Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9.20

c9.20

8. *Menhirs* or standing-stones occur in the Deccan and Kerala but are otherwise not common in south India. At Anapāra, near Trichur in Cochin, a granite monolith twelve feet high is thought locally to mark a battlefield, and another at Kuttūr is dreaded by the local people as the haunt of ghosts; but the name *nadu-kal* given to menhirs in the Tamil Shangam literature (poetic anthologies) of the early centuries A.D. indicates a commemorative function, which in a general sense recalls that of some of the standing-stones of north-eastern India (p. 150). At Maski, in the Raichur district of the Deccan ‘a number of roughly aligned menhirs’ occur in close vicinity to burial-circles,⁹⁰ but excavation showed no burials actually beside them. On the other hand, at Devikulam in Travancore a burial-urn containing four pots and an iron axe was found beneath a menhir, and similar discoveries are affirmed elsewhere in that region. A single alignment of menhirs ranging up to 12½ feet high at Komalaparathela in Kerala is the only monument of the kind known to me south of the Hyderabad area; but in that area, particularly in the districts of Raichūr, Gulbarga and Mahbūbnagar, apart from the possible example at Maski, is a large number of serried groups of granite or, rarely, sandstone menhirs from three to twenty-five feet in height and arranged either in parallel lines or as a quincunx.⁹¹ The over-all orientation is roughly to the cardinal points. More than half of these alignments adjoin burial-circles, as at Maski, and the indications are that they and the circles are contemporary; but their function is unknown and guesswork scarcely profitable. They are not similar in lay-out to the alignments of north-eastern India, and are not obviously derived from there.