Author: Kenneth R Hall
Editor(s): Kenneth R Hall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 334
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195672410
Description
The essays in the volume demonstrate the richness and diversity of contemporary research based on the study of pre-colonial south Indian temple inscriptions. They trace the mergence of rural and urban societies and state systems in early south India between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, particularly under the Cola and Vijayanagar rulers.
Individual contributors study the extension of settled cultivation, the specific role of the brahmadeya communities therein, the Kancipuram and Cidambaram ritual centres, kinship, feminism, and the Vijayanagara nayaka networks. An essays on the Indian communities in contact with Southeast Asia, offers a contrast between the evolving and functional role of south Indian and Javanese temple centres.
This volume would be of special interest to under-graduate and post-graduate students of history as also to historians and sociologist-anthropologists working on issues related to state formation, evolution of agrarian communities, kinship and cultural relations and temple epigraphy in South India.
REVIEWS
This felicitative volume, opens a new window to the writing of history of south India, The extreme lucidity of these painstaking macro-studies in this excellent volume, mercifully free of jargon, shows a mature level of scholarship.
-The Statesman
The Papers, demonstrate convincingly, the scope for further research on a great variety of themes in south India history, using the vast data from the inscriptions.
-Economic and Political Weekly
Professor Kenneth Hall has done well to bring out this volume, contributed by eminent scholars in the filed, The topics of the essays give us a broad view of the variety of themes and their great relevance to the study of South Indian history.
-The Hindu
Contents
LIST OF TABLES, CHARTS, MAPTS AND FIGURES
CONTRIBUTORS
Structural Change and Societal Integration in Early South India: an Introductory Essay
In Search of Change: Reflections of the Scholarship of Noboru Karashima
Whispering of Inscriptions
Reappraisal of a Brahmanical Institution: The Brahmadeya and its Ramifications in Early Medieval South India
Merchants, Rulers, and Priests in and Early South Indian Sacred Centre: Cidambaram in the Age of the Colas
Urbanization and Political Economy in Early south India: Kancipuram During the Cola Period
The Emergence of Sedentary Agriculture in Interior Tamilnadu in the Thirteenth century
Kinship, Language, and the Construction of South India
Women in the Temple, the Palace, and the Family: the construction of women's identities in pre-Colonial Tamilnadu
Arasus of the Pudukkottai Region and the Nayaka System
the Nayakas of Vijayanagara Andhra: A Preliminary Prosopography
Ritual Transitions and Kingship in Fifteenth-Century Java: A view from the Candi Panataran Complex
Bibliography
Index