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A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6: Chapter I. Survey of the Sources

A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6

Language
English

Contents

Chapter I. Survey of the Sources

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1. Scope: Neglect of South Indian history—its interest and general trends—no thesis to maintain or lessons to draw—main approach still necessarily from the North—political and cultural history: their relation.

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2. Sources: Inscriptions: stone, copper—coins—literature: Indian, foreign.

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OUR aim in this book is to present a brief general survey of the ancient history of South India to the middle of the seventeenth century A.D. Then began a new epoch with the downfall of the empire of Vijayanagar, its partition between the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, and the establishment of the English East India Company at several points on the coast of peninsular India. We mean by South India all the land lying south of the Vindhyas—Dakshiṇa (the Deccan) in the widest sense of the term. Our knowledge of the history of this region has been greatly advanced during the last fifty years by many important discoveries, archæological and literary. Much of this new source-material lies embedded in the inaccessible periodical reports of the different branches of the Archæological Survey of India, and of the more important ‘Indian states’, such as Hyderabad, Mysore and Travancore. Scholars, none too many, have addressed themselves to the task of interpreting the data and have written learned monographs mostly confined to particular dynasties, areas, or topics; these are very helpful as far as they go, but by their very nature cannot give a general idea of the main lines of movement in the history of politics and culture. Sir R. G. Bhandarkar’s *Early History of the Dekkan* (1895) is the nearest approach to a general history; but that brilliant work is now outdated and does not deal with the history of the extreme South. P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar’s *History of the Tamils* (1929) deals only with the early history of the extreme South.

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In general histories of India, the part of the country with which we are concerned figures only in a small way. Vincent Smith rightly observed: ‘Hitherto most historians of ancient India have written as if the South did not exist’, and explained this neglect of the South in two ways. ‘The historian of India,’ he said, ‘is bound by the nature of things to direct his attention primarily to the North, and is able to give only a secondary place to the story of the Deccan plateau and the far South.’ Again, ‘the northern record is far less imperfect than that of the peninsula. Very little is known definitely concerning the southern kingdoms before A.D. 600, whereas the history of Hindustan may be carried back twelve centuries earlier. The extreme deficiency of really ancient records concerning the peninsula leaves an immense gap in the history of India which cannot be filled.’ Scanty as our information is on the earliest phase of the history of the South, the situation is not so hopeless as Smith depicts it, and this will become clear as we proceed.

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On any view the history of South India is an integral and not the least interesting part of the history of India. The Deccan is one of the oldest inhabited regions of the world and its prehistoric archæology and contacts with neighbouring lands, so far as they are traceable, constitute an important chapter in the history of the world’s civilizations. All over India the foundations of Indian culture were laid by the fusion of Indo-Aryan and pre-Aryan elements in varying conditions and proportions; and in the languages, literatures and institutions of the South there has survived much more of pre-Aryan India than anywhere else. The Marathas of the western Deccan are the southernmost of the Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples of India, and all the country to the east and south of them speaks languages that fall into a single group, the Dravidian, of which Tamil is the oldest surviving literary idiom. And the earliest strata of Tamil literature take us back at least to the early centuries of the Christian era. A picture of politics and society drawn on the basis of this early literature must be interesting in itself and go some way to help unravel problems of early culture-contacts between Aryan and pre-Aryan. The rise of Hindu kingdoms in the eastern lands across the Bay of Bengal is but an expansion and continuation of the process by which South India and Ceylon were colonized and aryanized; and beyond doubt the Deccan and the far South formed the advanced bases from which this transmarine movement started in the early centuries before and after the Christian era: in Indonesia and Indo-China emigrants from India met the same problems as in India south of the Vindhyas and solved them in more or less the same manner. A detailed study of the many interesting analogies between the results of these early culture-contacts in these different lands has not yet been attempted and lies beyond the scope of this book; but we should do well to remember that the history of India has been too long studied more or less exclusively in isolation and from the continental point of view, little regard being paid to the maritime side of the story. The Sātavāhanas were described as ‘lords of the three oceans’ and promoted overseas colonization and trade. Under them Buddhist art attained the superb forms of beauty and elegance preserved to this day in the cave-temples of western India and the survivals from the stupas of Amarāvatī, Goli, Nāgārjunikonda and other places in the Krishna valley; and the tradition was continued long after the Sātavāhanas by their successors both in the eastern and western Deccan. The latter half of Sātavāhana rule in the Deccan coincides with the age of the literature of the Sangam in Tamil and of active trade between India and the Roman empire in the west, and there is good reason to believe that the plastic arts of the Deccan in this period and the succeeding one owed something to Græco-Roman models and artists.

