write a note on indian fedualism debate 500 words
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Answer:
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Explanation:
The first assimilation of 'feudalism' in the Indian context occurred at the hands of
Col. James Tod, the celebrated compiler of the annals of hjasthan's history in the
edy part of the nineteenth century, For Tod, as for most European historians of his
time in Europe, lord-vassal relationship constituted the core of feudalism. The lordbrty M~~E~~~Y in medieval Europe looked after the security and subsistence of his vassals and they
its Continuities in turn rendered military and other services to the lord. A sense of loyalty also tied
the vassal to the lord in perpetuity. Tod found the institution and the pattern replicated
in the Rajasthan of his day in good measure.
The term feudalism continued to fiw off and on in works of history in India, often
with rather vague meanings attached to it. It was with the growing Marxist influence
on Indian history Witing between the mid-1950s and the mid-60s that the term
came to be disassociated from its moorings in lord-vassal relationship and acquired
an economic meaning, or rather a meaning in the context of the evolution of Indian
class structure. One of the major imperatives of the formulation of an Indian feudalism
was, paradoxically, the dissatisfaction of Marxist historians with Marx's own
placement of pre-colonial Indian history in the category of the Asiatic Mode of
Production. Even though Marx had created this category himself, much of the
substance that had gone into its making was commonplace among Western thinkers
of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Marx had perceived the Asiatic Mode
of Production as an 'exception' to the general dynamic of history through the medium
of class struggle. In Asia, he, along with numerous other thinkers, assumed there
were no classes because all property belonged either to the king or to the community;
hence there was no class struggle and no change over time. He shared this notion of
the changeless Orient with such eminent thinkers as Baron de Montesquieu, James
Mill, Friedrich Hegel and others. Real dynamism, according to them, came only
with the establishment of colonial regimes which brought concepts and ideas of
change from Europe to the Orient. Indian Marxist historians of the 1950s and 60s
were unwilling to accept that such a large chunk of humanity as India, or indeed the
whole ofAsia, should remain changeless over such large segments of time. They
expressed their dissatisfaction with the notion of the Asiatic Mode of Production
early on. In its place some of them adopted the concept of feudalism and applied it
to India. Irfan Habib, the leading ~arxist historian of the period, however, put on
record his distance from 'Indian feudalism' even as he vehemently criticised the
Asiatic Mode of Production.