Comprehensive tribute to man of many parts

Source: The Hindu, 05 March 2012

by B. SURENDRA RAO

D.D. Kosambi was a rare genius. In a world that revels in narrow specialisation, he was truly a man of Renaissance versatility: a mathematician of distinction, a polyglot, a Marxist, an active member of the World Peace Council and a man who had strayed into Indian history (“… I had fallen into Indology, as it were, through the roof.”) and yet created a major paradigm shift there. He had creatively subverted — which means enriched — the understanding and writing of Indian history.

A whole generation of historians has harnessed his ideas to new areas and destinations, to test his theories and hypotheses, and drawing on not only his critical, scientific temperament but also his strong social commitment. That 45 years after his death his discerning admirers should yet join together to re-visit him shows how strong his impact is on Indian historiography. Professor D.N. Jha and the scholars who have participated in this academic venture and produced this book deserve our compliments.

The book has eight essays that touch upon the myriad aspects of Kosambi's work and legacy. D.N. Jha's essay highlights the various areas of Indian history which Kosambi upturned to achieve newer perspectives and refreshing harvests like numismatics, religious and secular literature, ethnography and even archaeology.

Though Kosambi was a Marxist, he refused to be dogmatically so. It was for him a method, a ‘tool of analysis' and not ‘a substitute for thinking.' He questioned the received Marxist notion of Asiatic Mode of Production and the simplistic slavery-feudalism-capitalism scheme of epochal progress. But Kosambi could identify features of feudalism in India, which, he believed, had its source both from below and from above, an idea which has been productively debated and cultivated in Indian historiography.

Irfan Habib's essay points out that for all his sturdy independence, Kosambi had accepted the universality of class struggle and hence the foundational idea of Marxism. But what he would not compromise with was the academic rigour with which to test a theory or a hypothesis. Irfan Habib gratefully acknowledges that “He opened doors for many of us to new ideas and new questions …”

ACCULTURATION

Not only did Kosambi adopt a framework in which to explain Indian history, but as Prabhat Patnaik shows in his brilliant essay, he extended the frontiers of dialectical materialism. His concept of ‘acculturation' by which the tribal societies were anaesthetically subjugated and sucked into the agrarian and hence class societies, was new to the usual Marxist analysis, which also proves the point that the theory is much more open-ended than its traducers would have us believe.

Kosambi's understanding of medieval India has been analysed by Eugenia Vanina, who takes up certain issues like ‘ahistoricity' of ancient and medieval India, the applicability of feudalism as an idea or the class character of medieval literature and argues for the need to extend the researches to areas such as culture, literature, mentalities, ethical values, and scientific views.

K.M. Shrimali's attempt to explore Kosambi's idea of religious histories of India is done by strenuously juxtaposing it with the work of Mircea Eliade. He points out that contrary to the belief that Marxism denies religion and culture, Kosambi sought to study religion in the larger historical contexts and as responding to various ideas. Suvira Jaiswal's essay on ‘Kosambi on Caste' takes up several strands of debates and shows how material conditions and ideologies together went into its making and consolidation.

Kesavan Veluthat in his essay points out that Kosambi, notwithstanding his uncharacteristic modesty about his facility in Sanskrit, was the first to analyse Sanskrit literature within the framework of historical materialism to show its class character. He contends that Sheldon Pollock's rejection of Kosambi's thesis is based on exceptions which proverbially prove the rule. The last essay by C.K. Raju deals with Kosambi's work on mathematics which the author interestingly and illuminatingly links with the status of science management in post-Independence India which has consecrated the idea and workings of hierarchy.

All the essays seek to reaffirm the place of Kosambi in Indian historiography. He could be faulted in matters of some details and judgments; but it is less important to criticise or defend them than acknowledge the shifts he had effected and the larger debt we owe him. Some critics have gleefully noticed his influence only with the Left, which at least concedes that scientific and critical history is possible with, and palatable to, a few.

THE MANY CAREERS OF D. D. KOSAMBI: Critical Essays: Edited by D. N. Jha; LeftWord Books, 12, Rajendra Prasad Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 275.

Renaissance man

Source: Deccan Herald, 05 March 2012

Renaissance man

Mar 04, 2012 :

Lead review

This collection of essays manages to bring out various facets of a man who has been able to authoritatively comment on a wide range of topics, writes S Nanda kumar.

Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi was a remarkable person — mathematician, statistician, historian, numismatist and Sanskrit scholar — who lived between 1907 and 1966.

The Many Careers of D D Kosambi: Critical Essays is a collection of essays that throws more light on this rare and interesting human being.

Noted historian Prof D N Jha, who has

edited the book, says in his preface that the book attempts to bring together articles by scholars “who are neither allergic nor adulatory about the work of Kosambi.”

Through the essays, one is introduced to a man with the ‘renaissance’ type of versatility: a wide range of knowledge without sacrificing depth. This important choice was made when he was studying mathematics in Harvard University in the 1920s. The famous American mathematician George David Birkhoff told him to focus on this field.

He is said to have consulted his father, another versatile scholar, who agreed that he should instead acquire knowledge as widely as possible. Kosambi then went to take advantage of the freedom available in American universities to take 18 courses in a year!

In his essay, C K Raju writes that Kosambi’s refusal to specialise went against him, even at the beginning of his career, since “on the capitalist value of specialization, non-specialists are taken non-seriously.” The essays also underscore the loneliness of a man who refused to kowtow to authorities, or dabble in the politics that even academic institutions revel in.

Kosambi used his abstract mathematical methods to study various branches of social sciences. He studied numismatics purely to get a better grasp of statistics, and weighed nearly 12,000 coins for this exercise. Kosambi, through his detailed studies of coins, was able to reconstruct the social and economic history of India. For instance, the paucity of coinage in the post-Gupta period led him to link it with the decline of trade and the emergence of the self-sufficient village economy during the same period in history.

Kesavan Veluthat, a professor of history at Delhi University, who has written an essay on Kosambi’s contribution to Sanskrit, outlines how Kosambi took up the analysis of coins to solve a statistics problem, and states that he had used the famous Taxila hoards for this purpose. Kosambi found that the “written sources display a shocking discordance. The Puranas, Buddhist and Jain records give different names for the same king.” So, he decided to go into the records himself.

Veluthat quotes Kosambi as saying that he selected a specific work, Bhartihari’s Subhasitas. But Kosambi found that the philosophy of Bhartihari, as glorified by commentators, was at variance with his poetry of escape and frustration. He quotes Kosambi, “By pointing out this (variance) in an essay, which made every god-fearing Sankritist who read it shudder, I had fallen into Indology, as it were, through the roof.”

C V Raju’s essay brings out human facets of the man, who restlessly flitted from the Banaras Hindu University to the Aligarh Muslim University, and then to Fergusson College in Pune.

Kosambi was sacked from Fergusson’s on the alleged grounds that students did not understand the mathematics he was teaching. Finally, he met Homi Bhabha, who was expanding the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) at Mumbai, who offered him a lucrative job in pure research. Even at TIFR, Kosambi was sacked for playing a prank – albeit on a high intellectual plane – by publishing a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. He meant this as a joke. Kosambi continued to remain active in mathematics, and continued his work on probability and the number theory even after his removal from TIFR.

I do not know if Raju, in his essay, has sought to make an example of Kosambi’s sacking from TIFR for a debate on Nehru’s vision; or questioning Nehru’s packing the top three departments of atomic energy, space, and Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) with the scions of leading industrial houses: Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai and the Birlas respectively.

Raju points out a very relevant fact — that Kosambi argued in vain for technology to be better adapted to the needs of Indian people, such as solar energy, small dams, even small reactors. All contrary to Nehru’s vision of mega projects — and we are, as Raju points out, still debating this even today.

That Kosambi belonged to a tight group of Marxist scholars who were against many of Nehru’s ideas makes it more difficult to understand in today’s era, when there is no USSR, and when China, a country that was impressed by some of Kosambi’s thoughts, is relentlessly pursuing capitalist methods of capturing the world market.

While there is no doubt that the essays in this book bring out fascinating facets of Kosambi, they might only interest those who are of a more academic bent of mind. Some of the essays are beyond the common man’s grasp, and are too scholarly and specialised.

The essays, however, do manage to bring out captivatingly the man who was able to comment on the caste system, Sanskrit, numismatics, the religious history of India, on how Bhartihari’s poetry resonated with “the groans of the oppressed man,” and of course, his contributions to mathematics. Common readers like myself can only marvel at Kosambi, the man, the mathematician, the historian, and believer in world peace.

I certainly have been captivated by the remarkable D D Kosambi, and do hope that somebody would soon undertake the task of writing a faithful biography of the man that will reach the common masses, rather than specialised tomes on him that adorn just the bookshelves of mathematicians, scholars and Marxists.

The Many Careers Of D.D. Kosambi- A Review

Source: Outlook

The Master Revisited

Historian, statistician, Indologist, polyglot—there is a datedness to his political verities, but the scholar lives

DILEEP PADGAONKAR

The Many Careers Of D.D. Kosambi Critical Essays

By

Edited By D.N. Jha

LeftWord | Pages: 203 | Rs. 275

The name of Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi hardly rings a bell beyond a small circle of Marxist scholars—a circle that has shrunk with the implosion of the Soviet empire, China’s tight embrace of the market economy and the rout of Communist parties around the globe. Another reason for his limited appeal, paradoxically, is the sheer range and complexity of his intellectual pursuits. He was, at one and the same time, a mathematician and a statistician, an economic and social historian, an Indologist and a major contributor to the studies on genetics and numismatics. Moreover, he excelled as a polyglot—his peers envied his mastery over several classical and modern languages—and, not the least, as a ‘public intellectual’ who commented on issues of topical relevance with an unmatched flair for polemics.

Interest in Kosambi’s multi-faceted work revived briefly on the occasion of his birth centenary in 2007. Universities across India held seminars to subject it to critical scrutiny. That exercise was also conducted in the pages of academic journals. The articles reappraised his vast output in the light of newer insights that scholars had gained in their respective fields of endeavour following his death in 1966. However, some of them, including, especially, those published in a special issue of the Economic and Political Weekly, bordered on the scurrilous. This book, edited by D.N. Jha, the distinguished Marxist historian, seeks to restore the balance.

The result is a mixed bag. Drawn from various disciplines, the eight contributors present Kosambi’s achievements without succumbing to the twin temptations of gratuitous insult or obsequiousness. Jha’s own introductory essay offers an excellent overview of his life and work in a style that is accessible to the general reader. And yet, to our great relief, the style is singularly free of the virus of ‘popular’ writing—conversational, slang-ridden, crowded with cliches, laced with platitudes—that infects so many columns of newspapers and newsmagazines.

Some of the essays, however, are far too technical in nature, notably those that focus on Kosambi’s writings on Indology and mathematics. They demand a level of expertise that is out of reach for anyone but a scholar. Likewise, readers not entirely familiar with the intricacies of Marxist thought—or rather with the tedious squabbles over what Marx or some Marxist or the other actually meant—will find themselves in a befuddled state as they attempt to come to grips with a text that discusses, say, the “frontiers of historical materialism”.

