George W. Spencer A Review of his work and Assessment of Chola Historiography

 

The death of Professor George Spence came both as a surprise and a shock. With his death the last significant American  interpreter of medieval South Indian History has called it a day. Burton Stein, James Heitzman and now George Spencer all three of whom contributed in their own unique way to further our understanding of the medieval period have now left the stage and with this we can say that a creative period of research comes to an end. A few years back Professor Noboru Karashima died and he too was a  contemporary of these historians.

George Spencer (b.August 30, 1939 d. January 19,2021)  taught for several years at Northern Illinois University, de Kalb.  He took his PhD in History from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967. His dissertation though extremely short was eminently readable unlike the dissertations churned out these days which are heavy on jargon and impenetrable post colonial drivel and make sense only to the writer and his press ganged audience.  He later revised this dissertation and published it in 1983 under the title, The Politics of Expansion: The Chola Conquest of Sri Lanka and Sri Vijaya.

Prof. Spencer

  In this book Spencer raised an issue that still resonates in the Historiography of the medieval period. How are the conquests of Indian kings and monarchs to be explained. It is generally believed that kingship in India was not predicated upon conquest and empire building. And yet we have inscriptions of the medieval period proclaiming the digvijaya extending over the eight directions and the four quarters. George Spencer attempted to explain the paradox of medieval kingship: military expansion presented as an elaborate pilgrimage or conquest justified as an act of restoration of the legitimate dynasty. Conquest primarily for political control or territorial aggrandizement was almost invariably absent. Basing his analysis on the inscriptions found on the walls of the Great Temple at the Chola capital, Tanjavur, Spencer argued that the very uncertainty of political and military power of medieval monarchs made them devise strategies that shored up their uncertain power in spectacular displays of royal might.

This thesis was highly problematic in that it seemed to see the practice of Statecraft as being predicated upon the exigencies of court factions and alliances rather than the human agency acting through the king. Medieval polities all over the world were animated by ideological considerations, but hard political realities lurked beneath the surface. There is no reason to doubt that medieval South India was any different.

The most interesting work of Professor George Spencer was the series of  papers he published in a Hong Kong based journal called Asian Profile. He tried to map the actual extent of the Chola conquest by studying the distribution of medieval inscriptions. Using locational information found in Chola Inscriptions collected by the Archaeological Survey of India, Spencer was able to demonstrate that Chola inscriptions can be used as markers of imperial control as they are seen the ebb and flow with the political fortunes of the dynasty. This line of investigation was further amplified by Peter Granda and his colleagues. 

George Spencer also investigated the Chola naval expedition on Sri Vijaya in AD 1025, the same year that Mohamed Ghazni launched his attack against Somnath Temple. He came to the conclusion that the Cholas were motivated by the desire for plunder and this interpretation is negated by the evidence found in the Karandai Copper Plate Inscription of Rajendra I. Of course we must say that the Karandai Plates were not available to scholars at the time when Spencer wrote his book.

We must celebrate the contribution of George Spencer. He may not have created a paradigm shift as did Professor Burton Stein. But he enriched the field of Chola Historiography and we are  grateful for that.