Reviews of Books 139

Rethinking Early Medieval India: A Reader. Edited by Upinder Singh. Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 354. Rs. 1240.

This book is a collection of essays conceived of as a “Reader” that the editor, Upinder Singh, feels
constitutes a “rethinking” of what has come to be called “early medieval” India. It brings together thir-
teen essays, written over a period of the approximately the last twenty years, on a variety of subjects
and regions, all relating to the period, approximately, of 600 to 1350 or so c.e. As the editor points out
in her introduction, this period was traditionally understood as one of political disarray, social stagna-
tion, and cultural decline—an image that post Independence scholars of a Marxist persuasion partly
accepted, but which since the 1980s has been steadily revised, as the field of “early medieval” studies
has come into its own. The essays are divided into four sections. In the first, “Theoretical Models and
Political Processes,” we are presented with well-known essays by R. S. Sharma, Burton Stein, and
Hermann Kulke, representing feudalist, segmentary, and processualist theories of state (de)formation,
respectively. In the second section, entitled “Village, Town and Society,” we face a more varied list of
contributors—Kesavan Veluthat on land rights in Kerala, Noboru Karashima, Y. Subbarayalu, and P.
Shanmugam on commerce and towns in Tamil South India, Cynthia Talbot on medieval Andhra, and
Devika Rangachari on women in medieval Kashmir. In the third section, on “Religion and Culture:
Within and Across Regions,” the editor presents essays by Leslie Orr on women in medieval Tamil
Nadu, Kunal Chakrabarti on the Purāṇas and Bengal, and Kapila Vatsyayan on the dissemination of
a bodily motif in Indian dance and sculpture. The final section, “Mapping Language, Ideas and Atti-
tudes,” includes essays by Sheldon Pollock on the Sanskrit “cosmopolis,” the editor Upinder Singh
herself on Kāmandaka’s Nītisāra, and B. D. Chattopadhyaya on the representation of Muslim and
Hindu kings in Sanskrit sources.
There is no space here for (nor would there be much point in) summarizing the diverse arguments
of each of the essays contained in this volume. They are all worth reading, though they remain mixed
between those that speak well to one another and stand-alone essays that introduce new topics or cover
otherwise neglected areas. Some of the essays in the first two sections come from a Marxist perspec-
tive, while others take on anthropological or other social scientific models. There is a basic divide
between the former and latter two sections of the book. The first two sections contain essays on the
traditional “staple” subjects of early medieval historiography—state structure, state formation, urban-
ization, agrarian exploitation, and social mobility, with the refreshing addition of an essay on gender.
The latter two sections of the book, by contrast, take up themes that have traditionally been neglected
or treated cursorily by historians until recently—religion, art, culture, language, and “ideas.”
The first half of the book is, generally speaking, on solid ground, though in a collection claiming
to “rethink” early medieval India one wonders why relatively more recent innovative work has been
excluded. The absence of the ground-breaking perspective taken in James Heitzman’s challenging
monograph Gifts of Power (Oxford, 1997) published several years after the essays on state formation
included in this volume (which are misleadingly dated from later anthologies) is problematic, given
the volume’s title, and limits its presentation on state formation. The omission of the work of younger
scholars like Ryosuke Furui, or scholars working on topics like littoral societies, pastoralist communi-
ties, trade, and the environment is unfortunate. The volume’s selection of essays on the subjects of the
latter two sections, relating to cultural, religious, and intellectual/literary history, is more obviously
uneven. The collection once again includes several path-breaking essays (including the editor’s own
contribution), but also has many omissions. Nor does the introduction provide a clear historiographical
roadmap in discussing the topics of the last sections of the book and thus lacks a justification for the
works chosen and omitted. Absence of any discussion of the works of R. Inden and M. Willis on reli-
gion and royal ritual, a host of junior scholars like Whitney Cox and Yigal Bronner on language and
literature, or the work of Barry Flood, to name a few, loom large. Flood’s work, for example, suggests
a profound re-orientation of northern India with western Asia and the Indian Ocean in an era that his-
torians have generally considered hermetically sealed. Overall, the selections in the final parts of the
book cannot but leave the impression of somewhat arbitrary criteria. As a volume purporting to rethink
the early medieval, this collection, then, gets a mixed review. While it contains some truly exceptional
140 Journal of the American Oriental Society 134.1 (2014)

and influential essays, it inexplicably leaves out others. As a teaching resource for what is new in early
medieval history, what its future directions might be, and how the field has arrived where it is today,
this volume, despite its highlights, is for this reader not as useful as one would have hoped.

Daud Ali
University of Pennsylvania