ABSTRACT
In the reconstruction of the history of early and early medieval India, a general emphasis has been on the core, nuclear areas of various regions. Socio-economic and religious dynamics in the areas that are considered to be peripheral have generally not attracted the kind of attention they should have. The persistence of this view may partially be due to a general reluctance to take into account historical implications of the heterogeneity of geographical space. This is despite some excellent observations made by geographers and historians alike. Way back in the 1920s, Arthur Geddes had emphasized the need to understand the evolution of Indian history in terms of interactions between its core ‘grain lands’ of the middle and upper Ganga Valley, and ‘grasslands’ and ‘forest lands’ of the rest of the subcontinent. It was a persistent attempt of the population of the ‘grain lands’ to expand their subsistence pattern to the ‘grasslands’ and ‘forest lands’ and this expansion had significant socio-economic and cultural implications.1 Later, Richard Eaton argued a similar thing: much of Indian history is marked by a continuous attempt by the settled agrarian population of low-lying plains to expand agrarian frontiers in the outlying jungles. In this expansion of agrarian frontiers, there was a mutual flow of cultures, but the signs and symbols associated with the agrarian population had greater appeal on the other side.2 B.D. Chattopadhyaya too talks of a persistent interaction between the forested space and cultivated space, which had significant
socio-economic and religious implications for societies on the both side of the continuum.3
