A History of India, Third Edition

THE REGIONAL KINGDOMS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIA

and jewels of the samantas who surrounded the king when he held court.
The durbar, or court, emerged in this way as a special feature of the display
of royal glory: the greater the number of samantas and mahasamantas who
attended the durbar, the greater the fame of the overlord. Such a
samantachakra was, of course, inherently unstable. As soon as the power
of the central ruler declined a mahasamanta would strive for independence
or would even dream of stepping into the centre of the samantachakra.

The emergence of regional kingdoms

So far we have only highlighted the negative effects of this process by
referring to the fragmentation of royal control in the core regions of the
ancient empires in North India. But the development of political
institutions in East, Central and South India must be seen in a different
light. In those regions local rulers emerged who became regional kings
using the new royal style as a model for the integration of local and tribal
forces. In some ways this ‘development from below’ was similar to that
of state formation in the Gangetic plains in the seventh to the sixth
centuries BC.
There were usually three stages of this process: initially a tribal chieftain
would turn into a local Hindu princeling, then this prince would become a
king surrounded by samantas and thus establish an ‘early kingdom’, and,
in the third stage, great rulers of ‘imperial kingdoms’ would emerge who
controlled large realms and integrated the samantas into the internal
structure of their realm. The transition of tribal chieftains to Hindu
princelings is not very well documented, but it is known that there were
many petty Hindu principalities in Central and South India in the period
after the decline of the Gupta empire. These petty rulers controlled only
small nuclear areas. Once they transcended these areas and defeated their
neighbours, the second phase began. This was often accompanied by
agrarian extension in the nuclear area and the displacement of tribal
people who were either pushed into barren or mountainous tracts or
incorporated into the caste system as Shudras. In this second phase, the
kings of these early kingdoms also invited more and more Brahmins,
endowing them with land grants and immunities and often establishing
whole Brahmin villages (agraharas). By such formal grants the extraction
of surplus revenue was often defined for the first time in an exemplary
fashion as immunities granted to Brahmin donees in areas which had not
yet come under full control of the ruling dynasty. The most important
feature of the second phase was the subjection of neighbouring rulers
whose territory was, however, not annexed but was treated as a tributary
realm. These tributary princes attended the court of the victorious king but
did not yet play any significant role in the administration of the nuclear
area of his realm.