But other essays do provide a respite, notably Irfan Habib’s fine piece entitled ‘What Kosambi Gave Us’. Even as he rebuts the critics of Kosambi, he does not hesitate to express his own scepticism about the theses of this Renaissance Man on certain issues like caste, Indian feudalism, ‘Asiatic Despotism’ and Brahminism. On this latter score, Kosambi was ruthless in denouncing Brahmins and Brahminism for lending legitimacy to unjust social structures—a feat all the more remarkable given the fact that he himself belonged to the Gowd Saraswat Brahmin community.

Where this book disappoints is on its failure to address Kosambi’s role as a public intellectual. In his anti-imperialist and anti-colonial zeal—which few can question given the conduct of the West during the Cold War period—he chose to look the other way when evidence of the crimes perpetrated by totalitarian Communist regimes came to light. He had not a harsh word to say about the way these regimes choked voices of dissent or about the follies of economic policy that brought untold misery to millions of people. The word Gulag apparently was a mere trifle in his reckoning.

All the same, this collection of essays is to be commended for the possibilities it opens up for a new generation of scholars—Marxists and non-Marxists alike—to build on Kosambi’s ideas and insights. This will arm them to ask tough questions about injustices and inequities that prevail in every nook and cranny of the country today, thus making a mockery of the highfalutin rhetoric of a ‘resurgent India’. The remedy for the ills afflicting the nation lies, to use John Kenneth Galbraith’s memorable phrase, in “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”—but without the ideological blinkers that sometimes distorted his generous and enlightened vision.

(Dileep Padgaonkar is consulting editor, Times of India.)

The Many Careers of DD Kosambi- pdf version

Thanks to the good folks at Leftword, the publisher of the book The Many Careers of DD Kosambi, a pdf version of the book is now available for download.

Do purchase the paper copy of the book from Leftword, and help their efforts in publication of studies on DD Kosambi.

Download the pdf version.

The Many Careers of DD Kosambi

Thanks to the truly indefatigable Arvind Gupta, the latest collection of critical essays edited by the historian DN Jha is now available for download. Most of these essays have appeared in EPW earlier and are available on this blog. However, this book contains all essays in one place, along with a couple of newer ones.  

Download the book

Kosambi the Mathematician

Dr. CK Raju writes in the current issue of the EPW on DD Kosambi the Mathematician (pdf file). I will convert the pdf to html at a later point and re- post the full article here. Here is the summary:

Apart from his more popular work on numismatics and genetics, D D Kosambi worked on path geometry, exploring the foundations of general relativity. He also worked on statistics in infinite dimensions, computing, and probabilistic number theory. His whole mathematical career appears as one long clash of values. A rejection of the value of specialisation saw him leave Harvard. The high value he placed on research saw his exit from Banaras Hindu University and Aligarh Muslim University. His attempt to impart real knowledge of mathematics saw him sacked from Fergusson College, Pune. His insistence on ethical and relevant research led to his exit from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research where, too, the diversity of his interests was portrayed negatively, though he continued his mathematical research till the end of his life. His mathematical career raises a number of questions regarding science management in post-independence India. These questions are vital today when the state is again making huge investments in science and technology.

The Kosambi Effect on Indian Historiography

The Kosambi Effect: A Hermeneutic urn that shook Indian Historiography

Rajan Gurukkal

Source: EPW, 26th July 2008 Special Issue on DD Kosambi (Download pdf)

Kosambi was a scientist who talked about the past with the politics of intimacy with the present. This paper identifies the “Kosambi effect” and its various constituents. The most crucial constituent is the awareness that historical knowledge cannot be based on empirical givens and that a methodology guaranteeing a systematic, deductively formulated, and empirically verified concept of reality about the past is indispensable. The adaptation of historical materialism to serve the purpose, and accordingly writing a history worth designating a genre by itself in form, content and hermeneutics is another crucial constituent.

I am grateful to Kesavan Veluthat for his comments on the draft of this paper.

Rajan Gurukkal (rgurukkal@gmail.com) is currently visiting professor, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

*

Indian historiography in the mid-1950s, when D D Kosambi turned to the field, was not all that weak, thanks to contributions of both foreign and indigenous scholars towards discovery and publication of sources as well as standardisation of the positivist craft of reconstructing history. However, limitations like preoccupation with dynasties and kings, their incomplete lists, obscure dates, eulogistic biographies and spiced tales of wars and conquests, extent of kingdoms and typology of administration, persisted ad nauseam. Books of James Mill and Vincent Smith were still inescapable master-narratives, even for those engaged in corrective efforts on them. Kosambi, a hard scientist, was impatient of the kind of soft knowledge that historians fabricated around India’s past. He was, hence, looking for ways of charting the main currents of Indian history without losing the logic of science, although he never ever hoped to turn history into a science. His goal was to be scientific about the past, which hardly meant equation of science with non-science; it meant steadfast adherence to the logical relationship between premises and conclusions. Marxism was the answer he sought and it resulted in bringing a fundamental hermeneutic turn virtually questioning the meanings, measures and values hitherto accepted in contemporary Indian historiography.¹ The present paper seeks to try and identify what can be called “the Kosambi effect” and figure out its constituents.

1 Adapted Marxist Methodology

It is well known that Kosambi’s historical methodology was founded on Marxism. Exploring “scope and methods”, the opening chapter of his book, he states: “The present approach implies a definite theory of history known as dialectical materialism, also called Marxism after its founder”.² In another context he reaffirms: “...the theoretical basis remains Marxist – as I understand the method.”³ Historical materialism, “a definite theory of history”, as he put it, was indeed his framework of comprehension and source of interpretation of historical societies. Accordingly he defined history as “the presentation, in chronological order of successive developments in the means and relations of production”.⁴ He quotes a long passage from Marx’s preface to Critique of Political Economy (1859), as an excellent statement of what he needed by way of a theoretical basis for characterising historical societies and their transformations. The famous passage begins as the following:

In the social production of their means of existence, men enter into definite, necessary relations which are independent of their will, productive relationships which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The aggregate of those productive relationships constitute the economic structure of the society, the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of the material means of existence conditions the whole process of social, political and intellectual life.

Though Kosambi quotes the entire paragraph from Marx’s preface, what seems to have attracted him most is the portion reproduced above, as evident from the essence of Marxist historical perspective summarised elsewhere in his own words:

An aggregate of human beings constitutes a society when, and only when, the people are in some way related. The essential relation is not kinship, but much wider; namely, that developed through production and mutual exchange of commodities. The particular society is characterised by what it regards as necessary; who gathers or produces the things, by what implements; who lives of the production of others, and by what right, divine or legal – cults and laws are social by-products; who owns the tools, the land, sometimes the body and soul of the producer; who controls the disposal of the surplus, and regulates quantity and form of the supply. Society is held together by bonds of production.⁵

Kosambi understood Marx’s class theory in the least literal sense as referring to the embedded dynamic of difference in the social form rather than a conflict manifesting itself in war. To quote him: “The proper study of history in a class society means analysis of the difference between the interests of the classes on top and of the rest of the people....”⁶ Obviously, what he has in mind is the contradictory dynamic of class differentiation carried forward to diverse aspects of social life.

It appears that Marx’s primacy thesis about social transformation theorising the process of one mode of production dissolving into another, impelled under the dynamic of incompatibility between forces and relations of production, does not seem to have engaged Kosambi much. It is true that he talks about tools and implements as fundamental determinants in a social form. He says:

“Social organisation cannot be more advanced than the instruments of production will allow...”⁷

However, the theoretical insights underlying the following sentence from Marx’s preface to Critique of Political Economy do not seem to have prompted him to explain transformation:

A social system never perishes before all the productive forces have developed for which it is wide enough; and, new, higher productive forces never come into being before the material conditions for their existence have been brought to maturity within the womb of the old society itself.

Kosambi did think about forces of production central. He underlines the centrality of plough and discovers economic practices, ideas and institutions indicative of a transformed society in the course of critical analysis of ancient Indian literary texts, but hardly seeks to interpret change by problematising the incompatibility between forces and relations of production, which Marx emphasised the most.⁸

Like any other historian, what Kosambi wanted to adopt too was the direct procedure from historical records to history, but he was confronted by the question as to how history of India could be written in the absence of sufficient documentation. The texts and traditions of ancient India are not only different but also do not have social continuity of contacts with accuracy of space and time.⁹ He says: “We are thus led inevitably to concentrate upon successive developments, in chronological order, in the means and relations of production. Only this can tell us how people lived at any period. The point of view here is, as in any other science worth the name, purely materialistic.”¹⁰

2. Anti-Deterministic Stance

D D Kosambi’s historical methodology does not let us just brand it as Marxist and be done with it. Historical materialism was indeed his framework for comprehending the past but his procedure was not exactly as construed in Marxism, the basic presumption of which meant formulation of theoretical truth first and checking it against the theoretically accessible empirical evidence. Kosambi often preferred to proceed the other way around, of course under the predicament of lack of direct sources. He says:

We shall at times have to reconstruct the material changes from what survives as marks upon the ideological superstructure, but let it be noted that Marxism is far from the economic determinism which its opponents so often take it to be. For that matter, any intelligent determinist must discuss ‘conditions’ rather than ‘causes’ and take full cognisance of the course of historical development.¹¹

Kosambi had little regard for theoretical empiricism that precluded hypothetico-deductive destined to deviate from the foundational theory, perhaps the central property that can be called the Kosambi effect. He says: “When one applies (Marxism) to the Indian problem, it must be kept in mind that Marx speaks of all mankind where we deal only with a fraction”.¹²

Kosambi does not adhere to the teleological evolutionary schema through which Marx illustrated his theory unlike most Marxist historians who religiously do, often to the extent of even taking the illustration itself for theory.¹³ Though he has not defined it anywhere, it appears that he understood and practised Marx’s theory exactly as construed by the structuralist Marxists who took it more as an instrument of analysis than a typology of social development. Kosambi observes “...no single mode prevailed uniformly over the whole country at any one time; so it is necessary to select for treatment that particular mode which, at any period, was the most vigorous, most likely to dominate production, and which inevitably spread over the greater part of the country, no matter how many of the older forms survived in outward appearance.”¹⁴ However, he had accepted feudal mode of production with least botheration about its non-universal characteristics that historians subsequently debated at length in the Indian context.¹⁵ At the same time, he summarily rejected the concept of Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) by dismissing Marx’s remarks inapplicable to Indian history in the following words: “Acute and brilliant as these remarks are, they [Marx’s words] remain misleading nevertheless”.¹⁶

He makes clear that his position is far from mechanical materialism:

