Karnata and Oiniwar-Period Social Economy

Economy The Karnata and Oiniwar centuries are often narrated through rulers, invasions and genealogies, yet their historical significance also lies in the institutions that converted land, labour, knowledge and movement into durable social power. The Karnata kingdom, conventionally dated from Nanyadeva’s establishment of power in 1097 to the Tughluq conquest of 1324, was centred on Simraungadh and linked the middle Gangetic plain to the Himalayan foothills. The Oiniwar order that followed operated through smaller, shifting centres and changing relations with stronger neighbouring powers. A socio-economic history must therefore distinguish political command from the underlying systems that sustained it. Agrarian production remained fundamental; villages, market places, artisans, scribes, religious establishments and learned households connected local resources to courts and regional routes. This chapter reads inscriptions, juristic and literary texts, genealogical materials, archaeology and later historiography together, while refusing to turn prescriptive texts into demographic statistics or later caste labels into medieval facts. 33.1 Two dynastic phases, not two sealed economies Karnata and Oiniwar rule should not be imagined as two self-contained economic systems. A dynasty could change rapidly while fields, irrigation habits, village boundaries, kinship obligations, market routines and craft knowledge continued. Conversely, continuity at village level did not mean political stasis: the destination of revenue, the composition of courts, the scale of fortification and the geography of patronage could alter significantly. The most useful comparison therefore separates layers. At the top were rulers, military retainers, ministers and fiscal claims. Beneath them were landed rights, cultivating households and service relationships. Alongside these stood market exchange, routes toward Nepal and Bengal, religious establishments and scholarly networks. The 1324 conquest is consequently treated below as a major political rupture whose economic effects must be demonstrated sector by sector rather than assumed. This layered method also prevents later Oiniwar institutions from being projected backward into the full Karnata period. 33.2 The source base and its asymmetries The evidence is uneven. Inscriptions can identify rulers, donors, officials, religious foundations and particular grants, but they illuminate exceptional recorded transactions more readily than ordinary cultivation. Jyotiriśvara’s Varṇaratnākara provides an extraordinarily rich lexicon of social types, occupations, spaces, commodities and cultural practices, yet its literary form warns against reading every list as a census. Caṇḍeśvara Ṭhakkura’s legal and political digests reveal categories through which learned elites thought about property, kingship, taxation, offices and disputes. Genealogies preserve remembered relations among selected groups but are not a universal population register. Archaeology at Simraungadh and associated sites supplies evidence of urban form, art production and material culture. Fifteenth-century works associated with the later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura illuminate documentary and courtly practices in the Oiniwar world. Each source therefore answers a different question, and secure reconstruction depends on agreement across unlike evidence. 33.3 A Himalayan–Gangetic regional economy Mithila’s economy was shaped by location. The plains between the Himalayan piedmont and the Ganges combined fertile alluvium with rivers whose shifting channels could enrich fields, obstruct movement and destroy settlements. The northern route system connected the plains with Nepal’s valleys and passes; 355355 GAJENDRA THAKUR eastward connections led toward Bengal; southward movement reached the Ganges and the wider commercial world of Bihar. Political boundaries did not seal these corridors. People, animals, salt, metals, textiles, manuscripts, ritual specialists and information could move across them at different scales. Simraungadh’s position near the modern India–Nepal border makes sense within this geography: it was not a peripheral fortress in national terms that did not yet exist, but a node in a trans-Himalayan and Gangetic landscape. The same geography later allowed Oiniwar courts and learned households to survive through dispersed connections even when political authority became more fragmented. 