Suchergebnisse

Lennart Bes, The Heirs of Vijayanagara: Court Politics in Early Modern South India (Leiden: Leiden University Press), 2022, pp., 567 + illustrations + maps, price not stated.

The emergence of merchants and guilds in South India is studied here by paying attention to occurrence of terms in literary texts and inscriptions, and the determination of their senses both by contexts and by their use in North India and the Deccan.

Tamil inscriptions offer details that enable us to reconstruct agrarian developments in the Tamil region from about the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. Land grants spawned Brahmana land holders, but elsewhere too a landlord class formed, with growing conflicts with peasants over rent and labour dues. The presence of the depressed Paraiyas provided the bulk of wage labourers. A certain advance in urbanisation produced not only active merchant guilds but also migratory artisan groups.

M.G.S. NARAYANAN, Perumals of Kerala: Brahmin Oligarchy and Ritual Monarchy, Political and Social Conditions of Kerala under the Cera Perumals of Makotai (c. AD 800–1124), Trissur: CosmoBooks, 2013, pp. 512.

There are two twelfth-century Chola inscriptions recording the royal orders concerning public auctions of land and prohibition of land purchase in the lower Kaveri valley. By analysing these two and other related inscriptions* of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the authors clarify the politico-economic conditions of the Chola state, which caused the emergence of big-scale landholders from among the military and other privileged people towards the latter half of Chola rule. These big landholders carved out chiefdoms for themselves in some localities, and finally brought about the demise of the Chola state, preparing the region for the emergence of a feudal state formation in the fourteenth century and after.

In ancient and medieval south India, from about the fifth century, the term nādu denoted a micro-region which was important as the basic unit of agricultural production. The agricultural community formed in the nādu was called nāttār or nāttavar, literally meaning the people of the nādu. Initially it was exclusively composed of the Vellāla peasantry, but from the eleventh century there began to appear in Tamil inscriptions the term periyanādu meaning "big nādu" to denote a supra-nādu assembly. In this paper we examine the meaning of the emergence of this and other similar supra-local and/or multi-community organizations.The Chola dynasty, which had ruled south India for about four hundred years, disappeared in the latter half of the thirteenth century. The succeeding Pandyan dynasty was put down in its turn by the invasion of the Delhi Sultan's army at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Therefore, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in south India were a period of political turmoil, during when, nevertheless, foreign trade was carried out vigorously in the Indian Ocean. Merchants and artisans joined peasants in the activities of the periyanādu, generating a new state and social formation that became explicitly visible in the fifteenth century under Vijayanagar rule.