Abstract
Professor Noboru Karashima was one of the few outstanding Japanese historians who has enriched Indian historiography during the last five decades. Son of a professor of Chinese language, he had been working on South Indian history using Tamil inscriptions as primary sources ever since he submitted his graduation thesis on an aspect of Chola history (in Japanese) in the Department of Oriental History in the University of Tokyo in 1958. Japan being a Buddhist country, the major Indian studies in Japanese Universities, until about 1960, were generally related to North India using Sanskrit-related sources. Hence, Karashima’s choice of Chola history using Tamil sources was a revolutionary change in Japanese universities. In the subsequent three decades of his teaching career, he could motivate more students to study South India, and his achievement in that venture may be clearly seen in the many contributions of his students to his last major edited work, A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations, published in 2014. In 1967, he joined as a lecturer in Indian History in the Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) attached to the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. In 1974, he returned to the University of Tokyo, his alma mater, as associate professor in South Asian History and then served as professor from 1981 to 1994. After that, he served as professor of Indian Studies in the Taisho University, Tokyo, from 1994 to 2004. He continued to be professor emeritus of both the universities until his demise.
In the first stage, from his graduation to about 1980, he gradually mastered the technique of handling the epigraphical sources from the scratch. In 1963, he got enrolled in the History Department of Madras University as an exchange student and spent most of his time in Ootacamund, where the Epigraphy Office of the Archaeological Survey of India was located at that time, to learn Tamil and study inscriptions. After he joined ILCAA in 1967, he could spend more time in the Epigraphy Office at Mysuru whereto the office had been shifted in 1966. During 1968–70, he actually lived with his family for nearly three years in Mysuru and started his passionate and intensive epigraphical studies under the guidance of senior epigraphists such as K. G. Krishnan. At this juncture, he started his first collaborative work with B. Sitaraman of the Epigraphy Office on the Revenue Terms in the Chola inscriptions.
In this work, he tried to experiment with his new methodology of studying inscriptional data using quantitative methods and taking cue from a suggestion of Nilakanta Sastri, the doyen of the Chola history who despaired about the prevailing unsatisfactory interpretation of the data on taxes and stressed the fact that any explanation at that stage could be only some tentative inferences from the records which would require confirmation or modification in the light of further study. Karashima (1984, p. 69) took up this challenge: It is not only the meaning of the revenue terms that we do not know but also their correlation and degree of importance. In fact, the very mode of occurrence of these terms, which present a rich variety, is rather arbitrary and often irregular. The only way to bring light into this darkness, therefore, is to study those revenue terms systematically and to examine each of them analytically.
He suggested that a concordance of all the revenue terms, within certain time and spatial parameters, is a desideratum which may help in the statistical analysis of the terms, give contextual clues to their correct meaning and also suggest the overall significance of the individual terms in the revenue system of the day.
During 1973–75, the next major project in Chola inscriptions was undertaken (in collaboration with Y. Subbarayalu) to study the personal names and titles for understanding the social and political organisation of the Chola times. A concordance of nearly 9000 names was prepared by using hole-sort punch cards in the first stage and later converting the same into computer cards to analyse the data by using the mainframe computer facilities of the Tokyo University. In 1977, another study on socio- and agro-economic terms in the inscriptions of Thanjavur district was made by Karashima and Sitaraman. In this, a concordance of the agrarian and other correlated socio-economic terms was prepared in order to understand the historical setting for a big research project of ILCAA—to study the agrarian society in the three big river valleys in South Asia, that is, in the Ganga–Brahmaputra delta in Bangladesh, Mahaveliganga valley in Sri Lanka and the lower Kaveri valley in South India. The Institute sent a team of Japanese specialists comprising of cultural anthropologists, historians, economists and geographers to South India in 1979 to carry out field survey in the lower Kaveri valley in collaboration with some Indian scholars. This project carried out over a three-year period, 1979–82, gave an opportunity to Karashima and his Indian associates to study thoroughly the archaeology and inscriptions of Tiruchirappalli district, resulting in some interesting publications. Karashima completed his major paper on the emergence of private landholding in the later phase of the Chola rule, mainly on the basis of the inscriptions collected in this area. In 1984, his first collection of essays entitled South Indian History and Society was published. This included all the important papers pertaining to the Chola times starting with his first seminal paper made in 1966 on Allur and Isanamangalam, asserting the existence of communal landholding until the tenth–eleventh centuries.