Economic determinism will not do. It is not inevitable, nor even true, that a given amount of wealth will lead to a given type of development. The complete historical process through which the social form has been reached is also of prime importance. ...If the superstructure cannot be adjusted during growth, then there is eventual conflict. Sometimes the old form is broken by a revolution in the guise of a reformation. Sometimes the class that gains by preserving the older form wins, in which case there is stagnation, degeneracy or atrophy. The early maturity and peculiar helplessness of Indian society against later foreign invasions bears testimony to this general scheme.¹⁷

Kosambi’s scathing review of S A Dange’s “painfully disappointing book”, India from Primitive Communism to Slavery, based on “facile pseudo-Marxism” shows the extent of his intolerance towards mechanical application of Marxism.18 However, Kosambi was never reluctant to ascribe universal generalisations to the particular context, even deterministically, so long as sources supported it, as the following statement exemplifies: “At every stage the survival of previous forms and the ideology of the top classes exert tremendous force – whether by tradition or revolt against tradition – upon any social movement.”¹⁹ In short, what Kosambi made clear was that the adoption of Marx’s thesis never meant blind repetition of all his conclusions (and even less, those of the official, party-line Marxists) at all times.²⁰

Kosambi was always an ideal analyst who produced the same results every time, and hence, quite scientific. Nevertheless, his views were hardly independent of himself. They were invariably mixed up with sense of justice and empathy, a feature quite sufficient for a scientist to see the approach unscientific. Perhaps, this duality is inevitable to any social scientists, for they make a different sense of “scientific/unscientific” as well as “objective/subjective”. To be scientific for social scientists means to be truthful to and self-reflexive about their ways and means of knowing the social. The central reason is the epistemological distinction they make between the objects of knowledge of science and non-science. The objects of science are ontologically objective and those of social sciences, subjective.²¹ Marxist concept of objectivity takes it out of the sphere of humanist perception and places it in the sphere of theoretical statements although many Marxists do the other way. Kosambi’s historical methodology was more humanist than Marxist in the theoretical sense. He always insisted upon following a scientific investigation but his observations were objective in the social scientific sense, according to which objectivity resided in the openness and transparency of the evidence and analytical procedure as well as commitment to social justice. His observations seldom became objects of theoretical statements and they often deviated from the avowed theory as required by the nature of the source and probably under various influences including the pressure for rendering his arguments plausible to the sensibility of fellow-historians and readership. These account for the dominance of empiricist language over theory in his writings. It is a fact that they precluded the possibility of theoretical production, though marvellously transcended theoretical empiricism.

Kosambi has delineated a schema of the stages of social development in Indian history with unevenly evolved “tribal forms co-existing in varying concentration” as the long lasting background in time.²² The question as to “how at various points these tribal forms were assimilated to the society” has been central to his identification of the developmental stages. The oldest progressive stage that he identifies in Indian history is that of the class-structured society whose surplus sustained the Indus cities. The next stage he makes out is that of the Aryan pastoral tribal population with horse, mobile food-supply in cattle, and metal weapons, which overpowered the urban population and moved on to the east by clearing forests and assimilating lesser tribes by force and peaceful means. The subsequent stages are those of the rise of agriculture, trade, states, state-controlled agrarian villages and feudalism. There is no Marxism, deterministic or otherwise, in this schema of developmental stages, for it does not address itself the question of transformation from one stage to the other in the light of the theory of conflict between material productive forces and social productive relations. Nonetheless, it was indeed with Marxist insights he identified the advance of agrarian village economy over tribal country as the first social revolution in India, albeit without detailing the incompatibility between the forces and relations of production. Of course, he does state: “Nevertheless, just those social relations within the tribe that had made the first settlements possible had at this stage turned into fetters which had to be broken before society could advance to a higher level.”²³ But even when he turns towards changes in forces and relations of production, there is a top-down stare precluding theoretical focus on the process at the base.²⁴ Obviously, the inadequacy of sources disallowed Kosambi to ask from which forms of development of productive forces what relations turned into their fetters where and when. Perhaps, it is not accidental that his definition of history emphasises changes in means and relations of production and not forces.

3 Fieldwork and ethnography

While Kosambi’s hermeneutics was based almost entirely on Marx’s social theory and universals, his heuristics was based on ethnographic fieldwork and particulars. Field was his laboratory and ethnography of the present-day practices, his experiments. The importance he had given to fieldwork, his caution about ways of conducting it and the ingenuity he insisted are evident in the following words:

...fieldwork has to be performed with critical insight, taking nothing for granted, or on faith, but without the attitude of superiority, sentimental reformism, or spurious leadership which prevents most of us from learning anything except from bad textbooks... The paramount importance of fieldwork in the study of Indian history seems altogether to have escaped their [historians’] attention. Such works in the field falls into three inter-related classes: archaeology, anthropology and philology. All three need some preliminary knowledge of local conditions, the ability to master local dialects, and to gain the confidence of tribesmen as well as peasants. In all fieldwork it is necessary to develop a technique and critical method during the course of the investigation itself. Fitting observations into rigid, preconceived moulds is ruinous. The technique of asking the right question in the proper way cannot be taught nor mastered except in the field. Whatever transport is used to reach any given locality, the actual fieldwork can only be done on foot...there is no substitute for work in the field for the restoration of pre-literate history. This extends to all historical periods for any country like India where written sources are so meagre and defective while local variations are indescribably numerous...²⁵

This methodological emphasis on field data for the study of history is not something common to historians, for their approach is normally confined diachronically to a specific period in the past presupposing a rupture with the present. Further, they seldom learn things from living objects; they derive their knowledge out of dead relics in their archaeologically stratified contexts. Kosambi, on the other hand, stated:

Archaeology provided some data, but I could get a great deal from the peasants. Fieldwork in philology and social anthropology had to be combined with archaeology in the field as distinguished from the site archaeology of a ‘dig’.²⁶

It is chiefly out of ethnographic survivals identified through careful observations that he sought to construct ancient socioeconomic processes. For instance, he argued that the change from an aggregate of gentes to a society, by relying on factors such as the endless ramifications of the extant caste system and the continuation of caste names, endogamy, commensal ‘tabu’, exogamous ‘septs’ (often with totemic names), and caste ‘sabha’ councils of tribal origin.27 One thing that is exciting about Kosambi’s fieldwork is his rare acumen to tracing survivals of the past in the present without losing the embedded evolutionary dynamic in the diachronic perception. It is an extremely difficult exercise with the lurking danger of being anachronistic any time unless the continuity is archaeologically and theoretically well-sustained.

4 detection of Long Continuity

Kosambi was pretty sure that there existed a long continuity of past traditions in the folk present. He could theorise convincingly that change in ancient times was extremely slow and hence despite the distance in time, the past persisted in the present under certain historically contingent material conditions of human existence. Pre-history thus turned out to be a heritage of pre-class society to Kosambi. Archaeology of early tools and materials made a live sense to him more in the light of the current ethnography of tribal life with the notion of continuous acculturation. Likewise, the social anthropology of the rise of patriarchy, elaboration of ritual and sacrifice, and disposal of the dead, made sense to him in the perspective of sustained continuity. His analysis of the power of group-life and the interpretation of the descent of castes from tribes are based on ethnographic insights into continuity as well as change. We are shaken to open our eyes when he says: “The vast majority of country-side gods are still daubed with a red pigment that is a palpable substitute for long-vanished blood sacrifices – which also survive in a few cases, although the very idea of blood sacrifices would now come as a shock to many devotees. One finds rites practised which clearly go back to the Stone Age, though the votaries – often people with a modern education – are not conscious of the incredibly long continuity.”²⁸ His first book, after discussing “scope and methods”, goes straight into the heritage of pre-class society, focusing on tribal survivals by way of cults, festivals and rites.

Kosambi’s “long continuity thesis” goes far beyond material artefacts, pursuing ancient ritual practices through a rigorous literary critical analysis of cultural texts. Continuity of culture is a rare trait that Kosambi ascribes to India on the basis of his superstructural analysis, seminal in the absence of historical records and feasible, thanks to the presence of ritual or religious texts in plenty. In response to allegations such as: “India was never a nation”, “that Indian culture and civilisation is a by-product of foreign conquest”, Kosambi argued that the continuity of Indian culture in its own country is perhaps its most important feature unlike other continents of ancient civilisations.²⁹ He observes: “At every stage, in almost every part of the country, a great deal of the superstructure survived, along with the productive and formal mechanism of several previous stages; there always remained some people who could and did cling stubbornly to the older mode.”³⁰ He discovers as “an extraordinary feature of the literary source, namely, that even the latest of the works may be the first to contain a very ancient tradition not recorded earlier, except sometimes by passing mention”.³¹

Kosambi owed his method of linking the past with the present-day folk-life to his father who had used the method of reconstructing the past practices and their contexts out of village life.³² He was pretty sure of the long historical continuity of folk practices and the continuity had brought him great relief as a researcher of ancient history encountering acute dearth of source material. To quote his words: “Nevertheless, the country has one tremendous advantage that was not utilised till recently by the historian: the survival within different social layers of many forms that follow reconstruction of totally diverse earlier stages. To find these strata one has to move from the cities into the countryside.”³³

5 Politics of intimacy with the Present

Kosambi sought to study the past not out of antiquarian interest, but under pressures of socio-economic problems of the present. A praxis interventionist seeking resolutions to the problems of the present out of the past, he went about mastering history under the politics of intimacy with the present. Learning about the past was drawing oneself intimate to the present as far as he was concerned. It was learning about the present in the light of the past too. He was aware of and deeply committed to the political function of history, which meant facilitation of critical understanding of the past in relation to the present. Kosambi makes his function as a historian clear by quoting E H Carr:

The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present. Great history is written precisely when the historian’s vision of the past is illuminated by insight into problems of the present... To learn about the present in the light of the past also means to learn about the past in the light of the present. The function of history is to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them. ³⁴

Kosambi’s starting point of investigation into Indian history is critical consciousness about deeper socio-political and cultural conditions of the contemporary India. He begins identifying and characterising the Indian ruling class in the following way:

The class that rules India today, the paramount power, is the Indian bourgeoisie. This class has some peculiar characteristics, due primarily to the course of history. The Indian bourgeoisie is technically backward. Its production (and mentality) is overwhelmingly that of a petty bourgeoisie as yet... Its government has a unique position as by far the greatest power of capitalist assets, and a monopolist wherever it chooses to be. This seemingly absolute power is under compulsion of reconciling the real needs of the country, and its professed socialist goal, with the rapacity of both petty-bourgeois and tycoon sections of the ruling class. Finally, the class came to power too late, in a world where the international bourgeois failure and crisis had already manifested itself.³⁵

The first chapter of Culture and Civilisation, ‘The Historical Perspective’ opens with characterisation of “the Indian scene” of unity and diversity, diversity as the cultural truth and unity as created by the modern ruling class consisting of the capitalist bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, its politicians and bureaucrats and, the government as a single entrepreneur. Going into the historical composition of the Indian bourgeoisie and its multi-class origins, he observed: “A good deal of modern Indian Capital is, in fact, transformed primitive feudal and moneylender’s accumulation... In recent times even India’s feudal princes have had to (turn) their crude hoarded wealth into shares and stocks or sink into poverty... The feudal, moneylending, and trading families, especially their womenfolk never lost the outward forms of their religious superstition.”³⁶ Characterising the Indian villages he viewed: “...the dominant class in India and India’s urban life bears the stamp of foreigners who imposed bourgeois mode of production

– the countryside and religious institutions carry the indelible mark of their primitive origins because primitive modes of life have been and are still possible in many parts of the country”.³⁷ Discussing difficulties of the historian against such traits of the contemporary socio-political and cultural reality, he sets unique procedure.

