SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION BEFORE FIXED CASTE NARRATIVES

Detailed chapter description

Early historic society in the Middle Ganga valley was unequal, but inequality should not be reconstructed by placing every person into a later, fully elaborated caste order. Political rank, control of land and labour, ritual prestige, occupation, lineage, gender, wealth, freedom or dependency, and access to institutions could all shape social position. These axes overlapped, yet they did not always coincide. A wealthy merchant might possess substantial economic power without belonging to a ruling lineage; a ritual specialist could claim high prestige without controlling the largest productive resources; an artisan could be indispensable to urban life while occupying a lower social rank in some textual classifications. The task is therefore to reconstruct historically visible forms of differentiation before assuming the later fixity of endogamous jātis. This follows the broader methodological shift from treating caste as a timeless fourfold structure to examining how social formations changed with settlement, production, state formation and ideology (Thapar 1999; Chakravarti 1987; Sharma 1983). No single source provides a complete social census. Brahmanical normative texts organise society through varṇa and rules of ritual eligibility, marriage, inheritance and conduct. Early Buddhist texts frequently identify people instead through terms such as khattiya, brāhmaṇa, gahapati, seṭṭhi, vāṇijja, occupational labels, and categories of dependence such as dāsa and kammakāra. Archaeology reveals differences in house size, access to imported or prestige goods, craft production and consumption, but it rarely supplies the names by which people classified themselves. Later inscriptions make some occupational and donor categories more visible, yet they post-date much of the period considered here. These vocabularies must therefore be compared rather than collapsed. Apparent disagreement between texts may record different institutions, audiences and purposes rather than a simple choice between a “true” and a “false” social order (Fick 1920; Chakravarti 1987; Aktor 2017).