The heroic hound of Eduthanur
And other select stories carved in stone
Some time in the 7th century CE, in the village of Eduthanur, in modern Tamil Nadu (southeast India), the community erected a ‘hero stone’.1 It commemorated the bravery of a local warrior, Karundevakatti, who defended the community’s buffalo herds from raiders. The warrior was killed in the fight. So was his dog, Kovivan, who was carved alongside him and named in the inscription.
Hero stones were erected all across South Asia, from the later first millennium BCE right down to the 17th century CE, but in the southern peninsula, where my research focuses, they are particularly important for understanding the period c. 7th-12th centuries.
The main thing hero stones tell us about is a landscape in which violence, especially cattle and buffalo raiding, was fairly common and communities mainly relied on their own resources to protect themselves. At a structural level, that can be handy for understanding things like government, military activity and community organisation or economic systems and this is often the scale on which I like writing history. It can help us to understand big changes, which affected the lives of millions of people. It can also help us to understand at least the outline of the choices people had, who have left no personal record to us, rather than focusing only on those, often unusual, individuals, who were able to write or who were written about.
In peninsular South Asia, looking at this level, a view across the whole first millennium shows gradual change: a few areas of military and political power were centred along fertile rivers, and trading with societies in other areas of the peninsula for animal and plant products. Slowly, however, this turned into a situation in which virtually all territory was claimed by some king or other, with kings then competing with one another to become overlords over larger empires.
Primary sources, though, rarely tell us stories at this scale. Mostly their view is narrower: they are documents about a specific person, or place or moment in time (or, in the case of the hero stone of Karundevakatti and Kovivan, all three). Getting from one (sources about specifics) to the other (useful generalisations about past societies) is a big part of doing history, but over the years I’ve found it is important to spend some time just basking in the specifics.
It is a good idea because those details are, ultimately, what makes the difference between a good, robust generalisation and a less good one, but it is also a good idea because it is a different kind of skill and a different kind of enjoyment.
This week, I’m writing a couple of pieces for publication which are ‘big picture’ stuff, summaries of arguments or overviews of the state of a field. They are interesting and I hope they will be useful but they were also starting to feel a bit dry.
That’s when I stumbled on Kovivan. I took a break and read my way through a book of inscriptions from Tamil Nadu.2 They come from different periods, roughly from the 3rd century BCE to the 15th century CE, but clustering between the 8th and 13th centuries. They are arranged under various headings, from ‘Religion and Philosophy’ to ‘Social Life’, ‘Trade and Commerce’ and ‘Political History’.
In practice, historic inscriptions in southern peninsular South Asia were mostly about three things:
Giving or managing land or the revenue from it (including donations to religious organisations)
Heroic deeds, either on hero stones or praising kings
Building infrastructure, especially irrigation and water storage
Later on, there could also be a certain amount of law and order carved into temple walls, especially of the form: ‘there was a lot of disagreement about [thing - often, as it happens, the giving or management of land or the revenue from it] so we put together a council and made a decision and now we’re carving that decision on the wall so we don’t have to have the same conversation in 30 years’ time’.
Under those 3-and-a-bit headings, you can indeed see all sorts of things about lots of different aspects of life, of the sort selected by the volume editor, T. S. Sridhar, a man whom I remember kindly for being generous and thoughtful when I visited the museum he was in charge of, in Chennai, camera in hand, a couple of years after this book was published.
The headings, though, can also seem at times a bit superfluous, not because they aren’t helpful or sensible, but because the details in the inscriptions are just too exuberantly human to squeeze into the.