33.4 Karnata state formation and Simraungadh The inscriptional date associated with Nanyadeva’s establishment of power in 1097 anchors the beginning of Karnata rule more securely than many narrative traditions. Simraungadh became the principal fortified centre of the dynasty. Fortification itself is economic evidence: walls, gates, reservoirs, roads, temples and court buildings required organised labour, materials and recurring provisioning. A capital concentrated consumers who did not produce all of their own food—rulers, soldiers, priests, scribes, artisans, visitors and dependants—and therefore drew surplus from a wider hinterland. Excavated and documented sculpture from the Simraungadh region also points to workshops and patronage connected with broader Pala-Sena artistic currents. Yet the capital should not be equated with the whole economy. Its capacity to function depended on networks of villages, local officials, routes and producers extending well beyond the fortifications. Figure 128 — Karnata to Oiniwar: political periodisation and economic continuity 33.5 Agriculture as the fiscal foundation Agriculture was the basic source of reproducible surplus. Medieval textual descriptions of Mithila repeatedly assume a countryside of cultivated fields, cattle, grain, fruit, ponds and village production. The state’s interest in land was consequently not abstract territorial possession but access to recurring agrarian resources. Harvest shares, dues, service obligations and rights assigned through grants could support courts and institutions without requiring all produce to be physically transported to a central treasury. The ecological regime demanded flexibility: floods, silt deposition and channel migration could alter productivity over short distances, while the dense river network created both risk and opportunity. A realistic political HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II economy must therefore avoid imagining uniform yields or a single tax rate across the region. What can be stated securely is that control over agrarian claims—who could demand, remit, receive or transfer them—was central to both royal authority and local social power. 33.6 Land grants and layered rights A medieval grant did not necessarily transfer modern absolute ownership. Charters and legal texts could distinguish cultivated land, waste, water, trees, fiscal dues and jurisdictional privileges, while existing cultivators might continue working the soil after a superior right changed hands. The useful question is therefore which rights were transferred: revenue, possession, exemption, adjudicatory privilege, access to produce or some combination. Grants to Brahmanas and religious establishments could create durable local interests and tie scholarly or ritual service to agrarian resources. They could also encourage settlement and reclamation, though such effects must be established case by case. Because many surviving grants record privileged transactions, they over-represent recipients capable of preserving documents. They nonetheless show the mechanism by which political power became embedded in local society: royal favour could be translated into recurrent claims on land and labour. 33.7 Cultivators, tenants and the production of surplus The archive is much less articulate about ordinary cultivators than about kings and learned recipients, but no landed order functioned without them. Peasant households supplied grain, maintained cattle, processed produce and absorbed ecological shocks. Depending on locality and tenure, they might owe shares, fixed dues, labour or payments in kind and cash. C. P. N. Sinha’s reconstruction of Karnata social and economic life drew attention to literary evidence for unequal relations between producing households and those claiming surplus. Such evidence should be used to identify hierarchy, not to invent precise rates of exploitation. Cultivators were also not a homogeneous class: access to plough animals, family labour, irrigable or high land, market connections and local protection could differentiate households substantially. The village economy was thus a field of negotiation among producers, superior claimants, service groups and officials rather than a simple two-class structure. 33.8 Floodplain ecology and economic resilience The Kosi, Kamla, Bagmati, Gandak systems and their tributaries made northern Mithila unusually dynamic. Medieval people lacked modern embankment regimes, but they possessed local knowledge of raised settlement sites, seasonal routes, ponds, channels and crop timing. Floods could destroy standing crops and houses while also renewing soils and creating fisheries and grazing zones. The political economy therefore had to accommodate uncertainty. A revenue demand that ignored local ecological variation could undermine its own base, whereas flexible assessment, remission or dispersed storage could make extraction more sustainable. Direct documentation for such administrative responses is incomplete, so the chapter does not claim a uniform Karnata or Oiniwar flood policy. Instead, ecology is treated as a structural constraint explaining why settlement, market access and household reserves mattered as much as nominal sovereignty. 