To clarify, Crusader Kings 2 spans ~800AD to ~1400
Even in medieval european history the entire concept of feudalism is heavily disputed. Ask two scholars and you will get three answers what is feudalism, where it applied and when it applied. So if we fragment feudalism into various local "feudalisms" ( the french feudal experience is different from the german or english one for example) then we must surely come to the conclusion that at best only the broadest (and therefore least useful) definition of feudalism would ever apply to a completely different social and legal system, like we have in India.
"Reynolds: Fiefs and Vassals. The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted" has become a standard book for the idea of feudal revisionism (if we wish to call it that way) just like Bloch's "Feudal Society" encapsulates the old "standard" theory of feudalism. As a word of warning, Reynold's work, while highly interesting, is also highly technical and perhaps somewhat exhausting to read.
Was "India" even a cohesive political unit over that time frame? At some points individual states did occupy most of modern India (not including Pakistan, I think), but even then (e.g the Delhi sultanate), it would be emphatically not feudalistic, let alone something resembling a state by the name of "India".
No. Europe was never under a "feudal" system. And the term "feudal" is, in essence, simply a way of terming historical people "not modern", which is particularly troubling when the term is applied to a state that was once under colonial rule, like India.
To begin: Feudalism is a fiction, the creation of an ahistorical imagination attempting to grapple with contemporary concerns. And its origin lies with the origin of another fiction - the idea that there was a "medieval period".
The most universal of the "regulative fictions" which historians employ to make some order out of a chaotic past is "periodization," by which we cut the continuous thread of time into manageable lengths, and then do our best to present such divisions as natural rather than contrived. (Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 16)
Let me repeat for emphasis: all periodizations are fictions. They are anachronistic creations imposed on the past. Novick, as I understand the quote above, would have us believe that they are simply necessary contrivances which historians create, and which they do not really believe. Novick is an eminent historian; his formulation is probably how most, even most historians, tend to assume periodization works.
They are wrong. Periodizations are not our servants but our masters, and the creation and utilization of periodization is necessarily a political act. In her very difficult but brilliant book Periodization and Sovereignty, Kathleen Davis has recently shown that the idea of a "medieval" age opposed to the "modern"(1) is a product of English juristic disputes over the location and possession of sovereignty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, responding to the problems created by the English Civil War and the decapitation of Charles I. The primary method by which these jurists distinguished between themselves and the past, i.e. between royal and parliamentary authority, was to reify the idea of "feudalism". But what they (and four hundred years of subsequent scholarship) referred to as "feudalism" is derived from a collection of texts called the Libri feudorum (Books of Fiefs), a private, “eclectic collection of treatises, statutes, and northern Italian legislation regarding fiefs... accumulated in various recensions throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”(2) Thus, the Libri feudorum did not describe a general system, or even a specific one. But the jurists found the Libri to be useful, as it allowed them to separate authoritarian monarchy as an arbitrary, feudal, "medieval" form of government, as opposed to the parliamentary, pluralistic, "modern" one.
The reification of feudalism and the creation of the medieval in the seventeenth century is not simply a distortion of our view of the past; it created a meme that is deeply embedded in our culture, one which has been put to rather nefarious purposes in colonial contexts. As Timothy Mitchell discusses in Rule of Experts,(3) when the British took control of Egypt in 1882, they determined that "under the laws of the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled Cairo since 1517, all land was considered property of the state."(4) Such a system was (to the report’s authors) not based in an abstract body of law, but in the personal, tyrannical will of an absolute ruler, and thus patently inimical to the conception of private property, which was seen as the cornerstone of (European) civilization. The 'modern' European conception of property directly opposed individual and arbitrary---that is to say 'medieval'---coercive power, of which the state ownership of land was one facet. Consequently, the imposition of "law based on private rights represented a rupture with the previous world of arbitrary and despotic power."(5) The British report advanced the argument that the Ottoman Empire’s failure to evolve systems of private property ownership was a clear sign of the backwardness of the Muslim East and a clear indicator of the benefits offered by colonial rule. As Mitchell puts it, to the colonizers, "Law could claim to be universal, and thus nonarbitrary, only by appearing as the expression of civilization."(6) The expression of modern, western, European civilization, of course—what other sort was there? So the artificial and political creation of the periodization "medieval" and its memetic bond to feudalism was also used for political ends.
But let's come back to how the creation of "medieval" has distorted our view of the past. To list every consequence would far exceed the word limit here, but let's look at an easy one: if the medieval ended with modernity, it must have begun. But where? The historiographic discussion over the origins of "medieval Europe" is generally known as "the debate over the year 1000."
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