As a natural sequel to his Chola studies, Karashima took up his research in the Vijayanagara history thereafter. He wanted to make a comprehensive study of the Nayaka system by using Tamil inscriptions to verify and elaborate the pioneer study of N. Venkataramanayya who had depended mostly on the Telugu sources. Besides, a collaborative study was made of the Vijayanagara period revenue terms found in Tamil inscriptions (1988). This was later extended to Kannada and Telugu areas too (1993). The second major book, Towards a New Formation (1992), may be said to be an important landmark in Vijayanagara historiography as it clarified the structure and functioning of the Nayaka system and brought in sharp focus the changes in the society. An extension of this study was his book, A Concordance of the Nayakas (2002), which put together all the relevant information relating to some five hundred Nayaka chiefs. Another subsequent study of Cynthia Talbot on the basis of Telugu inscriptions has fully corroborated the findings of Karashima on the Nayaka system.
Three other projects, somehow related to each other, extended the horizon of his research activities beyond the confines of South India: first, the exploration for the Chinese trade ceramics in South India (1987–89 and 2002), second, a project on the trade and cultural contacts between South India and Southeast Asia (1991–95) and third, the analysis of trade guild inscriptions of South India and Sri Lanka (1997–98). In all these projects involving field surveys, several Japanese and Indian scholars were involved. The findings from all these projects formed part of a volume (2002). A companion volume on ceramic sherds with colour illustrations was published in 2004. An observation may be made here on the above projects, that is, Karashima’s encouragement to team work. In a way, this is the hallmark of the several study groups active in Japanese academic institutions. Brought up in this academic atmosphere, Karashima showed great interest in organising the collaborative projects with the financial help from the Japan government, Mitsubishi and Japan Foundations, and also ICHR in one instance, and saw to their successful completion producing much new knowledge on the medieval history of South India.
When Karashima published his first volume, there was criticism about his concentration on micro-level studies. Actually, those earlier studies introduced the necessary corrective to many of the previous studies which used the inscriptions arbitrarily without any reference to spatial and temporal parameters. Later, when he became more familiar with the nature of inscriptional sources and confident in handling them, he extended his studies to macro-levels too, as may be noticed in his study of the Vijayanagara period and trade guild activities. From the beginning, he was very meticulous in analysing the empirical data, and at the same time, he was not for pure descriptive methods. Although he was not so explicit in his theoretical stand, Marxist or other, he always gave emphasis to the scientific interpretation of the data.
There is another aspect of Karashima which is least known to English readers. He encouraged his students to write in English for communicating with the outside world, which he also practiced. At the same time, he was an effective writer in Japanese language and published most of his English papers in Japanese versions also. He wrote and edited a number of books in Japanese. There is a popular book by Karashima and his wife on India, Watashi tachi no Indo (This is Our India), and a book on Gandhi for children. Until 1990, he used to write the Japanese articles only by hand as Japanese typewriter was a cumbersome machine to handle. His wife, who was a history graduate herself, was mostly helping him in fair-copying his manuscripts for the press. Once the Japanese word processor (prelude to the actual desktop computer) became available, he started using it and gradually shifted to computer.
Karashima was quite devoted to his academic pursuits. He was certainly a workaholic. In 2004, when he retired from Taisho University, he wished to retire from active academic work and take to his old-time hobby of woodcarving. However, it did not happen. He went on making more papers to make his third major book Ancient to Medieval: South Indian Society in Transition in 2009. Then he started the work on Concise History of South India (2014), which he once thought would be his posthumous publication as he was off and on becoming critically ill at that juncture due to the malfunctioning of liver. Just a month back, he almost completed editing two books for the Indian Study section of the Toyo Bunko Research Department. He was the general president of Epigraphical Society of India for the year 1985. He was closely associated with the International Association of Tamil Research and presented several papers in its annual conferences. He was its president for more than a decade since 1989. The Indian government conferred on him the Padma Shri Award for his contribution to Indo-Japanese understanding. Professor Karashima and his wife loved India very much and had a number of Indian friends. They had planned to visit India in January 2016 after a two-year gap. Unfortunately, the visit could not materialise as he was hospitalised early in November and breathed his last on 26 November due to sudden development of Leukemia.