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After the close of the Sangam epoch, from about A.D. 300 to A.D. 600, there is an almost total lack of information regarding occurrences in the Tamil land. Some time about A.D. 300 or a little later the whole country was upset by the predatory activities of the Kalabhras who are described as evil rulers who overthrew numberless chieftains (adhirājar) of the land and got a stranglehold on the country. With the overthrow of the Kalabhras opens the new era of Pāndya-Pallava achievements from the close of the sixth century A.D. This obscure period of Tamil history was marked in the Deccan proper by the rise into prominence of several dynasties of kings who divided among themselves the heritage of the Sātavāhana empire, kept up its administrative and political system, and carried forward its artistic and cultural traditions. The Ābhiras and Traikūṭakas in the north-west, the Vākāṭakas in Berar, the Ikshvākus, Sālankāyanas and Vishnukundins in the eastern Deccan, and the Chutas, Kadambas, Gangas and Pallavas in the south Deccan are the most notable among these dynasties. Buddhism and Jainism made considerable progress in this period, the former inspiring the art of Ajantā, the Andhra country, and Sigiriya in Ceylon, the latter finding widespread acceptance among the kings of the western Deccan and the Tamil country and possibly also among considerable sections of their subjects. To this period also belong the earliest extant inscriptions from Burma, Malaya, Java, Borneo and Indo-China that furnish unmistakable evidence of the important part played by the Deccan and South India in the colonization and aryanization of these lands.

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The next period (c. A.D. 600-950) is one of relatively large states each with a notable record of its own in war and peace. In the Deccan at first the Chālukyas of Bādāmi rise and spread their power over the entire country between the two seas, though the Telugu country along the east coast and the province of Lāṭa in the north-west develop into virtually independent kingdoms under collateral branches of the royal line. The Chālukyas hold their own against Harshavardhana and confine his empire to the north of the Vindhyas; they wage successful war against other neighbours in the North, and the Pallavas in the South, and the many fine stone temples, rock-cut and structural, found at Aihole, Bādāmi and Pattadakal attest their devotion to religion and architecture; doubtless some of the additions to the caves and paintings at Ajanta must also be ascribed to this period. By the middle of the eighth century, the power of the Chālukyas declines, and from among their numerous feudatories the Rāṣṭrakūṭas rise into eminence and establish a new empire with Mānyakheta (Malkhed) as its centre. In administration, and in its relations with its neighbours in the north and south, this empire generally continues the tradition of the Chālukyas of Bādāmi, except for the fact that it keeps up an almost perpetual feud with the Chālukyas of Vengi, the rulers of the eastern Deccan. The splendid rock-cut temple of Kailāsa at Ellora is perhaps the most remarkable monument of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas.

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In the South the Pallavas and the Pāṇdyas share the country, and the frontier between their territories is shifting about the line of the Kaveri as a result of repeated warfare; the Pallavas in particular have a strenuous time as they have to fight all the while on two fronts. The name of the Cholas, who were so prominent in the Saṅgam Age and were again to raise in the succeeding epoch one of the most splendid empires known to history, almost disappears from the political map of the Tamil country; and it is not known what relation, if any, the Telugu-Chodas of the Renādu country in the Ceded Districts, one of the minor dynasties of this epoch, bore to their namesakes of the Tamil land, though they claimed descent from Karikāla, the most celebrated of the early Chola monarchs of the Śangam Age. The Pāndya-Pallava period was marked by striking developments in religion, literature and art. Sanskrit held an honoured place as the language of higher literature and culture, and the Ganga monarch Durvinita had claims to authorship both in Sanskrit and in Kannada. The Pallava king, Mahendravarman I, aptly styled vicitra-citta—‘wonderful-mind’—was author, architect, musician and painter. In his time there arose a strong reaction against the growing influence of Jainism and Buddhism, which found expression in a widespread bhakti movement among the worshippers of Śiva and Vishnu; the leaders of this movement were known as Nāyanārs and Ālvārs, and their exuberant devotional songs, gathered later in the collections known as the Dēvāram and the Divyaprabandham, celebrate every orthodox shrine they visited many times over in the course of their propagandist peregrinations, and constitute the most priceless treasure in all Tamil literature. The great Kumārila and the still greater Śankara also lived and taught in the same age, the former restating the principles of Vedic exegesis and upholding the religion of sacrifice, the latter expounding the fundamentals of monistic vedānta with unsurpassed power and brilliance. The temples and sculptures of the period register the highest perfection of form that their arts attained in the South. Māmallapuram (Mahābalipuram) and Kānchipuram (Conjeevaram) are the best museums of this art even now.

