In the evolution of political forms in India, environmental factors, economic complexity and religious ideology all played important and interlinked roles. As a first step in delineating the long conjoined history of states and com- munities in the subcontinent, I propose the following chronological scheme: Communities without states from bce 7000 to 800. Communities as … Read more
I disagree with this Eurocentric political formulation. Colonial subjugation during the eighteenth century altered and may have distorted the trajectory of state formation in India, but even before the imposition of British domi- nance, and very likely as a precondition of that dominance, relations between states and historic urban and rural communities had changed irreversibly. … Read more
‘Indian exceptionalism’, the belief that India is sui generis, and can be under- stood only in its own special terms, has long existed in western social science, and especially when considering civil society. A related question is whether the Indian people can be said to have had the institutional base upon which modern states and … Read more