A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations

A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations 
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014
Ed. Prof. Noboru Karashima

For nearly 50 years Nilakanta Sastri's A History of South India held the field as a synthetic account of the history of Peninsular India. The chronological limit of this book, the Battle of Talikota in 1565 made Sastri's approach to the narrative history of South India a tad suspect as it was founded on the assumption that the end of Vijayanagara Empire marked a decisive disjuncture in the history of the region. The lines of continuity and change represented by the emergence of post Talikota polities such as the nayakdoms in different regions the peninsula were ignored in favor of a larger identity based narrative, one that has been reconstructed by Sumathi Ramswamy in her outstanding book, Passions of the Tongue. The twin challenges of identity founded narratives and nationalist hagiographies have made the study of history not only difficult but also professionally dangerous. South India with its obsession with caste and linguistic identities, particularly the Tamil region. has projected over the past 4 decades a historiography that is nourished in the soil of distortion, misinformation, fabrication and worse outright forgery. The book under review is a sound and welcome contribution to  the study of the past of a historically and culturally vibrant region.

Even since Robert Cauldwell published his Comparative Grammar of Dravidian Languages the Aryan - Dravidian dichotomy became the stock in trade of historians who posited a Dravidian utopia which was upset of the Aryan invasion. This theory which found political resonance in the Pure Tamil Movement and the caste politics of the Dravidian Movement was not question seriously until the 1990s and even then the arguments against the Aryan- Dravidian Theory was stymied by the progressive/secular/communal fault lines of Indian historiography of the post colonial period. Karashima needs to be congratulated for steering clear of such intellectual and political minefields though  there is some concession to the Dravidian origin of the Tamil language in the early chapters of this edited volume.

The archaeology of the South Indian past is being explored by a number of historians some of whom have contributed chapters to this volume. Unlike the Gangetic valley in which we have a clear and datable archaeological horizon in the form of NBP ware, in south India the ubiquitous presence of Black and Red ware makes the task of using ceramic tradition as a marker for cultural and social change extremely difficult. Added to this is the problem  posed by the Megalithic Culture whose antiquity still remains a subject of deep controversy. In the recent excavations undertaken by Prof. K Rajan in the site of Porunthal a vast burial mound has been excavated and ceramics with graffiti scratches have been discovered. Can these marks be read as a primitive kind of Brahmi which would make the advent of literacy coterminous with the black and red ware, an interpretation which cannot be sustained. Cultural and historical changes as reflected in the historical and material evidence need to be studied carefully before generalization made. The Iron Age in the region was at best a society of pastoral and semi agricultural people who were drawn into a nexus of trade which linked parts of the Peninsula with the wider world which sources beads, metals and textiles and perhaps exotic animals from the region.

The bulk of the book deals with the Chola and Vijayanagara Empires which stretched from the ninth century till the end of the seventeenth century. Karashima and Subbarayalu have themselves contributed to the study of these empires and the analysis of the data is essentially around their works. Burton Stein and other historians have also made singular contribution though there is not much discussion on their contributions.   An aspect of medieval society which is neglected in this volume in the Right Left division of  society and its gradual consolidation into jati/ caste formations in the Vijayanagara period which witnessed the rise of a mature caste society. The use of water and disputes over water which were abundant in the Vijayanagara period has not been dealt with in this work. The fact that during the Vijayanagara period the dry region was opened for settlement has not been studies in the work. The use of tribal people and their transformation into armed auxiliaries during the Vijayangara period can be attested by the history of communities such as the Gollas and the Boyas.

The book under review can be recommended as a text book for introductory courses at the graduate and advanced senior courses.  

