational function but in which in turn are located, a notion in short appropriate to the kinds of pre-industrial economy in question. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 156, refers to ‘networks of skills and information’ in respect of commerce.Google Scholar

⁵³ Gazetteer of … Dhárwár, 439–53.

⁵⁴ The following detail is drawn from archival materials: A. Kasbe Rahimatpur: (i) tajakare dasta kasbe rahimatpura pāā vāi sumārasana (1070) rakama jamā berija, which gives the various payments categories; (ii) a large bundle of various Adil Shahi papers for sumār son (1074), including, for example, letters to village ‘officials’ (ajadivān pāā vāi tāā mokadamane …); (iii) dasta kasbe rahimatpura suāā sita (sabaina alafa (1076)), which gives the various payment categories; (iv) hisebu kadima thāne bāba kasbe rahimatpura pāā vāi sumārasana (1066) aja nāne honu pātashāhi…, all of which documents are in Satara Jamav, Rumal 359 (such documents are often very substantial, no. iii, for example, consisting of 64 sheets written on both sides).

B. Kasbe Supe: (i) a series of different papers all labelled with slight variation dasta kasbe supe pāā majakura dasta suāā samāna (8); (ii) tāā kānu kasbe supe tāā thāne moina suāā samāna;, (iii) hisebu ināmati kasbe supe suāā (1052) aja kāsa dori …; (iv) tajakare bagāitā kāā supe suāā (1058) aja rakama; (v) ugavani kasbe supe suāā (1059); (vi) sista kasbe supe surasana (1054) … all of which are in Pune Jamav, Rumal 473.

⁵⁵ The view that the medium is cowry is based on recent study of a large number of cases of references to exchange media termed khurda take and generally translated as copper.

⁵⁶ Except for Joshi's, P. M. excellent article on ‘Coins current in the kingdom of Golconda’, Journal of the Numismatic Society of India, v (1943), 85–95Google Scholar, there seems to be no serious study of minting and production of coins in southern India to match what is available for the Mughal north. These statements are thus based upon indirect and circumstantial evidence including the mentioned inventories, listed collections of coins, and the evidence of increasing imports by the Dutch and English East India Companies. I discuss the problem in ‘Money-use in late pre-colonial India and the international trade in currency media’, forthcoming, and in ‘Changes in production and circulation of money in 17th and 18th century India: an essay on monetization before colonial occupation’, in van Cauwenberghe, E., Irsigler, F. and Koerner, M. (eds), Mintage, Monetary Circulation and Exchange Rates (Trier, 1984).Google Scholar The discussion in these pages is based on full awareness of the difference between monies of account and the means of actual payments.

⁵⁷ Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 47–8, and Fukazawa, , ‘The state and the economy: Maharashtra and the Deccan: a note’, CEHI, i, 197–8.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Typical examples are: (i) for the village of Parvati near Pune city, Pune Jamav, Rumal 121, thalajhādā cakabandi māuje parvali tāā haveli pāā pune aja jamina kāsa …, and (ii) for the village of Padvi in the tarf of Patas, Pune Jamav, Rumal 660, thalajhādā cakabandi māuje padavi tāā patasa pāā pune aja jamina jumalā kaditna kāsa … (both undated).

⁵⁹ Among a large number of papers for different villages and market towns in the Satara Jamav: A. Kasbe Rahimatpur: (i) akāra nakhtābāba kasbe rahimalpurafasti sana 1121 jamā rupaye …; (ii) hiseba ekuna jamā suāā sana (1119), both documents from Rumal 359; B. Kasbe War: jamābandi kasbe vāi suāā sana (1104) bāā mohatarfā jama sāla majakura, from Rumal 1677; C. Māuje Apsinge: akāra (… māuje apasinge sāā koregāva pāā vāi) fasli sana 1122, from Rumal 227; D. Māuje Sap: akāra niāā sipāi thānā māuje sāpa sāā koregāon … fasti sana 1122, from Rumal 397.

⁶⁰ Observed for many villages in the Pune and Satara districts.

⁶¹ This general set of reforms and increases in taxation rating imposed between the 1750s and ‘70s, is called the kamal. Examples of surveys can be found in many village rumals, for example two separated by a decade in the village of Padvi in tarf Patas, both in Pune Jamav, Rumal 660: (i) mojani māuje padavi tāā pātasa prānta pune suāā (1163) ch 10 sāvala; (ii) jangalakhurdā māuje padavi tāā pātas prāntā pune suāā (1172).

⁶² Thus, the document for the village of Padvi, in Pune Jamav, Rumal 660: yādi māuje padavi tāā pātasa prānta pune suāā (1184) tankhā dekhila saradeshamukhi rupaye …, in which we find comments on the attempt to impose the new standard and the failure of the inhabitants to ‘understand’ it (sadarahu mojanice bighāyane kula samajuta hota nāhi sababa cālate lāvaganavaraca ugavani jamina …).

⁶³ Such papers are very abundant. Take the village of Wing in the prānt of Karad (Satara Jamav, Rumal 529), where we find a series of papers titled pāhāni khurdā and pāhāni jangalakhurdā for suāā (1158); sudabanda pāhāni suāā (1159); bhotakhata pāhāni suāā (1161).

⁶⁴ The accounts prepared under Apaji Mahadev's kamavisi for the village of Padvi are typical (Pune Jamav, Rumal 660); for example: (i) hiseba māuje padavi tāā pātasa prāā pune suāā (1181) …; (ii)yādi māuje padavi … suāā (1184) tankhā dekhila saradeshamukhi rupāye.

⁶⁵ Thus the surveys referred to in note 61.

