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A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations
The course of south Indian history from pre-historic times to the contemporary era is a complex narrative with many interpretations. Reflecting recent advances in the study of the region, this volume provides an assessment of the events and socio-cultural development of south India through a comprehensive analysis of its historical trajectory.
Investigating the region's states and configurations, this book covers a wide range of topics that include the origins of the early inhabitants, formation of the ancient kingdoms, advancement of agriculture, new religious movements based on bhakti, and consolidation of centralized states in the medieval period. It further explores the growth of industries in relation to the development of East-West maritime trade in the Indian Ocean as well as the wave of Islamicization and the course of commercial relations with various European countries. The book then goes on to discuss the advent of early-modern state rule, impact of the raiyatwari system introduced by the British, debates about whether the region's economy developed or deteriorated during the eighteenth century, decline of matriliny in Kerala, emergence of the Dravidian Movement, and the intertwining of politics with contemporary popular culture.
Well illustrated with maps and images, and incorporating new archaeological evidence and historiography, this volume presents new perspectives on a gamut of issues relating to communities, languages, and cultures of a macro-region that continues to fascinate scholars and readers alike.
Investigating the region's states and configurations, this book covers a wide range of topics that include the origins of the early inhabitants, formation of the ancient kingdoms, advancement of agriculture, new religious movements based on bhakti, and consolidation of centralized states in the medieval period. It further explores the growth of industries in relation to the development of East-West maritime trade in the Indian Ocean as well as the wave of Islamicization and the course of commercial relations with various European countries. The book then goes on to discuss the advent of early-modern state rule, impact of the raiyatwari system introduced by the British, debates about whether the region's economy developed or deteriorated during the eighteenth century, decline of matriliny in Kerala, emergence of the Dravidian Movement, and the intertwining of politics with contemporary popular culture.
Well illustrated with maps and images, and incorporating new archaeological evidence and historiography, this volume presents new perspectives on a gamut of issues relating to communities, languages, and cultures of a macro-region that continues to fascinate scholars and readers alike.
418 pages, Paperback
First published July 31, 2014
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552 people want to read
About the author
Noboru Karashima
16 books19 followersNoboru Karashima (辛島昇 Karashima Noboru?, 24 April 1933 – 26 November 2015) was a Japanese historian, writer and Professor Emeritus in University of Tokyo, Japan. He also served as Professor Emeritus at the Taisho University, Japan. He was a prominent scholar of Asia in the studies of South Indian and South Asian histories. He has rewritten historical accounts on medieval South India and published a number of writings.
Professor Karashima played a critical role in developing Indo-Japan cultural ties and was conferred the Padma Shri award in 2013, one of India's highest civilian award, for his contribution in the field of Literature and Education.[3] In a rare gesture the Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh handed over the award personally to Professor Karashima in Tokyo. He died in 2015.
Professor Karashima played a critical role in developing Indo-Japan cultural ties and was conferred the Padma Shri award in 2013, one of India's highest civilian award, for his contribution in the field of Literature and Education.[3] In a rare gesture the Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh handed over the award personally to Professor Karashima in Tokyo. He died in 2015.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 8, 2020
There is no absolute truth in history. It depicts the perspective of the narrator and has all the perversities/ prejudices of the narrator loaded into it.
In technical domain, Data Management Body of Knowledge states the following - ‘Most people assume that, because data represents facts, it is a form of truth about the world and the facts will fit together. But facts are not always simple or straightforward. Data is a means of representation. ‘
I remembered the above definition while reading it.
I liked the book in parts.
This book is not having a waterfall flow. It is a collection of essays by different authors. Karashima edited it. It does give a picture of south india during various periods, albeit with colored glasses in some places.
Articles by Y Subbarayalu, Noburu Karashima & P Shanmugam were of very good quality.
I especially liked the analysis of governance and agrarian systems during Chola, Vijayanagara & Nayaka periods by Noburu Karashima. He also mentioned about the origin of castes during late chola period. It is worth reading.
