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From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-First Mellennium B. C.

in the Ganga
Valley by Romila Thapar
Review by: Richard W. Lariviere
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1987), pp. 517-518
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/603487 .
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517

Reviews of Books
presented with a breathtaking discourse on contradiction
and complementarity, liminality, transformation, and permutation.
The King and the Clown is an analysis of the political
iconography of medieval South India, from the 7th to the
17th centuries, centering on Chola times and the Chola
heartland in the Kaveri delta. The work is not an attempt at
a "factual" account of medieval South India from epigraphic
records, chronicles and accounts of foreign visitors, but an
analysis of literary sources (epics, war poems, ballads and
South Indian folk drama). Shulman demonstrates that these
sources contain a wealth of information on social and cultural
life, especially the world views, of the traditional South.
Shulman has chosen the Chola king as the centerpiece for his
analysis because he views the Chola period as an efflorescence
of Southern culture, and the Chola king as the focus of that
culture. Shulman's closely reasoned, elegantly written excursion through the representations of the king and his court
is impossible to summarize. One can only point to the route
taken. Shulman begins with the dharmic view of kingship,
but quickly reveals this as a mask behind which lurk other
more problematic and elusive norms. The king's mask of
perfection entails self-contradiction: the inevitability of failure
and consequent self-destruction. Shulman then explores the
foundation of the state, the relationship of king and Brahmin.
The Brahmin is portrayed as a boundary figure embodying
another contradiction. A keeper of the otherworldly ideal of
renunciation, the Brahmin is mired in the mundane world as
a powerful maintainer of the social order. Supposedly
complementary and mutually dependent, in the texts the
king and the Brahmin overlap and collide. Another figure
whose character reveals the king is the bandit. His unchecked
power is examined as a contrasting, sometimes overlapping:
the thief is sometimes a hero; sometimes even a god. Shulman
delves further into the nature of the state by exploring the
disorderly side of South Indian kingship: exile and war. The
women of the court, queens and courtesans, in their complementary relationships further illuminate the problematic
of kingship. The queen upholds the illusion of stability; the
courtesans undermine it. By exciting passion and withholding
love, they reinforce the king's separation.
But the characters that Shulman finds the most illuminating
and the most enjoyable to study are the comic ones. Clowns,
according to Shulman, have the "freedom both to see and to
state simple, sometimes shocking truths" (p. 101). The Indian
clown's simplest most profound truth is that whatever is
perceived as real is wholly ludicrous and false. The clown
dissolves, unravels and undermines perceived reality. It is
this comic transformation, developed by Shulman from folk
genres as much as from classical ones that truly sets in
perpetual motion his portrayal of South Indian polity. One
has a sense of interpretations only fleetingly glimpsed before
the elusive subject is again transformed. This sense of

dynamic movement, flux and dissolution in the subject and


in the analysis, is Shulman's greatest achievement.
SUSAN

S.

BEAN

PEABODY MUSEUM OF SALEM

From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-First


Mellennium B.C. in the Ganga Valley. By RoMILA THAPAR.
Pp. 189. Bombay and New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY
PRESS. 1984. Rs. 110, $24.95.
This is a valuable little book. It is an expanded version of
the Heras Memorial Lectures delivered by the author at St.
Xavier's College, Bombay in February, 1980. It contains an
impressive attempt to define and describe society in northern
India during the mid-first millenium B.C. In the process,
Professor Thapar has made observations about the nature of
this society which attempt to explain its continuity in later
epochs.
She has chosen the western and middle Gangd valley for
her study for four reasons: (1) there is more and earlier data
available for these regions than anywhere else in the subcontinent, (2) they are contiguous and therefore well suited
for comparison, (3) the societies here are the precursors of
the Nandas and Mauryas, and (4) they are traditionally the
most important regions in India (Aryavarta). Her main
theme is that during the Vedic period this area underwent a
change in social, political, and economic organization from a
lineage system to a combined lineage and householding
system. In the post-Vedic period there was increasing stratification of the chiefdoms (gana-sanghas) of the middle
Gangd valley and this stratification was the beginning of the
formation of states.
In order to develop this theme, Thapar has had to draw
heavily on the theories of state formation developed for
other societies by both anthropologists and political theorists.
She is quite correct in her assertion (p. 3) that theories about
state formation in India have been few and simplistic. Yet
she also is fully aware that the theories and categories
developed for, say, Meso-America or Africa are not mechanically transferable to the societies of the subcontinent. Her
models of the lineage system and of the house-holding
economy are borrowed from other theorists, but with explicit
adaptations for the evidence of the early and later societies
of the subcontinent.
Much of the change in governance and social order which
Thapar finds in this region and this period she attributes to
ecological variables. The western Ganga valley land was
easily available for cultivation without major co-operative
efforts: this meant that the lineage system of social organization was best suited to these circumstances. When the

518

Journal of the American Oriental Society 107.3 (1987)