⁶⁶ The terms ‘patrimonial’ and ‘prebendial’ are used here in a limited and precise way. The first refers to heritable and ownable rights, thus properties, and the second to rescindable or delegated rights, which in legal terms were held, rather than possessed, through the mere good favour of the ruler. In ‘The pre-colonial Indian state’, 276, I refer to the ‘emergence of semi-patrimonial bureaucratic organizations’, but this refers to a more general proposition concerning the points made in Section D (a) above (the role of household organization in state formation and economy). Because of the general tendency of the historiography to emphasize the prebendial (king-centred, jagir-organized, taxation-run) character of South Asian polities, I have been tempted in contrast to use the term ‘patrimonial’ to characterize the general behavioural features which I see influencing social organization, action and change. None of these uses should be confused with Weber's applications (Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Roth, G. and Wittich, C. (Berkeley and London, 1968), ii, chs XII and XIII)Google Scholar, nor with those of Burton Stein. In order to avoid confusion I have provisionally renounced these more general usages in this text.

⁶⁷ For example, Neale, Walter C., ‘Land is to rule’, in Frykenberg, R. E. (ed.), Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Madison and London, 1969), 3–15Google Scholar; and Arjun Appadurai, ‘The terminology of measurement in a peasant community in Maharashtra’, cyclostyled discussion paper, December 1981.

⁶⁸ Thackeray, St John, ‘Jumabundi fusli 1229’, ‘“Revenue enclosure” in Mr. Chaplin's report, 5th November 1821’, Selection of Papers from the Records of the East India House, iv (London, 1826), 388–90Google Scholar, is both eloquent and specific on measurement types. The absence of studies of measurement systems at an appropriate level contrasts markedly with the tradition of great studies on European field systems carried out in the late igth and early soth centuries. See especially, Gray, Howard Levi, English Field Systems (Cambridge, Mass., 1915).Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Gazetteer of … Dhárwár, 440.

⁷⁰ Grant, James, ‘“Revenue enclosure” in Mr. Chaplin's report, 20th August 1822’, Selection of Papers from the Records of the East India House, iv, 646, for a cursory reference.Google Scholar

⁷¹ It need not be laboured that such types of measure are remarkably universal. For example, Gray, English Field Systems; Smith, R. E. F., Peasant Farming in Muscovy (Cambridge, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, e.g. 30, for Muscovy.

⁷² Pedder, W. G., ‘Correspondence relating to the introduction of the revenue survey assessment in the Kaira collectorate of … Guzerat’, Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, new series, xiv (1869), esp. 50–6Google Scholar on Kubadthal in pargana Daskrohi.

⁷³ For the mír, see Robinson, Geroid Tanquary, Rural Russia under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord–Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917 (New York, 1932), 274 and n. 24Google Scholar, and Male, D. J., Russian Peasant Organization before Collectivization: A Study of Commune and Gathering 1925–1930 (Cambridge, 1971), 6Google Scholar; Bloch, Marc, French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics (London, 1966)Google Scholar, and Blum, Jerome, ‘The internal structure and polity of the European village community from the 15th to the 19th century’, Journal of Modem History xliii (1971), 541–76Google Scholar, provide interesting discussion of the systematic manner in which communal institutions developed during the period of growing commercial capitalism in Europe. Notably, these institutions characterized the most fertile and populous villages and thus those most involved in market production and penetration by urban capital; see also Braun, Rudolf, ‘Early industrialization and demographic change in the canton of Zurich’, in Tilly, Charles (ed.), Historical Studies of Changing Fertility (Princeton, 1978)Google Scholar. In the light of this discussion, it is worth emphasizing that the mír itself adapted and changed right into the first years of the Soviet regime.

⁷⁴ Information privately given by Hardiman, David, and his Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District (Oxford, 1981), 37.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ These shares frequently involved parallel collection agencies (see also section F). Countless examples pervade the whole system of rights and distributions of powers and sovereignties in pre-colonial India, and will ultimately need to be mapped if we are to escape anachronistic views of frontier and territory. For a well-researched example of the point see Sen, Surendranath, The Military System of the Maralhas (Calcutta, 1979 reprint of the second revised edition of 1958), 20 ffGoogle Scholar, for a fascinating account of the origins and development of ‘chauth’ (cāutāi); ‘chauth’ was a share of the taxable surplus taken by one territorial authority from an area partly controlled and taxed by another. See also Pissurlencar, Pandurang, Portuguese–Maratha Sambandh (Bombay, 1967), 79–80Google Scholar, and Kulkarni, G. T., ‘Some new light on chauth and chauthai kul’, Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute, xxxvi (1976/1977), 66–72Google Scholar. Sen refers to a ‘petty Rajput chief’ who ‘used to exact chauth from the Portuguese subjects of Daman’, and who was known as ‘the Chauthia’ and the ‘Raja Chauthia’ (20, 23–4). For Stavorinus's observation, see Stavorinus, John Splinter, Voyages to the East-Indies by the late John Splinter Stavorinus, translated and annotated by Wilcocke, Samuel Hull (London, 1789), iii, 140–1.Google Scholar By the mid 18th century cāutāi had become incorporated into the ‘internal’ Maratha system of rights and often granted as saranjam (prebend). These references are incidental evidence of the kind of history writing advocated in this essay.

⁷⁶ Such shares were called amals;, for examples concerning inam villages and inam fields in the Pune region, see my ‘Extended class relations, rights and the problem of rural autonomy’, 228 n. 37 and 231 n. 53. One such example is the village of Sudumbre in tarfa Chakan: up to 1753/54 the Chinchvad temple had held only the svarajya-half in inam, but in that year (sumār san (1154)), the other muglai-half was given to the Marathas who in turn granted it to Chinchvad. Often, however, the muglai was either retained as khalsa or granted in inam or saranjam to a new party. It should perhaps be stressed that such a right, although in our perspective fractional, was complete within the channel defined by that right; contemporaries could thus speak without contradiction of the complete (mātra or sambandhe) valan of the quater mokadami of a given village. That quater contained all the privileges, was inviolable and could be exercised in full.