While discussing about early period, Y Subbarayalu & P Shanmugam presented all the facts meticulously. I would have given 5 stars for this section but for one remark about jainism being favoured by early kings - this was not presented with facts, While all the available evidences of the early period suggests vedic religion practice by the kings. To prove this point, author quotes ‘Vadakkiruttal’ by Kopperuncholan and equates it to jain practice ‘Sallekhana’. However author conveniently forgets the practice of ‘Prayopavesa’ of vedic times.
I didn’t get much details about 19th century societal changes (This was the problem I noticed in Rajmohan Gandhi’s Modern South India too)
The information given for 20th century is straight out of dravidian movement writers. No fact check. I felt like I was reading ‘Dravida Iyakka Varalaaru’. This part is certainly a blemish to this book. In my opinion Ramachandra Guha’s ‘India after gandhi’ gives a right perspective of 20th century dynamics.
No, It doesn’t unseat Nilakanta Sastri’s book from the throne.
In technical domain, Data Management Body of Knowledge states the following - ‘Most people assume that, because data represents facts, it is a form of truth about the world and the facts will fit together. But facts are not always simple or straightforward. Data is a means of representation. ‘
I remembered the above definition while reading it.
I liked the book in parts.
This book is not having a waterfall flow. It is a collection of essays by different authors. Karashima edited it. It does give a picture of south india during various periods, albeit with colored glasses in some places.
Articles by Y Subbarayalu, Noburu Karashima & P Shanmugam were of very good quality.
I especially liked the analysis of governance and agrarian systems during Chola, Vijayanagara & Nayaka periods by Noburu Karashima. He also mentioned about the origin of castes during late chola period. It is worth reading.
While discussing about early period, Y Subbarayalu & P Shanmugam presented all the facts meticulously. I would have given 5 stars for this section but for one remark about jainism being favoured by early kings - this was not presented with facts, While all the available evidences of the early period suggests vedic religion practice by the kings. To prove this point, author quotes ‘Vadakkiruttal’ by Kopperuncholan and equates it to jain practice ‘Sallekhana’. However author conveniently forgets the practice of ‘Prayopavesa’ of vedic times.
I didn’t get much details about 19th century societal changes (This was the problem I noticed in Rajmohan Gandhi’s Modern South India too)
The information given for 20th century is straight out of dravidian movement writers. No fact check. I felt like I was reading ‘Dravida Iyakka Varalaaru’. This part is certainly a blemish to this book. In my opinion Ramachandra Guha’s ‘India after gandhi’ gives a right perspective of 20th century dynamics.
No, It doesn’t unseat Nilakanta Sastri’s book from the throne.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 5, 2017
The author develops, through his essays the South Indian history with an objective manner. South Indian history, by any author of Indian origin seems at times biased towards a very parochial version of Vedic Hinduism.
January 26, 2026
For the better part of the last ten days, I found myself immersed in the quiet, exacting labour of assisting a student with a research paper titled “The Continuity of South Indian History.” What began as academic guidance soon turned into a sustained, almost meditative engagement with the region’s deep past. In the course of this work, I returned—slowly, attentively, and in detail—to three remarkable volumes that together trace the long, interwoven currents of South Indian history:
Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas by Anirudh Kanisetti; Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire, also by Anirudh Kanisetti; and A Concise History of South India by Noboru Karashima.
What follows is a considered review of all three—read not in isolation, but in conversation with one another, as companion texts illuminating the enduring continuities of the southern past.
To approach ‘Lords of Earth and Sea’ after ‘Lords of the Deccan’ is to feel the historical lens tighten and sharpen. Where the earlier book re-centres the Deccan within the mediaeval world, this one performs an even more daring act: it takes a dynasty that has long been mythologised, flattened, and often domesticated into cultural pride, and restores to it its full strangeness, ambition, brutality, and brilliance.
Kanisetti’s Cholas are not marble icons or nationalist mascots. They are unexpected, unsettling, and—precisely because of that—magnificent.
The word “unexpected,” which the author foregrounds in his introduction, is doing a great deal of work. For most of Indian history, power gravitates toward two immense zones: the Gangetic plains in the north, birthing continental empires, and the Deccan plateau, whose militarised polities repeatedly reshape the subcontinent. Coastal polities, particularly those speaking Tamil, are rarely imagined as imperial centres.
