International Research Journal of Education and Technology

For long, the predominant view has been to look at early medieval society and economy as being characteristically ‘feudal’ in nature. The roots of such an interpretative framework go back to the writings of D. D. Kosambi and R. S. Sharma in the 1950s and 1960s. Society in general is seen in terms of proliferation of castes, the emergence of certain new groups and incorporation of the tribes into the sudra-varna of the brahmanical fold, the lowest rung in the varna order. In the following decades many other scholars used the same analytical framework of ‘feudalism’ to account for the changes during the early medieval period, like for example Suvira Jaiswal, who argues for the absence the two middle orders in the varna scheme in eastern and south India.

Key words: predominant, decades, feudalism