⁷⁷ The unintended consequence of the influential relativist thesis (the specificity of the systems of meaning defining each), is that one system should be incomprehensible to, even unapproachable by, a person within the embrace of another system (known as the ‘translatability problem’, for which see n. 108), and thus beyond his (thus our) capacity either to describe or explain. Relativism is a kind of substantivism confined to the cognitive. My argument that both substantivism and its opposite, instrumentalism, inhabit all complex societies, suggests instead that despite cultural variation the problem of translatability is misconceived. See my ‘Exchange economy and culture in late pre-colonial India’, where I discuss this question at greater length. Moreover, note that relativism begs the problem of what in the first place should constitute a cultural unit.

⁷⁸ See my ‘Extended class relations, rights and the problem of rural autonomy’, 228–9, n. 38, and for the series of confirmations referred to in the text the following Pune Jamav documents all concerning kasbe Supe: (i) hajārata panā haradu jiyā āta dasta … suāā (1028), from hajārata rajeshri shahaji bhosale to the various appointed and hereditary officials of prānt Supe (Rumal 474); (ii) ājama haidarashā kāji kasbe supe …, from the hujur (of) maharāja rājashri svāmi … suāā (1048) … (Rumal 473); (iii) bajānebu kārakunāni hala va …, to the appointed and hereditary officers and rayāni of pāā supe suāā (1069) … (Rumal 474); (iv) māhārāja mirja raja sahebu ajamahal … to the appointed and hereditary officers and rayāni and others (sic.) of pāā supe … suāā (1069) … (Rumal 513); (v) khudāvandi valishāhā kāji pragane supe dāma mohobalahu/āji dila yekalāsa shankarāji rāma sarasubhedara va karakuna maa haya suāā (1094) … (Rumal 473).

⁷⁹ Several of the major powerful families of the 17th and 18th centuries possessed collections of rights dispersed within different systems of right, and further affected by local variations within particular system types. The Ghorpades of Mudhol, for example, owned patrimonies and held prebend in both Karnataka and central Maharashtra. All entered the central accounting house as so many quantitatively specified categories.

⁸⁰ These are especially visible in the daily and monthly accounts (silakbands) of the various Dabhade family household accounting units of Talegaon which refer to items of, say, land separately accounted, or of cloth which again appears in the accounts of both the cloth store of the household and of the merchant dealing with that household. However, such examples understate this cross-referential complexity. A remarkable example occurs in tolls taken from carriers of goods (jakat): not only do fractional right holders each receive their own accounts but the khalsa authorities maintained a special account checking the appearances of payers at different toll stations so as make claims against those attempting to avoid them.

⁸¹ Such credit tables are very abundant in the Dabhade Daftar at the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal (hereafter BISM). For example: (i) ucāpata avabāsetha girima talegāvakar suāā (1197), a credit account kept by the dealer Avabaseth Girim of Talegaon for purchases of various grains by the Dabhade household; (ii) botakhata sarakāra rāva dābhāde ucāpata avabāsetha girima talegāvakar suāā (1197), which tabulates fractional sums handed to various persons to be debited to the Dabhade account of the dealer; (iii) the individual chits from which these tables are composed: for example, tāā avabāsetha girima suāā (1197) mānika dhondā niāā pāgā hujarāta yāsa sadi …, followed by the quantities of grains to be given to Manik. Payments of such credit accounts were registered in the normal household accounting of the year.

⁸² mufard and tahsil papers, and others of a similarly detailed kind called rojkird may be found in many village rumals in greater or lesser abundance. The following are merely samples, even for the rumals, villages and years mentioned: A. For the village of māuje Kathapur, in the samat of Koregaon, prānt Wai (Satara Jamav, Rumal 248), (i) a large number of individual rojkirds for given days of a month in suāā (1147) listing all payments by named individual tax-payers in the village; (ii) many bolkhat jamin papers for the same years, each detailing the lands held by one individual in terms of size and quantity of fields, qualities of soil, kharif or rabi crop-season, the kinds of crop grown; thus botakhata jamina apaji udaji pāā māuje kathāpura suāā (1147) tāā mankoji pātila. B. for kasbe Supe in prant Pune (Pune Jamav, Rumal 473), (i) individual mufard papers of fasli 1103, each paper being devoted to one person; (ii) tahsils for particular dates of fasli 1115, each for one date detailing payments by different persons. C. For the village of Girvi in prant Phaltan (Satara Jamav, Rumal 1158), (i) tahsils as B for days fasli 1118, and (ii) mashrifs (being equivalent to mufard papers) per person in the same year.

⁸³ No document or report appears to succeed in listing all of the rights, duties and functions known to be associated with patilki (village headmanship). The deeds probably concern themselves with what is strictly vatan. Throughout the period covered here, relatively powerful persons were purchasing shares in such headmanships: for the most part the lines of division cut through all the component rights, so that each share could indeed be considered a complete vatan (see note 72). However there is a clearly observable trend for inequalities to appear in such division; some rights are either not given to both parties (seller and purchaser) or are split unequally (generating shares defined by what was termed vadilpan, or seniority). These generally affected the most lucrative sources of income and power, with which it must be added, the litigious questions of precedence and seniority were intimately associated. An interim discussion occurs in my unfortunately very badly written ‘To identify change in an old regime polity: agrarian transaction and institutional mutation in 17th to early 19th century Maharashtra’, in Gaborieau, M. and Thorner, A. (eds), Asie du sud: traditions et changemmts (Paris, 1979), 197–204Google Scholar; the ‘full version of the paper’ mentioned there, has become part of a larger study of vatan provisionally completed in 1982 and which it is hoped eventually to publish.