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The rise of the imperial Cholas of the line of Vijayālaya may be dated from the middle of the ninth century A.D. As they emerged from their obscurity, they soon displaced the remnants of Pallava power to the north of their capital Tanjore, and subdued the Pāndya and Chera countries in the south and invaded Ceylon. The hostility of the Rāshtrakūtas, particularly of Krishna III, threatened to wreck the Chola empire at its birth (c. 950), but the Karnātaka power was operating too far from its base to achieve permanent results; and Krishna's wars, while putting a temporary check on the rising imperialism of the Cholas, spelled disaster to his own empire which was easily overthrown under his successors by the Chālukya Taila II. The Chola power recovered soon after the withdrawal of Krishna's arms, and swept on to its meridian in the first part of the eleventh century under Rājarāja I and his even greater son Rājendra I. At a time when Northern India was divided into a number of weak and warring states, some of which began to stagger under repeated Islamic inroads, these two great monarchs gave political unity to the whole of Southern India for the first time and established it as a respected sea-power controlling the highways of the Indian Ocean and effectively regulating the affairs of the empire of Śri Vijaya by invasion and diplomacy. They perfected a highly organized administrative system of central control and fostered the autonomy of village assemblies as none had done before; the father constructed the Great Temple of Tanjore, the purest and most magnificent gem of South Indian architecture; and the son created its replica in the wilds of the Trichinopoly district and called up a new city to surround it. The name of the city, Gangaikondaśōḷapuram—'the town of the Chola who took the Ganges'—was an advertisement of the new power of South India to the rest of the country. This was the silver age of the religious revival which had begun under the Pallavas; a fresh commentary on the Rig-Veda was composed by Venkaṭa Mādhava who lived in a village on the banks of the Kaveri in the reign of Parāntaka I; the Tamil hymns, Śaiva and Vaishṇava, of the last epoch, were gathered together and grouped into canonical books, a form which they have retained to this day; the glorious conception of the form of the Dancing Lord Naṭarāja found embodiment in many monumental bronze images which, alike for the technical skill they imply and the artistic perfection they exhibit, have few rivals in the history of the world's art.

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The Chālukyas of Kalyāṇi who built up their power on the ruins of the Rāshṭrakūṭa empire were the contemporaries and opponents of the Cholas during the eleventh and twelfth centuries A.D. The frontier between their kingdoms fluctuated about the line of the Tungabhadra as the result of many wars, some of which were fought with unusual bitterness. The Eastern Chālukya kingdom of Vengi was the bone of contention throughout; its rulers were allied to the Kalyāṇi Chālukyas by descent; but they were also beholden to the Cholas who had restored them to their throne whence they had been driven into exile as the result of a civil war (at the end of the tenth century), and several dynastic alliances followed and brought the lines closer together until, in A.D. 1070, when succession failed in the Chola male line, the ruler of Vengi himself succeeded to the Chola throne. This was Kulottunga I.

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His great Chālukya opponent was Vikramāditya VI. Their rivalry filled the annals of South India for about half a century and made for the weakening of their respective empires under their less competent successors. The Hoysalas of Dvā(ō)rasamudra, the Yādavas of Devagiri and the Kākatīyas of Wārangal, all feudatory powers nurtured on the breast of the Chālukyan empire of Kalyāṇi, come up in the latter half of the twelfth century and partition among themselves the territories of the parent empire. Ruling territory contiguous to the Chola empire, the Hoysalas not only aggrandize themselves partly at its expense, but intercede with effect in the politics of the far South; they protect the Chola monarchs from the aggressions of their overgrown vassals. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the Pāndya line begins to throw up a succession of able and powerful monarchs, and the northern half of the Chola empire is dominated by the ambition and turbulence of Kōp-perunjinga, a chieftain who claimed descent from the Pallavas. The help of the Hoysalas secures a brief respite for the Chola kingdom, but the inevitable end soon overtakes it and by the middle of the century the whole of the Tamil country and the east coast right up to Nellore passes under the Pāndyas. Hoysala efforts to check the growth of Pāndyan power were not attended by any conspicuous success, nor did the Telugu-Chodas fare better in the enterprise.

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Sanskrit learning and literature found patronage everywhere, while the study and cultivation of the languages of the people received encouragement each in its own place—Kannada under the Chālukyas and Hoysalas; Telugu under the eastern Chālukyas, Kākatīyas and Telugu-Chodas; and Tamil under the Cholas and Pandyas. The Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata were rendered into all these languages by celebrated poets, and a large volume of devotional and polemical literature in religion began to grow. The practice of entertaining a poet-laureate at each important court came into vogue and gave birth to many secular literary works of a quasi-historical nature. Political and juristic thinking made considerable progress and expressed itself in the form of commentaries on old law books like that of Yājñavalkya or in independent treatises on polity. In religious philosophy Rāmānuja systematized the doctrines of Viśiṣṭa-Advaita and sought to reconcile the Upanishadic doctrine of the Absolute with the theistic predilections of the great Vaishnava Āḷvārs and Āchāryas who had preceded him. Close to Rāmānuja's system, but still differing from it in some important respects, was that of Nimbārka in whose theology Krishna and Rādhā take the place of Nārāyaṇa and Lakshmi, and claim the exclusive devotion of their followers. The construction of large stone temples was undertaken everywhere in the land by all the dynasties, and architecture, sculpture and allied arts found extensive patronage and achieved new forms of beauty and splendour. In many ways the age of the Cholas and Chālukyas (900-1200) was the grandest epoch in the history of South India.