Kosambi’s context of doing history is not merely the bourgeoisie present theoretically abstracted, but done to the empirical details of everyday life, such as daily food requirements per Indian adult, in ounces. He grows impatient of official declarations stating that Indian food consumption continues to decline.

The grim tale of a diet so miserably deficient in every single particular is made still more tragic by the fact that it is a rare Indian who can afford to buy even the food assigned to him by the statistical averages. The question is, whether this situation of a populace doomed to hunger and disease is permanent, or whether Indian society is about to rid itself of such basic evils. How long can any country remain a democracy with this little sustenance for the average man? The answer has to be worked out by correct thinking, for which the study of history is quite indispensable. But the solution has then to be made a reality by correct action, which means a step beyond mere study of the past. Control over history is not to be attained by the passive suffering that has perpetuated Indian life from generation to generation. The time has now come to make history, to a seriously thought-out, conscious design in order to preserve the peace of Asian and of the world.³⁸

The intimacy that he purposefully maintained between the past and the present gives credence for his commitment to generating critical consciousness by linking specialised knowledge to politics, the most crucial service that the people need from a social scientist. This strong attitude to politics of knowledge showing clarity about and insistence upon the epistemological connection between the history one constructs and its relevance to the contemporary problems, makes the form and content of his history different, as the vital constituent of the Kosambi effect.

6 Primacy of Evidence

Absence of the usual Marxist teleological schema in Kosambi’s Indian history can be understood in the light of his anti-deterministic stance. That there is no direct discussion of the changes in the means and relations of production, which is his definition of history, in his books is a feature of apparent surprise. We have already seen that the stages he identified in Indian history are not theoretically given but empirically endowed.39 There is a discussion of the need for a radical change at the end of the chapter on Aryan expansion. But even that refers to intricacies of ritual as an unimpeachable testimony to the need for a more productive social organisation.⁴⁰ The observation is that rituals reflected the underlying necessity – the shortage of food under the inadequate system of production. Analysing post-vedic rituals and rites, he identifies emergence of castes as indication of economic differentiation among tribes and class structuring within. He digs out from his sources the relics of institutions like mortgage, interest, usury and so on to characterise a changed society. However, nowhere does one come across in his writings a direct entry into the question of social form and its means and relations of production, despite the avowed methodological insistence upon the primacy of material processes.

Kosambi sought to discuss the cultural first, for the evidence existed there. It helped him reach out to the material basis of social existence by a reversal of the Marxist methodological strategy of proceeding from the base to the super structure with the theory of the homologous bearing of the former on the latter. For instance, he begins his discussion of the transformation from tribe to society by characterising the new priesthood, new religions, the mid-way approach of the Buddha, the dark hero of the Yadus, and the rise of Kosala and Magadha. Speaking about the new creeds and sects that emerged in the Gangetic region he comments:

In the study of these sects, the finer metaphysical differences are of lesser importance than the background phenomena of tribal life and the monstrous cancer growth of sacrificial ritual in the tribal kingdoms. It is out of these and as a protest against their anti-social features that every one of the sects appeared... The new society had gone over to agriculture, so that the slaughter of more and more animals at a growing number of sacrifices meant a much heavier drain upon producer and production.⁴¹

The following statements show how he related contents of cultural texts to the historical context of social change.

Truth, justice, non-stealing, not encroaching upon the possessions of others show that a totally new concept of private, individual property had arisen... The injunction against adultery denotes a rigid concept of family and the passing of group-marriage. Without such a morality taken for granted today, trade would have been impossible... The ahimsa doctrine first expressed the basic fact that agriculture can support at least 10 times the number of people per square mile than a pastoral economy in the same territory.⁴²

Likewise, he characterises political changes before examining the economic processes.

Kosambi carefully checks whether the absence of clues to theoretically valid hunches is accidental or natural. He always preferred to explain the absence and go by the evidence. One cannot see arbitrarily imposed theoretical extrapolation in his construction of the past. Absence of evidence for the existence of slavery in ancient India was not accidental for him but quite natural because, as he explains:

There was neither surplus nor enough commodity production for extensive slavery to be profitable. The territory was still thinly settled over long distances in difficult country... There was plenty of room for retreat of the tribesmen as well as for expansion of plough-cultivation, in contrast to the limited useful terrain in Greece or Italy.⁴³

Therefore, he asserted:

 “...it is impossible to see slavery in the classical European sense in India at any period”.⁴⁴

In chapter VII of his Indian History he himself says:

“The last three chapters drift away from the definition of history given at the beginning of this work. The reader may be lost in the text-critical morass presented by tenuous legendary material uncollated with archaeology.”

It is only at the end of a long discussion of polity in five sections based on clues ferreted out from the jumble of literary texts he focuses on the class structure and state-controlled agrarian village as the basic production unit of the Mauryan economy supplemented by trade. The next chapter is about the post-Mauryan polity, superstitions of agrarian society, caste village and Manusmriti, change in religion, development of Sanskrit and its social functions, etc, – apparently topics never to have anything to do with changes in the means and relations of production. He could not find evidence for delineating the conditions of change in the means and relations of production leading towards the genesis of feudalism in India, exactly as the theory would have him extrapolate. Therefore, he preferred to go by what the palpable sources had him believe and characterise feudalism in India, a two-way processes from above and below respectively.⁴⁵ The first was a stage of state initiative from above in the form of land-grants. He defined feudalism from above “as a state wherein an emperor or powerful king levied tribute from subordinates who still ruled in the right and did what they liked within their own territory – as long as they paid the paramount”.⁴⁶ The next was a stage of landed intermediary developing within the village, between the state and the peasantry, gradually to wield armed power over the local population.⁴⁷ According to him feudal developments were inevitable with the growth of small kingdoms over plough-using villages.⁴⁸

Kosambi explains probably this contradiction by saying:

“Unfortunately, none of these fasts can be elicited without tedious discussion of badly analysed sources. The reader who is dissatisfied with my treatment has only to compare it to any other standard discussion based upon documentation rather than pure conjecture. The most that could be expected here is a sketch of the possibilities for further work.”⁴⁹

His question is what one would do if the sources to be depended upon for discussing economic transition from pastoral to agrarian are mostly later ritual legend, myth, fable or sermons. According to him many of them have been readjusted by the priestly class which had begun to grow further and further away from the producers, rewriting tradition to prove their own importance or to claim special caste/ class privileges.⁵⁰

Kosambi states:

“A change of the utmost historical importance is in the relation of the ideological superstructure to the productive basis; what had been an indispensable stimulus at the beginning became a complete hindrance by absolute stagnation at the end.”⁵¹

His argument is that the tribal society could not have been converted peacefully to new forms and free savages changed into helpless serfs without the ideological superstructure replete with superstitions such as worship of the cow, cobra, and monkey.

Such theoretical arguments apart, he let the evidence go first and theory to follow. Kosambi did not do theory through history. Theory dissolves and disappears into the history that he writes. Advancing from the superstructure through culture to property relations and economic base was his methodological procedure, which involved rigorous text-critical analysis in search of evidence, a feature of high level technical competence that saved his arguments from being easily branded as Marxist reductionism.

7 Sources First

Kosambi’s top priority was sources, a quality that he inherited from his father. There was a marked difference in Kosambi’s purpose and mode of dependence on sources, particularly literary texts that historians had searched for annals and dynastic accounts. He believed: “So far as annals, king-lists, chronicles, dates of important battles, biographies of rulers and cultural figures go, there is no Indian history worth reading”.⁵² Therefore, his approach to sources, especially literary texts, was analytical and multidisciplinary, which he called “combined methods in Indology”, putting linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and sociology together in the perspective of the materialistic social theory of history.⁵³ He goes deep into the structure, composition and social context of every text with enormous insights into their constitution. The study of Mahàbhàrata generally and Gita particularly exemplify the thoroughness of the texts with which he proceeded to interpretations implying significant hermeneutic departures in Indian historiography.⁵⁴ His critical literary analysis, genealogy of myths, archaeological corroboration, etymology of terms, their social anthropological implications such as tabu and totemic importance and so on running in several pages ingrain indications of the pattern of land-use, the presence of plough, the producers, surplus, trade, social groups and relations of appropriation. All this is done not by presenting evidence from texts full of legends and myths, the rationalisation and pursuance of the tantalising contents of which, he knew, would rarely yield direct historical information.⁵⁵ His use of source was indirect in the sense that he relied on the analytically accessed historical signifiers in it, which in turn could be produced as evidence theoretically.

His critical literary analysis of the available sources was thorough, contextualisation unique and the mastery, amazingly profound, as his reviews, articles and books testify.⁵⁶ It was a tedious process of critically knowing the internalities and externalities of the texts, which can be illustrated with the help of a few sample quotes from him:

“The Rigveda was put together from clan books combined with certain additions, and then transmitted to us Sakala recension which was generally accepted.... Sàmaveda may be discarded immediately, for its words are almost entirely from the Rigveda with trifling adjustments for the purpose of musical chanting at the fire-sacrifice”.⁵⁷

Then he goes into the several recensions of the Yajurveda and takes the Taittirãyasamhita of the Black ‘Yajus’ and the Satapathabràhmana portion of the Vàjasneyisamhita of the White Yajus as the most useful texts. In preserving the Yajurveda, several other widely separated tribal groups participated. Names like ‘Kañha’ connected with the tradition are confirmed by Greek sources as Indian tribal names at the time of Alexander. The ‘Taittirãya’ is only one such recension...”⁵⁸ “The name of the Taittirãyasamhita, derives from ‘taittiri, patrodge gotra totem’, all the more interesting because the book itself tells us that one of the heads struck off from three-headed ‘Tvaùñç’ by Indra became a taittiri bird. The taittiri country produced fine horses according to Mahàbhàrata.”

The Atharvaveda is the late text. He finds the two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata very difficult to fit anywhere into the closed sequence forming the next group of sources. Finally, there exists the Buddhist canonical literature in the simpler Pàli language, which was first written down in Bihar about the time of Asoka, say about two and a half centuries after the events narrated, and about which grew up a whole series of tales in the nature of commentaries, the Jàtakas being the most informative. He says that Pàli literature brings us into verifiable history, for archaeology supports the record. He thinks that the Jain sutras must be included therewith though in their present state they are later as well as less important. Kosambi delves into the complex sources with his profound multidisciplinary scholarship and amazing competence in linguistics and comparative literature to see what could be historical about them and does archaeology support their historicity.

