Gone Medieval - The Dynasty that Transformed Southern India

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

Histories of India usually concern themselves with events and invasions in the subcontinent’s North, while the rest of India’s rich story is often reduced down to little more than dry footnotes. Now historian and Indian history podcast presenter Anirudh Kanisetti has brought to light the early medieval period in the Deccan Plateau - between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal - when the region was transformed by the Chalukya dynasty, shaping life in southern India for centuries.In this edition of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman is at the Jaipur Literature Festival where she meets Anirudh Kanisetti to find out why his work means the history of the subcontinent will never be seen in the same way again.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. In this episode, I am in India. Today I'm at the Jaipur Literature Festival and I've managed to find myself an Indian medievalist. So today's episode is all going to be about southern India in the medieval period because this period has actually been quite largely neglected here in India and certainly overseas in northern Europe. When people learn about Indian history, it tends to be focused on northern India. But today's guest is called Anirud Kanishetti. He's a history researcher

and writer based out of Bangalore and Hyderabad. He currently works at the Museum of Art and Photography. And he has written a new book called The Lords of the Deccan. So we are still at the festival, so we've sneaked away into a little corner so you can hear some birds and some music and some background noise, but that will just sort of give you the atmosphere as if you were here. But anyway, thank you so much for joining me here today. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. So I listened to you talk earlier this morning. And one thing you said was that this period is really, even here in India,

people aren't really focusing on this medieval period and certainly in this part of India. Is that right? Yes. I feel like in India, we tend to focus to a great extent on northern India. I feel like even in the West, there is some awareness now of Indian history, people heard of the Mughals, people may have heard of the Delhi, alternate. They definitely heard of the modern empire and these kinds of things. But very few are really aware of just how vast Indian history is and how non-representative these time periods

that we generally know about actually are of the subcontinent's like a broader historical trajectory. Because India is a vast place. It's the size of Europe. And by thinking about it as only a single country and by reducing its history to a series of imperial moments that we think are representative of the subcontinent large, we actually end up missing out on far, far more. interesting. To me, at least the medieval period is so fascinating because so many of the things that we think of are so quintessentially Indian actually really emerge in the medieval period. Sanskrit literature, for example, even though it's very often believed to be 5,000 years old, Sanskrit literature actually really flowers in the medieval periods. And by medieval, I mean the period

from roughly 600 to 1,100, that's the period that we generally refer to as the early medieval in India. And it's characterized by the expansion of courtly cultures, this very kind of sophisticated material culture that is really based on consumption of luxury resources from all across the world and also on new forms of political organization that are generally based around a single court, an imperial centre that kind of develops sub-centres and vassal networks across vast, vast land masses, while simultaneously also investing agricultural surplus in building temples. Temples today are the archetypal representative image of India. You cannot think of in India without temples or other sacred sites. And it's really in the medieval period, the large

number of temples are built. And that's when the culture of building a temple that is associated with kingship and that is developed and inculcated by the state really emerges onto its own. So it's also a time when alongside Sanskrit, which is essentially the Indian equivalent of Latin, right, it's a great classical language, the language of knowledge and so on, you also begin to see very rich vernacular language cultures emerging. And this again is something that actually has in common with Europe. In fact, the more that I learn about medieval India, the more I'm struck by its resemblances to medieval Europe. While there are, of course, very significant differences, medieval India also has these great lordly houses with insignia and codes of honour. They have these

vassals who conspire against their lords. It also has tournaments. It has knights who are riding elephants and horses, but it also has battles, it has monument building, it has the patronage of religion. Many of the things that we really associate with medieval Europe can be seen in a slightly different form in medieval India as well. And my perspective on the period of least, is that the better we understand medieval India, better we are going to understand not just how South Asia has developed and continues to develop throughout historical time, but it also helps us gain a better understanding of European and global history as well,

because you cannot really build a representative picture of the history of the world unless you also include the history of India within it, and you cannot build a representative picture of the history of India unless you talk about the medieval tech. That's an excellent answer, and I think this is why you refer to this really as that the golden age of India, Is that right? Because of all these things you've just been explaining now.