⁸⁴ Section E summarizes the contents of the manuscript referred to in n. 83. On the point in the text, see n. 31, and Mundle, Sudipto, ‘The agrarian barrier to industrial growth’, Centre for Development Studies Trivandemm, working paper no. 189 (1984), 37.Google Scholar It reads a little like the ever rising middle classes and disappearing peasantries in European history and is seriously contradicted by the fact that our major evidence derives from the igth and aoth centuries: thus Raychaudhuri, , ‘Non-agricultural production: Mughal India’, CEHI, i, 279–81Google Scholar, and ‘The mid-eighteenth century background’, CEHI, ii, 9.Google Scholar

⁸⁵ Sharma, R. S., ‘Problems of transition from Ancient to Medieval in Indian history’, Indian Historical Review, i (1974), 1–9Google Scholar, and ‘Methods and problems of the study of feudalism in early medieval India’, Indian Historical Review, i (1974), 81–9.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ Certain 'split’ villages of Satara district are cases in point: the mokadamis (patilkis) are equally divided; each mokadam heads two distinct social categories of tax-payers and inhabitants in the 18th century documentation; lands and even habited sites are similarly divided (often along boundaries invisible to an outsider), being distinguished by different sets of family names (adnav) and exogenous marriage relations. Lee Schlesinger has been studying their 20th century forms since 1975, while both of us worked together on materials in the Pune Archives. The origins seem to lie in the depths of the late 17th century crisis during local conflicts between Mughals and Marathas, when large numbers of villages were dehabited. Muglai and svarajya amals, and parallel collecting agencies representing them, were instituted and if popular lore is to be believed coincided with resettlement by populations from villages outside the region. Although this hypothesis is largely speculative, a good basis of evidence exists in the Satara Jamav, for example Rumals 397 to 399, for māuje thāne Sap, in samat Koregaon, prant Wai.

⁸⁷ Systems of right differ markedly in space but certain fundamental principles are common, for instance those of category-formation and quantitative valuation, of prebend and patrimony, and so forth. Gujarat presents an especially fascinating, complex but still little understood or researched case. In respect of Marwar, Ziegler, ‘Some notes on Rajput loyalties during the Mughal period’, is important although presenting only part of the case.

⁸⁸ Vatans could be temporarily confiscated in certain well-defined situations, such as when disputed. Much confusion between legal heritability and de facto inheritance exists in the literature, the latter often being treated as identical with the former or leading inevitably towards it. I would argue that they are fundamentally different, their confusion preventing disentanglement of the different legal complexes to which they separately belong. Thus, Raychaudhuri, , ‘The state and the economy: the Mughal empire’, CEHI, i, 177Google Scholar, on madad-i ma'āsh grants (‘though subject to resumption, [these] were both heritable and saleable’) seems inconsistent in this respect; at the very least, this combination of apparently contradictory properties requires discussion.

⁸⁹ These ‘new vatans’ and those mentioned below, can hardly be considered anything less than ‘would-be-vatans’ in the sense that although parvenu and derived from the king's fiat (who is of course the source of the alternative downflowing ideology), they are intended as vatan. Heritability is the only common defining element of the different items composing the legal umbrella of vatan, together with the ideology of which it is a central principle. Thus inam deeds show use of the same phrases and formulae that basically distinguishes vatan from saranjam; for example, one eats (khāne) inam just as one eats patilki and deshmukhi. However, the extent of popular recognition and a real extension of valan ideology to these ‘would-bes’ is more doubtful; inamdars did not normally appear (in their capacity as inamdars) at the judicial assemblies of vatandars (gota) on which see below.

⁹⁰ Gune's Judicial System of the Marathas is the only serious study of popular institutions outside of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu (for which see n. 21). In the following discussion, many complex issues surrounding vatan and the gota are necessarily subordinated to brevity.

⁹¹ For example, Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, 22–3, and Kulkarni, A. R., Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji (Poona, 1969), 30–2.Google Scholar. The effectiveness of these attempts is disputed, but this seems to be partly due to confusion between official duties which are removable and modifiable and the rights of vatan which are inviolable. This would suggest that official functions have little to do with contemporary notions of the intrinsic content of vatan (despite origins and practices). Duties of the former kind tended to be distinguished as karbhari (management), and in the case of powerful mokadams surrogate managers were employed precisely for these functions. In this respect the formula quoted by Raychaudhuri from Sinha, N. K. (‘The mid-eighteenth century background’, CEHI, ii, 11 and 13)Google Scholar, seems inconsistent: ‘A zamindar is a person possessing hereditarily on the conditions of obedience to the ordinances of government a tract of land … subject to the payment of revenue’ (Sinha, N. K., Economic History of Bengal from Plassey to the Permanent Settlement, ii (Calcutta, 1962), 1, my italics).Google Scholar Significantly, Sinha was in turn quoting an employee of the colonial ‘revenue department’ (1 and 21 n. 2, unfortunately undated), and not an old-order source; such qualified interpretations (and indeed, applications) of right are characteristic of the colonial period and have to be treated critically. But as is well known, zamindar itself is an umbrella category used by central administrations, so that an understanding of its content and meaning requires quite different non-centre oriented perspectives (see, for example, Habib, ‘The social distribution of landed property’, 307ff; Raychaudhuri, , ‘The mid-eighteenth century background’, CEHI, ii, 11Google Scholar; Ziegler, ‘Some notes on Rajput loyalties during the Mughal period’). For example, the term zamindar neither captures the social range of vatandari nor provides any clue to its popular meaning. Finally, in line with the distinction made above between official functions and intrinsic, unqualifiable rights, I would make another between the liability of the body of a person in his official capacity to violence (he may be thrashed for non-payment of taxes) and the inviolability of his hereditary vatan-persona (the enjoyment of rights may be confiscated, but his possession be unaffected). In practice the interdependence between the two aspects created problems for both regimes and vatandars, but the distinction helps us to understand the seeming paradox of Shivaji's sometimes violent treatment of vatandars and the reference in Stein's contribution to corporal punishment of hereditary officers under Tipu.

⁹² See the notes to the Table for references.

