A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.6

c6.6

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.