History south of the Vindhyas

Although my name is suggestive of a hardcore orthodox Tambrahm from the depths of Tamil Nadu, or at the very least Triplicane, the sad truth is that I have been living in north India since I was three months old. Amongst other things, this also means all my education was in the north of the Vindhyas, indeed almost entirely in Delhi.

One consequence of this was a near-complete ignorance of the history of peninsular India. Only the period when the Muslims defeated north Indian kings existed for my contemporaries.

History began when a looter from Ghori came here in 1191. Until Akbar this history was bad, after that it was good till Aurangzeb became boss. The decline started when he died, till the gora sahibs conquered us bit by bit. It became good again.

We weren’t told except in passing maybe that the empires of the south had existed long before the armies of Allah and the traders of Christ descended on India. And those southern dynasties had ruled for far longer than any of these fellows.

I came upon this well-kept secret, or at least the depth and extent of it, of which I knew only vaguely, when a Punjabi friend sent across a book about the south. It is called Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from Chalukyas to Cholas by a young man called Anirudh Kanisetti. He says he is a researcher.

His book isn’t the first one but its flourish and style are certainly a first. Southern dynasties, I learnt from it, were larger and more long lived than any other. One, the Cholas, went on for nearly 1,500 years. The Chalukyas ruled for more than 600.

Mr Kanisetti, who works at the Museum of Art and Photography, writes very nicely. The book reminded me of the six-book Moghul series by the husband-wife duo who wrote under the pseudonym Alex Rutherford. One of them was a student of history, the other of English.

The opening paragraph of Mr Kanisetti’s Introduction is the hook on which any fish will bite. “Every monsoon the rain clouds bathe the cool, dark surfaces of an ancient temple in Ellora. Peals of thunder echo in its cavernous halls, like the bells that once greeted throngs of devotees.”

That was enough. I started reading the book and I was unable to put it down for two days. I would urge you to read it, too.

The main dramatis personae are the elite of south India from about 550 CE to 500 years later. But the non-elite are not missing. All were what are called “madrassis” by north Indians.

The Chalukyas became the rulers of the Deccan for nearly 500 years from about 500 CE. Modern historians tend to dismiss them as being a Karnataka dynasty. But the truth is that all of central and west India paid obeisance and tributes to them.

And then there were the Tamil Cholas. They are mentioned as far back as 250 BCE. But they became proper empire builders only around 1000 CE. And what a huge empire they built.

They also had a maritime thing going and their power and influence extended to mid-East Asia. That story is better known.

It wasn’t just the Chalukyas and the Cholas, of course. Given how long they ruled over such vast territories, family offshoots were inevitable. The book has their stories as well, stories that have been largely ignored by modern India in favour of the Muslim rulers who actually never quite managed to conquer the south and who have been glorified beyond the call of academic duty.

But who were these pre-Muslim people? What religion did they follow and what were they culturally? The received wisdom is that it’s they who helped Hinduism to spread in the Indian peninsula.

But that Hinduism was very different from what was there in the North, in that it was far less monolithic in practice.  The Brahminical version never really caught on amongst the common folk. For the best account of it you should read Susan Bayly’s 1989 book, Saints, Goddesses and Kings.

But it’s not just the south whose history is so badly neglected. The same thing is true of the north-east as well.

As a result, Indians who live in the plains treat people from the north-east and the south quite badly. North-eastern Indians are chinkies, just as everyone south of the Vindhyas is a “kala madrassi”. Historians of the left clearly have a lot to answer for.

Anyway, let me conclude with a sentence from the book that reflects contemporary India since 1947 “…a close alliance of religion and politics; ruthless violence against dissenters and rivals; relentless narcissism and ambition; stark inequality…”.