I actually don't call it a golden age because, I mean, I've read enough about the period to realize that it's one of profound violence and inequality alongside all these other significant cultural and religious developments that I was talking about. But in India, we do tend to think about history as composed of a series of golden ages, as defined by great and glorious emperors who are militarily successful and extremely pious and so on, very similar in some ways to the way that some European nationalists construct their history. but these golden ages are usually set in periods that are very different from the medieval period. They're set either in the Gupta period, which is about the fourth and fifth centuries in northern India,

roughly the same time as the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe for context. And it's at this time that we begin to see a very influential Northern Empire emerging, that really pioneers' temple building, that pioneers the identification of the gods with the kings, and also builds a very sophisticated economic system, a really hierarchical kind of political network. and that kind of establishes a template of sorts of what a successful model for Indian kingship looks like but it's really in the period after the fall of the Guptas which is very often seen as a kind of dark age in India

but it's really not just as a lot of evidence and a lot of historians and European medievalists are calling what used to be the dark ages as the bright ages now these are also bright ages for India it's a time of profound cultural innovation profound cultural churn and as I said the fact that temples are beginning to proliferate across places that have never seen temples before, being built by new quarterly elites, who are actively invested in developing agricultural surplus and using the wealth that they have generated, often through war, often through taxation, to purchase goods from the farthest corners of the world. As I think what really makes a strong case for this to be considered,

I would still not say a golden age, but at least one that is extremely important in shaping how India came to be India. Okay, so let's get on to your book then. And can you set the scene to go, our listeners might not be that familiar with the geography and where we're talking about. So set the scene a little bit. What is this territory you're writing about? And at the beginning of this period, what's going on, who's living here? What's the general background?

So if you were to imagine India as a kind of ice cream cone, right? It's called this great peninsula that projects into the Indian Ocean. And of course, it's got these vast populist plains in the north. When you think about India generally, the way it's represented in Western media, is that it's usually about these plains or perhaps it's about Bombay which is the coast on the peninsula so if you think of India as an ice cream cone

then the ice cream is basically the Gangesetic Plains or Northern India and the cone is southern India and of course I say southern and north and south as of these small regions but in reality these broader regions also contain many many many micro regions and micro region is a bit of a misromer because a lot of these micro regions

are the size of European countries that it's enormous one example that I actually gave the audience in the morning was that the southern Indian state of Kerala, which is on the southwestern corner of the subcontinent, has a coastline the same length as that of Portugal. And that's a really, really small part of southern India. So this entire ice cream cone is this enormous landmass. And dominating this landmass of the very heart of the ice cream cone, as it were, is the Deccan Plateau.

The Deccan Plateau is this ancient geological formation, which was created about 66, 66, 67 million years ago, as India began to move towards this collision with the Asian plate. and it was formed by enormous amounts of volcanic activity that kind of created a vast plateau that spreads out of an area nearly the size of Germany. Through this plateau flows a vast river system called the Godavri River. The Godavie River system is the third largest river system in the subcontinent, the largest, of course, being the Indus and the Gengetic Valley Systems. So the Deccan is a dry landmass. It's got the rain-fed Godavir River and all of his tributaries, as well as a few others,

and it's bounded on one side by these ancient hills called the Western Ghats. So the Western Guards basically block the monsoon winds that come in from across the Indian Ocean. And the Western Ghats are a place of enormous biological diversity. In fact, they're second only through the Amazon, I think, just how many species are there. And just on the other side, the eastern side of the Western Ghats, is the dry deck and plateau. In the period that I am writing about, it's a plateau that is torn by war. It is one that is defined by constant competition for water, for cattle, for agricultural resources, and of course for women. and it is from this competition that you begin to see political centralisation emerging.

There are many, many dynasties that rise and fall in the decon over the centuries that I write about, but to keep the narrative simple and easier to understand because the deacon is a really interesting region, but I want to make sure that people are able to understand and gently be introduced to its history. I keep the focus on two specific dynasties, the Chalukyas and the Rastrakutas. So both these dynasties rule in the regions corresponding to Maharashtra and Karnataka today. So there's two cent western and southern Indian states, and they create what is perhaps the greatest and most influential empire of the entire medieval period.

This Deccan imperial formation that they create fundamentally transforms the way that Indian polities imagine themselves and the way they fit into the world. Did you know that the earliest condoms were made of animal guts and they were designed to be reused? Or that beans were once considered to be an aphrodisiac? Join me. Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a new podcast from history hit

where I, Kate Lister, ask the questions about the stuff we didn't learn in history lessons, or sex ed. We'll be bed-hopping around different time periods, from ancient civilizations to the Middle Ages, to Renaissance and early modern, right up to now. Listen and subscribe to Betwixt the Sheet Now, wherever you get your podcasts. How about religion in this time period? I mean, how well as Hinduism developed and is that the only religion? What sort of happens in this period?

