State-building and the Management of Diversity in India (Thirteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)

Abstract

How has political diversity—and, first of all, administrative and institutional diversity—been handled within the succeeding polities that prevailed in the Indian subcontinent from 1200 to 1700? In order to provide the non-specialist reader with a first insight into this complex question, the present article opens with a presentation of the sources available for reconstructing the administrative organisation and functioning of medieval and early modern Indian polities. Despite the fragmentary and biased nature of the information they provide, these sources (mainly epigraphic materials and narrative texts) have often been elevated to the rank of a solid substratum that allowed for the development of highly sophisticated yet antagonistic analyses of both the nature and the working of the Indian state in pre-British times. Besides a strong focus on the question of centralisation, most of these analyses have also long been marred by an implicit but ever-present Western point of comparison. From the middle of the 1980s, however, a number of voices have argued in favour of an alternative approach that would value both the processual character of state- and institution-building and its ideological dimension while stressing at the same time the need to take into account the diversity of the forms assumed by this process in the various regions that came to constitute a given polity and to pay more attention to the wide range of actors involved in state-formation and to the latter’s political cultures. Taking its cue from these non-aligned or revisionist studies, as they are often termed, the last part of the essay shifts from the purely institutional perspective presiding over the first and largely historiographical section and proposes to examine instead the politics of diversity that were theorised and implemented by pre-colonial South Asian dynasties as well as the way these politics were perceived and handled by those who bore their brunt most directly, that is to say the subordinate functional elites.