33.9 Village, market and town as connected scales The categories ‘village’, ‘market’ and ‘town’ were not isolated boxes. A large village could host periodic exchange, specialised artisans and religious establishments; a market could serve several villages without becoming a permanent urban centre; a capital such as Simraungadh depended on supplies assembled through smaller nodes. Jyotiriśvara’s descriptive vocabulary is valuable precisely because it presents a socially 357357 GAJENDRA THAKUR differentiated world of streets, shops, occupations, entertainments and goods alongside rural life. Exchange linked grain producers with oil pressers, potters, metalworkers, cloth makers, transporters and merchants. Periodic markets reduced the need for continuous urban residence and fit a floodplain landscape in which movement could be seasonal. Under the Oiniwars, the importance of multiple smaller court locations reinforces the likelihood that political consumption was distributed across a network rather than concentrated permanently in one metropolis. 33.10 Craft production and specialised labour Courtly and religious consumption stimulated specialised work. Stone carving, metalwork, carpentry, pottery, textiles, manuscript preparation, construction and ornament production are visible directly or indirectly in the material and textual record. Simraungadh sculpture demonstrates that skilled artistic production participated in interregional styles while remaining locally embedded. Craft specialists could work for patrons without being permanently attached to a single court; some skills were mobile, and commissions could draw artisans between centres. Everyday craft production was even broader, serving agricultural households with tools, vessels, clothing and building materials. The surviving prestige objects must therefore not define the whole craft economy. They are best understood as the upper end of a larger occupational spectrum in which subsistence, market demand, temple requirements and elite patronage overlapped. 33.11 Trade routes, tolls and cross-border exchange The Karnata capital’s northern position placed it close to routes between the Gangetic plain and Nepal. Later political and literary evidence likewise shows Mithila embedded among Nepal, Bengal, Jaunpur and the Delhi sphere. Long-distance commerce did not displace local exchange; it added higher-value goods and opportunities for tolls, brokerage, transport and credit. Salt from Himalayan or trans-Himalayan circuits, metal, horses, textiles and luxury goods could move through regional networks, while grain and bulky produce generally travelled shorter distances unless price differentials justified transport. Evidence is insufficient to quantify trade volumes. Nevertheless, repeated political interest in routes and frontier centres indicates that connectivity itself was a resource. Control of passage, market dues and secure transit could generate income while also making courts dependent on wider geopolitical stability. 33.12 Money, payments in kind and the limits of monetisation claims Coins circulated in the wider north Indian economy, but the presence of money does not imply that every tax, wage or transaction was monetised. Agrarian dues could be collected in produce; services could be remunerated through assignments, shares, customary perquisites or gifts; market transactions could use coin selectively. Political change also brought different monetary zones into contact. For social history the key issue is plural payment. Households and institutions could combine grain, labour, land rights, cash and ceremonial gifts. This plurality gave resilience where coin supply was thin but also made obligations difficult to compare. Because the surviving evidence does not support a continuous price series for medieval Mithila, claims about inflation or total monetisation would be speculative. The chapter therefore treats money as one instrument inside a mixed economy rather than as a measure of economic modernity. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 129 — Agrarian surplus circulated through courts, markets, services and learned institutions 33.13 Religious and learned institutions as economic actors Temples, monasteries and learned households consumed resources, employed specialists and redistributed patronage. A grant could sustain ritual, teaching, manuscript work, maintenance of buildings or hospitality. The Naulagarh inscriptional evidence associated with the Karnata world also complicates any image of a single religious economy by preserving traces of Buddhist institutional presence alongside Brahmanical patronage. Intellectual centres required food, housing and material support just as courts did. Their economic importance lay not only in landholding but in creating demand for scribes, students, ritual goods, books and travel. At the same time, religious prestige could legitimate donors and help stabilise claims to local authority. It is therefore misleading to separate ‘culture’ from ‘economy’: patronage converted agrarian surplus into institutions whose symbolic capital could strengthen political and social relationships. 