They are cast instead as mercantile, devotional, or cultural spaces—rich, certainly, but politically secondary. The Cholas explode this assumption. Their rise in the ninth century CE is not merely another dynastic turn; it is a geopolitical rupture.
At the moment of their emergence, the Rashtrakutas dominate the subcontinent so completely that even distant Arab observers acknowledge them as India’s paramount power. And yet, within a relatively short span, the Cholas do what no Tamil-speaking polity had done before or since: they unite the Tamil and Telugu coasts into a single imperial formation and sustain it for nearly three centuries. The comparison Kanisetti draws with the Mughal Empire is not casual or rhetorical.
Duration matters in history. Longevity is proof not only of military success, but of administrative adaptability, economic depth, and social negotiation. The Cholas pass that test.
What is particularly striking is how Kanisetti refuses to frame Chola expansion as either inevitable or divinely sanctioned. Their campaigns are described as audacious gambles—sometimes breathtakingly successful, sometimes brutally extractive.
Raiding north to the Ganga, humiliating Deccan powers, projecting authority through the potent symbolism of the tiger-surmounted sengol—these are not merely acts of conquest. They are statements of intent, carefully staged performances meant to announce a new centre of gravity in South Asia. For a brief but extraordinary historical moment, a Tamil coastal empire claims symbolic overlordship of the entire subcontinent.
Yet the Cholas do not stop at the subcontinent’s edge. One of the book’s great strengths is how decisively it places Chola history within the Indian Ocean world. Sri Lanka becomes not a peripheral appendage but a deeply contested imperial outpost. The Malay Peninsula is not a vague zone of influence but a real theatre of military action—an expedition so unprecedented that it sends ripples all the way to East Asia.
The Chinese bureaucrat’s account that Kanisetti cites—pearls, precious stones, sixty thousand war elephants, thousands of court servants—is not included merely for colour. It reminds us that the Cholas were legible, visible, and formidable to distant observers. They mattered on a global stage.
And yet, one of Kanisetti’s most important interventions is his insistence that we do not need to exaggerate the Cholas to admire them. This is a quiet but devastating critique of much popular history. We do not need to imagine a vast, centralised Chola navy when we know Tamil merchant corporations were capable of transporting armies across the sea.
We do not need to fantasise about overseas colonies when material evidence shows Tamil merchants governing settlements in Sumatra. We do not need to invoke mystical explanations for Chola temples when inscriptions, logistics, and engineering expertise already testify to human genius on a staggering scale. The Cholas, Kanisetti suggests, become more dazzling when we stop forcing them into modern fantasies of empire.
This insistence on demystification runs throughout the book. Temples, perhaps the most iconic legacy of the Cholas, are treated not as timeless monuments but as political instruments. They are sites of devotion, yes, but also of negotiation, display, and persuasion. Kanisetti’s argument that Chola kings used temples as spaces of political advertisement is both persuasive and unsettling. Donations, inscriptions, and architectural grandeur are not simply acts of piety; they are strategies to convince powerful regional collectives—assemblies, guilds, and landholders—that the king deserves obedience. Power here is never assumed. It is constantly performed.
This leads to what may be the book’s most intellectually satisfying theme: the relationship between rulers and ruled.
Kanisetti refuses the familiar procession-of-kings model that dominates so much Indian historiography. Instead, he asks the questions that are usually glossed over:
1) Where did royal wealth come from?
2) How was manpower mobilised?
3) Why did people consent to be ruled at all?
The answers are complex, contingent, and often uncomfortable. Chola kings rise within a relatively egalitarian and participatory world of the Kaveri floodplain, structured around local assemblies and collective decision-making.
Their eventual transformation into a warlike autocracy is neither natural nor smooth. It is the result of sustained tension between centralising ambition and local autonomy.
The tragedy of the Cholas, as Kanisetti tells it, lies precisely here. The creation of a wealthy ruling elite—initially a sign of imperial success—gradually undermines the state itself. Tax evasion by elites hollows out royal finances.