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The thirteenth century was the age of the four Hindu kingdoms which inherited the territories and traditions of the two large empires that had preceded them. The Pāṇdyas and Hoysalas in the south, and the Yādavas and Kākatiyas in the north are the chief powers, and as usual a number of local feudatory dynasties flourished under the suzerainty of each. This state-system experienced a shock from outside at the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth. The Khilji sultans of Delhi after consolidating their power in North India began to cast their covetous eyes on the South; and the Khiljis were followed by the Tughlaks. At first the motive was only plunder and spoil; but soon the spread of Islam and territorial conquest became the objectives. Considerable parts of the country passed under the nominal sway of Delhi; and Madura, at first the seat of a Muslim governor from Delhi, grew by the rebellion of the governor into an independent sultanate. Colonies of Muslim soldiers and generals found lodgement in several parts of the country and began to control the administration of the land; temples were plundered and demolished, and mosques came to be erected. Hindu society faced a new peril; but the crisis was of relatively short duration; the distance from Delhi, the inherent weakness of a far-flung military imperialism, and the spirit of resistance in the people saved the Hindu faith in the South. Out of the numerous revolts that disrupted the empire of Muhammad bin Tughlak there arose two kingdoms in the Deccan, with centres in Vijayanagar and Gulbarga, in the first half of the fourteenth century.

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The Bāhmani kingdom of Gulbarga was a Muslim state which spread its sway from sea to sea in the northern Deccan, and was no less opposed to its Muslim neighbours in the north than to the Hindu empire to its south. The annals of the Bāhmani kings make no pleasant reading; fourteen sultans occupied the throne between 1347 and 1518; of these, four were murdered, two others were deposed and blinded, and all were cruel and bloodthirsty fanatics addicted to drink and debauchery. ‘It would be difficult,’ says a modern historian, ‘to specify any definite benefit conferred upon India by the dynasty.’ This harsh, but not altogether unjust, judgement may be mitigated by the recollection of the patronage extended by the rulers to authors and architects from Persia, and of their particular regard on some occasions, as in time of famine, for the well-being of their Muslim subjects. In the sixteenth century the Bāhmani kingdom split up into five separate sultanates which kept up the feud with Vijayanagar though they quarrelled not less among themselves. Bijapur and Golconda were the most prominent among them; all were absorbed in the Mogul empire at different dates in the seventeenth century.

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Starting on its career a decade earlier than the Bāhmani kingdom, that of Vijayanagar became the focus of resurgent Hindu culture which offered a more successful resistance to Islam in this part of the country than anywhere else. But it was a long military vigil; the polity had to be organized on a warlike footing, and there was no room for weak or incompetent monarchs on the throne; whenever the hereditary claimants were found wanting, they were displaced by the ablest among their lieutenants. The empire is best looked upon as a military confederacy of many chieftains co-operating under the leadership of the biggest among them. Even so, the exigencies of the struggle compelled the rulers of Vijayanagar to resort to the employment of foreigners and even Muslims in the artillery and cavalry sections of their armies to make them adequate for the defence of their country and religion. This course had its obvious disadvantages. The fact, however, remains that Vijayanagar kept up the fight, with not inconspicuous success, for the best part of three centuries before it succumbed to the forces it had struggled against so long; but, by then, other and in the long run more decisive factors had put in their appearance in the form of European trading companies, and a new epoch begins. The Portuguese indeed had built up their short-lived and predatory maritime empire much earlier—from the first half of the sixteenth century; but their activities never counted as a serious menace to the Hindu empire with which they took care to be on friendly terms though they quarrelled often enough with its feudatories on the coast, especially in the west. Their attempts to plunder rich Hindu temples, and the conversions to Christianity procured by the Jesuits and other orders of monks in the ‘pearl fishery coast’ and elsewhere, constituted a threat to Hinduism from another side; but it was soon controlled and checked by the monarchs of Vijayanagar and their agents.

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The task of Vijayanagar was thus to conserve Hindu society and save it from the dissolution which threatened it from several directions. Little wonder therefore that during this period the outlook of the Hindus of the South developed new standards of a narrow and rigid orthodoxy in social and religious matters which persist to this day in great force and render a widespread reform at once necessary and difficult. Literature and the arts subserved this rising tide of orthodox feeling and strengthened it in every way. The work of Sāyaṇa, Mādhava and others, resulting in the great commentaries on the Vedas and on the Smriti of Parāśara and in a new codification of the philosophical systems in the Sarvadarśana-sangraha (‘Digest of all systems of philosophy’), may be said to have laid the foundations of this development. The erection of new maṇḍapas, pavilions and colonnades, as well as gōpuras, in all the important shrines of the country, and the innumerable gifts to temples and learned men for the promotion of religious worship, education and learning that are found recorded in stone inscriptions all over the country attest the large material support given to the movement by the monarchs and the nobles of the court. Painting, music, drama, indeed all fine arts, gathered round the court and the temple and found liberal support from both. In one important respect, however, there was a setback. In the villages the people seem to have lost a good deal of their initiative and come to depend more and more on the tender mercies of petty officials appointed and controlled by the central government or its representatives. The admirable system of autonomous village rule that had been established under the Cholas, and that survived intact for several generations after them, now fell into neglect and all but disappeared in this period, thanks to the pressure of military needs on the emperors and the feudatory nāyakas. The militarization of the empire proved disastrous to some of its most valued civil institutions.

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In narrating briefly the history of the political and cultural movements in ancient South India in the following pages, the present writer has no thesis to maintain, and any lessons that the story may suggest he is well content to let the reader draw for himself. His endeavour will be to present as simply and clearly as possible a connected narrative of ascertained facts with the minimum of comment necessary to make the story intelligible. Attention will be confined to facts, persons and tendencies of outstanding importance—minor details being everywhere eschewed in order not to distract the attention of the reader by an array of names and details that often serve only to obscure the main trends.