33.14 Administrative labour: ministers, scribes and record specialists Government required literate labour. Inscriptions name ministers and officials; legal digests presume adjudication and record; grants themselves required drafting, authentication and preservation. Kayastha and other scribal lineages appear in the documentary landscape, but the terminology must be read historically rather than forced into later fixed caste taxonomies. The career of Śrīdharadāsa, known from inscriptional and literary contexts, illustrates how a skilled official could connect courts and regions. Administrative expertise was portable capital: knowledge of formulae, account keeping, correspondence and precedent could survive dynastic change better than a particular ruler’s household. Such specialists formed an important bridge between abstract sovereignty and the practical extraction or allocation of resources. Their work made land claims legible and helped convert oral agreements into documents capable of outliving the immediate transaction. 33.15 Nanyadeva’s court: patronage as economic concentration Nanyadeva is remembered not only as a conqueror but as a patron and intellectual participant, including in musical scholarship. Courtly learning was financed activity. Musicians, teachers, scribes, ritual specialists and performers needed maintenance, while prestige objects and ceremonies mobilised artisans and suppliers. 359359 GAJENDRA THAKUR Patronage could attract skilled people to a court and give the dynasty cultural authority beyond military success. The economic significance of such patronage is not that culture formed a separate luxury sector, but that it concentrated surplus into human capital and reputation. A court that rewarded learning could create networks whose members later served other rulers. This helps explain why intellectual traditions in Mithila survived political disruptions. Yet patronage was selective: its visibility in texts reflects elite priorities and cannot be taken as evidence that prosperity was evenly distributed among rural producers. 33.16 Jyotiriśvara’s Varṇaratnākara as an economic archive The Varṇaratnākara, associated with the Karnata-period milieu, is one of the richest sources for reconstructing the texture of social life. Its catalogues evoke towns, markets, occupations, foodstuffs, ornaments, entertainments, religious specialists, courtesans, travellers and many forms of material culture. For economic history its value lies in range: it demonstrates a vocabulary capable of distinguishing numerous kinds of work and consumption. But genre matters. A literary thesaurus arranges the world rhetorically; it does not report numbers employed in each occupation or the market share of a commodity. The safest use is relational. If a text distinguishes many service and craft roles, historians can infer occupational specialisation; if it names diverse goods and spaces, they can infer differentiated consumption and exchange. Quantification, however, requires evidence the text was never designed to provide. 33.17 Harisimhadeva, genealogy and regulated alliance Tradition associates Harisimhadeva’s reign with the formalisation or strengthening of genealogical regulation later embodied in the Panji system. Chapter 31 treated that tradition critically: surviving manuscripts and later accounts must be dated, and institutional development may have occurred in stages. Economically, regulated marriage among selected lineages could shape alliance, property strategy, professional reputation and access to patronage. Genealogical expertise itself became specialised service. Yet this cannot justify projecting all later social rankings backward into the early fourteenth century. In particular, the distinct Śrotriya sub-caste classification adopted in this project is dated from Panji evidence to around 1800 CE, not to the Karnata court. Medieval records may preserve learned lineages and status distinctions without proving the existence of the later sub-caste as a fixed category. 33.18 The conquest of 1324: a political rupture with uneven economic effects Ghiyasuddin Tughluq’s campaign ended the Karnata court at Simraungadh and displaced Harisimhadeva toward Nepal. For political history this is a clear rupture. For social economy, the consequences were differentiated. A royal establishment could be dispersed; officers could lose assignments; military demands and routes could shift; elite patrons could relocate. Yet cultivated fields, village communities, craft knowledge and local kinship networks did not vanish automatically. Some disruption was likely around military movement and the abandoned court, but a claim of region-wide economic collapse would require evidence not presently available. The correct model is selective destruction and reorientation within a resilient agrarian landscape. This distinction also clarifies why new political arrangements could emerge relatively quickly: successor rulers inherited not empty territory but functioning productive and social infrastructures. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 130 — The 1324 rupture: separating political change from socio-economic persistence 33.19 Continuity under new overlordships After the Karnata collapse, Mithila’s rulers operated in a world where Delhi, Bengal, Jaunpur and Nepal could exert varying degrees of pressure or opportunity. Political autonomy was therefore negotiated rather than absolute. Tribute, military service, recognition and alliance could redirect part of the surplus outward while leaving much local administration in place. Such arrangements were common in premodern South Asia because central powers often found it cheaper to work through local intermediaries than to administer every village directly. The resulting economy had several levels of claim: cultivators produced; local holders and officials collected or managed; a regional court supported its household and dependants; and an overlord could demand acknowledgement or tribute. This layering helps explain why literary culture could flourish in modest courts that were politically subordinate yet socially influential. 33.20 Oiniwar polity and the scale of court power The Oiniwars did not reproduce Simraungadh’s large fortified capital. Their political centres shifted among places remembered as Oini, Sugauna, Devakuli, Gajarathpura and other court locations. Pankaj Jha’s study of the fifteenth-century literary world emphasises the relatively small scale and contingent autonomy of these north Bihar chieftaincies. Economically, a smaller court could still be significant locally. It concentrated revenue, consumed agricultural produce, commissioned texts and rituals, supported officials and formed alliances. But its fiscal reach may have been more negotiated and spatially dispersed than that of an idealised centralised kingdom. The movement of court centres also redistributed demand: villages near a residence could gain patrons and suppliers, while old centres could decline. Court mobility should therefore be read as a feature of regional political economy, not simply as evidence of administrative weakness. 33.21 Shifting capitals and distributed fiscal geography A moving or multiple court changes the geography of extraction and consumption. Instead of one permanent urban concentration, authority travels with the ruler, household, officers and ritual apparatus. Supplies may be assembled from nearby estates and villages; temporary markets and service clusters can expand around the court; routes between residences gain importance. Oiniwar political geography therefore 361361 GAJENDRA THAKUR suggests a network of nodes rather than a single dominant city. This does not mean taxes were improvised at every move. Documentary claims, hereditary rights and local intermediaries could maintain continuity while the court relocated. The economic effect was to bind several localities into circuits of hospitality, provisioning and patronage. It also reduced the historian’s ability to identify one archaeological ‘capital’ whose material record would stand for the whole dynasty. 33.22 Learned households and the political economy of scholarship Mithila’s reputation as a centre of Sanskrit learning in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries rested on material support. Scholars required households, students, manuscripts, food and time removed from full- time agricultural labour. Land assignments, gifts, court employment, ritual fees and teaching networks could supply these resources. Learning in turn generated political value: jurists advised rulers, scribes prepared documents, teachers enhanced a patron’s reputation and scholastic lineages attracted students from outside the region. Knowledge was therefore both cultural capital and a form of skilled labour. The Oiniwar court’s modest territorial scale did not prevent it from participating in much larger intellectual networks. Indeed, portable expertise allowed a learned household to remain influential even when a particular patron declined. This institutional resilience is one reason political fragmentation should not be equated with cultural or economic stagnation. 33.23 Caṇḍeśvara and the fiscal imagination of kingship Caṇḍeśvara Ṭhakkura’s Rājanītiratnākara belongs to the early fourteenth-century Mithila intellectual world and systematises political categories drawn from earlier Sanskrit traditions. As a normative treatise it cannot be used as an administrative manual proving that every rule was implemented. It nevertheless reveals what a learned minister-jurist considered essential to kingship: revenue, officers, protection, punishment, territory, war, counsel and legitimate transfer of authority. Read alongside his legal digests, the work demonstrates a sophisticated conceptual separation of fiscal and judicial problems. This matters economically because extraction required legitimacy and procedure as well as force. The treatise’s afterlife also shows how regional political actors could appropriate older imperial vocabularies even when ruling much smaller territories. Political imagination could be larger than the material scale of a court. 