Wonder, war and writing hard history
A great book that I strongly recommend!
Hello and welcome,
This week, I’ve got a recommendation for you: something to get you through many cups of coffee, or a great afternoon curled up in your book nook if a) you read a lot faster than I do and b) you have a book nook.
The history of ancient and medieval South Asia is not well known for being the subject of numerous, accessible, up-to-date, readable publications. Go into your local Waterstones (for UK readers: choose your preferred chain book shop for your location!), and you’ll be lucky to find anything on the shelves about the subcontinent covering the period before c. 1700 and that might be true even if you’re readingt this in the subcontinent itself. (It might not, and I applaud those book stores!)
Even academic histories are less numerous than for other parts of the world, most obviusly Europe (for both the ancient and medieval periods), West Asia (more for the ancient than the medieval) or East Asia (also more for the ancient and the medieval). South Asia is not uniquely underserved. You might struggle to find much on the Americas, Oceania or Africa either. But since I study South Asia, it has always struck me as a shame. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand the reasons: it isn’t just a mysterious conspiracy.
I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…
One challenge is the kind source material, especially before c. 1000 CE. For a moment, I’m going to treat European/Mediterranean ancient and medieval as ‘normal’. It wasn’t, but because modern history developed in Europe, what was true there became what the methods were designed around and what early scholars went looking for when they researched other places. Where they found what they were looking for it became comparatively ‘easy’ to write histories. Where they didn’t, it was harder. Some even declared that such places had no history. In South Asia, they mainly didn’t find what they were looking for. So what was that?
The main thing historians wanted was narrative sources. By that I mean people telling us (in writing) what happened in what order, prefeably over long periods of time or going into a lot of detail about shorter periods. Imagine somebody writing about a major war, making sure to let you know who was involved, which battles were fought in what order, who won them, and so on. Or imagine somebody putting together their own account of the previous two hindred years of history, listing who ruled in what order, events like floods, famines and storms and wars and battles.
Ideally, narrative sources, to be most useful to historians, should contain enough information to be able to date the events they describe in absolute terms. So, for example, knowing that Ruler A came before Ruler B, who came before Ruler C (what we call relative dating) is useful, but knowing that Ruler A reigned from 877 to 898, Ruler B reigned from 898 to 903 and that Ruler C reigned from 903 to 921 is much more useful. Absolute dating might also come from details in a ext that can be externally verified, such as that Ruler A came to the throne in the same room as a comet appeared in the sky. (I have written more here about different ways to date historical sources and events.)
European history is full of narrativer sources, from people actually trying to write histories of their own times to chronicles (more like year-by-year records of events). Plus, the more details you have with secure dates, the better your chance of being able to date other sources that you find. So, for example, if you know when Government X was in charge then you find a collection of private family letters, even if they don’t have dates on them, if they talk about Government X, you can still see when they have to fit.
The advantages of narrative sources are that they are usually long, fairly detailed and as well as just listing what order things happened in, they often also explain how those things were connected. We don’t have to agree with the conclusions they reach, but it is a starting point.
For South Asia, especially the southern areas and particularly before around 1000 CE (i.e., the bits I’m most interested in!) there are very few narrative sources. It wasn’t simply that people weren’t writing. In some times and places, they weren’t, or not much. But in others, there was plenty of writing. People just chose to write different things: fictional stories, love poems, religious tales. What there wasn’t was one of those nice, simple accounts of the ‘important’ things that traditional history is made of: who ruled when and won what battles.
Over time scholars have worked out different ways of teasing out the history of South Asia. Archaeology can’t necesarily tell us what order people ruled in but it can tell us about how they built, farmed or organised their cities and how they changed over time. Fictional and religious texts can’t pin things down to specific dates but can tell us about the values of a society or details about how people lived, the foods they ate, their rituals and habits.
And people have become better at working with the kinds of sources that people did write about their own history instead of regretting that they weren’t the same as in Europe. In South India, for example, inscriptions on stone, often mainly intended to do things like assign ownership or rights over land to a person or community, also had quite long introductions, which might include the name, titles and victories of the ruler or aristocrat making the gift. If you can find enough of these, you can piece together something like a narrative history, especially if you can determine when the inscriptions date from.
Still, these can be hard histories to write. They don’t necessarily have the personal touches - the funny or intimate or personal dimension that at least some kinds of narrative hsitory do. They can have big gaps and it can be confusing trying to tell a reader a coherent story on the one hand and being clear about where you’re getting each piece of information from on the other.
And then there is the questuion of market: if something doesn’t exist yet it can be quite difficult to convince publishers that it will sell. So, if there are already a lot of books about, say, the Second World War, you’re going to have an easier time convincing a company to publish another one, whereas if there aren’t many books about, e.g. South India in the Middle Ages, you might struggle to get somebody to believe that there is a market for them. After all, if people wanted to read about something, there would already be books about it, right? (Wrong, but I see why it is a simpler, safer choice not to think so.)
No heroes here
All of this is why I was so excited recently to get my hands on a (Kindle) copy of this book:
Kanisetti, Anirudh, Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas (Juggernaut Books, 2022)
If you’ve never heard of the Chalukyas or the Cholas or would struggle to put the Deccan on a map, don’t worry. Kanisetti has plenty of maps to keep you on track and starts from the assumption that his readers won’t have any starting knowledge at all. But he would really like to fix that and the result is a fantastically engaging read, full of characters and exciting events, from court intrigue to dramatic battles. Kanisetti does the work of piecing them together, mainly from scholars’ work on individual sources. He is clear when he is making things up, telling the most likely story not necessarily the one we know for certain happened.
From his pages emerge bold young men willing to bet their lives on a single battle and fearsome women able to command armies and construct great temples. There are poet kings and bitter rivals, family feuds and terrible wars. Kanisetti has a talent for capturing the human and a commitment that I love throughout the book to seeing the people he writes about, who can seem so remote and impressionistic from the glimpses we get, as complex, multi-faceted individuals with lives… just like ours.
There are no heroes in Kanisetti’s book, nor any villains either. There are people who did bad things (by our standards or by theirs) and who did good things (again, by any definition) but they are not turned into simple caricatures of Good or Bad People. Considering that some of the people he is talking about are semi-mythical, locally revered figures this stubborn insistence that they were people is especially admirable. I have a real weakness for a historian who seems to like the people s/he writes about without having to see them through rose tinted spectacles!
So, if you’re looking for a book to take on holiday or a way to inject a bit more history into your everyday, get your hands on Lords of the Deccan and hopefully, by the time you’ve finished it, Kanisetti’s next book, picking up the story with the reign of the Cholas, Lords of Earth and Sea, will be available for Kindle in the UK…