Historical Atlas of Chola Inscriptions and Epigraphy

The Tamil Nadu Archaeological Society has published an interesting atlas which was prepared by Professor Y Subbarayalu, Muttusankar and Balamurugan. Though the Atlas is in Tamil, it provides a wealth of information about the Nadu units and village settlements during the Chola period. The only major Historical Atlas for medieval India is the prepared by Irfan Habib using the information found in the Ain-i- Akbari. Y Subbarayalu's own work, the Political Geography of the chola Country which was published more than four decades back has remained the only published source for locating the nadu -s, valanadu -s, and ur mentioned in medieval inscriptions. The work undertaken by Subbarayalu as part of his thesis was based entirely on the published inscription which were available uto 1968. Since then many more inscriptions have come to light.

The book under review is a collection of 13 maps which cover all the major regions of the Chola Empire: Tondaimandalam, Cholamandalam, Gangai Mandalam, Naduvil Nadu and pandya Mandalam. The maps have been prepared using the standard Survey of Indian Topographic Sheets. The palaces mentioned in the inscription are marked in the maps using the GPS coordinates. Since there is a minor error factor in the use of GPS data, the overall accuracy of the maps may be called to question. However since we are dealing with place names which have survived from the medieval past, slight variation will not rally affect the utility of these maps.

The small volume brought out is an important contribution to the study of the historical geography of the medieval period.

Vijayanagara Inscriptions from Tamil Country

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE VIJAYANAGARA RULERS VOLUME V PT I
Edited Y Subbarayalu and S Rajavelu
New Delhi, Primus Books, 2014

Right from the very beginning of the nineteenth century Vijayanagara Epigraphy has been a popular theme in the historiography of medieval South India. The early volumes of the Asaiatik Researches contain a number of interesting articles by Ravenshaw and later by Fleet, Elliot and Sewell on Vijayanagara inscriptions. The prime purpose of the early pioneers was to establish the chronological context of the Vijayanagara Empire and untangle the knotty problems associated with the order of succession of the kings (rayas) belonging to the four dynasties of the Vijayanagara state. The fact that the script of the Vijayangara inscriptions was very close to the scripts of South Indian languages as they were written in the early nineteenth century made scholars spend considerable effort on Vijayanagara inscriptions. Further, there was also the fact that concentrated collections of Vijayanagara inscriptions were located in Temples such as Tirupathi, Srisailam, Kanchipuram and Srirangam making the study of Vijayanagara history both popular and relatively widespread. And in the decades prior to Independence, the study of Vijayanagara history was particularly bereft of the overtones of identity politics that this aspect of South Indian history came to acquire after Independence and more sharply after the linguistic division of states in 1956. Against this background any attempt to bring together epigraphs and historical records distributed over three linguistic zones is certainly welcome.

The eminent historian Y Subbarayaly along with Dr S Rajavelu have in the volume under discussion collected the texts of all Vijayanagara inscriptions found in the Tamil country distibuted in time from the middle of the fourteenth century till 1509, the year that marked the accession of Krishnadevaraya. The Telugu inscriptions found in the Tamil region have to some extent been published in South Indian Inscriptions volume XIV. The transliteration of all the inscriptions is provided along with a brief summary of the contents of the inscriptions.In all 576 epigraphs have been published and since they are all arranges in chronological sequence, a glance through the volume provides insight into the changing pattern of Vijayangara rule in the region. It is interesting to note that after the rather impressive debut of Kumara Kampana, whose inscriptions are found even in the deep South, Vijayangara ruler Devaraya II (1422-1444) was the next ruler whose inscriptions are fairly widespread. Another interesting aspect to note is that from the time of Devaraya II we find multiple copies of the same inscription in different parts of the Tamil region which suggests that effort was being made to standardize  the administrative and revenue protocols.

The German historian Herman Kulke in one of his papers has argued that the age of myth of Vidyaranya associated with the establishment of the Vijayanagara empire was created post 1565 as a strategy of legitimating the post Talikota polities which surfaced after the collapse of Vijayanagara. This interpretation may need to be revisited as the volume under discussion and review has an ealy Vijayanagara inscription from Srirangam (183) which was issued in the reign of Virupaksha which mentions Vidyaranya. An ealy reference to the sage in an inscription from Tamil region is certainly interesting and the issue needs to be restudied  in the light of this record. The inscriptions demonstrate that from the middle of the fifteenth century new administrative units such as uhavadi and rajayam came into existence in the Tamil region.

