No society is static. It changes according to the nature of challenges it has to respond to and the requirements it lias to answer. From the tribal society of the Rigvedic period to the feudal society of the early medieval period, ancient Indian social structure underwent numerous changes.
Politico- economic factors, changes in the mode of production, demographic changes, a continuous and large influx of foreigners etc. were largely responsible for the social changes.
These changes mainly related to the caste system, marriage and position of women. It is not easy to mark the main contours and landmarks of changes in the social structure of ancient India because the social changes were not like the chronologically linked political changes. Some of the well-marked phases of change in the social structure of ancient India, however, are: Rigvedic to Later Vedic and the age of the Dhar- masutras, the Buddhist, the Mauryan, post- Mauryan, the Kushana and the Gupta ages.
But these phases of change mainly relate to the history of North India and cannot be universally applied to South India where the process of Aryanisation started very late. Consequently, the post-Mauryan society of North India and the Satavahana society in the Deccan and the Sangam society in the far south had very few similarities.
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There is no authentic social history of ancient India and the vast corpus of secular and religious literature is our main source of information. Here we shall basically confine our study to the North India within the periodisations discussed earlier.