33.24 Document culture and the later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura The project distinguishes the earlier Mahākavi Vidyāpati from the later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura associated with Oiniwar and neighbouring courts and with Sanskrit and Avahaṭṭa works such as Likhanāvalī, Puruṣaparīkṣā and Kīrtilatā. For Chapter 33, Likhanāvalī is especially important because a manual of letters and documents reveals the social demand for formal written communication. Petitions, orders, grants, acknowledgements and private letters required recognised forms, scribal skill and institutional memory. Pankaj Jha has shown that such writing practices were part of a broader fifteenth-century political culture rather than mere literary ornament. Economically, documentation reduced ambiguity in obligations and allowed claims to travel across space and time. It also created specialised labour and gave literate households leverage in courts and disputes. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 131 — Oiniwar-era court society as a distributed social-economic network 33.25 Service communities and occupational interdependence Agrarian surplus supported a wide field of service labour: artisans, transporters, ritual specialists, domestic workers, performers, guards, messengers, scribes and many other occupations. Some services were exchanged through markets; others were embedded in patronage, customary dues or household dependency. The temptation to translate each medieval occupational term directly into a later caste is especially dangerous. Occupation, lineage, status and endogamy could overlap without being identical, and their relationship changed over centuries. The evidence from literary lists and legal categories is strongest for demonstrating occupational differentiation and hierarchy. It is weaker for proving the exact social boundaries of every group. A social-economic history should therefore ask what work was performed, who paid or maintained the worker, and how portable the skill was before assigning a later community label. 33.26 Women and household production Chapter 32 showed that women’s legal visibility is only one part of their economic history. In the Karnata and Oiniwar countryside, household production depended on labour that texts often leave unnamed: processing grain, managing food stores, textile work, tending animals, collecting fuel, assisting cultivation, caring for children and maintaining ritual and domestic spaces. Elite households added management of servants, gifts and movable property. Marriage linked households and could redirect resources through dowry-like transfers, strīdhana, maintenance and inheritance claims, but the surviving prescriptive texts cannot tell us how frequently each rule was applied across social strata. The important economic conclusion is structural: the agrarian household was not a male individual producer. It was a cooperative and hierarchical unit whose reproduction depended heavily on women’s paid and unpaid work, even where formal documents foreground male holders. 33.27 Mobility, military labour and migration Political competition generated movement. Soldiers, retainers, messengers, scribes, scholars and artisans could follow patrons; merchants and transporters followed opportunity; displaced elites crossed into Nepal after military defeat. Such mobility moved more than people. It carried languages, legal forms, artistic styles, 363363 GAJENDRA THAKUR religious practices and credit relationships. The Karnata dynasty’s own origin traditions place it within wider movements of military elites, while the post-1324 displacement of Harisimhadeva illustrates the reverse process. Later Oiniwar politics also unfolded amid shifting relations with neighbouring sultanates. Mobility therefore belongs inside economic history because skills and patronage were transferable assets. At the same time, migration should not be exaggerated into mass demographic replacement without evidence. Most agrarian production depended on populations that remained tied to local land and water regimes even as elites circulated. 33.28 Regional powers and the circulation of surplus Mithila’s economy was never insulated from larger states. Karnata rulers negotiated with Senas, Kalachuris and powers in Nepal; later chieftains confronted Delhi, Bengal and Jaunpur. Warfare could destroy assets, but political connection also opened markets and patronage. A ruler recognised by a larger power might retain local revenues after tribute; a scholar could seek service beyond Mithila; merchants could exploit routes protected by changing authorities. The fifteenth-century world described by later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura’s political literature makes sense in this multi-centred environment. Regional surplus thus circulated outward through tribute, military expenditure and trade while external goods, coin, styles and ideas circulated inward. The balance varied over time, and the evidence does not permit a single estimate of ‘drain’ or prosperity. What is clear is that political economy operated across scales larger than the local dynasty. 