⁹³ This process was further extended by the colonial regime so that by the 20th century village mokadams and Dirks’ ‘little kings’ had been progressively divested of their powers and of many sources of wealth, leaving them encased conceptually and actually in ritual exchanges and acts. This is thus an example of the distortions arising from reading back into the past the apparently traditional features of a later period; see nn. 31, 37 and 115.

⁹⁴ I owe the following references to kuttam to Burton Stein: (i) Gopal, M. H., The Finances of the Mysore Stale 1799–1831 (Bombay, 1960), 142Google Scholar: In September 1830, the ‘ryots of Nagar refused to pay their taxes and assembled in kuttams or assemblies of protest, and very soon the ryots of the Bangalore and Chittledrug divisions followed suit’ (the incidents are also mentioned by Hayadavana Rao, C. (ed.), Mysore Gazetteer compiled for Government (Bangalore, 1930), ii, pt iv, 2870Google Scholar, where the ‘raiyats in various places’ are said to have ‘assembled in Kuta or indignation meetings’), (ii) According to Wilson, H. H., A Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms … of British India (Delhi; 1968 reprint of the 1855 edition), 305 iiGoogle Scholar, kuttam means an assembly, village or group of houses, or kindred, (iii) Burrow, T. and Emeneau, M. B., A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (Oxford, 2nd edn of 1984), 167–171Google Scholar (nos. 1850, 1866 & 1882), define various forms with a short ‘u’ as fist and blow with a fist, kud as bundle, and kū$$$ttam with a long ‘u’ as flock, assembly, court, heap, and so forth. The word may be followed into Molesworth, J. T., A Dictionary, Marathi and English, assisted by G. and T. Candy (Poona, 1975 reprint of the 1857 second edition), for example: 177Google Scholar, iii, kuta meaning confederacy, combination, league, heap of grain; 245 i, goda meaning offspring of a married woman (interesting because the abstract vatan-persona is sometimes referred to as ‘mother’ in deeds); and gothan meaning people in an assembly. Note then that the term ‘church’ originally held a similar set of social meanings independent of whether or not there was an actual building (the members being ‘brothers’, the ‘church’ being ‘parent’, while it is the church alone that accorded union to the disparate members; ‘church’ was both a gathering and place of gathering).

⁹⁵ Thus letters from the court giving notice of new inam grants (‘would-be-vatan’, in n. 89) in the late 17th and early 18th century begin typically: shri/rājashri trimbaka sivadeu deshādhikāri va lekhaka vartamāna va bhāvi prānta khatāva gosavi yāsa …; it is the term bhavi (rather than praja, which also occurs) which is significant and characteristic (Pavar, Appasaheb, Tarabaikalin kagadpatre (Tarabai Papers), i (Kolhapur, 1969), 70 no. 44Google Scholar, for the case quoted).

⁹⁶ Shahaji Bhosle is referred to as ‘son’ in letters from the Adil Shah, for which Sarkar, Jadunath, House of Shivaji: Studies and Documents on Maratha History: Royal Period (New Delhi, 1978)Google Scholar reprint of the 1955 revised 3rd edn, 68, 69, 75 and 80: ‘To our son Shahaji Bhonsle, the pillar of our state’. Complementarily Shivaji is described as eating the bread of the Adil Shah (See Sen, Surendranath, śiva Chhatrapati: Being a Translation of Sabhāsad Bakhar with Extracts from Chitnis and Sivadigvijaya, with Notes (Calcutta, 1920), 174 and 177Google Scholar, where he is also described as ‘servant’ of the Adil Shah, for which see n. 101). Equivalents for ‘bread’ are part of a complex of eating metaphor associated with these ideologies. ‘Bread’ itself is used to represent the abstract personas of both king and valan (see n. 110 for examples and references) in the two ideologies; in the first it has a hierarchic function equivalent to use of padar (n. 100) and in the second an egalitarian function. ‘Bread’ thus represents the same abstract subject as parental terms, whether ‘father’ in king-centred ideology, or ‘mother’ in that of vatan. Put into context with a body of such language and terms, common words can be seen to possess overtly different social meanings. For an example of use of ‘mother’ for vatan (in conjunction with terms of fraternity for relations between the individual, and otherwise very unequal vatandars), see Sykes, William H., ‘Land tenures of the Deccan’, Parliamentary Papers (London 1866), iii, no. 226, 25.Google Scholar For Erich Fromm's relevant distinction between uses of patriarchal and matriarchal metaphor see Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (Boston and Toronto, 1973), 96.Google Scholar

⁹⁷ For example, on iqta, Habib, , ‘Northern India under the Sultanate: agrarian economy’, CEHI, i, 68–75Google Scholar; on jagir, Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, ch. III; on mokassa under the Deccan Sultanates, Fukazawa, ‘A study of the local administration of Adilshahi Sultanate’, 60ff, and several passing references in Tamaskar, The Life and Work of Malik Ambar; on saranjam, Sen, The Military System of the Marathas, 49ff.

⁹⁸ For relative proportions of saranjam to khalsa see my ‘Extended class relations, rights and the problem of rural autonomy’, Tables 1 and 2, 204–6. In contrast to the usual emphasis in the literature on convertability of prebend into de facto heritability, saranjam, like office, was frequently taken away and given to others. The fact that it might have been continued through two or three generations of the same family only makes this deprivation the more significant. In contrast, vatan could only be confiscated. When Shivaji wished to seize a vatan, he conquered the place concerned, destroying both the possessor and his sons and thus the line of potential inheritance (see also n. 91). This is what happened to the More deshmukhi (see n. 45) and was untypical.

