DURING THE SEVENTH and eighth centuries there were significant political, religious, economic, and cultural transitions in north India following the fall of the Gangetic Plainbased Gupta dynasty (320– 550 CE), with secondary impact on emerging Central Indian and South Indian successor polities. Diverse Indian regional populations embraced evolving Hindu and Buddhist religions in the post-Gupta era, as Indian religious universality attracted numbers of converts from among existing and expansive Indian residential clusters and their surrounding hinterlands that extended into Southeast Asia. Gupta-era religious tradition provided the foundation for bonding between developing networked post-Gupta temple centres that were patronized by emerging polities and their rural populace.

In the period ca. 600– 800 CE, networked partnerships of kings, religious clerics, and merchants provided an alternative to militarism. Most notably, the era was formative to societal development that embraced Indian religions, above all temple-centred Hinduism. By the eighth century new regional capacities for societal inclusion based in temple urbanism marginalized previous rural animistic/ naturalistic local traditions. Universal Hindu and Buddhist texts, ritual practices, theological debate, and economic systems centred in temples provided justification for the replacement of long-standing indigenous beliefs which were perceived to have lost their prowess under a failed elite who had previously patronized a variety of secular religions. This study addresses the key role of eighth-century transitional networking among monarchs, priests, civil administrators, commercial specialists, agriculturalists, and craftsmen.

Post-1950s historiography has moved away from the scholarship of British colonialera historians, who were most interested in warfare, to the new post-colonial scholarship which has been focal on evolving cultural practices. By the eighth century clerical practitioners of the then “universal” Hindu and Buddhist faiths were agents in the spread of literacy, agricultural technologies, and increased commercialization beyond previous north India epicentres. North Indian Gupta civilization, at its height from the early fourth century to seventh century, had impressed South Asians and foreigners with its advanced agriculture, momentous popular literature and art, and secular diversity.