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The study of the subject is still in its initial stages and there is scope for widely different views and interpretations at almost every stage of the story. The plan of this book does not allow of elaborate discussions of rival authorities or citations from them, and to this reason and to no other must be ascribed the apparently summary and even dogmatic treatment of controversial topics. Care has always been taken, however, to choose the most reasonable reconstructions for presentation; but it is too much to expect that all of them will satisfy every reader. Several of the conclusions set forth will be found argued at some length in the works to which reference is made at the end of each chapter.

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‘Attention has been concentrated too long on the North, on Sanskrit books, and on Indo-Aryan notions,’ said Vincent Smith. ‘It is time,’ he added, ‘that due regard should be paid to the non-Aryan element.' And, before Smith, an Indian scholar, Professor Sundaram Pillai, had remarked: 'The scientific historian of India ought to begin his study with the basin of the Krishna, of the Kaveri, of the Vaigai, rather than with the Gangetic plain, as has been now long, too long, the fashion.'

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But this cannot yet be done, and it is doubtful if it will ever be possible to undertake such a revolutionary, though undoubtedly logical, treatment of the subject. This is due to no reluctance on the part of historians to recognize the influence of pre-Aryan elements on the formation and growth of Indian culture, but to a very real difficulty which was recognized by Professor Sundaram Pillai himself. For after affirming that India south of the Vindhyas was India proper, where the bulk of the people still continue distinctly to retain their pre-Aryan features, their pre-Aryan languages and their pre-Aryan social institutions, he took care to add: 'Even here, the process of aryanization has gone indeed too far to leave it easy for the historian to distinguish the native warp from the foreign woof. But if there is anywhere any chance of such successful disentanglement, it is in the South; and the farther south we go the larger does the chance grow.' The difficulty of distinguishing the Aryan from pre-Aryan elements in Indian culture has continued to baffle the skill of modern scholarship to this day, and forced attempts to discover 'Dravidian' elements has sometimes led to curious results like the attempt to derive the name Hanumān from āṇ maṇḍi—an impossible contradiction in terms unknown to Tamil—or to connect the Sanskrit word pūjā (worship) with the Tamil words pū (flower) and śey (do), on the one hand, or pūśu (smear, with unguents or the blood of sacrificed animals), on the other. The Indus valley excavations have raised more problems than they have solved, and until the writing on the numerous seals has been satisfactorily deciphered, it will not be easy to decide the relation of this culture to that of the Indo-Aryans or of the 'Dravidians' so called. Some attempt will be made in the third chapter to give a brief tentative account of the earliest inhabitants of the land and of their culture, as far as the evidence of prehistoric archæology and of probable survivals in later times at present enables us to do so; but it must be recognized clearly that the systematic study of the prehistory of South India has just begun, and that our main approach to the historical growth of South Indian culture must for the present still continue to be made from the North.

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The complaint is often heard that history generally, and that of India in particular, tends to be a chronicle of dynasties of kings and the endless wars they waged, and devotes little attention to the common people and the cultural movements that influenced their daily life in a profound manner. The fact is that in recent times the conception of history has become much wider than it used to be, and changes in polity and administration, the development of social and economic institutions, and developments in the spheres of religion and art claim the attention of the historian much more today than ever before. But chronology is the skeleton of history, and for the most part the establishment of a dependable chronology necessarily rests on an adequate study of political history; and when large sections of that history are still in the process of being studied and there remains scope for differences of opinion on a number of unsettled questions, the historian is obliged to devote rather more attention to the political side if he is to make his narrative intelligible. Further, the kings and chieftains who so much attract our attention were often splendid promoters of culture and the arts besides being the upholders of society and the protectors of the people. Their history, if pursued on a proper scale and with a full knowledge of the sources, will often be seen to verge on that true history of the life of the people which the critics of dry-as-dust history pine for.

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The ancient history of South India is still a relatively new subject of study, and the workers in the field are few; there is no dearth of source material, but the progress in its elucidation and interpretation has not been as great as one would wish. In this book we must pass by all unsettled questions and confine ourselves to the more or less established facts; but even the general outlines of South Indian history are so little known that they deserve to be set forth at some length before we proceed to sketch the main lines of cultural movements in the land.

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Inscriptions are the most copious and authentic source of Indian history, particularly of South Indian history. The earliest are in the Brāhmī script and constitute the southern versions of the Aśokan edicts found in Siddāpura, Jaṭinga-Rāmeśvara, and Brahmagiri in Mysore state, Maski in Raichur district, and Yerraguḍi and Rajula-Mandagiri in Kurnool district. They show the extent of the Mauryan empire in the South, but their contents belong to the general history of India and have little particular bearing on conditions in the South. Not so the short inscriptions found in natural caves in the Tamil districts which seem to record the names of the carvers of the rock-cut beds they contain or of their occupants; though their script is Aśokan Brāhmi with modifications, the language employed in them seems to be the most ancient form of Tamil so far known to epigraphy. These records number only twenty or thirty in all, though many more of a similar nature are found in the island of Ceylon. These brief records which still continue to be enigmatic in some measure are evidence of the spread of ascetic orders, probably Jain but also Buddhist, in the early centuries before the beginning of the Christian era. To the same epoch belong the inscribed relic casket from Bhaṭṭiprolu in the Krishna valley, an early witness to the stronghold of Buddhism in that region, and the early inscriptions of the Sātavāhana dynasty found engraved on the walls and pillars of the exquisite cave temples at Kanheri, Karle, Nasik and other places in the western Deccan. The language of these records is generally a local variety of Prākrit which is the generic name for all popular tongues with Sanskritic affiliations; the script is Brāhmi with variations due to locality and time; all are engraved on stone.