There is always a detailed examination of sources at each stage with exhaustive critical comments on what to be used, why and how in the light of what were composed when. For instance, speaking about the Buddhist literature, he would note:

 “...Jàtakas cannot be utilised directly for a picture of social relations at the time of the Buddha. The reason is that they were written much later, in a traders’ environment – perhaps, during the Satavahana period. They have in addition been influenced by the lost Ceylonese versions of Buddhist stories from which the present text was again reduced to Pàli. The Buddhist canon was mostly formed about the time of Asoka, a part even later. Only the fact that society and its means of production changed slowly, that there was no special reason to invent the particular details cited, allows parts of the canon to be used as evidence for conditions at the time of the Buddha’s death.”⁵⁹

The multidisciplinary insights and comparative cultural wisdom with which he handled the sources can be exemplified by a couple of his reflections on the flood incarnations: “The tortoise is of totemic importance, as it has to be built into the sacrificial altar though not a sacrificial animal. It is etymologically related to the Kasyapa ‘gotra’ of the brahmins, which is notorious for being able from early days to absorb (as the name Màtanga Kassapa shows) aborigines who wanted to become brahmins and as the gotra of all those without a clan name or unable to remember their clan name or born of mating against exogamic gotra rules. Kasyapas were negligible in the Rigveda, of growing importance in the traditions above while they took the lead in the early Kosala-Magadhan Buddhist order. The tortoise is specifically included in the list of five nailed animals which may be eaten without breaking a tabu. This shows that it was eaten by brahmins apparently for totemic rights since it is nowhere prescribed as an article of diet nor known to have been specially popular as staple or delicacy. The fish incarnation goes back to Sumeria, perhaps through the Indus culture; the goat fish is a symbol of Ea who is also ‘Enki’ and sleeps in a chamber within the waters just as Vishnunàràyaõa sleeps upon them. The very name Nàràyaõa may be of non-Aryan derivation, for Nara is explained as the waters. The word is probably borrowed by Sanskrit and may be Dravidian, or even Assyrian.”⁶⁰

8 AfterWords

A scientist who talked about the past with the politics of intimacy with the present, Kosambi remained an intimidating scholar for his contemporaries (for that matter he still does so even for scholars today), to take issue with him, thanks to what can be epitomised as “the Kosambi effect”, the most crucial constituent of which is the awareness that historical knowledge cannot be based on empirical givens and that a methodology guaranteeing a systematic, deductively formulated, empirically verified concept of reality about the past is indispensable. The adaptation of historical materialism to serve the purpose, and accordingly writing a history worth designating a genre by itself in form, content and hermeneutics is another crucial constituent. The authority and authenticity with which he wrote his strong prose of political determination based on a commendable grasp of classical world history, profound knowledge in Sanskrit and Pali texts, scholarship in several foreign languages, intellectual honesty with sources, extensive fieldwork, ethnographic wisdom, familiarity with cognate disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, economics and sociology, and technical competence in epigraphy and numismatics, are other constituents. Naturally, scholars seldom braved a cognitive encounter with his conclusions. They never dared to dismissively brand them Marxist either, since he himself was a ruthless critic of contemporary Marxist arguments. He has noted once that his conclusions “...had a mixed reception because of the reference to Marx, which automatically classifies them as dangerous political agitation in the eyes of many, while official Marxists look with suspicion upon the work of an outsider.”⁶¹ Kosambi, distinguished from the positivist, re-constructionist mainstream with empiricism as the central methodology for discovering reality, was a Marxist constructionist inclined to proposing conditions of historical happenings, rather than discovering their causes. He knew that the knowledge about the past in terms of specific details will always remain tentative leaving historians’ representations unending since real past never exists out there for verification. Nevertheless, the version with “the Kosambi effect” will last long, for it ingrains the ultimate realisation expressed in his own words echoing Marx’s philosophical position:

“It is doubtless more important to change history than to write it…”.⁶²

Notes

1. Interestingly, Kosambi arrived in Indology gently addressing Marxists and later thundering at them by putting across his views in a few provocative reviews and assertive responses. An example of the gentle tone is ‘Caste and Class in India’, Science and Society, Vol III, No 3. New York, 1944, pp 243-49. A typical example of thundering is the review of S A Dange’s book, India from Primitive Communism to Slavery, D D Kosambi, ‘Marxism and Ancient Indian Culture’ in Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol xxIx, No 4, Poona, 1948, pp 271-77. Also see ‘On a Marxist Approach to Indian Chronology’ in Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol xxxI, No 4, Poona, 1950, pp 258-66, wherein he makes critical responses to D A Suleikin’s note on the periodisation of Indian history. But his book appeared strikingly quite unassuming and humble. The preface to the first edition of the book says: “This book does not pretend to be a history of India. It is merely a modern approach to the study of Indian history, written in the hope that readers may be impelled to study that history for themselves, or at least be enabled to look at the country with greater sympathy and understanding”.

For rest of the notes, download the pdf

Early Indian History and the Legacy of D D Kosambi

Early Indian History and the Legacy of D D Kosambi
Romila Thapar

Published in the DD Kosambi special issue of EPW on 26th July 2008. Download pdf

(Romila Thapar is professor emeritus, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. )

This article discusses three of the many themes in D D Kosambi’s writings which have been seminal to the study of early Indian history: the relationship between tribe and caste, the link between Buddhism and trade, and the nature of feudalism in India. Many of the methods of Kosambi’s analyses are substantially valid even 50 years later. Some need reconsideration either because of new evidence or because of new theories of explanation or because the overall perspectives of the past are today differently nuanced. Kosambi’s intellectual perspectives and sensibilities were inevitably of his own times. Up to a point they carry traces of both the idealism and the dismissals of those times. He insistently asserted his autonomy from the clutches of contemporary orthodoxies, both of the Left and of the Right. The past was not to be used as a mechanism of political mobilisation as it has increasingly come to be among some in our time. The sources that inform us about the past have to be meticulously analysed and subjected to a rigorous methodology irrespective of their status or the authority they command. Kosambi would undoubtedly have agreed that the advance of knowledge was dependent on a constant critiquing of existing explanations.
This is a slightly expanded version of a lecture given at Pune on July 31, 2007 to mark the inauguration of the birth centenary year of D D Kosambi. I would like to thank Meera Kosambi and others who took on the responsibility of organising the series of lectures.

***

It was an immense honour for me to have been asked to give a lecture inaugurating the year-long remembrance of D D Kosambi during his birth centenary. For me personally, it was remembering someone whose work provoked me into thinking beyond the obvious in my interpretation of early Indian history and who allowed me the privilege of some valuable discussion. I mean this quite literally as he was not easily accessible and discussion with him was therefore a privilege.

I first met Kosambi 50 years ago. In 1956 I was a PhD student at the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University, working on a thesis on Ashoka Maurya. My supervisor A L Basham announced one day that he had invited Kosambi to give some lectures on Hinduism. We had read a couple of his papers, but his book, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, was to be published only later that year. His first lecture, we assumed, would be about the Rigveda, since scholars generally began with that. But no. He showed some slides of a domestic ritual associated with the name-giving ceremony of a child. It involved dressing the pestle of the household in baby clothes and placing it in the child’s cradle. Kosambi provided an explanation that touched on many facets: the bestowing of blessings and imbuing the child with strength, belief systems in prehistoric societies, theories of mother-right, and fertility rituals. He argued that the beginnings of Hinduism lay in these ideas and practices. Religion was and is not just a matter of belief but also involves, and perhaps even more so, the meaning of the ritual occasion as social articulation.

In the course of that year I was visiting Mauryan period sites in connection with my thesis. Coming to Bombay, I mentioned to my brother Romesh Thapar that I would like to discuss my work with Kosambi. My brother and others such as Sham Lal were part of a small but lively study group that had been discussing with Kosambi his manuscript of what was to be published as An Introduction to the Study of Indian History. On my contacting Kosambi he explained that he was rather busy that week, but on hearing that I was going to Pune, suggested we travel together by the Deccan Queen on which he commuted between Pune and Bombay. It was a memorable journey. He had walked the entire route and knew every hill-top, stone and tree of consequence in terms of ethnographic and historical connections. His familiarity with the landscape was phenomenal. Those of us who were backing up our library research with field work had to think again about the meaning of field work and the co-relation of literary and tangible sources.

I called on him in Bombay at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research on a few other occasions and our conversations were largely clarifications that I was seeking on what he had written. Prior to the publication of the Introduction, his papers on history had been published in various journals such as the Bombay Branch of the Asiatic Society, and The Annals of the Bhandarkar Research Institute. These were scattered papers and not always easily accessible. It was helpful therefore to have his ideas on history distilled into three books: An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956), Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture (1962) and The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline (1965). His important papers pertaining to history have been republished now in a collection.¹

Kosambi’s major writings date to the 1950s and 1960s although he had begun to publish articles on Indology and Indian history earlier. These years were a turning point in the study of ancient history² and his writing was in many ways a crossing of the threshold. His studies moved out of the confines of colonial and nationalist historical writing and made visible new dimensions of the past. What had earlier come under the rubric of Indology was now being inducted into the social sciences which were a different kind of study. This was largely because the earlier interest in dynastic history and chronology was being expanded to include social and economic history and the interface of this with cultural articulation. Culture for him was not a separate entity, but an intrinsic part of the making of a historical context. This may sound trite today but 50 years ago the inter-weaving of society, economy and culture was a departure from the standard histories of ancient India.³ His discussion of what he called combined methods in Indology was a reflection of this change.⁴ These new dimensions gradually superseded the previous ones in terms of the primary interest of historians. In part this followed from the theoretical problems of social, economic and cultural change becoming the concerns of Indians in the post-colonial period. There was an interest now in ascertaining what had continued and what had changed from pre-colonial times. But it was also because the discipline of history was expanding its investigations into the past. Equal emphasis was now being given to understanding and explaining the past as was earlier given to gathering information on the past. Apart from the continuing discussion on colonial and nationalist historical writing on early India, there was a turning to other ways in which the Indian past had been viewed. Scholars of Indian history both in India and elsewhere were debating the ideas of Max Weber, the French Annales School and Karl Marx and their studies of some aspects of early India. Marxism elicited the maximum attention in India.

Outstanding exponent of Marxist interpretation

The outstanding exponent of the Marxist interpretation of Indian history in all its complexity and the one who ushered in a paradigm shift in the study of ancient Indian history was D D Kosambi. The paradigm shift was the move from colonial and nationalist frameworks and the centrality of dynastic history to a new framework integrating social and economic history and relating the cultural dimensions of the past to these investigations. This provided the context and highlighted the interface of different facets of society. In expanding historical information to include data from archaeology, linguistics, technology and ecology, he was also able to point out socio-economic hierarchies which he recognised as social inequalities and explain how they had an impact on history. For him history was the presentation in chronological order of successive developments in the means and relations of production. Historical study therefore did not stop with chronological narrative but required the investigation of many interrelated facets. “Production” was not confined to just the economy and technology of the time but involved an understanding of the multiple aspects of a society that constituted its entirety.