We have a tendency today, and I think it's partly a result of the proliferation of yoga and other Indian ideas in the West, that India is a place of like unchanging spiritual and religious continuity. But nothing could be further from the truth. Just like Europe, India went through profound and constant religious change and continues to go through that all the way to the present day. I found a little strange when people in New York, for example, are studying these ancient yoga sutras and so on, because it would be like me

studying Plato and claiming that it's like enlightened me and sent me to a higher plane of existence, you know, that kind of thing. But at least in the medieval Deccan, yoga is one of many, many, many schools of thought. And a lot of these are not fundamentally what we would call Hindu today. The religious boundaries that we are familiar with in India today, we think about Hinduism, I think of Islam, we think about Jainism, I think about Buddhism. all of these were very interchangeable labels in the medieval period. All of these religious traditions took a great deal from each other

and competed in some rather ruthless ways to attract royal patronage. I would say the single defining dynamic of medieval Indian religion is the idea of tantra. Now, tantra today is very often associated with weird sex rights and so on. But to medieval Indians, tantra was basically a system of philosophy, a metaphysical system, if you will, that explain to them how you tap into the underlying structure of reality itself and restructure it to gain material and spiritual powers for yourself. So this is something you see in tantaric Buddhism and you also see it in Hinduism. You see it in Ashawism and in Vaishnavism.

And all the way up to the present day, many aspects of Hinduism, including, for example, the sacred geometrical diagram, the yantra, particular kinds of hand gestures, the repetition of particular kinds of mantras. while there is some influence from much older Vedic traditions fundamentally it is really tantra that shapes all these religions it's most clear now in Hinduism but you can still see it in tantric Buddhism which though it did not survive in India continue to survive in Tibet and you'll notice that tantric Buddhism is very different from the Buddha's Buddhism

it is one that is full of thousands of gods it is one that uses sacred geometry and chanting and sounds and rituals and dances to kind of ensure a prosperity to ensure that the rains fall on time and so on and those who have more than a passing knowledge of Hindus, and we'll know that Hindus actually have all of the same things. And this is a relic of the fact that they both stem from one very eclectic school of religious thought that dominated India in the medieval period. And what are the sources that we have for all of this?

Do we have a lot of written sources? Was this all easy to research when you were putting together your book? Or what's the situation in terms of getting this knowledge? One of the really big reasons that India is not as represented, I think, in narratives of global history is because the source, sources are so fragmentary in comparison to medieval China where you actually have detailed court records, administrative records and so on, or medieval Europe where you have biographies and texts that are actually been preserved in monasteries all the way to the

present day. In India, we simply have not done as good a job at preserving our texts. Many of them are still sitting in state museums, in archives, and simply they've been cataloged and have really been studied by scholars and brought to the world's attention. And they were being produced in the medieval period. A lot of texts were being done in thousands of texts as a sense that I get, at least from my reading of sources, but the sources that do survive are either land grants, which were made by Kings to Temples, which were cataloged by the British and published over the

course of the 19th and early 20th century, and also a few texts that were popular enough that they were edited and translated by scholars of the course of the 20th century. So it's a mere fraction of everything that was produced. And unfortunately, though religious texts do still survive in archives and libraries, in if they haven't been studied, court records simply have not. So we have a very poor sense of the kind of populations that these people are ruling over. We don't really know just how much they could expect in terms of land revenue and that. We can infer some things. And of course, the internal worlds of these kings and queens is impossible to reconstruct. We simply do not have any journals that they wrote. We have a few

court commissioned biographies in highly ornate Sanskrit or Canada. But again, these are so stylistically rigid that though you can read some subtext about the poet's mind, it's impossible to get into the minds that people actually root. And of course, nothing survives of the people who lived at the time, the common people. We need decades more of archaeology to actually uncover that truth. And hopefully my book will actually inspire some kind of work on that front. Yeah, absolutely. I hope so indeed. Now, the thing I really wanted to get to and talk to you about is relating to international trade and global connections.

Because, of course, you've already mentioned that you've got this big coastline here. You're sitting right on the Indian Ocean. You obviously got connections going east but also west. And so going across the Indian Ocean to Africa and beyond. And my own research touches on the very far side of this, going connections all the way up to Europe. But tell me a little bit about these sort of external trade connections. How connected are we to the outside world here?

