Sudras in Ancient India: A Social history of the lower order down to circa A.D. 600

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Sudras in Ancient India tries to show how the labouring class in ancient times came to be known as sudras. It explores their social and economic relations with the members of the higher varnas. It also tries to tackle several other problems: Was ancient Indian society a slave society? How far did the ritual status of the sudras correspond to their economic status? How did the vaisyas come to be reduced to the level of the sudras and the sudras placed on a par with the vaisyas? What accounts for the proliferation of the servile orders in Gupta and post-Gupta times? Why were social revolts comparatively absent in ancient India?

Although the study hinges on the history of the sudras, it also works out a framework for the history of social differentiation and marks the main stages in the evolution of ancient Indian society. Since social history cannot be studied without appreciating material life, at various stages the impact of settled agricultural life, thriving trade, and land grants on the social formation has been made with developments in other ancient societies and also with tribal practices and institutions known to anthropology.

About the Author:

Professor R.S. Sharma (b. 1920) was mostly educated in the institutions affiliated to Patna University, under which he taught for 30 years till 1973 when he moved to Delhi University. He retired from Delhi University in 1985 and is now Emeritus Professor of History at Patna University. He did his Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies where he also served as a research associate. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Toronto. He was the first chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. His well-known book Ancient India (1977) was withdrawn by the Indian Government under the pressure of obscurantist elements in May 1978. Sharma's other publications include Indian Feudalism: 300-1200 (1980); Perspectives in Social and Economic History of Early India (1983); Material Culture and Social Formations In Ancient India (1983); Urban Decay in India (c. 300-c.1000), (1987); Communal History and Rama's Ayodhya (1992); Aspects of India Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient India(1995); Looking for the Aryans (1995); The State and Varna Formation in the Mid-Ganga Plains (1996) and Early Medieval Indian Society (2001). His publications appear in fifteen languages, Indian and non-Indian.

Excerpts From Reviews:

This is an outstanding piece of research and authentic history of Sudras in ancient India. Professor Sharma has made use of all published sources, literary as well as archaeological, bearing on the social and economic position of Sudras. It gives a lucid and comprehensive account of all aspects of the anguished career of Sudra community.

L.M. Joshi
Journal of Religious Studies
Vol. 10, No. I & II, 1982

The facility and confidence with which Sharma makes his arguments and conclusions comforting, it weaves together scattered references into the first connected account of the Sudra varna and places this within a broader historical framework.

Upendra Singh
Contribution to Indian Sociology,
Vol.26, No.1, Jan-June, 1992

Sharma co-relates the phases of economic development with social organization and social change. He rightly calls the Rigvedic society as 'basically tribal', pastoral and egalitarian and 'a pre-class society' and contends that 'the defeated and disposed sections of Aryans and Non-aryan tribes were reduced to the position of Sudras'. The later-vedic society was food producing and agricultural, but their agricultural technology was primitive; consequently differentiation between haves and have-nots could not be intensified… The Sudras continued to form the labour force of a labour-intensive economy; they also supplied surplus produce as peasants. There were no violent social upheavals… because their minds were enchained by the Karma theory.

In ancient India, the cultural apparatus of the Sudras, more so of the untouchables or the 'asat' Sudra, was very primitive, consequently their response was usually of abject submission.

S.N. Mishra
The Eastern Anthropologist
Vol. 37, No. 4, Oct.-Dec. 1984