The impressively produced volume is a welcome contribution to Vijayanagara studies and we hope that the post 1509 inscriptions are also published soon.

The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India

The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India
Professor Romila Thapar
New Delhi; Orient Blackswan, 2013

Professor Romila Thapar, India's most outstanding historian has contributed more than six decades for the reconstruction and understanding of the early past of India in general and the Gangetic valley in particular. Since the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment reconfigured Historiography as a story of progress and the saw sharp differences in the cultural and therefore moral level of "civilization" between the Western and the non-Western world, historians and philosophers have dismissed India as a land extra territorial to history, The early pioneers like Sir William Jones, Colebroke, Hastings and McKenzie did not find historical literature in India comparable with the Annals and Chronicles that existed in the West. Hegel even went to the extent of saying that India has only a past and does not exist in a historical space. Ideas of a timeless land vegetating in the teeth of time as Marx put it circulated in Europe and even Marx was not immune to the seductive charms of an ahistorical India. His notion of Oriental Despotism essentialised the existing theories about the past of India. It is indeed a formidable task to take on the task of subjecting the weight of two centuries of literary and historiographical representations and attempt a serious rehabilitation of India as a historical subject, and this is the achievement of Professor Romila Thapar.

Speculations about the aims, methods and purpose for representing the past in a narrative form constitute the fabric of Historiography and except for the Kashmir text, Rajatarangini, the River of Kings, India has not produced any work which enable us to seek answers about the nature of historical past. The absence of a systematic records of the past became the evidence on which speculative theories about a static Indian society came to be mounted. Since there was no change in India, there was no need to understand the past was the logic of the orientalist approach to the past and Romila Thapar effectively challenges this view. While admitting that India did not have the mimetic and chronicle inspired tradition, Professor Thapar locates Indian historiographical concepts in three distinct arenas: the Bardic, the Puranic and the Shrmanic. The earliest historical works embodied in the Rg Veda and other texts speak of gift giving and battle as the main themes for memorializing the  past and with the advent of the state with its dynastic armature we notice a transition to the vamsavali or the royal genealogies. Alternatively, there was also the Buddhist or the Shramaic tradition which dealt with the exemplary life of a Buddhist king/monk or the organization of the sangha. The changing attitudes and perceptions toward the past reflected as Thapar points out different claims made on the past to legitimize the present, either contemporary forms of political dominance or social privilege. In charting out the fascinating twists and turns of these complementary and at times conflicting modes of representing the past, Thapar draws attention to the advent of royal inscriptions as a specific genre of historical writing in early India.
The work undertaken by Profesor Romila Thapar is an important intervention in reshaping the Historiography of early India. More than seventy five years back Pargiter in his Ancient Indian Historical Tradition tried to separate the historical from the mythical in the conventional sources available to him. But given the vast swathes of time covered by the Puranic lists of the Kings of the Kali age and the absence of any true chronological marker, Pargiter was able to achieve little by way of suggesting an approach to the study of early India. Professor Thapar has revisited that territory and has suggested methods and techniques for historisizing the literary texts in conjunction with dated inscriptions of the period. The early historians were troubled by what they thought was the cyclical view of time, and the absence of a linear conception of historical time. Thapar has shown that with the emergence of kingdoms and states in India time keeping and the calendar became an integral element of the royal elan and mystique. It is not an accident that the early Indian kingdoms were very particular about measuring time and using the planetary motion to draw up reliable calendars. In fact during the Chola period as the researches of Swamikannu Pillai has shown thge astronomers were seldom wrong when it came to predicting eclipses and other celestial events. The super nova explosion of 1054 recorded by Chinese astronomers may also find some echo in Indian hiostorical sources.

Professor Romila Thapar at Pondicherry University on January 17th 2014



The Past Before Us will remain a classic work for a long time.