"lineage group" became too large for a particular area to


support, then the group could simply split and one of the
new sub-groups could go off to take up the cultivation of
some other, easily available, arable land. The middle Gahga
valley, however, was densely forested and marshy. Cultivation
in this region required far more co-operative effort. Pressures
of population had to be dealt with in ways other than the
simple fission of the group, since the availability of arable
land for the new sub-group was much more limited than in
the western Gahga. This led to the investiture of political
power in certain segments of society so that dispute settlement, "super-lineage" organization, and the co-operative
application of the group's resources could be accomplished.
This led to the formation of states.
In developing this thesis, Thapar attempts to explain how
the hierarchy of the varna system came into existence and
was perpetuated by these economic/political considerations.
Her views also offer an explanation for the pre-eminence of
the purdna-itihdsa genre as historical writing in the Indian
tradition. Briefly, the purdna-itihdsa literature serves as both
model and legitimator of the society. She views the Ramayana, for example, as legitimizing the monarchical state
(p. 134). The myths and legends of this literature contain
justifications for changes and adaptations which have become
necessary over time. Their value to their intended audience
(and to contemporary scholars) is not so much in their
fidelity to historical events as in their depiction of a certain
perception of the past and the articulation of a particular
world view (p. 137). Thus the genealogies in them, to take
one example, may not always be "historically accurate," but
the presence of geneologies indicates the value that the
society placed on familial descent.
As one might expect, a book such as this involves a good
deal of speculation, and there is always the danger that
speculation once made can be reified in a scholar's mind and
taken as fact upon which further speculation is then based.
Thapar does not explicitly acknowledge this danger, but she
is so careful to always provide some textual or archeological
evidence to lend support to her speculations that it is clear
that she is aware of it. Her mastery of the primary sources is
impressive. She has used secondary sources extensively, and,
perhaps most successfully, she has brought a sophistication
and breadth to her theorizing about state formation in
ancient India the like of which has not been seen before. This
will be a book which scholars will necessarily react to,
dispute with, and be indebted to in all future speculations on
the difficult problem of the evolution of Indian social
organization.
RICHARD
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

W. LARIVIERE

The Deeds of God in Rddhipur. Translated and Annotated


by ANNE FELDHAUS.
Pp. 211. New York: OXFORDUNIVERSITY PRESS. 1984. $24.95.
"This is a good book ... It is a horrible book, I say ... It
is a fabulous book, I tell you!"
After reading Anne Feldhaus' translation of this unique
biography, the reader, if properly graced, pitter-patters about,
thinking and talking like Gundam Raul, i.e., God, even
though one is not supposed to imitate this particular incarnation. The above Maharashtrian conversational version of
a Hegelian triad-though my own-is one of the Raul's
typical speech-patterns, as in the following vignette:
"The Gosavi (Gundam R50l) used to sit on his thinking
rock and say to himself, 'Oh, I should go to the High
Lane. . I should go to the Low Lane. . I must go to the
Rich Man's Lane, I say.' And he would run pitter-pattering
off. He would go there." (Chapter 34, in full, p. 57).
Rarely is a book such an unmixed pleasure to read (though
not in every respect easy reading). Attractively as well as
fittingly titled, Feldhaus' translation of the 13th to 16th
century Marathi Rddhipurall/d brings us into the world of a
Northeast Maharashtrian bhakti sect, the Mahanubhavas
("the magnanimous ones," "the charismatic ones"?). More
exactly, it brings us into the town owned and operated,
abused, graced, and saved by Gundam Radil, alias GosdvT,
Sriprabhu or Govindaprabhu (d. 1286/7), utterly free-spirited
avatar of the Mahdnubhavas' one God, Parameivara.
Gundam Rdul is a contemporary of the Mahanubhavas'
founder, Cakradhar, who is another of the sect's five recognized avatars (the others being a near-contemporary named
Cangdev, Krsna and Dattatreya). The problem is that
Cakradhar and the other three (even Krsna) behave as God
"should," while the Rdul is as clearly crazy as he is God. This
is the issue Feldhaus addresses in the first two parts of her
Introduction. In the first she shows that, besides his frequently miraculous divine behavior, the R5ul is wildly
unorthodox, "rude . . greedy . . petulant . . obnoxious" (5),
violent, depressive, childishly playful, and much else. And
the Mahanubhava texts are at pains to point this out,
repeatedly and without excuse (6, 10-16, esp. 14), calling
him "mad" (vedd, p. 14). In the second part Feldhaus essays,
in a manner perhaps too concise but extremely thoughtful
and well balanced, a "Comparison and Analysis" of divine
madness. After arguing that the madness of saints and
devotees is often an imitation of God, she establishes that
God's madness or folly is a way of revealing his transcendence. "In its most basic meaning, then, Gundam Rdul's
madness is holy because it is abnormal. Gundam Rdul's
extraordinary behavior manifests to Mahanubhdvas the
otherness of Paramesvara, his transcendence of human ways"
(25). The conclusion seems to me not only accurate, but
proved in unprecedented extreme by this biography. I would

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