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In addition to stone inscriptions, copper-plate grants come into vogue under the successors of the Sātavāhanas, and some dynasties among them like the Brihatphalāyanas are known only by a single copper plate. Prākrit continues to be the language of the inscriptions till about the fourth century A.D., and then Sanskrit comes to be preferred as the sole language of official documents by the Kadambas, Gangas and Pallavas for a period of two or three centuries. Later inscriptions become bilingual, employing Sanskrit generally at the beginning and the end, and the local speech of the people—Kannada, Telugu or Tamil—in the body of the document, particularly when describing in detail the gifts made and the boundaries of land given to temples, learned men, and so on. From about the tenth century A.D. inscriptions composed altogether in the popular speech become very common, though Sanskrit continues to be employed wholly or in part in other records and holds an honoured place everywhere as the best medium of cultural intercourse. The script undergoes many changes and evolves, in the Deccan, into the ancestor of the modern Telugu and Kannada scripts while farther south its evolution first assumes the early form of Grantha known from the Pallava inscriptions of the seventh and eighth centuries, and then undergoes modifications under the influence of the Tamil alphabet in its two forms—Tamil properly so called and Vaṭṭeḻuttu or round hand. The origin of these two scripts is by no means definitely settled yet. It may be noted, however, that Bühler held it probable that the Tamil alphabet was derived from a northern alphabet of the fourth or fifth century which in course of time was strongly influenced by the Grantha used in the Tamil districts for writing Sanskrit. He also pointed out that ‘the Vaṭṭeḻuttu may be described as a cursive script, which bears the same relation to the Tamil as the modern northern alphabets of the clerks and merchants to their originals, e.g. the Moḍi of the Marathas to the Bālbodh and the Ṭākari of the Dogras to the Śārada’. The Vaṭṭeḻuttu went out of use in the Tamil country about the tenth century A.D. though it continued in use till much later on the west coast.

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The early Pallava-Grantha script in the stage when it is yet little differentiated from the ancestor of Telugu-Kannada was carried by Hindu colonists across the seas to west Java, Borneo and Indo-China, the earliest stone inscriptions in this script from these places dating from about A.D. 300. The language of these early colonial inscriptions is Sanskrit.

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Stone inscriptions begin to increase in number steadily from the sixth century onwards, but copper-plate records continue to be the mainstay of the historian for some centuries more, and at no time can they be left out of the reckoning. The history of the early Pāṇḍyas from the seventh to the tenth century A.D. rests altogether on two long copper-plate records which are both bilingual and employ the Grantha script for the Sanskrit and the Vaṭṭeḻuttu for the Tamil parts; so also the history of the contemporary Pallava line of Simhavishnu is derived more from copper plates than from stone inscriptions.

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Almost the whole Eastern Chālukyan history, and much of that of the Chālukyas of Bādāmi are also based on copper-plate charters. Some of the Chola charters on copper plates attained enormous length, being engraved on a large number of good-sized, well-turned-out plates strung together on huge rings with a big circular seal soldered on them; the most conspicuous examples are the Leyden grant of Rājarāja (21st year)—so called because it happened to fall into the hands of the Dutch and pass into the custody of the Leyden museum—the Tiruvālangādu and the Karandai plates of Rājendra I, and the Chārāla plates of Virarājendra (7th year), the long Sanskrit praśasti of which is a copy of the Kanyākumāri stone inscription of the same monarch. The copper plates of the Vijayanagar rulers often employ a variety of the Nāgari script, known as Nandi Nāgari, for Sanskrit. Sometimes, but very rarely and only in recent centuries, the charters were inscribed on more precious material than copper; a charter granted by Vijayarāghava Nāyaka of Tanjore to the Dutch in 1658, and another to the same power by Ekoji in 1676, the former in Telugu and the latter in Tamil, are both engraved on silver plates now in the Batavia (Jakarta) museum. But copper is the metal prescribed in the law books and the most powerful rulers of the land did not employ any other metal.

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Copper plates, however, are apt to be fabricated either to establish titles to property or from other motives. Such spurious records betray themselves in one way or other, and the expert epigraphist generally experiences little difficulty in separating the genuine from the false. An exceptionally large number of spurious copper plates have brought confusion and obscurity into the early history of the Gangas of the Mysore country.

