NCERT Book Class 9 Social Science (Understanding Society India and Beyond PART-I) Chapter 5 State and Society up to 1000 CE

Chapter 5

State and Society
up to 1000 CE
The Big Questions
1. How did society and state organise themselves prior to 1000 CE?
2. How did states and societies emerge and spread to different parts
of the Indian subcontinent?
3. How did the ideas of dharma and chakravarti samrāṭ help create
unity in social values and governance, and promote the idea of the
Indian subcontinent as one political entity?
4. How did different social, administrative, and occupational groups
take shape over time and come together culturally?

In the previous chapter, we traced the long journey of human
development from our early ancestors to the emergence of settled
communities and, subsequently, civilisations. We also examined
the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation along with other Bronze Age
civilisations of the world.
Let us now study the historical developments in the Indian
subcontinent, with reference to state and society up to the end of the
first millennium CE. By the end of this chapter, we will notice that
our understanding of this period is more detailed and qualitatively
enriched. This is because, from at least the second millennium
BCE, we begin to find literary sources—the Ṛigveda being the
earliest—that supplement archaeological evidence and provide
insights into the social, political, cultural, and moral dimensions of
the past. As a result, we gain insights into the social and political
realities, ideas, ideologies, institutions, and practices of this period.
We will begin with the social and political landscape described in
the literary sources such as kin-based social organisation (jana,
kula) and early forms of polity. Thereafter, we will study their
development into more complex and bigger, territory-based
political units like janapadas and mahājanapadas, and eventually
into empires during the time of the Mauryas and the Guptas in
northern India, and the Cholas in southern India. Alongside these