Extremely connected. And there's two examples that really transformed the way that I thought about this. I really shook me with the sheer scale of what we're talking about, right? The first is of course the Helgo Buddha with which you must already be familiar, which is this beautiful bronze Buddha that was made in Kashmir in northern India, which is very far from the deccan, in the 5th or 6th century, and was buried in Helgo near Stockholm in Sweden about 200 days after that. So for an object to reach from the Himalayas all the way across the steppe,

crossing perhaps the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea in the process, many, many mountain ranges, the Iranian plateau, and like this is the sheer scale of that exchange boggles me. It's happening through these. relay networks. That's one example of how connected India was to the world at the time. Another example of it is this fascinating shipwreck that was found off the coast of Indonesia called the Bellytung Shipwreck. And this is interesting because it had 60,000 Chinese ceramics packed into its hull. 60,000 is not a small number. It would have taken an enormous

amount of capital to actually commission something of that scale. It would have required thousands and thousands of man asked to make. There are suggestions that this is probably producing some kind of assembly line, where some people are focusing on shaping the pottery, some are focusing on firing it, some on painting it, some on enameling it. And the most fascinating thing about these bowls is a painted Middle Eastern motifs, though they were produced in China. And we know, of course, through various inscriptions that on the West Coast of India had a very significant Middle Eastern presence. So it was possibly these merchants who were based in India who are acting as intermediaries for buyers in the Middle East and producers in China who are transmitting these designs,

who are arranging capital, who are hiring the crew, you know, getting the ship together for this shipment. And it really, really boggles the mind to think about how cosmopolitan. And just how vast the world of the medieval Indian Ocean was. The medieval Indian Ocean was the central cog in the great global mechanism, that was the economic networks of Afriorasia. And unless we really give a lot more attention to India and all of India's geopolitical regions, we will never really understand how the medieval world came to shape the early modern world. world and then our own. Absolutely. And I completely agree with that. There's some great

examples there. And do you see, well, you would have said that there's not really quite been enough archaeology because presumably seeing some of these traded objects further in land would be further proof, I suppose. But do we know much about how much of an impact this has in land as well? So we have one very interesting port in southern Gujarat and northern Marastra. It's a very contiguous region. It's called Sanjan. This we know was the premier port of the Rastrakuta imperial formation, which is based in the inland deckin. And here we have examples of ceramics from Persia, here are examples of Chinese ceramics, as well as residences of Parsi merchants, as well as a significant West Asian presence, who were actually members of the town council,

as well as, of course, Indians. And as I mentioned my talk, the governor of the port of Sanjan was Persian gentleman by the name of Muhammad Ibn Sharia, who also made grandstow local temple there. So given that he was actually appointed by an intermediary of the Deccan of the emperor of the Deccan himself, and that we have some hints in literature that the capital of the Deccan at the time, a city called Mani Khaeta, had things that we know that the Abbasids had, such as fountains or, you know, very fine automata. Archaeology would really help establish this definitively, but I think the fact that Sanjan, the premier Astrakota port, has so much evidence of interactions to West Asia as well

as of China is a very, very encouraging sign. I really hope that further excavations would really shed light on precisely the scale of what was happening. Absolutely. And so what's next for you? What sort of more research are you planning to do around this now? Well, like I said, medieval southern India is a vast world. And while I've written about the Germany equivalent, there are many, many other smaller regions which have been as influential as the Deccan, either militarily or culturally or economically in terms of shaping how India can be India, that is the area that I intend to work in the next few years. And hopefully my next book will be out in a couple of years as well.

I mean, I don't want to come into anything. I hope my elders aren't listening to this. But yes, it's going to happen at some point. Fantastic. And I think it's really important that those of us who study the other end of this actually really open eyes to seeing how interconnected they were. And you've made a really good case for that now, I think. So I think looking at those objects, looking at the trade, looking at the connections,

I think we are going to get a much better understanding of it. So brilliant. I'm going to keep an eye on this. Maybe I'll come and help you with some of those excretions. Should we do that? Perfect plan. Anyway, thank you so much for joining me here. It's an absolute pleasure to listen to you, talk about this.

My pleasure. Thank you so for having me. So thank you so much to everyone for listening as well. So today's episode was brought to you from Jaipur Literature Festival. So you got the nice atmosphere and the birds and the noises in the background as well, as if you were all here with us. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History Head. Please do remember to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already.

And join us again for the next episode. I'm Dr. Kett Jammann and I hope you'll join me again soon. Thank you.