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While copper-plate inscriptions number all together only a few hundreds, stone inscriptions amount to several tens of thousands. Most of them are records of small gifts of lamps, sheep, land, and so on, to temples, and are of little historical value. Records of larger gifts, especially when they are made by the ruling monarchs, are sometimes of exceptional interest as they record details of taxes remitted in favour of donees and privileges conferred on them, and furnish other details of administrative organization and policy. The Tamil inscriptions of Chola Rājarāja I on the walls of the Tanjore temple deserve special mention for the technical perfection of their engraving and the complete and detailed picture they give of the entire economy of the Great Temple—a creation of Rājarāja calculated to symbolize all the glory and grandeur of the empire he had built up. Quite a number of other fairly long inscriptions give interesting information on the constitution and functions of village assemblies, the part played by craft and trade guilds in the economic and artistic life of the country, the courses of study and the numbers of pupils and teachers in important educational centres, and so on. The Tirumukkūdal inscription of Virarājendra is unique in the list it furnishes of the stock of medicines maintained in a hospital in the locality; and the Motupalli inscription of Kākatīya Ganapati is one of the very few records which give some idea of the conditions of maritime trade.

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Almost every inscription on stone or copper, unless it is the very brief record of a mere name or small gift, is seen to follow a definite order. The opening is generally an invocation, either a brief formula in prose, a verse or sometimes a number of verses invoking either one deity or several deities one after another. Then follows a preamble, the *prasasti*, in which the names and achievements of the ruler and his ancestors are narrated, sometimes in a set form which is common to several records of the reign; it is this part which is generally most valuable to the student of political history. After this comes a description of the actual donor, if he happens to be other than the king, together with details of his achievements and those of his ancestors, with a similar but generally briefer description of the donee and his ancestry where he is an individual. If the gift is made to a group or an institution, that is described in some detail. Next there is a description of the object given—money, cattle, taxes, and so on; often it is land, and then the boundaries of the land are carefully specified. Then comes the formula of gift which usually says that it is given with water poured out from the hand of the donor into that of the donee for his perpetual and undisturbed enjoyment. The record concludes with an imprecation on anyone who may terminate the charity or otherwise disturb it, and praise of those who will maintain and protect it in the future. This analysis of the different parts of a typical inscription indicates roughly their relative value to the historian.

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Some of the longer inscriptions are dedicatory and commemorative and often contain valuable *praśastis* of long lines of rulers; the Aihole inscription of the reign of Pulakeśin II and the Tālagunda pillar inscription of the Kadambas are the most conspicuous examples of this class. But few are so purely historical in their contents as the Tiruvendipuram inscription of the reign of Chola Rājarāja III which gives an unvarnished account of the troubles of this ruler and of the manner in which he got relief from the intervention of the Hoysalas. Two other inscriptions deserve particular mention. One is the fairly long Kuḍumiyāmalai inscription from Puḍukōṭṭai region, beautifully engraved in the ornate Pallava Grantha of the seventh or eighth century on a wide rock face and containing groups of musical notes arranged for the benefit of his pupils by a king, who was a *māheśvara* (worshipper of Śiva) and a pupil of a certain Rudrāchārya. The other inscription comes from Tiruviḍaivāyil in the Tanjore district and contains an entire hymn, otherwise unknown, composed by Ñānasambandar to the local deity and bearing all the marks of a genuine composition of the great saint.

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All the early inscriptions are dated in the regnal years of kings, and often there is no guide to absolute chronology except the palæography of the inscriptions; synchronisms are rare, but very decisive where they clearly occur. The first mention of the Śaka era by name is found in the Bādāmi rock inscription of Pulakeśin I, dated Śaka 465 (A.D. 543), recording the fortification of the hill of Vātāpi by that monarch; the existence of this record was brought to light only in 1941. Later inscriptions, whether they bear Śaka dates or not, often contain astronomical details which do not always work out satisfactorily; in some cases, there is no way of reconciling all the data given in the inscriptions, and our choice must depend on the probabilities and remain to some extent arbitrary. One inscription in the reign of the Chola Parāntaka I from South Arcot is dated by counting the number of days that had elapsed since the commencement of the Kaliyuga and the date arrived at supplies satisfactory verification of the other details recorded. In giving the regnal years of kings, the Pāṇḍyan inscriptions often mention one year opposite another; the exact significance of this has not been understood, and epigraphists are agreed in adding up the figures and treating the total as the year of the reign when the inscription was issued.

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Inscriptions can by no means be said always to speak the truth, much less the whole truth: legends and exaggeration are often found, and easily recognized as such; more difficult is the task of detecting the truth behind partisan statements made by the composers of records of different dynasties engaged in constant warfare. The instances are not few in which both parties claim victory in a war, and there is often some kind of justification for the claim. And much work still remains to be done in the study and interpretation of the social and economic information contained in the inscriptions—work that has been delayed mainly by the slackness of the Epigraphical Department in publishing the texts.