The burden shifts downward. Cultivators are squeezed, trampled, and impoverished. The throne weakens even as temples gleam brighter than ever. This is not a story of sudden collapse, but of slow erosion, where the very mechanisms that once sustained empire turn corrosive.
And yet, even as the dynasty falters, the society it helped shape does not. This is one of the most quietly radical aspects of the book. Kanisetti shows how middle-class collectives—merchants, weavers, corporate guilds—emerge from the Chola world not diminished but empowered. As royal authority fades, these groups become more cosmopolitan, more interconnected, more adaptable.
They form alliances with each other and with new rulers, eventually integrating into the Vijayanagara Empire and dominating Indian Ocean trade by the fifteenth century.
The Cholas fall, but the social energies they unleashed continue to flow outward, reshaping the wider world.
Throughout, Kanisetti’s prose maintains a rare balance between narrative drive and analytical depth. He does not shy away from moral complexity. The Cholas are builders of astonishing beauty and agents of ruthless extraction.
Their empire expands opportunity for some while crushing others. There is no attempt to resolve this tension. Instead, it is allowed to stand, unresolved and instructive. History, in this telling, is not a morality tale but a study in consequence.
What makes ‘Lords of Earth and Sea’ so compelling is that it refuses both nostalgia and cynicism. It neither romanticizes the Cholas nor reduces them to mere exploiters.
It takes them seriously as historical actors operating within constraints, ambitions, and contradictions not unlike those faced by empires elsewhere.
The comparisons to Rome and Britain are not meant to elevate or diminish India’s past, but to normalize it—to insist that Indian history deserves the same analytical rigor applied to other civilizations.
By the end of the book, the Cholas no longer appear as an anomaly or an exception. They become a case study in how power is built, justified, and ultimately exhausted.
They remind us that empires are not sustained by monuments alone, but by consent, negotiation, and material balance—and that when those fail, even the most dazzling structures cannot hold.
In stripping away fantasy, Kanisetti gives us something far richer: a Chola history that feels alive, contested, and profoundly human.
It is a story not of who we wish the Cholas were, but of who they actually were—and that, in the end, is far more irresistible.
Most recommended.
Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas by Anirudh Kanisetti; Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire, also by Anirudh Kanisetti; and A Concise History of South India by Noboru Karashima.
What follows is a considered review of all three—read not in isolation, but in conversation with one another, as companion texts illuminating the enduring continuities of the southern past.
To approach ‘Lords of Earth and Sea’ after ‘Lords of the Deccan’ is to feel the historical lens tighten and sharpen. Where the earlier book re-centres the Deccan within the mediaeval world, this one performs an even more daring act: it takes a dynasty that has long been mythologised, flattened, and often domesticated into cultural pride, and restores to it its full strangeness, ambition, brutality, and brilliance.
Kanisetti’s Cholas are not marble icons or nationalist mascots. They are unexpected, unsettling, and—precisely because of that—magnificent.
The word “unexpected,” which the author foregrounds in his introduction, is doing a great deal of work. For most of Indian history, power gravitates toward two immense zones: the Gangetic plains in the north, birthing continental empires, and the Deccan plateau, whose militarised polities repeatedly reshape the subcontinent. Coastal polities, particularly those speaking Tamil, are rarely imagined as imperial centres.
They are cast instead as mercantile, devotional, or cultural spaces—rich, certainly, but politically secondary. The Cholas explode this assumption. Their rise in the ninth century CE is not merely another dynastic turn; it is a geopolitical rupture.
At the moment of their emergence, the Rashtrakutas dominate the subcontinent so completely that even distant Arab observers acknowledge them as India’s paramount power. And yet, within a relatively short span, the Cholas do what no Tamil-speaking polity had done before or since: they unite the Tamil and Telugu coasts into a single imperial formation and sustain it for nearly three centuries. The comparison Kanisetti draws with the Mughal Empire is not casual or rhetorical.
Duration matters in history. Longevity is proof not only of military success, but of administrative adaptability, economic depth, and social negotiation. The Cholas pass that test.