⁹⁹ In this light, we may understand the contradictory views on ‘property’ in old-order India (thus the inconsistencies referred to in n. 91): from a downflowing source of sovereignty derives the view that ‘property’, to the extent that it can be said to exist, can only properly be the king's, the rest of the populace merely holding it of him; from an egalitarian, many-headed expression of sovereignty, as in vatan, property exists unequivocally and is owned by those possessing deeds to it, possessors constituting the sovereigns or ‘sharers’ of the territory (see for example Puntambekar, S. V., ‘The Ajnapatra or royal edict relating to the principles of Maratha state policy’, Journal of Indian History, viii, 214Google Scholar, and Joshi, Pralhad Narhar, Ramchandra Nilkantkrut Maratheshahitil rajniti: Adnyapatra (Pune, 3rd edn, 1980), 29Google Scholar, and use of the term kuldesh, for example in Pavar, , Tarabaikalin kagadpatra, i, 72–3, no. 45Google Scholar). In Joshi's text we read: he loka mhanaje rājyāce dāyādaca āhel.

¹⁰⁰ For padar, see Molesworth, A Dictionary, Marathi and English, 488 i–ii, and Vaze, Shridhar Ganesh, The Aryabhushan School Dictionary Marathi–English (Poona, 1938 reprint), 352 iiGoogle Scholar: end of a cloth, lap, private purse, end of cloth opened to receive, asylum, place of refuge, dependence, and so forth. For example, see Rajvade, Vishvanath Kashinath, Marathyacya Itihasaci Sadhane, iii (?Pune, 1901), 66, no. 64Google Scholar: tyāvaruna mahārāja svāmini mandilācā padara gheuna hāta vara kelā; and Mawjee, Purshotam Vishram and Parasnis, D. B., Kaifiyats and yadis (Poona, 1908), 59 (and see also 62): āmce āje sadashivarāva he candrasena jādhāvarāva yāce padari pālakhi padasta.Google Scholar

¹⁰¹ For a typical example of the language of service, see Pavar, , Tarabaikalin kagadpatra, i, 161, no. 124Google Scholar, concerning a grant of new inam (nutana ināma) by Shivaji II Bhosle of Kolhapur to Girjoji Yadav in 1702: tumhi svāmice rūjyātila purātana sevaka, following which seva occurs in the same sense repeatedly, as in: svāmici seva karuna. See also Ziegler, ‘Some notes on Rajput loyalties during the Mughal period’, 225, 227–8 and 234.

¹⁰² Both Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (London, 1969), 484Google Scholar, and Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), 63–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, bring out this disassociative individualism among brothers with the same parent by blood. It must be added, then, that property brotherhood indeed activates this kind of individualism but in addition provides a level of unity in the abstract persona of the vatan subtending from its material institutionality.

¹⁰³ A whole range of language, of terms, metaphor, alliteration and repeated phraseology, concerning both the subject and the object of possession, and the relationships between possessors, bears witness to these qualities of vatan.

¹⁰⁴ For example, Kamen, Henry, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe 1550–1660 (London, 1976 revised edn), ch. 10Google Scholar, provides fragmentary but fascinating material on this aspect of widely dispersed urban and peasant risings (especially on fraternal and ‘eating’ metaphor, about which see n. 96).

¹⁰⁵ For example, Hobsbawm, E. J., Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester, 1959), chs VIII and IX.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁶ Useful material on religious sects is abundant. See, for example, the wealth of evidence in Hill, Christopher, The World Turned upside down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London, 1972).Google Scholar

¹⁰⁷ Pollock, Frederick and Maitland, Frederic William, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I (Cambridge, 2nd edn of 1968, introduced by Milsom, S. F. C.), i, 232–40Google Scholar, and Ullmann, Walter, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London, 2nd edn of 1966)Google Scholar, as examples.

¹⁰⁸ See also n. 73. Dan Sperber, ‘Apparently irrational beliefs’, in Hollis and Lukes, Rationality and Relativism, 149–80, has sensible criticism of the position of the relativists on translatability, while Gellner, ‘Relativism and universals’, masks the issue. See also Steven Lukes, ‘Relativism in its place’, in the same volume (261–305). Although relativism draws faulty implications, its focus on both system-making in other societies and on the need to unravel 'systems of meaning’ from the perspectives of their users, is valid. Anderson, Perry, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London, 1983), ch. 2Google Scholar, also argues against relativism.

¹⁰⁹ Robertson, ‘“Revenue enclosure” … 1821’, 536. The characteristic phrase is: tyāsa nime mokadami deuna āpanāsa bhāu karāvā (Chimnaji Vad, Rao Bahadur Ganesh and Parasnis, D. B., Selections from the Satara Raja's and the Peshawa's Diaries, i (Poona, n.d.), 146, no. 289Google Scholar). The sense of adjacent and independent sovereignties, and thus of equality between the sovereigns, is very clear in the different context of a meeting between rival princes. Shah Alam and Shivaji are said to have referred to themselves as rāje va āpana bhāu (Vakaskar, Vinayak Sadashiv, Krishnaji Anant Sabhasadaci bakhar kathit Chatrapati Shrishivaprabhuce caritra (Pune, 1973 printing), 62, para. 66Google Scholar). Significantly, they divided rights to the taxable surplus of a territory, and these were to be managed by parallel collecting agencies.

