FARLY medieval India did not have a Montaillou, of rather, even if it had one, there is no way we can know about it. A document of the kind of the Fournier Register, on the basis of which Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie reconstructed the fascinating profile of a peripheral village society in medieval France, is simply unavailable for a researcher working on early medieval India. It is only perhaps towards the end of the medieval period of Indian history that documents which were concerned with certain details of rural life and which may be organized into a somewhat regular series became available for some regions. And yet, considering India's long-term agrarian history, rural settlements, in different geographical settings and of different sizes and structures, were the primary units in which human activities were socially organized. Since in these lectures I shall be concerned mainly with problems associated with studies of such units, I must first of all define the scope of my enquiry. I would like to do so by referring to sources and to historiography interminglingly.
The fact that our understanding of early medieval-or for that matter early historical-rural settlements and rural society is at the moment rather inadequate may in a large measure be attributed to the nature of the sources available for these periods. My reference to the Fournier Register was only incidental; it is nevertheless true that we do not have any category of records for the early medieval period which may be used to focus on different dimensions of individual rural settlements or to reconstruct, satisfactorily, long-span chronological history. I would however hesitate to attribute the current state of rural historiography to limitations of sources alone. Even though attempts to prepare chronological history of village settlements and village communities in a regional context were made as carly as 1927, the trend has generally been to focus on themes like social and economic history, works on which generally incorporate and rarely analyze material rela-ting to rural economy and society. Even in studies speci-fically devoted to the carly medieval village and there are not many of this genre the profile of a village or of groups of villages as spatial human settlements, with particular forms of social organization, docs not emerge in clear con-tours. In the absence of micro-level studies, with the village as their main focus, such problems as the structure of rela-tionship at the level of the rural society or relationship be-tween rural society and systems beyond it have been more or less subsumed by generalities on agrarian system", agrarian structure, 'ownership of land', 'agricultural pro-duction', 'agrarian relations' and so on. What general impressions we gather from historical writings and sources regarding early medieval villages are, however, exciting, and should encourage us to probe further. One of the impressions which the sources, not all necessarily of the early medieval period, provide is that space was differentiated and perceived as corresponding to different social spheres. The sphere where accepted socie-tal norms could be prevalent was a janapada, and from the time of the Buddha, the three distinct types of settle-ments which constituted the janapada were grama, nigama and nagara. This of course was not a simple schema, universally applicable, and grama, nigama and nagara certainly do not exhaust the early settlement terminology. In the early medieval period, new terms and new distinctions arose, but the essentials of the schema which conceived of a janapada as constituted by different types of settlements-rural and non-rural continued. Aranya, the forest, was in sharp contrast to a janapada. Aranya was not a non-living space; it was also not simply a recluse for the hermits, although the stereotype of the hermit-forest equation continues in early medieval literature.
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