Great video. There is also inscription related to this . 5th century kurud plates of Narendra, dakshin kosala a feudatory of guptas talks about a re issuence of a land grant done by gupta overlord 2 generations ago , as the earlier one was engraved on a palm leaf which has burned / perished away.
Great video. As you know topics near to my heart. A few thoughts: 1. changing from recording things on one medium to another is never trivial, it must always indicate something of wider cultural significance. I know this is true of the change from wood to paper in Tibet. It might be that Sharma has the wrong story to tell about non-copper to copper, but any good response to his work would have to answer why copper plate charters started and increased. 2. The stadial theory of social development goes back at least to Turgot. It is certainly in Smith. Marx also had it, but nowhere in much detail, and the version you presented is specifically associated with Stalin, who, aprės moi, is not one of the great luminaries of social history. I am sure what is going on here is Stalinist orthodoxy influencing Indian historiography, but better to call this by its name. 3. What are the other ideas out there? One needs some theory of Indian social/productive organization in different epochs. 4. I would only call something feudal if it involved inaliable hereditatry property (allod) and enfeoffment. Sounds like these charters provide pretty good evidence for both.
Yes, we are both interested in this - but according to UA-cam we are the only ones (this sort of thing gets less interest than quite esoteric die studies stuff). In answer to the question of alternatives. I don't know of a well worked out alternative. There is a suspicion, shared by some numismatists and archaeologists, that its almost exactly the opposite of what Sharma thinks. So, to use the numismatic example which is unfair on Sharma as it is not his main argument, it works like this - states increase their production of coins, so mints make the coins smaller, more debased, and less variable in design (because all of those things make it easier to manufacture and as scale increases ease of manufacture becomes a more desirable feature and prestige elements like artistic quality become less desirable); therefore the coins are less likely to be collected, less likely to arouse antiquarian interest, less likely to get into museums, less likely to be studied; therefore the more common coins actually appear rarer. And so, at the back of this idea, is that rather than stages (with Hegelian style internal contradictions and dramatic ruptures) what you probably have is just gradual expansion - society slowly and steadily increases long distance trade, monetisation, urbanisation, and so on, but ironically that slow, steady, change produces evidence that appears to be filled with ruptures and dramatic breaks. The methodological problem, of course, for those who suspect that, is having trashed Sharma for leaping to far reaching conclusions on shaky interpretations is that they find themselves in the bind of needing to deploy a much larger and much more rigorous argument if they want to assert something positive so I think the tendency is to simply point out the issues in the positive models and be relatively quiet about what you might think the alternative is.
Great video. There is also inscription related to this .
5th century kurud plates of Narendra, dakshin kosala a feudatory of guptas talks about a re issuence of a land grant done by gupta overlord 2 generations ago , as the earlier one was engraved on a palm leaf which has burned / perished away.
Great video. As you know topics near to my heart.
A few thoughts: 1. changing from recording things on one medium to another is never trivial, it must always indicate something of wider cultural significance. I know this is true of the change from wood to paper in Tibet. It might be that Sharma has the wrong story to tell about non-copper to copper, but any good response to his work would have to answer why copper plate charters started and increased. 2. The stadial theory of social development goes back at least to Turgot. It is certainly in Smith. Marx also had it, but nowhere in much detail, and the version you presented is specifically associated with Stalin, who, aprės moi, is not one of the great luminaries of social history. I am sure what is going on here is Stalinist orthodoxy influencing Indian historiography, but better to call this by its name. 3. What are the other ideas out there? One needs some theory of Indian social/productive organization in different epochs. 4. I would only call something feudal if it involved inaliable hereditatry property (allod) and enfeoffment. Sounds like these charters provide pretty good evidence for both.
Yes, we are both interested in this - but according to UA-cam we are the only ones (this sort of thing gets less interest than quite esoteric die studies stuff).
In answer to the question of alternatives. I don't know of a well worked out alternative. There is a suspicion, shared by some numismatists and archaeologists, that its almost exactly the opposite of what Sharma thinks. So, to use the numismatic example which is unfair on Sharma as it is not his main argument, it works like this - states increase their production of coins, so mints make the coins smaller, more debased, and less variable in design (because all of those things make it easier to manufacture and as scale increases ease of manufacture becomes a more desirable feature and prestige elements like artistic quality become less desirable); therefore the coins are less likely to be collected, less likely to arouse antiquarian interest, less likely to get into museums, less likely to be studied; therefore the more common coins actually appear rarer. And so, at the back of this idea, is that rather than stages (with Hegelian style internal contradictions and dramatic ruptures) what you probably have is just gradual expansion - society slowly and steadily increases long distance trade, monetisation, urbanisation, and so on, but ironically that slow, steady, change produces evidence that appears to be filled with ruptures and dramatic breaks. The methodological problem, of course, for those who suspect that, is having trashed Sharma for leaping to far reaching conclusions on shaky interpretations is that they find themselves in the bind of needing to deploy a much larger and much more rigorous argument if they want to assert something positive so I think the tendency is to simply point out the issues in the positive models and be relatively quiet about what you might think the alternative is.