There is Kovivan, the heroic hound. But there are also two brothers who got into a fight in the fields, in or just before 1057 CE. The elder brother started the fight but the younger one finished it, fatally. The parents were asked if they had any other sons. They did not. Consequently, the surviving brother was made to light a perpetual lamp (= stump up the ongoing cost of keeping a lamp lit at all times) rather than face death or exile, because that way, one son would remain to take care of his parents and continue the family line.3
There is a very tangly and pretty tragic case of a man, also charged with lighting a perpetual lamp, this time as punishment for the death of his mother.4 Interestingly, the case was brought by a merchant guild, the Nanadesi, who at their height, when this inscription was made in the mid-11th century, had hostels all over the subcontinent and out into Southeast Asia. They accused the son of compelling his mother to commit suicide by poison over unpaid tax. There is a lot here that isn't completely clear: who immediately responsible for demanding the tax and why should pressure have caused the accused to treat his mother so badly that she took her own life? And why were the Nanadesi involved?
Another inscription from 1012 CE records that a merchant was (again) ordered to light a perpetual lamp, this time for killing a man who broke into his house at night and assaulted the merchant’s female companion.5 In this case, it is said that the killer brought the case to the village council and they decided that he should not be considered a murderer, though he did have to do penance.
A man in the 14th century who was charged with guarding the treasury of his local temple was caught stealing from it instead.6 He was forced to sell his land to reimburse the temple, but also to sell his right to participate in temple rituals, which he could do for 6.5 days out of every 48-day cycle and 10 in every 30-day cycle.
One very long inscription from Uttiramerur village, near Kanchipuram, dated to 920-21 CE, details how people were to be chosen to sit on the various committees and councils which governed local affairs.7 Mainly, the concern was with ensuring the participation of men of the right age (35-70), who owned land and had suitable knowledge of scripture (specifically, the Vedas and related texts). However, near the end, it is also specified that a man who has committed forgery or ridden on an ass will not be eligible for selection: an interesting equivalence!8
I could go on, and I did. Not every inscription was quite as vivid as these, but every one was an insight into something that people long ago felt was worth carving into stone.
Each one was a glimpse into complex, layered choices: which language to use and which script? Often, the answer was to provide parts of the inscription in one language and parts in another. Sometimes, it was to provide roughly the same message in two languages, but with slightly different content. So, both might have a section praising the king, but they might not praise him for exactly the same things, hinting at distinct audiences, perhaps, or languages used for specific spheres of life and politics.
Stacked in my pile of notes for future posts, I’ve got one I keep coming back to, tinkering with and deciding it isn’t ready yet about reading without a purpose. That wasn’t what I was doing this week. I’d got lots of things I was on the look out for as I read select inscriptions of Tamil Nadu, which are related to those chapters I’m writing - things to do with water management and community conflict and the regulation of land use. But I was still reading something all the way through, letting the texts lead me. I was taking myself back to the small, the contingent and messy.
It wasn’t necessarily… fun. There’s nothing fun about a man killing his brother or causing his mother’s death. There’s nothing especially fun about a man and his dog dying in a fight over buffaloes, for that matter. But it was invigorating and reassuring: in the middle of trying to articulate a big argument, doing history can become a purely cerebral thing. Maybe it’s just me, but in those moments, it can be a little difficult to remember why I wanted to do this thing, even if I’m pretty sure I can do it.
Kovivan is the answer the past gave me this time, and there is always one waiting whenever I go back to the sources. There is always some reason to be surprised, amused, impressed, angry or admiring. There are always real people, who did not live their lives as a way of creating the systems that I am trying to abstract, even if those systems shaped who they had the chance to be and what they thought of doing.
They remind me that the point of articulating any system is to understand the people who lived in it better, because they were as unique and wonderful as we are, even if we can only see tiny fragments of it and imagine the rest by imagining the structures they likely took for granted.
The inscription records a regnal year of 34 and the stone appears to date from the reign of the Pallava king Mahendravarma. This has led some people to calculate the date of the stone to 624 CE, but there isn’t enough certainty about exactly when Mahendravarma ruled for me to be confident about this. It was probably in the 620s or 630s.
Sridhar, T S, and N Marxia Gandhi, Select Inscriptions of Tamilnadu, 1st edn (Department of Archaeology, 2006).
p. 123.
p. 120.
p. 126.
p. 121.
p. 55
p. 59.