Jignasa Journal Of History Of Ideas And Culture Part 01

Author(s): Vibha Upadhyaya and Others
Publisher: University of Rajasthan

Page 160

122
/ Jijñāsā
XI
K. M. Shrimāli's work entitled Agrarian Structure in Central India and the Northern Deccan (c.A.D.300-500): A Study of Vākāțaka Inscriptions 46 is a substantial contribution on the subject. Published in 1987, it gives for the first time a systematic study of the economy of the Vakarakas on the basis of their inscriptions. According to Shrimāli, the large-scale mechanism of land-grants and the absence of money reflect an economy characterized by burgeoning rural settlements and contraction of urbanism. These features, he argues, lead to the conclusion that "the Vākāțaka territory was the matrix of the earliest articulated tendencies of feudal beginnings."
A merit of Shrimāli's work is the cartographic representation of the chronological and geographical distribution of the Vākātaka inscriptions, the villages donated, settlements other than donated villages and the geographical configuration of the administrative divisions. The statistical data given in the work is indicative of the fact that in the pre-Pravarasena II phase the concentration of activities was in the eastern half of the dominion while in the Pravarasena II and post-Pravarasena II phases there was a westward expansion. In the Vatsagulma dominion the economy had intimate trade links, whereas the Nandivardhana dominion gave agrarian orientation to the economy. According to Shrimāli, the Vākātaka settlements, mentioned in defining the boundaries of the donated land, were mostly rural, as indicated by suffixes attached to their names. Further, some of the rural settlements seem to have come up "for the first time under the Vākātakas in general and Pravarasena II in particular." Also, excavations are analysed to show a decline in the character of the settlements.
Shrimāli argues for the prevalence of serfdom in the Vākāțaka kingdom. According to him, "the king retained full ownership of land." The Yawatmal plates of Pravarasena II, he points out, do not record the renewal of a grant, but the formal donation of a piece which the donee was enjoying, apparently without any right.
Shrimāli also attributes the characteristic developments to the process of Sanskritization in the tribal area. The Väkätakas are given tribal origins and some of the place-names are explained as having totemistic origins and traces of tribalism. The channels of Sanskritization, according to him, are to be traced in the matrimonial alliance with the Guptas, the growing brāhmaṇic settlements and the migration of people from western, northern and north-western India.
Thus, Shrimāli's work is especially noticeable, for no scholar has discussed the economy of the Vākāțakas before him, the exception being R. S. Sharma, who, in his Indian Feudalism (Calcutta, 1965) has touched it only briefly.
XII The contribution of Ajay Mitra Shāstri to the epigraphy and history of the Vākāțakas has been the most significant. 47 He was intimately connected with the discovery and study of the majority of the Vākātaka inscriptions discovered after the publication of Mirashi's Corpus and dominated the field of the Vākātaka historiography since then. 18 As most of these records had either not been published till then or were reported only in rather obscure publications not easily accessible to historians, in 1987 he wrote a detailed chapter on them in his Early History of the Deccan: Problems and Perspectives