What is particularly striking is how Kanisetti refuses to frame Chola expansion as either inevitable or divinely sanctioned. Their campaigns are described as audacious gambles—sometimes breathtakingly successful, sometimes brutally extractive.
Raiding north to the Ganga, humiliating Deccan powers, projecting authority through the potent symbolism of the tiger-surmounted sengol—these are not merely acts of conquest. They are statements of intent, carefully staged performances meant to announce a new centre of gravity in South Asia. For a brief but extraordinary historical moment, a Tamil coastal empire claims symbolic overlordship of the entire subcontinent.
Yet the Cholas do not stop at the subcontinent’s edge. One of the book’s great strengths is how decisively it places Chola history within the Indian Ocean world. Sri Lanka becomes not a peripheral appendage but a deeply contested imperial outpost. The Malay Peninsula is not a vague zone of influence but a real theatre of military action—an expedition so unprecedented that it sends ripples all the way to East Asia.
The Chinese bureaucrat’s account that Kanisetti cites—pearls, precious stones, sixty thousand war elephants, thousands of court servants—is not included merely for colour. It reminds us that the Cholas were legible, visible, and formidable to distant observers. They mattered on a global stage.
And yet, one of Kanisetti’s most important interventions is his insistence that we do not need to exaggerate the Cholas to admire them. This is a quiet but devastating critique of much popular history. We do not need to imagine a vast, centralised Chola navy when we know Tamil merchant corporations were capable of transporting armies across the sea.
We do not need to fantasise about overseas colonies when material evidence shows Tamil merchants governing settlements in Sumatra. We do not need to invoke mystical explanations for Chola temples when inscriptions, logistics, and engineering expertise already testify to human genius on a staggering scale. The Cholas, Kanisetti suggests, become more dazzling when we stop forcing them into modern fantasies of empire.
This insistence on demystification runs throughout the book. Temples, perhaps the most iconic legacy of the Cholas, are treated not as timeless monuments but as political instruments. They are sites of devotion, yes, but also of negotiation, display, and persuasion. Kanisetti’s argument that Chola kings used temples as spaces of political advertisement is both persuasive and unsettling. Donations, inscriptions, and architectural grandeur are not simply acts of piety; they are strategies to convince powerful regional collectives—assemblies, guilds, and landholders—that the king deserves obedience. Power here is never assumed. It is constantly performed.
This leads to what may be the book’s most intellectually satisfying theme: the relationship between rulers and ruled.
Kanisetti refuses the familiar procession-of-kings model that dominates so much Indian historiography. Instead, he asks the questions that are usually glossed over:
1) Where did royal wealth come from?
2) How was manpower mobilised?
3) Why did people consent to be ruled at all?
The answers are complex, contingent, and often uncomfortable. Chola kings rise within a relatively egalitarian and participatory world of the Kaveri floodplain, structured around local assemblies and collective decision-making.
Their eventual transformation into a warlike autocracy is neither natural nor smooth. It is the result of sustained tension between centralising ambition and local autonomy.
The tragedy of the Cholas, as Kanisetti tells it, lies precisely here. The creation of a wealthy ruling elite—initially a sign of imperial success—gradually undermines the state itself. Tax evasion by elites hollows out royal finances.
The burden shifts downward. Cultivators are squeezed, trampled, and impoverished. The throne weakens even as temples gleam brighter than ever. This is not a story of sudden collapse, but of slow erosion, where the very mechanisms that once sustained empire turn corrosive.
And yet, even as the dynasty falters, the society it helped shape does not. This is one of the most quietly radical aspects of the book. Kanisetti shows how middle-class collectives—merchants, weavers, corporate guilds—emerge from the Chola world not diminished but empowered. As royal authority fades, these groups become more cosmopolitan, more interconnected, more adaptable.
They form alliances with each other and with new rulers, eventually integrating into the Vijayanagara Empire and dominating Indian Ocean trade by the fifteenth century.
The Cholas fall, but the social energies they unleashed continue to flow outward, reshaping the wider world.
Throughout, Kanisetti’s prose maintains a rare balance between narrative drive and analytical depth. He does not shy away from moral complexity. The Cholas are builders of astonishing beauty and agents of ruthless extraction.