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Closely allied to the evidence of inscriptions on stone and copper is that of the shorter legends on coins. But the coinage of South India ‘presents greater difficulties to the student and offers less reward for his labours than that of the North’. Really ancient coins are rare and contain no dates and few intelligible legends, often only the ruler's name or title; also, the devices upon them are often crude and indistinct. The rectangular pieces of impure silver bearing several punch-marks, the purāṇas (eldlings) of the law books, were common to both Northern and Southern India and certainly belong to the centuries before Christ; copper punch-marked coins were also known, and this type of coinage may be taken to have gone out of circulation about A.D. 200. In later times the principal coinage of the South was struck in gold, not silver; copper was used for smaller denominations. Of gold coins there were generally two denominations: the varāha—perhaps deriving its name from the Chālukya crest of a boar; also called pon, hun, pagoda (from bhagayati?) and pardaos (Portuguese)—usually weighing a kalañju (Molucca bean), or 50 to 60 grains; and the fanam, being a tenth of the varāha, its weight, 5 to 6 grains, conforming to the mañjāḍi. The earliest gold coins are spherules of plain gold bearing a minute punch-mark; a little later came the padma-ṭankas which were thin cup-shaped pieces stamped with punches, at first on one side only and then on both; the gold coins of Rājēndra I and Rājādhirāja I Chola, and of Rājarāja I E. Chālukya, discovered at Dowleśvaram in 1946, are marked and inscribed on one side only; and finally came the die-struck pieces of which the thick, small Vijayanagar pagodas are the best surviving specimens. There was a general preference for small coins and the silver tāres of Calicut, only one or two grains in weight, furnish some of the smallest specimens of coins known.

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During the early centuries of the Christian era Roman imperial coins of gold and silver were imported in considerable quantity in the course of trade and circulated freely in the country; the small copper coins bearing Roman devices and legends might have been locally produced by foreign settlers. The Sātavāhanas used lead for many of their issues, and their coins bear legends of the names of kings which confirm the Purāṇic lists of these names. One of the most interesting types of these coins is that bearing a two-masted ship on the obverse, an indication of the maritime power and activity of the Andhras; the same design is found on some copper coins of about the same date or a little later from farther south.

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The earliest padma-ṭankas were perhaps struck by the Kadambas; but one of the coins that can be most satisfactorily dated is a base silver piece with a lion device and the title Vishamasiddhi on the obverse which clearly belongs to Vishnu-vardhana (615-33), the founder of the long line of Eastern Chālukya rulers. The practice of punch-marking on the gold coinage lingered long after its disuse on silver and copper, and a large hoard of coins struck by the Telugu-Chodas of Nellore in the thirteenth century, found in 1913 at Kodur, shows that the padma-ṭanka type had a long history and wide ramifications. Nāgari legends, generally incomplete, appear on Kākatīya coins and continue in those of Vijayanagar; they are also found on the coins of some other dynasties like the Kadambas of Goa and the Cholas. The legends on coins of other dynasties are in Kannada, Telugu or Tamil according to the locality in which they were struck.

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Conquests are often indicated by designs on coins; thus the Chola coins portray a tiger seated under a canopy in the centre of the field, with the Pāndya fish on one side and the Chera bow at the bottom, the latter symbols being smaller and less prominent than the tiger.

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The pagodas of many Vijayanagar kings are known; they are small and dumpy, and were issued also in their half and quarter divisions. Their legends were at first either in Kannada or Nāgari, while later kings used Nāgari exclusively.

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The coinage of the short-lived sultanate of Madura, usually in billon and copper, follows the contemporary Delhi models and is hardly distinguishable from Delhi issues except by its southern type of calligraphy. The gold and silver coins of the Bāhmani sultans also followed the Delhi patterns on a more generous scale. In those of earlier reigns there is some variety in arrangement and design, but later a single design was adopted for both metals. The earliest copper closely followed that of Delhi, but innovations soon appeared, and the copper standard underwent many and frequent changes. The five sultanates that succeeded the Bāhmani kingdom had their own separate issues, though not so well turned out.

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Literary evidence is the next important source of knowledge. It is both indigenous and foreign. In all Indian literature there are few professedly historical works. There are indeed some temple chronicles like the *Maduraittala-varalāru*, and the *Śrīrangam-kōyil-oḷugu*. While furnishing valuable hints on comparatively recent times, say from 1200 onward, they are nothing more than a farrago of legends for the earlier times and contain too many inaccuracies and distortions to be used by themselves without the testimony of other more trustworthy sources. The semi-historical works that were produced at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the orders of Col. Colin Mackenzie do not concern us as they deal with recent events outside the scope of this book. The *Kongu-deśa-rājākkaḷ caritram* and the *Kēralōt-patti* in its various recensions have often been overrated and are in fact of very little value; so too are the numberless *sthala-purāṇas*, mostly recent redactions of popular legends. Ballads like the *Rāmappayyan-ammānai* are in a somewhat better class, but no early specimens of such popular quasi-historical material have survived.

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While the direct contribution to history from literary sources is thus seen to be of little importance, the indirect value to the historian of a study of the literatures of the country can hardly be overrated. Not only do they enable him to picture the social and religious milieu in which the characters of history lived and moved and acted, but the prologues, epilogues and colophons of different works often embody valuable data on the lineage and achievements of the authors of the works and their royal patrons, and these often eke out the scrappy information drawn from inscriptions. The history of South Indian literatures in Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada will be briefly reviewed in the chapter on literature, and mention need be made here only of some outstanding facts of general interest.

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