Modes of power and production: A historiography of theories on pre-modern State in India

This paper examines the principal theoretical frameworks through which historians and Marxist theorists have interpreted the pre-modern state in India and the wider non-European world, such as feudalism, the Asiatic mode of production, the segmentary state, and the tributary mode of production. Moving beyond Eurocentric typologies, the study explores how each concept has been adapted or contested within Indian historiography from the nineteenth century to the present. It highlights the transition from early colonial analogies of lord and vassal to Marxist formulations emphasizing agrarian class structures, ritual sovereignty, and state-mediated extraction. Drawing on scholars such as DD Kosambi, RS Sharma, Irfan Habib, Burton Stein, TJ Byres, Samir Amin, and Murzban Jal, the paper situates India’s historical experience within global debates on non-capitalist formations. The argument advanced here is that the historiography of the pre-modern Indian state reveals not a single evolutionary sequence but a plurality of overlapping modes, in which ideology, ritual, and economic relations interacted to sustain complex, regionally differentiated political orders.