I have chosen here only a few themes out of the many from his writing and which I think have been seminal to the study of early Indian history. Given the versatility of his historical interests it is difficult to make a selection but I have selected three. I shall be speaking on his discussion of the relationship between tribe and caste, on the link between Buddhism and trade and on the nature of feudalism in India. His discussions reflect not only his formidable grasp on Indian data but also demonstrate his readings in Greco-Roman and Medieval European studies, readings that validate the importance of comparative history. In referring to these three themes I would also like to mention the questions they raise and the ways in which these have come into discussion in subsequent studies.

1. Tribe and Caste

The relationship of tribe to caste was for him a basic historical process in India.⁵ His familiarity with this process drew on his readings of texts and his observations in the course of fieldwork. Additionally, it was important to his understanding of class confrontations. His focus was on the two ends of the social spectrum: the organisation of the brahmana ‘varna’ and the creation of the ‘shudra varna’. The former was that of the highest ritual status and in later periods included the substantial number of recipients of grants of land.⁶ It was heterogeneous in origin although eventually it took a seemingly homogeneous form. The shudra varna, within which he included the ‘dasas’, provided the labour force and was essential to the definition of class. He compared this category as we shall see, not to Greco-Roman slavery but to the Greek helots. Tribes were distinct because they were not ‘shudras’ and neither were they slaves nor helots. They were a category outside caste and a pre-class formation. Tribe and caste were contrasting conditions. On occasion he equated varna with class but recognised situations where the equation did not hold.

The tribe was a community where land rights were derived from kinship relations and not from ownership. Rules controlled the choice of marriage relations partly because recruitment into the community was by birth. Partaking of food was generally within the community and contacts with outsiders were not encouraged.⁷ We can see here the process towards the creation of ‘jatis’ with some of the characteristics of the tribe continuing. Confrontation and negotiation were both used in converting tribes into castes. As a societal change this involved mutations in the economy, in technology – often in relation to the ecology, and in belief systems, all of which were important to Kosambi’s historical explanations. He saw the fundamental historical change as resulting from the extension of plough agriculture and the establishing of agrarian villages in areas that had previously been tribal lands, supporting scattered societies of hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators and pastoralists. This change brought about the transition from pre-class social formations to castes that suggested class.

In the context of these changing relationships, his analyses of rituals and of cultural practices and their historical context were particularly striking. Religious articulations were not just ideologies of the ruling class asserting hegemony. They were also ways in which status and control were negotiated and these could draw on more than economic causes.

Clan-based society and the state

The relationship between tribe and caste society is sometimes reformulated today as that between a clan-based society and the state. The term “tribe” has come to be used casually if not loosely to cover many societies and has lost the precision it may once have had. It is used for a range of social forms from food-gatherers to sedentary cultivators. A tribe can even incorporate more than one caste, as for example, in the descriptions of the Abhiras in early texts.⁸ Clan is more specific and is also suggestive of the evolution towards jati as caste although this does not negate the importance of varna. In a jati, recruitment is by birth into the jati (as it was in a clan), rules of endogamy and exogamy govern marriage; where occupation enters the definition it tends to restrict identity; and belief and ritual can be bound by a jati or at least identified with a cluster of them. A significant change is that the relatively egalitarian status among clans is undermined by caste hierarchy.

Some continuity from the clan to the jati is discernible although it is not the same from clan to varna. This was a distinction which, in the writing of early Indian history, was underlined by Kosambi, although he did not discuss jati extensively in the context of caste. Varna as a category has not always conformed to the norms of the ‘dharma-shastras’ and more so in the middle social levels where the caste status of varieties of groups could be adjusted. If varna is equated with class the equation varied with the context. The many intermediate categories of jatis as described in the normative texts had ambiguous identities in a system where hierarchy and inequality was emphasised. Where varna claimed divine sanction, this gave it yet another gloss.

The preference for the term “state” rather than caste as the form of change has to do with the coming of the state bringing about a large range of changes of which the conversion to caste society is one, albeit an important one. It is also an indirect critique of the notion that in early India there was an absence of the state because it was encompassed by caste. The political formation of a state generally implies a kingdom although some historians include clan polities as state systems. Kautilya’s well known ‘saptanga’ theory of the seven limbs that constituted a state are listed as a state requiring a king, a demarcated territory, ministerial administration, the storing of revenue in a treasury, a fortified capital, coercion which presumably could be physical or legal, and the presence of allies in the neighbouring kingdoms.⁹ Historians therefore look for processes that help in the establishing of states which subsume many changes, some being the ones discussed by Kosambi. The change from tribe to caste is a complex historical process. Kosambi was drawing attention to this complexity as well as to the fact that it was basic to much of historical change in India.

In the juxtaposition of tribe and caste or of clan and state, the encroachment on the tribe by caste society frequently resulted in its incorporation into the state. Apart from other factors this process also raises a number of questions on the etymology of words and consequently the interpretation of texts. Literal translations may not convey the exact meaning and may require to be co-related with the background of the society to which they refer. For instance, how is the term “raja” to be defined in its initial usage: as the chief of a clan or as a king, since both were called raja. The Arthashastra uses the same term for both but the context makes it clear as to which is meant.¹⁰ The difference in meaning would alter the reading of the text. Kosambi used the meanings almost interchangeably, yet he was aware of the distinction. He quotes a phrase from the Rigveda, that Agni eats the forests as a raja does the ‘ibhyas’, to which he could have added the later quotation from the Shatapatha Brahmana of the kshatriya eating the ‘vish’, the clansmen, as the deer eats grain.¹¹ The simile of “eating” does not convey the sense of awe associated with majestic royalty controlling subjects. Its association is more suggestive of activities of the raja in, for instance, conducting cattle-raids to acquire wealth as described in the Vedas. We are told that even the well-established Kuru-Panchalas go out in the dewy season to conduct cattle raids.¹² These are a staple means of acquiring wealth in small societies, dependent on agro-pastoralism where protection by a royal army is absent or not forthcoming.

That this activity continued into later periods in rural areas is evident from the numerous hero-stones commemorating the hero defending the village cattle against raiders. In such situations there seems not to have been a reliance on royal authority and defence was organised locally. Some heroes acquired immense status through this act of heroism and it is thought that they may even have been deified, as in the suggested origin of Vitthala at Pandharpur in Maharashtra. Historians of early India who are investigating such cultural flows are in part pursuing Kosambi’s insistence on investigating “living prehistory”.

In terms both of continuities and of social origins the relation between clan and caste also features in Kosambi’s discussion on the ‘gotra’ system among brahmanas.¹³ This was a subject of debate with Indologists such as John Brough.¹⁴ Myths of origin pertaining to ‘rishis’ such as, Agastya and Vasishtha, said to have been born from jars were analysed as referring to much more than what the narrative suggests.

The Aryan Question

Writing on what is often referred to as “the Aryan question”, Kosambi accepted the then current theory that Aryan speakers invaded India after the decline of the Harappan cities. However, he argued that there was an interface between the various communities – old and new. This conditioned the resulting cultural forms many of which are articulated in the Vedic corpus. The interaction is reflected in changes in the Indo-Aryan language and religious beliefs and rituals. It can also be seen in the emergence of new social groups.

For example, Kosambi pointed to the merging of Aryan and non-Aryan in linguistic usage and its reflection in particular caste identities. Brahmanas such as the much-mentioned Kakshivant among others, referred to in the Vedas are said to be the sons of ‘dasis’, i e, of ‘dasa’ women. This was a significant statement. Described as ‘dasyah-putra brahmana’, in some ways an oxymoron, it was nevertheless a known category, initially reviled but soon respected by other brahmanas.¹⁵ Thus, Kavasha Ailusha was first dismissed as being the son of a ‘dasi’ but when it was found that the Sarasvati followed him wherever he went, his eminence was conceded.¹⁶ This was the triumph of such brahmanas. Despite being of ambiguous caste they could be inducted into the brahmana varna. Such inductions are parallel to the legitimising “new kshatriyas” in post-Gupta times. Kosambi suggests that some from this category may have derived their vocation from what survived of the Harappan priesthood but this suggestion remains speculative. Kosambi was demonstrating the difference between the continuity of the formal structure of caste and the malleability of the functioning of caste which could contradict the normative codes

Changes in meaning

This raises a further question: can we understand the nature of the Aryan-non-Aryan interaction (if we choose to call it that), through observing changes in the meaning of certain terms, as for example, dasa? As described in the Rigveda, the earliest of the Vedas, the dasa was in effect “the Other” of the ‘arya’. Inevitably what constitutes Otherness or being alien, is a reflection of the Self, if in nothing else then at least in the characteristics that are chosen to represent “the Other”. Neither the arya nor the dasa societies were homogeneous, unified and monolithic. Societies and communities never are. Some dasa chiefs were arch enemies of the aryas but a few seem to have been patrons of the brahmanas.

The dasas are feared because they are wealthy and their strongholds cannot be easily overcome. Their Otherness lay in distinctions based on language, ritual observances, custom and perhaps, as some have argued, even appearance.¹⁷ Their numbers seem to be exaggeratedly large. Possibly the fear is also because they are associated with sorcery – ‘yatudhana’. Relations with the dasas change after a few centuries when in the later Vedic compositions they are regarded with contempt unless proved otherwise, as in the case of the Kavasha Ailusha and other such brahmanas. The status of the dasa had gradually been lowered and they now provided labour although the ritual specialists among them may have got a foothold into brahmanical ritual. The process by which this change occurred needs to be investigated in greater detail. How did the dasas, previously feared now become a group of bondsmen? It would also point to a change in the meaning of dasa, shifting from “the Other”, to “the subordinate one”.
The understanding of these kinds of changes, in terms of the interaction between the varying societies that existed in the north-western subcontinent at that time, introduces new questions and is far more helpful to explaining that period of history than the obsession with who was indigenous and who was foreign. The debate on the latter pays little attention to ascertaining whether the consciousness of being indigenous or foreign had any meaning for those societies. Recognised boundaries were non-existent. Therefore the differences between “us” and “them” were based on other features such as language, cultural patterns and belief systems, as also on negotiating hierarchies of status.
Kosambi had suggested that plough agriculture, iron technology, the use of the horse for mobility and a dependence on cattle for food, were among the crucial factors that gave the Aryan speakers an edge over other societies.¹⁸ This allowed them to become the dominant culture. Plough agriculture weakened clan solidarity and allowed caste to become the agency of control over land. But the archaeological evidence for plough agriculture from more recent excavations goes back to pre-Harappan times and therefore prior to the presence of Indo-Aryan speakers. If the arya-dasa relationship was between pastoralists and agriculturalists – as seems likely – then a different set of indices would also have to be analysed.