Their empire expands opportunity for some while crushing others. There is no attempt to resolve this tension. Instead, it is allowed to stand, unresolved and instructive. History, in this telling, is not a morality tale but a study in consequence.
What makes ‘Lords of Earth and Sea’ so compelling is that it refuses both nostalgia and cynicism. It neither romanticizes the Cholas nor reduces them to mere exploiters.
It takes them seriously as historical actors operating within constraints, ambitions, and contradictions not unlike those faced by empires elsewhere.
The comparisons to Rome and Britain are not meant to elevate or diminish India’s past, but to normalize it—to insist that Indian history deserves the same analytical rigor applied to other civilizations.
By the end of the book, the Cholas no longer appear as an anomaly or an exception. They become a case study in how power is built, justified, and ultimately exhausted.
They remind us that empires are not sustained by monuments alone, but by consent, negotiation, and material balance—and that when those fail, even the most dazzling structures cannot hold.
In stripping away fantasy, Kanisetti gives us something far richer: a Chola history that feels alive, contested, and profoundly human.
It is a story not of who we wish the Cholas were, but of who they actually were—and that, in the end, is far more irresistible.
Most recommended.
April 11, 2022
Detailed, Academic, Passionless, Historical Textbook for South India
Outline:
Common Era:
Brahmi Script
1st Century BCE to 5th Century A.D:
Sangam Literature
6th to 9th Century:
Bhakti Movement & Capitals
10th to 12th Century:
Chola
13th to 14th Century:
Fall of Old States
15th to 17th Century:
Vijayanagar
18th to 19th Century :
British Era
20th Century:
Independence and After
South Indian Cuisine:
Outline:
Common Era:
Brahmi Script
1st Century BCE to 5th Century A.D:
Sangam Literature
6th to 9th Century:
Bhakti Movement & Capitals
10th to 12th Century:
Chola
13th to 14th Century:
Fall of Old States
15th to 17th Century:
Vijayanagar
18th to 19th Century :
British Era
20th Century:
Independence and After
South Indian Cuisine:
September 11, 2024
The hit of A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations by Noboru Karashima is its thorough and scholarly approach to the often-overlooked history of South India. Karashima, a renowned historian, successfully weaves together complex historical narratives spanning the Chola, Pandya, and Vijayanagar empires, providing a balanced account of political, cultural, and economic developments. The book also excels in addressing South India’s distinct contributions to the subcontinent’s history, including trade networks, temple culture, and linguistic diversity. It’s a valuable resource for anyone looking to gain insight into a region that’s often overshadowed in broader Indian history books.
The miss may be its academic tone and structure, which could feel dense or overwhelming to readers unfamiliar with South Indian history or historiography. While the book aims to be a concise history, it is still packed with details, making it more suited for serious students of history than casual readers. Additionally, the focus on historiographical issues and interpretations might sideline readers looking for a straightforward narrative rather than an analysis of historical debates.
The in-between lies in its scope and ambition. Karashima covers a vast period and provides a wealth of information, but this breadth can sometimes come at the expense of depth in certain areas. For instance, while trade and economic systems are well covered, the social and cultural dynamics of everyday life in South India may feel underexplored. However, for those interested in historical analysis and the evolution of South Indian historiography, the book offers valuable interpretations that bridge the gap between academic and accessible.
The miss may be its academic tone and structure, which could feel dense or overwhelming to readers unfamiliar with South Indian history or historiography. While the book aims to be a concise history, it is still packed with details, making it more suited for serious students of history than casual readers. Additionally, the focus on historiographical issues and interpretations might sideline readers looking for a straightforward narrative rather than an analysis of historical debates.
The in-between lies in its scope and ambition. Karashima covers a vast period and provides a wealth of information, but this breadth can sometimes come at the expense of depth in certain areas. For instance, while trade and economic systems are well covered, the social and cultural dynamics of everyday life in South India may feel underexplored. However, for those interested in historical analysis and the evolution of South Indian historiography, the book offers valuable interpretations that bridge the gap between academic and accessible.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews