early medieval india- universiteteti oslo（中世纪早期印度——universiteteti奥斯陆）（19页）.docVIP

 Early Medieval India Many historians, Indian and British, have tended to look at South Asian history from the point of view of the north, and defined the medieval period mainly in terms of the Muslim conquests and Islamic institutions. These did not play a major role, however, until the l3th century. Until the last 25 years, those that bothered to talk about the previous seven hundred years between the fall of the Gupta Emperors and l200 A.D. saw these centuries as a sort of preparation for the Islamic governments which followed. So these years of the early medieval period have been characterized as witnessing the degradation of the culture of the classical Gupta period and its political order. This northern-centered view dismisses the parts of the subcontinent in the south where Islamic states never established stable governments. But this view was oriented in the end more toward justifying or condemning British Rule than it was in exploring the actual historical experience of South Asia between 500 A.D. and 1200 A.D. The focus here is on two major characteristics of the early medieval period, the structure and scale of the political forms which evolved and the gradual development of regional cultures and economies. Some authors divide the subcontinent up into four major regions, or megaregions: south, east, central and north India. Medievalist Burton Stein has pointed to the existence of six major regions, the south, the west (containing Maharashtra and Gujarat), the east, the north, the central and the northwest (containing Punjab, Sind, and Baluchistan). These divisions are relevant toStein’s discussion of the kinds of states which appeared between 500 AD and 1700. He figured that about 20 kingdoms succeeded in extending their sovereignty beyond a single megaregion, if we count the megaregions as six in number. Two thirds of these were ruled by Hindu dynasties, but the most durable of these imperial states was the