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While all of India certainly shared many characteristics, India cannot be considered one social unit during the medieval period (sixth through twelfth centuries, Common Era). Nearly every similarity is deconstructable by a parallel distinction and the Indians lacked the one thing that truly unites a society: social conscious.
India's social hierarchy remained fairly constant throughout the subcontinent. The varna (generalized to the caste) system, coupled with rule by feudalistic kings, was generalized to the population. The varna system, itself, however, was vague and amorphous. Any particular individual could move from one caste to another with little difficulty (as opposed to recent Indian history). Meanwhile, the various kings had little real unity among them. Jati, a more specific caste designation and rank within a specific varna varied from region to region-as a jati caste might be vaisya in one area, but shudra in another. Throughout India, societal dominance was contested by Brahmans and Ksatriyas, who emphasized differing religious texts (Vedas and the Upanisads) to develop their own social hierarchies.
Different regions also had different power loci-secular rule, in addition to conflicting with religious rule, was in constant turmoil, as kings fought each other for domination of given areas. Even on the large scale, the Rashtrakuta dynasty of northern India emerged from a Chalukyan general. Although superficially the political structure seemed constant in India-as governed by the varna and jati systems-it was actually subject to constant turmoil and the shifting of power.
Constant strife led to warfare among kings, but there was no accepted means for incorporating land into one's own country. No dynasty, therefore, could achieve overall political supremacy. At best, nominal tributary rule over neighboring kings was the accomplishment of Indian rulers of the medieval period.
The entire sub-continent also maintained use of an intellectual language, Sanskrit, which would seem to indicate a common culture for the entire area. The portion of the population who knew Sanskrit, however, was undoubtedly very small. Rather, the majority of people used their own regional, vernacular languages (i.e. Urdu, Tamil and Hindi). Even a small group of people cannot be held as an effective communal organization when they lack the ability to communicate with one another. Certainly an enormous geographic region, such as India cannot be considered one society when fraught with such difficulty. Many regions did share the commonality of Indo-Aryan dialects, but those dialects were not universal across India and they were still too distinct for cross-cultural communication.
The last major characteristic, which appears to be socially widespread, was Indian religion. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism had all spread across the country and each region's major holy places were generally considered to be holy to the others also. Buddhism, however, disappeared in the early medieval period in all areas of India except the Easter Pala dynasty. Moreover, almost the entire area south of the Deccan Plain was characterized by bhakti devotionalism, which was not common in the north. Even among non-Bhakti Hindus, there were distinct local gods and methods of worship that varied from region to region. The worship of the gods was not an over-riding characteristic of unity because it had too little that can be considered common to all Indians.
The continent was also divided in half by artistic considerations. Temple architecture in the south (Dravida style) was entirely distinct from that of the north (Nagara style). Both borrowed heavily from the Buddhist stupa (a dome design), but incorporation of those characteristics into Hindu worship varied by location. Nagara temples tended to be taller and "smoother." They also lacked gopura and the prominence of recessed sculpture.
The medieval Indian sub-continent was no more one society than was medieval Europe. In both locales, general trends can be seen across the region, but both lack one essential ingredient. What made Europe multiple kingdoms made India multiple kingdoms: neither culture had a social consciousness. The people of given areas didn't conceive of themselves as part of some large India, some abstract that went beyond their immediate regions. Yes, there were similarities among those regions and yes, they recognized that their neighbors shared them; but they did not consider themselves 'one' with those people. What makes a nation or a unified social group (both of which are somewhat modern ideas in our usage of the terms) is a unified consciousness. There must be a social collective beyond that of the local region. Because medieval Indians lacked this, they cannot be considered one country. None of the pan-Indic similarities holds itself inviolable-they all suffer from strong regional variance precisely because the people were regionally different and made up of multiple, smaller social units.
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