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.

Mission to Madura by Markus Vink, a Review

Mission to Madurai: Dutch Embassies to the Nayaka Court of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century
Markus Winlk
New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2013

The transition  to the rule of the European Companies in the seventeenth century over parts of South India is a complex problem in the historiography. On the one hand the nature of the source material changes with documents in Dutch, Portuguese, Latin and of course English and French and on the other, we have continuity in political and economic forms which add to the over all complexity of the historiographical questions. Few Indian historians with the sole exception of Sanjay Subrahmanyam have ventured to research this span of time and the reasons are not hard to determine: the linguistic resources required is extremely challenging and in our Universities here in India, teaching foreign languages as part of the Ph D programme is just absent. So there is little that has been published on the relations between the Nayaka kingdoms of Southern India and the representatives of the European companies. The Dutch were particularly active in the region after the conquest of Sri Lanka and the acquisition of Cochin and Negapattinam along the Kerala and Coromandel coast respectively. Markus Wink has published eight Reports written by ambassadors of the Dutch sent to the Nayaka court at Madurai.

There have been a few studies in recent years relating to the political and economic history of the southern part of the Tamil region. David Ludden's Peasant History in South India .   was based on English language sources available in the Archives of Tamil Nadu and the celebrated monograph of Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: The Ethno history of a South Indian Little Kingdom was based on archival records as well as a dense "thick description" of social and political relations emanating from the statecraft of caste and its hierarchical variations in the Kallar territories. To these we may add M SS Pandian's work on the Nanchil Nadu and its social and agrarian history during the rule of the Travancore rulers, the last of the little kings of the deep South. The arrival of the Christian Missionaries, first the Catholics and later the evangelists of the London Missionary Society added another layer of complexity to the tangled history of the area. Afterall Robert Cauldwell celebrated "Dravidian" theory is still a hot subject of debate, polemic and of course the starting point of the identity politics   that still grips the region. Hence any new addition of source material will be welcome.

The Dutch interacted with the Court of the Nayakas using a host of local intermediaries making the embassies sent to Madurai "courtly encounters" in which the Asian and the European engaged with each other using categories of thought and concepts of politics and culture derived from their own historical experience and perspectives. We get the distinct impression that the Dutch were able to see through the charade that passed off as Court or Darbar   under the nayakas. Their agents were well informed about court factions and the shifting sands of dynastic politics Above all they were aware of the hollwness of the political and military pretensions of the nayaks.

This is a valuable compilation of documents that sheds light on one of the more complex areas of historical inquiries and we must thank the author for making these documents available to historians interested in the early history of colonial rule in the area. 

A Cartographic Profile of the Deccan: A review

A Cartographic Profile of the Deccan
by Salma Ahmed Farooqui and A Subash
A K Sherwani Centre for Deccan Studies
Hyderabad: Maulana Azad National Urdu University


The history of map making, cartography and two dimensional representations of space is still in its infancy in India. Except for a few maps made in the Mughal court and the maps of military campaigns made by the Maharata chieftains in the eighteenth century we hardly have any indigenous examples of maps.  The last great medieval empire of South India, the VIjyanagara empire seems to have made absolutely no attempt at either mastering the art of artillery casting or map making and in the changing military scenario of the sixteenth century had little, if any chance of succeeding against a better equipped and disciplined army, the Deccan army of the Sultanates. The book under review is an attempt at bringing together both the printed and the manuscript maps in different repositories around the world which illustrate the Deccan and is a laudable attempt at documenting a neglected aspect of Indian history.

Indian historiography has a long way to go before it can analyze the contribution of Indian traders and explorers to the development of western knowledge about the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.We know that a sailor Majid had provided assistance to Vasco da Gama on his maiden attempt to sail across the Arabian Sea. The nautical tradition behind his venture has not yet been studies. Similarly the sailors of the Cholas who effortlessly sailed from Nagapattinam to Guangzhou have not left traces of their craft behind. It would be well worth our while to investigate the nautical and navigational knowledge behind such sea borne ventures. B Arunachalam began his research which culminated in a monograph published by the Bombay Maritime History Society, but this line of inquiry has not been pursued. In the light of the context outlined above, the book discussed in this essay makes a valuable beginning. Of course Susan Gole published her monumental work in the 1970s and there has been little since. The Atlas of the Mughal Empire and more recently the Atlas of Ancient India are valuable contributions to Historical Geography.

J B Harley in his monumental work History of Cartography which was published in five volumes by the University of Chicago Press has exactly 2 chapters on Indian cartography even though India and Ireland were the earliest countries to be surveyed using the Trigonometrical techniques. Mathew Edney has an extremely interesting book on this. Harley has frequently drawn attention to the political and ideological use of cartographic representations. The maps in this book contain a wealth of details which  reveal the intellectual and cultural presumptions on which the mappe mundi  were constructed. The authors have documented maps belonging to all the important powers which controlled parts of the Indian coastline from the early seventeenth century. By carefully studying the maps illustrated in this book we get a fairly accurate idea of the evolution of Indian geography. The dominant powers controlling the cost are carefully marked and the capital city depiction on the maps. We also get some idea of the fortification walls from the maps, like the example of Ginjee located near Pondicherry.  The coastline of the Deccan received particular attention as the Portuguese were interested in acquiring ports and facilities for their ecclesiastical and trading pursuits.

The book contains nearly   150 maps from different parts of the world. The section on Arabic maps and Chinese maps are particularly interesting. This book makes interesting reading and is a valuable contribution to the thin self of serious books on the history of cartography.

 

Penukonda Fort:History, Art and Culture

Penugonda Fort: A defence (sic) Capital of Vijayanagara Empire, History Art and Culture
R Vasantha
New Delhi: Sharada Publishing House, 2000

Vijayanagara History has emerged as one of the most interesting and intensively researches areas in the history of medieval India. Yet, alarmingly it is still possible  to produce doctoral theses which skirt the intellectual and historiographical issues and reduce the quest for understanding the past to a mere catalogue of inscriptions and in this case of monuments.  It is well known that Penukonda, Chandragiri and Vellore were all associated at different phases of its history with the Vijayanagara Empire. In the book under review one does not get any appreciation of the larger historical context of the Empire and its Architecture. In fact the author has completely ignored the recent works on the art, history and architecture of Vijayanagara. George Michell excellent book on the Architecture of Vijayanagara and its successor states in not even listed in the bibliography. Apart from sloppy research, this lacunae suggest that writing Vijayanagara history has turned into a mere ritual.

The book is divided into four chapters and each of them stands independent of the next making the book appear without any focus or theme.. The author has used the Mackenzie Manuscript as a source but has not said anything about the context in which the documents were collected. There is no discussion about the role of the Nayakas in the revenue system or tax farming system that existed in the dry region of Anantapur. The investment in tank irrigation undertaken by nayakas which was essestial to make this region productive is seen only as traditional charity. The early Company rule associated with Sir Thomas Munro is sketched against the background of the litany of folksy legends that has sprung up in the region. Surprisingly Burton Stein's Thomas Munro: Man and Vision of Empire  is not even mentioned in the discussion on Munro.

The book contains some good photographs and apart from the pictures there is hardly anything reddeming about this mis adventure into Vijayanagara History.

COURTLY ENCOUNTERS; VIJAYANAGAARA, THE PORTUGUESE AND THE SULTANATES

Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Harvard University Press, 2012

The nation state has become the unlamented victim of the linguistic turn in Historiography. The professional concerns of historians have to a substantial extent revolved around the ideological and political needs and demands of the national state and in parts of the "colonized" world, historical writing became the instrument by which societies inscribed themselves as political entities and therefore worthy of "self-rule" or "independence".  Post Independence historiography essentially added in detail to the sketches made during the colonial era and therefore colonial and post colonial historiographies mimic each other in more ways than is apparent to the uninitiated. In the study of the medieval history of Peninsular India in general and of the Vijayanagara Empire in particular the trend nis noticed by most recent historians of whom the late Professor Burton Stein was the most preeminent. The rise of the last imperial polity of Peninsular India is generally regarded as a direct consequence of the establishment of the Islamic-Turkish state in Delhi and its expansion across the Deccan is seen as the sine qua non for Vijayanagara and indeed its reason for existence Added to this is the imposition of the Hindu and Muslim communities as politically charges and self conscious societies to the medieval past, an anachronistic reading as pointed out by several recent historians. Against this background a new reading of Vijayanagara history is always welcome and Professor Sanjay  .Subrahmanyam has discussed the "encounter" between Vijayanagara and the expanding Portuguese empire in India in the book under review.

The present work divided into 3 substantial chapters with an Introduction and Conclusion is based on the Mary Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College in 2009. In the course of the lectures Subrahmanyam analyses the historical events which form the important narrative strands in Vijayanagara history from two quite distinct perspectives. Following the trend of much of post colonial historiography, there is an attempt at problematizing language in an effort to grasp the shape of events and personalities. In most of the histories written on Vijayanagara and its successor states, the pride of place is given to inscriptions which are taken as the very embodiment of empirical reality. Other kinds of materials are usually brought is as supportive documents with the inscriptions forming the mainstay of the documentation.One might agree with Julian Barnes when he says in the Booker winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, "history is  that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation". Sanjay Subrahmanyam gets past this methodological problem by locating the events is a dense description from a variety of written sources of which he uses the Portuguese chronicles and texts with aplomb.

