Abstract
Y. S
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Y. Subbarayalu’s work for the field of medieval South Indian history, especially for the study of Cōḻa-period state and society. Quite literally, all of the major positions over the last generation of Coḻa studies depend fundamentally upon his scholarship, both upon his own work and on the invaluable reference materials and scholarly tools he has helped to produce. Much of this work has been collaborative in nature, especially in the form of the decades-long partnership Subbarayalu has enjoyed with Noboru Karashima. Often overlooked however is the shaping influence Subbarayalu’s early studies exerted upon Burton Stein, often caricatured as an overreaching bête noire to the rigorously empiricist scholarship of Subbarayalu, Karashima and their collaborators. In fact, Stein’s signature attention to the nāṭu-s that formed the building blocks of Cōḻa polity derived—as he readily acknowledged—from his reading of Subbarayalu’s first monograph, The Political Geography of the Chola Country (1973). Over the past four decades, Subbarayalu has produced an enormously valuable body of work, much of which has been delivered as research papers to meetings of the Indian History Congress and to seminars around the country. OUP has done a great service in providing him the opportunity to collect these and other short pieces into this volume; with the recent publication of similar collections by Karashima and Kesavan Veluthat both from Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2009, the press has done its part to promote a state-of-the-field synthesis of medieval South India.
This volume brings together seventeen of Subbarayalu’s essays, most of them previously published, though all have been revised for this volume. The essays are unevenly grouped into two sections: the first five are grouped as ‘Epigraphy and History’, while the remaining twelve are placed under ‘State and Society’. The two rubrics are vague and the rationale behind their division not entirely clear: roughly, one might describe the first set of papers as philological in orientation, while the second group more directly pertain to social history. Thus, the opening five essays focus on the interpretation of particular terms, onomastic conventions and—in two cases—with the edition or translation of individual epigraphic texts, while the essays that form the bulk of the book concern themselves with revenue history, changing patterns of land tenure and of agrarian social relations, and with the reconstruction and explanation of the apparatus of the Cōḻa state.
Especially worthy of note among the opening, broadly philological essays, is the all-too-brief ‘Sociological Aspects of Names and Titles’ (pp. 48–58), bringing together several earlier papers; in this the centrepiece is an elegant prosopographical sketch of three generations of a Brahman family of Coḻa officials. But Subbarayalu’s greatest contributions surely lie in his unparalleled command over the intricacies of the Cōḻa agrarian order and in his painstaking ability to reconstruct its details. K.A. Nilakantha Sastri, the greatest Cōḻa historian of the Independence generation—and a scholar to whom Subbarayalu pays characteristically respectful homage throughout this volume—famously threw up his hands at the reconstruction of the imperial polity’s revenue system. The conclusions presented in the volume’s central chapters thus evince the revolution in Cōḻa social and administrative history that Subbarayalu’s work represents. So, in a fascinating description of the problems of land mensuration and classification (‘Land under Chola Rule: Measurement, Quantification, and Assessment’, pp. 77–99), Subbarayalu reconstructs both the complexities of field measurement (different local measures were employed throughout the region, despite imperial efforts at standardisation) and the remarkable vernacular knowledge practices that converted real fields into the idealities of assessment, employing an impressive battery of arithmetical techniques (including multiple power series) to notionally produce infinitesimally small parcels of assessed land.
This study is preliminary to a virtuoso piece of cliometrics, a meticulous reconstruction of the mature Cōḻa state’s annual revenue yield (‘Quantifying Land Revenue of the Chola State’, pp. 100–15). Almost all of the surviving evidence of the revenue system is negative in nature—to be found in the details of tax remissions to temple lands and brahmadeya estates—and so it is only by comparing the adventitiously recorded data across the enormous corpus of Cōḻa inscriptions that some inferences as to the tax system can be ventured. Subbarayalu does just this, and his conclusion—that at the height of its imperial successes, the Cōḻa state laid claim to a staggering 87,000 metric tonnes of paddy per annum (p. 103)—goes some way to putting to rest the idea of the Cōḻa kingdom as a weakly integrated, largely ceremonial polity. Subsidiary to his effort at revenue calculation, but of deep significance for the interpretation of Cōḻa-era politics and society, is Subbarayalu’s convincing explanation that temple and brahmadeya lands classed as iṟaiyili (‘taxfree’) were in fact actually only subject to a large reduction, rather than remission, of land tax. Equally salutary is the reminder that, despite the evidentiary bias in favour of these socially élite institutions, the massive majority of villages (more than 75 per cent) were regular cultivating communities, classed as veḷḷāṉvakai (‘agricultural type’) in the revenue system and paying full tax.
The volume concludes with a revision of the classic essay ‘The Chola State’, spread out over the final two chapters. It is in a sense slightly strange to end the volume with this, as it is the single greatest introduction ever written on its subject. As published here, the theoretical debates on the nature of the Cōḻa political system are hived off into a final, reflective essay (‘Characterizing the Chola State’, pp. 248–58). This makes good sense, allowing as it does Subbarayalu’s interpretative sketch to stand on its own. In the final paper, this resolutely anti-theoretical historian’s historian shows himself more than able to vigorously critique the adequacy of existing models, whether it be Stein’s anthropologically-conceived segmentary state, the Marxist modes-of-production theory once championed by Kathleen Gough or the broadly Weberian ‘early state’ typology of Claessen and Skalnik (though Subbarayalu does not mention it, this last is the model championed in the late James Heitzman’s Gifts of Power). But this final, spirited defence of the overriding complexity of the Cōḻa-period social order in the face of reductive explanatory frameworks seems less a positivist foreclosure of any possible theorisation than an exhortation to try to better capture the dynamism of medieval South Indian politics, economy and society.