Noboru KARASHIMA, South Indian Society in Transition: Ancient to Medieval

442 Book Reviews / JESHO 54 (2011) 417-446

Noboru KARASHIMA, South Indian Society in Transition: Ancient to Medieval. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xx + 306 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-806312-4 (pbk.). $35.00.

These thirteen studies that were originally published in Indian journals and collations represent Noboru Karashima’s most recent research on pre- 1400 South Indian history and society. The book is focused on the era of Chola rule over the Coromandel coastal, riverine, and upstream regions of South India from c. 875-1279, as the Chola age was foundational to the subsequent Vijayanagara polity (fourteenth-sixteenth centuries). Collec- tively, Karashima’s studies demonstrate that research on early South India needs to be based in detailed epigraphic analysis. The first section, ‘Change in Landholding and Production System’, is the strongest of three, as its four chapters continue Karashima’s prior research on transitions in South Indian landholding over the course of almost five centuries. These chapters provide new case studies that document wider societal patterns. A rich corpus of roughly 19,000 epigraphic records remaining from the Chola era allows Karashima to detail landholding-linked transfers (income and user rights) to temples that then funded a variety of ritual needs and activities, as also temple and related secular community land sales, government orders, decisions of local assemblies, resolutions of communities, and political compacts. Thematically, Karashima concludes that during the inclusive Chola age local landholding transitioned from substantially communal holdings in the earliest era to individual property in the later eras. Chola-era inscriptions on temple walls and elsewhere document landholding rights relative to use, transfers of ownership or landed income rights, exemptions from taxation, and rights to property production, among Brahmans, non-Brahmans, temples, political authorities/military, cultivators, and merchants and artisans. Karashima uses these epigraphic citations to support his view that there was increasing centralization of Chola political authority (state) over most of the southeast India region, against the views of Burton Stein1 that the Chola polity, except in its Kaveri riverine heartland, was better characterized as a segmented state sovereignty. In Stein’s view, the Chola state depended on a temple-based ‘ritual- ized sovereignty’ to induce the participation of its other linked regions.

1) Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980).

Karashima critiques Stein’s thesis on the basis that his data analysis was selective, and that ultimately Stein’s analysis supported Western views that pre-modern Oriental societies were based in unchanging village communities. In contrast, the studies in Karashima’s book demonstrate that Chola- era village societies were certainly not unchanging. The author reports that Chola monarchs periodically induced realm- wide land surveys, standardizations of grain and land measures, rede- finitions of territories (Cholamandalam, Tondaimandalam, and other divisional reorganizations), bureaucratization (kings’ secretariats and revenue departments), and prince-governors as these are all documented in the epigraphic records of landholding transitions. In addition, he argues that royal hegemony in the late tenth through the twelfth centuries was the base for successful Chola overseas ventures in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, as these are documented in the Chola-era inscriptions from these regions and acknowledged in Chinese sources. Karashima demarcates four periods of Chola rule. Period I, 875-985, marked the rise and initial expansion of Chola authority beyond their Kaveri River basin dynastic homeland; Period II, 986-1070, was the Chola ‘imperial era’ consequent to the conquests and overseas initiatives of Rajaraja I (r. 985-1014) and his son Rajendra I (r. 1014-1044); the subsequent Period III, 1071-1178, began with the Chalukya-Chola monarch Kulottunga I’s (r. 1072-1120) conquest and subsequent restructuring of the Chola realm; and Period IV, 1179-1279, was a prolonged era of Chola decay. In the first era, Chola sovereignty depended on the continuity of local agrarian community support, especially by ur settlements/villages of non- Brahman cultivators, Vellala, who Karashima proposes held property in common and determined communal use rights in their ur assemblies. In contrast, Brahman landholders, often connected to local Siva or Visnu temples patronized by Chola kings, occupied Brahmadeya communities, where they held individual (rather than communal) handholding rights. Brahmadeya landholders and other local residents participated in the community sabha administrative assemblies. The consolidation of the Chola imperial state in Period II brought new potentials, specifically as the conquest of Sri Lanka and other territorial expansionism provided abundant revenue to sustain Chola imperial gran- deur, marked by lavish beneficence to Chola realm temples by Chola monarchs and their political and military subordinates. Karashima’s view of this era is consistent with his projection of a Chola imperial state, against prior