33.29 Status formation without retrospective caste projection Land, office, learning, ritual authority and marriage regulation could generate durable status differences. Medieval Mithila unquestionably contained hierarchy and named social groups. The methodological problem is not whether hierarchy existed but how its categories changed. Later genealogies and colonial ethnographies often present classifications as timeless, whereas earlier inscriptions and texts may use different vocabularies or attach different meanings to the same word. This chapter therefore follows the governing rule established in Chapters 29–31: no modern or early-modern sub-caste will be projected backward without period evidence. The Śrotriya case is decisive. Panji-based evidence used in this project dates its emergence as a distinct sub-caste to around 1800 CE. Karnata or Oiniwar learned elites can be described as Brahmanas, jurists, scholars or holders where sources support those terms, but not retrospectively as members of that later fixed sub-caste. 33.30 Conclusion: prosperity, dynastic change and institutional continuity Royal patronage, rich literary description, monumental remains and active scholarship can tempt historians to label an entire period prosperous. Such a judgement requires caution. Courtly abundance may coexist with heavy peasant burdens; an urban centre may flourish while flood-affected districts struggle; elite texts may celebrate gifts precisely because resources were concentrated. Conversely, political fragmentation does not prove economic decline if cultivation, markets and skilled labour continue. The evidence supports a picture of productive agrarian foundations, occupational differentiation, regional trade and substantial patronage under both Karnata and Oiniwar orders. It does not support a numerical estimate of regional income or a uniform standard of living. Prosperity is therefore treated as distributional and sectoral: who controlled surplus, who consumed it, and which institutions were able to reproduce themselves across political change. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II The Karnata and Oiniwar centuries reveal a political economy in which land remained fundamental but never acted alone. Agrarian surplus moved through villages, offices, courts, religious establishments, learned households, markets and long-distance routes. Simraungadh represented one powerful concentration of that system; its fall in 1324 altered the political centre without erasing the productive landscape. Oiniwar rule reorganised authority around smaller and shifting courts, while documentary expertise, Sanskrit learning, genealogical practice and regional mobility supplied forms of continuity. The later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura’s documentary and political works belong to this fifteenth-century world and must remain distinct from the earlier Mahākavi Vidyāpati. Likewise, later caste formations must not be made medieval by repetition. The central historical lesson is institutional: dynasties command attention because their names survive, but social economies endure through the households, skills, documents, land rights and routes that make rule possible. Table 33.1 — Karnata and Oiniwar social economy: evidence, use and limit Evidence Primary period / Secure use Limit context Karnata inscriptions 12th–early 14th c. Identify rulers, Recorded grants and grants officials, donors, over-represent institutions and privileged recorded rights transactions and recipients Simraungadh Karnata capital and Reconstruct fortified Capital evidence archaeology and wider artistic zone consumption, skilled cannot represent sculpture production and every village economy material connections Jyotiriśvara, Late Karnata milieu Recover vocabulary Literary classification Varṇaratnākara of occupations, is not a census or goods, spaces and price series consumption Caṇḍeśvara’s legal Early 14th c. Study learned Normative categories and political digests concepts of property, do not prove revenue, office and universal governance administrative practice Panji and Developing medieval Trace selected Not a universal genealogical materials tradition with later marriage, lineage and population register; manuscripts professional networks later categories when dated require independent dating Later Vidyāpati 15th-century Study documentary Literary-political Ṭhakkura’s works Oiniwar / practice, political works require genre neighbouring courts language, mobility control and must not and courtly networks be assigned to the earlier Mahākavi Regional chronicles Post-medieval Recover remembered Late testimony can and later histories witnesses to earlier political sequences compress chronology traditions and compare source and project later traditions institutions backward Environmental and Long-duration Explain constraints Does not by itself settlement evidence floodplain economy on agriculture, establish a particular routes, storage and tax or social rule settlement resilience 365365