This book looks at the ways in which archaeological methods have been used in debates concerning the early medieval and medieval periods in South Asia. Despite the incorporation and use of archaeological data to corroborate historical narratives, the theories and methods of archaeology are largely ignored in and excluded from the dominating, institutionalized, and hegemonic disciplinary discourses. The volume offers contesting insights, polemical narratives, and new data from archaeological contexts to initiate a debate on many foundational premises of archaeological and historical narratives. It focuses on the much-neglected region of the Eastern Ganga-Brahmaputra Basin as a spatial frame to do this and studies themes such as spatial and temporal scales of concepts and methods, multi-scaler factors and processes of continuity and changes, the settlement archaeology of the alluvial landscape, changing patterns of agrarian transformation, and material cultures, including coins, inscriptions, pottery, and sculptures, in their contexts in sub-regional, regional, and supra-regional intersections. Dedicated to historian Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, this volume presents a crucial and unprecedented intervention in the study of the early medieval and the medieval periods. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of archaeology, ancient history, medieval history, water history, earth sciences, palaeoecology, historical ecology, epigraphy, art history, material culture studies, Indian history, and South Asian studies in general.

1) This is one of the first handbook to look at the state formation in pre-modern India. 2) It contains papers written by renowned historians like Harry Falk, Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer, Upinder Singh, Daud Ali, and Romila Thapar. 3) This handbook will be of interest to departments of South Asian history across UK.

1) This is one of the first handbook to look at the state formation in pre-modern India. 2) It contains papers written by renowned historians like Harry Falk, Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, Günther-Dietz Sontheimer, Upinder Singh, Daud Ali, and Romila Thapar. 3) This handbook will be of interest to departments of South Asian history across UK.

This book is the companion volume to A People's History of India 6, which gave an account of the political and economic history of the post-Mauryan period from c. 200 B.C. to A.D. 300. The present volume deals with the important aspects of the society and culture of the same period. It traces the diffusion of the caste system and describes its detailed codification. The major changes in religion, notably the emergence of Mahayana Buddhism and Bhakti in Brahmanism, are surveyed in depth. The reader will also find much that is fresh and enlightening in the accounts of sculpture, languages, and literature, in all of which fields the period saw much innovation and change.