Use of iron technology

The introduction of iron technology dated to the second and first millennium BC in addition to the existing copper and bronze, is said to have facilitated the clearing of forests to extend the area under cultivation. Subsequently the surplus from agriculture led later to the establishing of urban centres. But iron technology in itself is not a sufficient factor of change. The archaeological presence of iron varies from region to region and in some places dates to the second millennium BC. At some Megalithic sites in the peninsula it is prior to or contemporary with the presence of Indo-Aryan speakers in north India. Indo-Aryan was not the language in the more southern of the sites. The wide distribution of Megalithic sites was discovered subsequent to Kosambi so he did not know of it. The important question is not just the introduction of iron technology but the manner in which it might have been appropriated and used by those wishing to establish their authority. The locations of sources and the treatment of the metal
– forging or smelting – and the function of artifacts would be helpful in understanding the nature of the change brought by this technology. Similarly, the production of a surplus from agriculture in itself is not sufficient to bring about urbanisation. Surplus is a process and has to be directed towards change as is done by those who use it as a resource. The crucial questions in Kosambi’s argument were who controls the technology and who works it. These questions still remain relevant.

The interaction between tribe and caste is an essential factor of historical change. But this was not the only social mutation in history. Parallel to this was the expansion of exchange relations from barter to commerce to which Kosambi drew attention. Trade introduces the dissolution of tribal bonds and the earlier nature of exchange which changes could encourage the coming of a class society. He brought into his study not only the geographical expansion of commerce in the post-Mauryan period but also its links with Buddhist monasteries particularly in the Deccan and their patronage from a wide cross-section of people.¹⁹ This became another perspective of the mutation of tribes into complex polities. Where monasteries were linked to trade they signalled not only the presence of commerce but also of craft production and degrees of urbanism, not to mention an extension of agriculture, to support the commerce. Barter is more often associated with clan-based societies and can be transformed into commerce with the coming of the state and with extensive trading links. An obvious index of commerce as different from barter is the presence of coins as a common unit of value. This could also point to an increase in commodity production.

Numismatics

Kosambi’s work on numismatics was closely related to his professional training as a mathematician. He used the logic of mathematics to formulate his questions and statistical methods to examine the data. This was new in the study of coins. The coins circulating in the subcontinent during the earlier period were what have come to be called, punch-marked coins. These were small roughly square or rectangular shaped coins, largely of silver and some of copper that had a cluster of symbols on one side and small marks on the reverse. The coins coincided with the evolution of early historical urban centres in the Ganges plain and the north-west. They were in circulation from a little before the second half of the first millennium BC to approximately the end of the millennium. The challenge that they posed was that unlike later coins, they were neither dated nor did most of them carry an indication of the issuing authority. Only a small number carried the legend, ‘negama’. Therefore, the basic questions were: what did the symbols represent, who made the small reverse marks and was there a way of separating the older coins from the later?

Observing that the coins, mainly of silver, were cut with accuracy and that some came from hoards such as one from Taxila, Kosambi decided to use one such hoard as his basic data.²⁰ A hoard would provide more reliable statistical data than stray finds. There was the further advantage that the terminal date of the hoard was known from the presence in it of a few dateable post-Mauryan Indo-Greek coins. Of the punch-marked coins some would have been in circulation for a longer period than others with a greater wear and tear. Kosambi argued that there was an age-weight co-relation and that by measuring the weight with exactitude he would be able to provide a chronological flow from earlier to later coins. This he did meticulously. He then went on to study the distribution of the symbols and to interpret what they represented. The commonly used crescent on arches was read by him as a Mauryan symbol suggesting the name Chandra-gupta. His readings for dynasties and kings are debatable despite the logic of his reasoning, but the idea of using a statistical method in the study of coins is worth pursuing where possible. The other feature was that of the reverse marks. It had been thought that the coins were issued not by kings but by traders. The coins inscribed with the legend, negama, perhaps referred to an exchange centre or a guild-like institution. Kosambi maintained that the reverse marks were made by traders who, from time to time, checked the weight and value of the coin and marked it. Some of the marking could have been that of the state superintendent such as the ‘lakshanadhyaksha’, the examiner of coins ²¹ whose functions are described in the Arthashastra.

In the course of examining the coins he discovered that some were debased. Using the chronology of age-weight statistics he maintained that the debasement dated to the late period of Mauryan rule. Co-relating this with references to double cropping in the Arthashastra and to state supervised agriculture, he maintained that the decline of the Mauryan Empire was due to a fiscal crisis and a pressure on Mauryan currency and by extension on the economy. The pressure came from the huge expenditure on the army and the administrative infrastructure. This would be supported by the salary scales listed in the Arthashastra weighing heavily in favour of the upper bureaucracy.²² Kosambi also pointed to the expansion of trading activity involving money transactions, which, if there was a shortage of silver could have led to debasement.²³ Not all these arguments have been accepted but his focus on a crisis affecting imperial power can provide new dimensions to investigating the nature of Empire. This was a much needed departure in the discussion on the causes of the decline of kingdoms which was generally attributed to the predictable “foreign invasions”. New aspects of the study of state systems were now introduced.
By way of an aside one could ask why Kosambi who used his knowledge of mathematics to great effect in the study of numismatics did not combine his expertise in mathematics and history to write a history of mathematics in early India. If there was anyone in India qualified to initiate a Joseph Needham-like project on science and civilisation in India, it could have been Kosambi. Was it his commitment to writing a Marxist history of India founded on studies of society and the economy that kept him from a history of mathematics? Even commentaries on the major mathematical texts would have been illuminating as have been his editorial comments in editing works of literature and which have since become standard editions.²⁴

2. Buddhism and Trade

At the time when Kosambi was writing, the data on trade was more limited than it is now. Trade routes that ran from the northwest with a hub at Taxila were known from the Greek sources of the Hellenistic kingdoms in west Asia and some Latin sources of the Roman Empire, and through limited archaeological data. Some routes went westwards to the eastern Mediterranean, some went south-eastwards to the Ganges delta and some crossed the Vindhyas into the peninsula. These provided links between networks of cities from Maurya to Gupta times. That there was a vigorous trade was well-established and there was much coming and going between people from numerous places. This was exemplified in the emergence of styles of architecture and sculpture and by reference to what were probably dialogues on matters pertaining to astronomy, mathematics and medicine, all of which constituted the knowledge systems of that time. Each of the religions of the traders started to refer to a saviour figure – St John of the Revelations among Christians, Shaoshyant of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha Maitreya and the coming of Vishnu as Kalkin. This was a remarkable conjunction of ideas.

Trade with the eastern Mediterranean as treated in earlier studies was regarded as primarily land-based and relatively less attention had been given to maritime trade. The last few decades have seen extensive evidence on maritime trade and consequently new studies. Archaeological data indicates the presence of traders from the eastern Mediterranean in India and inscriptions on potsherds found at port sites in the Red Sea provide evidence of Indian traders.²⁵ Merchants from Alexandria financed ships and cargo to travel from the Red Sea ports to the western coast of India stretching from the Indus delta to Kerala. A careful use of the south-west monsoon winds enabled ships starting out from the Red Sea and particularly from close to Socotra to cross the Arabian Sea. The cargo they took back was substantially of pepper and spices and some textiles.²⁶ The recent discovery of a contract in Greek mentioning trade with Muziris and more recently the possible discovery of what might have been the port of Muziris at Pattanam near Cochin, further underlines the importance of this trade. It also begins to be seen as a forerunner of the later pattern of trade with Arab, Jewish and other merchants from west Asia. The items in the early trade were paid for in Roman gold and silver coins, often freshly minted. The coins have been found in hoards and in settlements scattered across the peninsula with a concentration in the south.

Roman Trade

This Roman trade, as it is called, began tentatively in the first century BC, peaked over the millennium change, and continued to be relevant to the economy particularly of peninsula India until about the mid-first millennium AD. It has been suggested that the mutation of the chiefdoms of the south – the Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas – into kingdoms was in part due to their participation in the economy of this exchange.²⁷ Apart from Roman coins, some small Roman objects turn up at excavations in the peninsula. This was a trade that touched many centres and among these were Buddhist monasteries.
As compared to 40 years ago we now have evidence of a network of monasteries almost covering the Deccan. They come down seriatim along the east coast with a cluster in the Krishna delta, the epicentre being Amaravati. The sites suggest a coastal route and their even spread may indicate a form of looping trade. In the west, there is a cluster around the Sopara area. But further up and down the coast they are located more inland and at greater distances from each other. As Kosambi noted the monasteries stand like sentinels at the passes that lead down from the Western Ghats to the narrow coastal plain. Communication was gradually beginning to extend further afield in the Deccan as is evident from archaeological finds and references to place names in the inscriptions at Buddhist sites.
Focal points of trading activities in the Deccan tend to coincide with the location of Buddhist sites. Recently a ‘stupa’ has been excavated at Kanaganahalli near Gulbarga in Karnataka which further confirms these connections.²⁸ In structure and form, it is similar to stupas at Sanchi and Bharhut and dates from the second century BC to the third AD. Its location – almost at the mid-point between the delta of the Krishna and the western Deccan suggests that traffic came along the Krishna valley and then travelled up the Bhima valley. Both valleys are revealing new Buddhist sites. Votive inscriptions from sites on the western side, recording donations from householders, largely traders and artisans, occasionally refer to kings, usually a Satavahana king. The paleography of the inscriptions is similar to that of the western Deccan caves at Junnar and Nasik. Narratives in low-relief carry occasional hints of east coast contacts, although themes with a Buddhist context would be similar at many sites.

Kosambi’s book has a telling photograph of pack-animals which to this day carry goods down the incline towards the coast – a picture that has not changed much in the narrower gullies of the ghats. Controlling both coasts of the Deccan was the ambition of many kingdoms of the peninsula as this would have had a tremendous advantage in providing access to the west Asian and south-east Asian trade.
Kosambi had linked the rock-cut cave sites of the western Deccan with this trade and was proved to be right when the evidence for the trade increased and the links between traders and Buddhist monasteries came to be more closely established. He was interested in the activities of Buddhist monks and lay followers as suggested to him by his father’s work on Pali sources.²⁹ Dharmanand Kosambi had drawn attention to the multifaceted information in Buddhist texts where narratives and commentaries on ‘bhikkhus’ and ‘upasakas’ depicted their lives in a background that included more than discourses on ‘dhamma’. That there was the direct participation of many monks in trade is becoming apparent from recent studies of the early Buddhist texts and the votive inscriptions at monastic sites.³⁰ The monasteries therefore were not just staging-points for travellers on a long journey, but some could even have been the nuclei of commercial activity. Guilds of artisans, merchants, small-scale landowners and some local royalty were donors as were members of the Sangha among whom, apart from monks, were quite a few nuns.

Inscriptions in the cave monasteries of the Western Ghats also record another kind of nexus. Guilds of craftsmen received endowments from royalty, the interest from which was used on the welfare of the monks.³¹ The reorientation of the economic aspects of religious institutions such as monasteries continued into later times and included large numbers of temples. This was an interface between society, economy and religion that had not previously elicited detailed study but is now regarded as an essential part of the history of religions in India.