¹¹⁰ Chambard, Jean-Luc, ‘Les commencements d'une histoire agraire: implantation des castes dominantes dans un village de l'Inde Centrale où le defrichement date du XVI^e s(iècle)’, Purusartha: Recherches de sciences sociales sur l'Asie du Sud, i (1975), 5–15.Google Scholar For Maharashtra, (i) in the form of a legal phrase, Rajvade, , Marathyacya Itihasaci Sadhane, xx (Pune, 1915), 380, no. 266Google Scholar: eka bhākara do thāi karuna samādhāne khāne (thāi means both share and plate, while khāne is the verb for to eat and indicates active possession in the full sense of the term; khāne is used abundantly in connection with proven or claimed ownership of valan); Rajvade, , op. cit., iii (?Pune, 1901), 54, no. 58Google Scholar; and (ii) in the form of an acted-out ritual described by the deeds, Rajvade, op. cit., 65, no. 64, and Rajvade, , op. cit., vi (Kolhapur, 1905), 11.Google Scholar

¹¹¹ Ziegler, , ‘Some notes on Rajput loyalties during the Mughal period’, and also 223 for an analogy with the use of roti and bhākara (bhākari) which we described in Maharashtra.Google Scholar In Marwar the term pimdas, a ball of food or clay, symbolizes the link between brotherhood and vatan. With respect to ‘fictional’ aspects of clan formation, see Kolff, D. H. A., ‘An Armed Peasantry and its Allies: Rajput Tradition and State Formation in Hindustan, 1450–1850’, 1983 (Doctoral thesis presented to the University of Leiden).Google Scholar

¹¹² See also Bayly, , Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 99 and 104.Google Scholar

¹¹³ This is the essential argument of both Ziegler, ‘Some notes on Rajput loyalties during the Mughal period’, especially 223 ff, and of my ‘The pre-colonial Indian state’. See also Fukazawa, ‘A study of the local administration of Adilshahi Sultanate’, 38 and 67: he ends appositely, ‘accordingly we may say that the administrative foundation for the rise of the Marathas was already prepared in the Adilshahi Sultanate’. See also Chattopadhyaya, ‘Political processes and structure of polity’, 5, Seneviratne, Sudharshan, ‘Kalinga and Andhra: the process of secondary state formation in early India’, in Claessen, and Skolnik, , (eds), The Study of the State, 317–38Google Scholar, and by implication, G. D. Sharma, Rajput Polity, Conclusion.

¹¹⁴ Besides the references to fiscality in Vijayanagar given in nn. 15 and 53, Saletore cites instances of sale where potentates associated with the court negotiate with local nadu-bodies for acquisition of properties (Saletore, , Social and Political Life in the Vijayanagara Empire, i, 168–9, and ii 346–54).Google Scholar

¹¹⁵ See section G ‘b’ below. In spite of his own views of the specificity of developments in western Europe, and the considerable criticism to which he has been exposed (most recently in Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, ch. 2), I find Michel Foucault's use of Bentham, and notably his exploration of ‘panopticism’ (based on Bentham's panopticon), particularly relevant in respect of the processes of centralization occurring both before and after colonial conquest (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977), especially pt 3, ch. 3Google Scholar), and closely comparable with the discussion of land taxation policy in Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959).Google Scholar Whether effective or not, the intention of penetrating directly to the individual ‘ryot’ (colonial administration) and manufacturer (Dutch and English East India Company merchants, on which Arasaratnam, S., ‘Weavers, merchants and company: the handloom industry in south-eastern India 1750–1790’, IESHR, xvii (1980), 257–81Google Scholar), can hardly be doubted, in addition to which it is not irrelevant that several prisons were actually built in the panopticon style (Stokes, op. cit., 150: ‘the prisons constructed at Poona and Ratnagiri … were symbolic of the new current of ideas which the Utilitarians were directing upon Indian administration’). The point I am making, however, is that the process is clear to see in the 18th century, and underlies the paradoxical fission of political authority; it is implicit in the class structure and in attempts to improve techniques of surplus extraction.

¹¹⁶ While not taxation categories, vatan, like all property, forms part of the general nexus of categories associated with different forms of surplus extraction.

¹¹⁷ Lee Schlesinger has collected considerable information on inter-village networks in modern Satara district, while Carter, Anthony T., Elite Politics in Rural India: Political Stratification and Political Alliances in Western Maharashtra (Cambridge, 1974), for example 138ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses non-caste endogamous marriage alliances among vatandar Marathas. 19th century reports bear testimony to such non-caste, property related marriage groups in both Gujarat and Maharashtra (for example, Pedder, ‘Correspondence relating to … Kaira collectorate’, 8, is characteristic). It is unfortunate that such practices are frequently confused with caste, or considered as necessarily leading to future caste divisions (as in Guha, ‘More about the Parsi Seths’, 118 iii).

¹¹⁸ My ‘Protoindustrialization and pre-colonial South Asia’.

¹¹⁹ See my ‘Extended class relations, rights and the problem of rural autonomy’, 223, n. 13, for secondary references.

¹²⁰ A thesis of which contemporaries were clearly aware; thus Puntambekar, ‘The Ajnapatra or royal edict’, 212.

¹²¹ For examples of Apaji Mahadev's voluminous kamavisi documentation, see nn. 64 and 65; for a contract for 16 villages in kamavisi taken by him in 1763/64, see Pune Jamav, Rumal 695, rājashri āpāji māhaāeva gosāvi yāsi sevak nilakantha namaskāra … suāā (1164), and the related order: adnyāpatra rājashri nilakantha māhādeva tāā mokadamāni dehāye also of suāā (1164). For a contract of two villages to Shamrao Indapurkar of 1795/96 in the same rumal, see yādi rājashri shāmarāva govinda indāpurakura yājakade māuje kurakumba va māuje nāndādevi tāā pātasa yelhila kamāvisa samadhe kalame. For the Dabhade contracts, Pune Jamav, Rumal 1398, a series of contracts among which: yādi behadā māuje talegāva tāā cākana ithila kamāvisi rājashri dāmodhara anandarāva yājakade suāā (1185) kamāvisi samadhi kalame … And finally, for advances by a Pune banker to Apaji Mahadev, see Tulsibhagvale Daftar (in the BISM), Rumal 3, Rojakirda kramāka 24, shake 1691 (A.D. 1769), item: guāā āpāji māhādeva tāā pātasa (the tarf in which Apaji's kamavis was largely situated) ravānagi ….

¹²² The various interests of a family of professional administrators, the Ashtikars of Chas, is tabulated in my ‘External class relations, rights and the problem of rural autonomy’, Table 7, 214, and concerns transfers, temporary and permanent, of lands, and a network of credit relations in at least 40 villages of the sarcar of Junnar.

