A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.4

c6.4

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*Early History of the Dekkan* (1895) is the nearest approach to a general history; but that brilliant work is now outdated and does not deal with the history of the extreme South.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.