The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India

What is India and when did it begin to take shape? This question is nearly two centuries old. The existing answers are fairly well known. Popular imagination identifies India as a unified civilization with a set of intrinsic values, arising in the age of the Vedas or, still better, in the Harappan times. Historians who disagree with this totalizing view lay emphasis upon plural origins and long-term processes of change and transformation. There is also an influential school of thought that rejects all antiquity claims and maintains that India is a construct of the colonial and nationalist imagination. In his radical reinterpretation of India’s past, Devadevan moves away from these reifying assessments to explore the evolution of institutions, ideas, and identities that are characterized typically as Indian. In lieu of endorsing their Indianness, he explores their origins against the backdrop of the political economy and traces their emergence to the period which historians now call the early medieval. In doing so, he refines many existing postulates in early medieval historiography and rejects several others. Devadevan takes the scope of the early medieval beyond the conventional questions concerning regional state formation, urbanization, the making of an agrarian economy, and the rise of new religious beliefs and institutions to shed light on many less understood aspects of the period, such as the evolution of vernacular languages, literary traditions and performance practices, rise of pilgrimage centres, making of identities based on caste, gender, religion, and territorial self-consciousness, and advances in intellectual life. Basing himself on these rich explorations, Devadevan advances the provocative thesis that India is a product of the early medieval times. The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India is a major contribution to the debate on what India is and how it should be understood–