¹²³ Frykenberg, R. E., Guntur District 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford, 1965).Google Scholar

¹²⁴ This is the subject of ‘Extended class relations, rights and the problem of rural autonomy’, sections D, E and F, and concerning which much tabulated data is given in the Appendices.

¹²⁵ Hossain, Hameeda, ‘The alienation of weavers: impact of the conflict between the revenue and commercial interests of the East India Company, 1750–1800’, IESHR, xvi (1979), 323–45Google Scholar, demonstrates this point clearly in the case of late 18th century Company Bengal. See also Chaudhuri, Binay Bhushan, ‘Growth of commercial agriculture and its impact on the peasant economy’, IESHR, vii (1970), 25–60 and 211–51Google Scholar, for its characteristic forms in the nineteenth century. The basic principle of Eric Wolf's formula is that the peasant is forced to sell cheap after harvest what he must later buy expensively in order to feed his family and plant his fields. This may result in a chain of debt and ultimate loss of holdings or possessions. The concept is based upon widespread empirical observation. Despite Raychaudhuri's remark that ‘the producer continued to meet all his requirements of food out of his own produce’ (‘The mid-eighteenth century background’, CEHI, ii, 15Google Scholar) his own arguments on the same page confirm Wolf's very point. It indicates a quite different kind of rural economy from that of the orthodox dualist thesis.

¹²⁶ All are abundantly documented in the Dabhade Daftar, BISM. For example, carriage is registered in detail in the toll (jakat) accounts for Umbre Navlak, Talegaon-Induri and Parner, individual payments being registered with names of the carrier, goods carried, quantity, origin and destination; soldiers are listed both by types and origins, in, among various kinds of document, salary tables (besides soldiers of local origin, there were mercenaries drawn from both northern India and overseas); household servants are found in salary tables and household monthly accounts, for example.

¹²⁷ Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, merchants and company’, and Hossain, ‘The alienation of weavers’.

¹²⁸ Hambly, Gavin R. G., ‘Towns and cities: Mughal India’, CEHI, i, 434–51.Google Scholar See also Naqvi, Hameeda Khatoon, Urban Centres and Industries in Upper India 1556–1803 (Bombay, 1968)Google Scholar, and the usual information, especially on rural production, in Sarkar, Jagdish Narayan, Studies in Economic Life in Mughal India (New Delhi, 1975)Google Scholar, for example chs 8 and 9 on Bihar and Orissa. Raychaudhuri, , ‘The state and the economy: the Mughal Empire’, CEHI i, 182 and 185Google Scholar, lays his emphasis on the central role of administrative functions in urban development, and on the market stimulus which resulted from these; this stimulus was especially important in the less official forms of administrative growth in the smaller centres of the countryside, for which see my ‘Protoindustrialization and pre-colonial South Asia’, section VI, especially 78.

¹²⁹ My ‘Protoindustrialization and pre-colonial South Asia’, section VI.

¹³⁰ Habib, , ‘Monetary system and prices’, 363–71, and my ‘Changes in production and circulation of money’.Google Scholar

¹³¹ Raychaudhuri, , ‘The state and the economy: the Mughal Empire’, CEHI, iGoogle Scholar, ch. VII, pt 1, is an especially eloquent presentation of the classical thesis, but with muted qualifications concerning the 18th century crisis, impediments to trade and other now disputed questions.

¹³² Blum, Jerome, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton, 1978), chs 1 to 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On size of state holdings in central and eastern Europe, see 18ff, 43, 209 and 227.

¹³³ For example, Raychaudhuri, , ‘The state and the economy: the Mughal Empire’, CEHI, i, 180–1 and 185–8Google Scholar, together with his qualifications to the latter 189–92. The description of impediments to trade in Western Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries in Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969), 126–8Google Scholar, makes surprising reading against the classic descriptions of Mughal India. With respect to the similar emphasis on luxury production and the extent of craft specialization in Mughal India, Stone's, Lawrence remark in ‘The new eighteenth century’, New York Review of Books, xxxi, no. 5 (29 03 1984), 45Google Scholar, is equally arresting: ‘It can plausibly be argued that all this was man's first big step to modern consumerism: the insatiable eighteenth century English demand for frivolous as well as useful goods and services created a world that is recognizably our own’. Moreover, concerning the ‘middling sort’ in the eighteenth century, their ‘existence was a never-ending source of astonishment and admiration to foreign visitors to England. In 1741 Horace Walpole remarked that “there was nowhere but in England the distinctions of the middling people”’ (44). Needless to say, these ‘foreign visitors’ were not from contemporary India but neighbouring Europe. This is merely to indicate not that there are no profound differences but that we have some serious comparative problems to solve in order to escape the parochial value judgements which currently litter the literature.

¹³⁴ Both 17th and 18th century England are notorious for royal grants of monopolies in particular goods, for ceremonial and parasitic offices and for insidious corruption, continuing right into the first period of industrialization.

¹³⁵ European studies classically emphasize time, event, individual, sequence and agency in both method and interpretation; in contrast, Indianist studies have emphasized functions and roles, representation, continuities and order.

¹³⁶ See Appadurai, ‘The terminology of measurement’, for the notion of negotiated measures, although our respective viewpoints otherwise differ considerably.

¹³⁷ See n. 115.

¹³⁸ For use of the term ‘portfolio’, see Bayly, , Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 165.Google Scholar6

¹³⁹ Siddiqi, Assiya, ‘Agrarian change in a Northern Indian State: Uttar Pradesh 1819–1833’, and ‘Money and prices in the earlier stages of Empire: India and Britain 1760–1840’, IESHR, xviii (1981), 231–64Google Scholar; and my ‘Changes in production and circulation of money’, and ‘Protoindustrialization and pre-colonial South Asia’, 79, n. 153.