There has been an earlier work which traverses the same terrain: Jean-Pau Rubies', Travel and Ethnology in Renaissance South India. While Rubies is concerned with the mental images and categories of thought through which the late medieval travelers interpreted what   they saw or "encountered" in South India. Subrahmanyam is more concerned about the political and diplomatic language in which the polities of late medieval South India apprehended the changing military and economic equation with the Iberian world. And he is interested in a larger question: Are there similarities to this in other parts of Eurasia particularly Malacca and Ache where the "native"polities /courts encountered a similar situation. The cumulative result of the written and artistic representations of the encounter made possible the circulation of ideas about the "Orient" that subsequently shaped Western polcy and politics toward India and parts of the non-White world.

The book is an interesting addition to the ever increasing number of important studies on Vijayangara and like Zupanov's Missionary Tropics  will find an important place in the historiography of Peninsular India.

VITTHALA AND THE VIJAYANAGARA EMPIRE:FOLK DEITIES AND SOCIETY

The Rise of a Folk God: Vitthal of Pandarpur
Ramachandra Chintaman Dhere
New Delhi: Permanent Black 2012

The spread of the Vijayanagara Empire throughout Peninsular India brought in its wake social changes which are now being investigated by historians. The gradual transformation of forest dwellers and tribal social groups into social formations allied to or integrated within the Hindu conceptual universe remains the most prominent feature of the social landscape of the last precolonial polity/empire of South India. There are transcriptional evidence to demonstrate that in parts of South India when social groups were enumerated in inscriptions an implied hierarchy  was already in place and when we look back at the history of the communities we find that they were rather late entrants into peasant society. One area of research which has opened by in recent years is the study of society and social change as is reflected in songs, ballads, hymns and devotional compositions. The book under review analyses the  cult of Vitthal in its setting in the Warkari tradition of Maharashtra. A recent Ph D thesis entitled The Songs of Purandaradasa in the Social,Historical and Religious Context of the Vijayanagara Empire submitted to Pondicherry University by Divya Sandesh looks at the patronage extended to the cult of Vitthala by the Rayas of Vijayanagara as a strategy to integrate marginal social groups like the Dhangars within the framework of the Vijayanagara state.

The work attempts a reconstruction of the religious tradition and practices surrounding the emergence of Vitthala as Vaishanava deity during the early medieval period. Part of the work was undertaken earlier by the Jesuit priest and scholar Father G A Delury whose Cult of Vithoba still remains one of the most important studies on this theme. Dhere wrote this book in Marathi and it  has been ably translated by Dr Anne Feldhaus. He is at pains to uncover the "identity"of Vitthala about whom even Purandaradasa is said to have remarked in one of his songs: Show me who you really are or I will tell the world the truth about you. It is clear that the identity of Vitthala or Vitthoba was a contested one even during the medieval period. Though he is considered to be form of Vishnu, the fact is that Vitthala like Venkatesvara is not one of the avatars of Vishnu or is he even included in the list of 24 upaavataras. Dhere traces the Vaishnavisation of Vitthala to the Wakari movement, the quintessential pilgrimage and circulation of bhaktas in Maharashtra. This movement seems to have begun in the eleventh century when the Yadavas of Devagiri were the dominant political force in the Deccan region and got absorbed into the larger pan-Indian Bhakthi tradition as a consequence of the  interaction between the Deccan and the Tamil  tradition as ably shown by Dr Divya Sandesh in the thesis already cited.

The author has used a particular kind of religious text known as the Panduranga Mahatmya in order to explore the spiritual and religious aspects of the Vitthala cult. This genre of texts is particularly difficult for historians to accept as source material because of the difficulty we have in arriving at a date for their composition.

 The same difficulty is faced by those historians who use ephemeral sources like abhangs and kirtans of saint composers like Purandaradasa whose compositions were collected and collated only towards the end of the nineteenth century. During the four centuries when songs and hagiography circulated in an oral medium there would have been considerable contamination by the incorporation of later elements and of course certain fundamental changes in the text itself due to the sectarian or political interests of the redactor. However, most historians assume that the texts they are dealing with retain their pristime quality, an assumption which is challenged by the work of Lord and Father Walter Ong. During the Vijayanagara period we find the spread of the cult of Vitthala to parts of Peninsular India where Vitthala was virtually unknown. One argument which has been put forwards by the historian cited earlier Dr Divya Sandesh, is to link the spread of the cult to the political needs and compulsions of the Vijayanagara state itself. She has shown that saint singers like Purandaradasa who traveled extensively in the Empire from Pandarpur in the North to Srirangam in the South created a sacred landscape in which the Vijayangara Empire became more or less coeval with the sacrality of deities like Vitthala and Narasimha whose worship was very popular during the period.

A question which Chintamani Dhere does not ask but is worth asking is: Did Vijayanagara promote the worship of Vitthala at the fabulous temple constructed at Hampi in order to appropriate the sanctity of Pandarpur after it had been conquered by the Adil Shahis Sultanate. This is a historical issue and we cannot fault Dhere for not attempting an answer. All in all this is a serious book and addresses the issue of popular religious cult and practices centering around the worship of theis pastoral deity in a detailed manner.