Labour, Service and Occupational Communities

Detailed chapter description

Early medieval social history is often reconstructed from landholders, rulers and institutions because they dominate the written record. This chapter reverses the angle of vision. It asks who cultivated fields, carried messages, guarded roads, supervised ferries, made tools, carved images, copied documents, supplied monasteries and performed the countless services that turned rights on copper plates into functioning society. The evidence does not permit a complete occupational census. It does permit a controlled reconstruction of differentiated labour, service and skill—and of the gradual processes through which some livelihoods became more tightly organised as hereditary social groups. Labour is easy to see in the results of production and difficult to see in the surviving texts. Fields were cleared and cultivated, embankments maintained, cattle tended, boats moved, pottery fired, metal repaired, images carved, documents copied and institutions fed. Yet royal charters usually record rights, beneficiaries and officials rather than the names and conditions of the people who performed most of this work. A social history of labour must therefore reconstruct relationships from several kinds of evidence instead of treating a list of occupational labels as a census. For Mithila, Vajji and Aṅga in the early medieval centuries, the best regional controls are Pāla-period charters from Munger and Bhagalpur, the archaeology of Antichak/Vikramaśīla, and material evidence from Mudgagiri. Wider eastern Indian inscriptions help identify possible patterns, but they cannot be imported wholesale into north Bihar.