3. On modes of Production and Feudalism

The question of trade and urban growth is also important to another aspect of Kosambi’s view of Indian history, namely, the question of whether India experienced a feudal period and if so what form did it take. Kosambi’s focus was less on the general nature of feudalism as formulated for Europe and more on Marx’s theory of the feudal mode of production. The debate among Marxist historians in India at that time highlighted the question of whether the modes of production that Marx had formulated for Asian and European history were applicable to the Indian past. The Asiatic mode of production, which Marx had based in part on 19th century European ideas of Oriental Despotism, could not be applied directly to Indian historical evidence. The supposed absence of private property in land, the infrequency of commerce involving cities, the notion of an unchanging village community, were preconditions contradicted by Indian sources. At most some elements of this construct could be used in analysing a few aspects of early societies but Kosambi did not regard it as an explanatory mode for early Indian history. If caste is class at a primitive level of production then presumably there would be some class contradictions for there to be a subsequent stage of history, but this seems not to happen in societies said to be characterised by the Asiatic mode.

Marx had formulated the dialectic for European history based on various stages of change in the means of production. Of these, the slave and the feudal modes of production were thought of as possibly relevant for the history of early India. An attempt was made by S A Dange, in his book, From Primitive Communism to Slavery, to argue for a slaved-based economy for the ancient past.³² Kosambi’s critique of the book pointed out the flaws in the reconstruction of etymologies as also in the use of sources and others that followed from conforming mechanically to a given view of what was thought to be the historical materialism of Marx. Attempting to fit the evidence to a particular framework showed a lack of analytical thinking.³³ For Kosambi, analytical thinking was a primary requirement especially in considering variant forms within a Marxist framework. Marxism he said was not a substitute for thinking.

Slaves in indian Context

Slaves are of course referred to in Indian sources as dasas, but these were largely domestic slaves and were not generally the primary providers of labour in production. The large-scale use of slaves in agricultural and craft production as in some Greco-Roman economies was replaced in India by shudra labour and shudras were technically not slaves. The monopoly of the state over basic production in the early period allowed the absence of chattel slavery. Kosambi suggested that the Greek institution of helots, not found extensively in Europe, could provide a more appropriate parallel.³⁴ Helots were a community of families, enslaved collectively as a group. They had well-defined military obligations and provided a fixed tribute to the city-state of Sparta where the system prevailed.

The category of slave was different. It applied to individuals who came from diverse communities and locations but had a common function as unfree labour and were privately and individually owned as chattel-slaves. The difference was even more marked in the Roman economy where slave labour was essential to the produce of the huge latifundia, the size of which as farms and estates with single ownership are not met with in early India.

The ‘shudra varna’ according to the dharma-shastra texts, consisted of communities that provided labour generally in the form of cultivators and artisans but were not individually owned. Unlike the helot the cultivator had no military obligations. This is also attested to by Megasthenes who wrote on Mauryan India in the late fourth century BC.35 A shudra, where he was cultivating state-owned land, paid a tax to the state.³⁶ The equation of shudra with helot could therefore at best have a limited application. In the period subsequent to the Vedic, the shudra caste had diverse roles. Puranic sources described some dynasties that they disapproved of such as the Nandas and possibly their successors, as of the shudra varna. Various mid-level professions in the post-Mauryan period were sometimes described as being of the shudra varna. The possible shudra-helot equation was not central to Kosambi’s studies of shudras. Nevertheless, his idea that the structure of caste society was such that it could demarcate a particular community to permanently provide labour becomes more evident with untouchables emerging as a source of labour.

Feudalism from above and below

Kosambi argued for a feudal period of Indian history dating its start to the later half of the first millennium AD and continuing with variations into recent centuries. He saw it as evolving in two phases: feudalism from above and feudalism from below.³⁷ Feudalism from above was the initial phase when a powerful king ruling over lesser kings and chiefs, received taxes from the latter who even if politically subordinate continued to control and administer their territories. Subsequent to this there emerged feudalism from below. This was enhanced through a system of grants of revenue by the king largely to religious beneficiaries – individuals and institutions – and to a more limited extent, the upper bureaucracy. This also led to the categories of ‘agrahara’ grants to brahmanas as also grants to temples and to Buddhist ‘viharas’ although the latter were less frequent. The grant related to specific lands. The revenue was not collected in order to be paid primarily to the king who had initially granted the land, but more as an income for the grantee. This created a body of power-wielding intermediaries between the peasant and the king especially when the grant of revenue in perpetuity came to be treated as ownership of the land.

Although the gifting of land and villages is mentioned in earlier times it was only occasional. The Mauryas for instance had crown lands – the ‘sita’ lands – some converted from waste land and worked by shudra cultivators. Tenancies of various kinds are listed in the Arthashastra.³⁸ From the later first millennium AD, the granting of land by the king became a more regular administrative and economic pattern. The intermediaries between the peasant and the king could exploit the peasant and also nurture aspirations of setting up small estates as the nucleus of later kingdoms. Many grants also gave judicial and administrative rights to the grantee which freed him from both the village administration as well as responsibility to the king.

Where the grant of land was in forested areas, the forest-dwelling tribes/clans could be converted into shudra peasants. This was perhaps a more common aspect of the mutation of tribe into caste or the incorporation of a clan-based society into a state system. The pattern was likely in areas newly cleared of forests adjoining kingdoms or where kingdoms were established for the first time. The change is evident from various sources, some being inscriptions recording the grant, and other texts such as the Harshacharita of Banabhatta. The system within which the change occurred was different in the post-Gupta period from the Mauryan when the state regarded forest-dwellers as a threat. The assumption of virtual ownership of the land so granted led to the grantees claiming superior status and if they later established kingdoms some claimed to be kshatriyas. They underwent rituals that conferred this status on them and had genealogies composed to confirm it. Whereas in earlier times brahmanas, vaishyas, shudras, could all establish dynasties, now those in power began to assert a kshatriya identity irrespective of their actual caste origins. Political power and kshatriya status would seem to have been an open category.

Indian Version’ of Feudalism

The question of whether or not there was an Indian version of feudalism has been debated for some years.³⁹ Some have critiqued what they thought was too literal an application of the feudal mode of production. Kosambi argued that the Indian version did not conform to European feudalism since, among the features of difference there was an absence of demesne-farming on a substantial scale on the land of the vassal by those compulsorily made to labour.⁴⁰ This involves questions of serfdom, the manorial system and the contractual element in the relations between king, vassal and serf. It was also pointed out that neither trade nor cities had declined in many parts of the subcontinent as was a requirement in some models. Maritime trade continued and its impact needs to be assessed together with the commercial economy of its hinterland. It has been argued that the use of money in exchange transactions was not minimal.⁴¹ There was also the need to recognise and explain regional variations.

In pursuing these questions, other patterns have been suggested on the formation of states, on the mutation of clans into castes, the administration of agrarian economies and the inter-weaving of local religions into the forms taken by the more wide-ranging Puranic and other sectarian movements. Alternate reconstructions refer themselves largely only to what has been called the Early Medieval period. They are not theories of explanation that follow from earlier formations and the changes these bring, as is envisaged in the theory on modes of production. Yet the earlier formations would have to be considered in a discussion on what constitutes the Early Medieval.

The period prior to the Early Medieval is generally referred to as the Early Historical. There has been scant attention given to formulating a descriptive label for it or even suggesting a distinctive pattern. The projection of a single period from the sixth century BC to the sixth century AD is problematic. It might be more appropriate to treat the lead up to empire and the Mauryan Empire as one continuum and the post-Mauryan as another, where in each case, the evolving of the state and the accompanying social and economic changes seem to take different forms in relation to the nature of the state, the political economies, the functioning of castes and of religious sects with their variant ideologies. In what way were these the precursors to the pattern of what is called the Early Medieval state? Endorsing the feudal mode without explaining the mode for the preceding period does not explain the dialectic that led to the feudal mode. Nor do labels such as Early, Early Historical, Early Medieval, Medieval, which we all use regularly, convey much in terms of the dynamics of a period of history. They are at best chronological parentheses.

European Models

Part of the problem in the debate on feudalism has been the focus on the models chosen based on the study of feudalism in Europe by historians such as Marc Bloch and Henri Pirenne, or the model as presented by Marx. Recent writings on medieval Europe range from a questioning of feudalism as a concept,⁴² to arguing for the validity of variant forms within the framework of feudal societies.⁴³ These are substantial contributions to the debate on feudalism in Europe. Nevertheless they also have a relevance to the question of feudalism elsewhere. Comparative history drawing on variants can hone the debate. Kosambi’s writing as a paradigm shift is evident in the questions he asked of the sources and in his attempts to answer them. This required a rigorous analysis of event and person in a historical context that extended beyond chronology and dynastic history to the social and economic mainsprings of societies and cultures and the interface between these various facets. His explanations of the historical process made visible many areas of investigation that had not received attention previously and the kind of new questions that can be asked of the data.

In the themes I have discussed each touch on different aspects but are nevertheless interlinked. The discussion on the mutation of tribe into caste registered the change from a pre-state society
to state systems, from pre-class to varying elements of class and introduced a new dimension to the history of caste. Initiating discussion on Buddhist monasteries and commercial activities, Kosambi raised the issue of the socio-economic functioning of the institutions of religions, characteristic of all religions. These changed with historical change and fostered particular forms that identify religions from their social perspective. In his discussion of feudalism in India we see a historian investigating and co-relating diverse aspects of society and not limited by adherence to particular historical explanations.

Many of the methods of Kosambi’s analyses are substantially limited to the historical alone. It was enveloped by the percepvalid even 50 years later. Some need reconsideration either tions of a firmly independent intellectual with a remarkably because of new evidence or because of new theories of explanation creative mind. or because the overall perspectives of the past are today, differently nuanced. His intellectual perspectives and sensibilities were inevitably of his own times. Up to a point they carry traces of both the idealism and the dismissals of those times. He insistently asserted his autonomy from the clutches of contemporary orthodoxies, both of the Left and of the Right. The past was not to be used as a mechanism of political mobilisation as it has increasingly come to be among some in our time. The sources that inform us about the past have to be meticulously analysed and subjected to a rigorous methodology irrespective of their status or the authority they command. Kosambi would not have maintained that his analyses were permanently valid. He would undoubtedly have agreed that the advance of knowledge was dependent on a constant critiquing of existing explanations (even his) in an effort to arrive at greater precision. The latter may however have come after heated debate!

Mathematics and not History was his primary discipline. However, the mind of the mathematician is evident not only in his application of statistics to some kinds of data, but even more in the search for clarity in organising the data and the logic of the argument. There were times when he was adamant in his views, but even disagreement could extend the debate since this would occasion new thoughts and new ideas in pursuit of a question. Re-reading Kosambi – and he has to be read more than once – is to experience each time the thrill of being provoked into thinking historically. But his thinking was not limited to the historical alone. It was enveloped by the perceptions of a firmly independent intellectual with a remarkably creative mind.

Notes:
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