CHAPTER-31

From Ancient to Medieval

Revision or Short Notes

Arora IAS

 

Social Crisis and Agrarian Changes

• The central factor that eventually transformed ancient Indian society into a medieval society was the practice of land grants.

Rise of Landlords

• Land grants became frequent from the fifth century AD.The brahmanas not only collected taxes from the peasants and artisans but also maintained law and order in the villages granted to them. Villages were made over to the brahmanas in perpetuity.
• Thus, the power of the king was heavily undermined from the end of the Gupta period onwards. In the Maurya period, taxes were assessed and collected by the agents of the king, and law and order were maintained by them.
• In the initial stage, land grants attest to the increasing power of the king. In Vedic times, the king was considered the owner of cattle or gopati, but in Gupta times and later, he was regarded as bhupati or owner of land.
• In the Maurya period, the officers of the state, from the highest to the lowest, were generally paid in cash. The practice continued under the Kushans, who issued a large number of copper and gold coins, and it lingered on under the Guptas whose gold coins were evidently meant for payment of the army and high functionaries.
• Thus, by the seventh century, there is a distinct evolution of the landlordism and a devolution of the central state authority.

New Agrarian Economy

• The Chinese pilgrim I-tsing states that most Indian monasteries got their lands cultivated by servants and others. Hsuan Tsang describes the shudras as agriculturists, which suggests that they no longer cultivated land just as slaves and agricultural labourers, but possibly occupied it temporarily.
• From the sixth century onwards, sharecroppers and peasants were particularly asked to remain on the land granted to the beneficiaries in the backward and mountainous areas such as Orissa and Deccan.From there, the practice spread to the Ganges basin.

Decline of Trade and Towns

• From the sixth century onwards, a sharp decline began. Trade with the main part of the Roman empire ended in the third century, and the silk trade with Iran and the Byzantium stopped in the mid-sixth century.
• India carried on some commerce with China and Southeast Asia, but its benefits were reaped by the Arabs who acted as middlemen.
• Before the rise of Islam, the Arabs had virtually monopolized India’s export trade. The decline of trade for well over 300 years after the sixth century is strikingly demonstrated by the virtual absence of gold coins in India.
• The decline of trade led to the decay of towns. Towns flourished in west and north India under the Satavahanas and Kushans and a few cities continued to thrive in Gupta times. However, the post-Gupta period witnessed the ruin of many old commercial cities in north India.
• Excavations show that several towns in Haryana and East Punjab, Purana Qila (Delhi), Mathura, Hastinapur (Meerut district), Shravasti (UP), Kaushambi (near Allahabad), Rajghat (Varanasi) Chirand (Saran district), Vaishali, and Pataliputra began to decline in the Gupta period, and largely disappeared in post-Gupta times.
• In the late fifth century, a group of silk weavers from the western coast migrated to Mandasor in Malwa, gave up silk weaving, and adopted other professions.

Changes in the Varna System

• From the sixth century onwards, some changes occurred in social organization. In the Gangetic plains in north India, the vaishyas were regarded as free peasants, but land grants created landlords between the peasants, on the one hand, and the king, on the other, so the vaishyas were reduced to the level of the shudras.
• This modified the old brahmanical order, which spread from north India into Bengal and south India as a result of land grants to the brahmanas, brought from the north from the fifth–sixth centuries onwards. From the seventh century onwards, numerous castes were created.
• A Purana of the eighth century states that thousands of mixed castes were produced by the connection of vaishya women with men of lower castes.
• This implies that the shudras and untouchables were divided into countless sub-castes, as were the brahmanas and Rajputs who constituted an important element in Indian polity and society around the seventh century.

Rise of Regional Identities

• Around the sixth–seventh centuries, there began the formation of cultural units which later came to be known as Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, etc.
• Since the seventh century, a remarkable development takes place in the linguistic history of India, the birth of Apabhramsha, the final stage of the middle Indo-Aryan.
• This language is placed roughly halfway between Prakrit that preceded it and modern Indo-Aryan languages that succeeded it.
• It roughly covers the period from AD 600 to 1000. Extensive Jaina literature was written in this language towards the end of this period. Glimpses of modern languages are traceable in both Jaina and Buddhist writings in Apabhramsha.
• Buddhist writings from eastern India show faint glimmerings of Bengali, Assamese, Maithili, Oriya, and Hindi. Similarly, the Jaina works of the same period reveal the beginnings of Gujarati and Rajasthani.
• In the south, Tamil was the oldest language, but Kannada began to grow at about this time. Telugu and Malayalam developed much later. It seems that each region came to develop its own language because of its isolation from the other.

Trends in Literature

• In the history of literature, the sixth and seventh centuries are equally important. Sanskrit continued to be used by the ruling class from the second century AD. In line with the pomp, vanity, and splendour of the feudal lords, the style of Sanskrit prose and poetry became ornate.
• Writing became replete with metaphors, imagery, adjectives, and adverbs that made it difficult for the reader to comprehend its essential meaning. Bana’s prose is a typical example.
• Kosambi considers the combination of sex and religion to be a distinctive feature of feudal literature. A leisured landed class sought the support of the Sanskrit writers who wrote on sex and tantrism. Sexual union came to be seen as union with the supreme divine being.
• According to the Vajrayani tantrikas, supreme knowledge, which amounted to supreme bliss, could be realized through the sexual union of the male and female. Spiritualism was thus inverted to justify eroticism in art and literature.
• The medieval period produced a large corpus of commentaries on ancient texts in Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit, and these were written between the fifth and eighteenth centuries. Commentaries on the Pali texts are called atthakatha, and those on Prakrit texts curni, bhasya, and niryukti.
• This literature greatly strengthened the authoritarian trend in intellectual life, seeking to preserve the state- and varna-based patriarchal society, and to adapt it to new situations.

The Divine Hierarchy

• In sculpture and the construction of temples, every region began evolving its own style from the seventh–eighth centuries onwards. South India, in particular, tended to become the land of stone temples.
• Stone and bronze were the two principal media for the representation of deities, and bronze statues began to be manufactured on an impressive scale.
• In the south, they were used in brahmanical temples, and in eastern India in Buddhist temples and monasteries. The various divinities began to be arranged according to grade in the pantheons.
• The practice of worshipping Brahma, Ganapati, Vishnu, Shakti, and Shiva, called the panchadeva or five divinities.
• The chief god Shiva or some other deity was installed in the main temple, around which four subsidiary shrines were erected to house the other four deities. Such temples were known as The Vedic gods Indra, Varuna, and Yama were reduced to the position of lokapalas or security guards.
• The monastic organization of the Jainas, Shaivites, Vaishnavites, and others was also divided into about five ranks. The highest rank was occupied by the acharya, whose coronation took place in the same manner as that of a prince, with the upadhyaya and upasaka occupying lower positions.

The Bhakti Cult

• From the seventh century onwards, the Bhakti cult spread throughout India, and especially in the south. Bhakti meant that people made all kinds of offerings to the god in return for which they received the prasada or the favour of the god. This implied the total surrender of the devotees to their god.

Tantrism

• The most remarkable development in India in the religious field from about the sixth century onwards was the spread of tantrism. Like the Bhakti cult, tantrism can also be seen in the context of socio-economic changes.
• In the fifth–seventh centuries, many brahmanas received land in Nepal, Assam, Bengal, Orissa, central India, and the Deccan, and it is at about this time that tantric texts, shrines, and practices came into being. Tantrism admitted both women and shudras into its ranks, and laid great stress on the use of magic rituals.