Georg Berkemer The Chronicle of a Little Kingdom Some Reflections on the Tekkali-tälükä Jamimdärla Vamsävali Introduction In the history of Andhra and Orissa there is very little known about the details of dynasty building and state administration during the period of the kingdoms of the Gangas and the Süryavamsa Gajapatis. These two dynasties of Hindu rulers, who reigned in northern coastal Andhra, the medieval Kalinga, and later also in Orissa, from 498 to 1434, and from 1434 to 1568, respectively, dominated politically the time we may call 'medieval' in that area. The historical sources pertaining to these two dynasties, predominantly copper-plates and temple inscriptions, give plenty of information on the general outline of their history and administration.1 We can make out regular and irregular successions of rulers, foundations of new capitals, patronage over new state deities, administrative reforms, and much more infor- mation about how a state system developed from a small local principality in the nuclear area of the Vamsadhara Valley into a large empire of all-Indian importance by the year AD 1200. The sources for the medieval period thus provide the material for the kind of his- torical study that may best be termed 'descriptive'. Since the sources are predominantly the result of a deliberate attempt to make a ruler and his administration be viewed as a traditional dharmic king with his circle of councillors and priests, emphasis in these sources is laid more on the proper result of an administrative measure, and, even more so, on the proper description of this result. The description contains, as it were, a potential past for the use by future generations. The decision-making process within the administration remains obscure. Who were the persons involved in the process of gather- ing information necessary to make a certain decision possible? Rarely anything but titles 1 The inscriptions are published in South Indian Inscriptions (Sil), Vol. IV, V, VI, X; Inscriptions of Orissa (IO), Vol. II, III, V; Temple Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh (TIAP), Vol. I; R. Subrah- manyam, Inscriptions of the Süryavamsi Gajapatis of Orissa. Delhi 1986; K. B. Tripathi, Evolution of Oriya Language and Script. Cuttack 1962. For further information on the administration of medieval Orissa and Kalinga see also H. Kulke, Jagannatha-Kult und Gajapati- Königtum. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte religiöser Legitimation hinduistischer Herrscher. Wiesbaden 1979; N. Mukunda Rao, Kalinga under the Eastern Gangas ca. 900 - 1200 A. D. Delhi 1991; S. K. Panda, Herrschaft und Verwaltung im östlichen Indien unter den späten Gangas (ca. 1038-1434). Stuttgart 1986; K. C. Panigrahi, History of Orissa. Cuttack 1981; C. V. Ramachandra Rao, Administration and Society in Medieval Andhra (A. D. 1038 - 1538) under the Later Eastern Gariga and the Süryavamsa Gajapatis. Nellore 1976; R. Subrahmanyam, The Suryavamsi Gajapatis of Orissa. Visakhapatnam 1957. 66 Georg Berkemer and personal names are mentioned. Who had to be consulted by whom and was a council given or taken as a part of an office, a hereditary privilege or some personal merit? Who had the right to intervene in the routine processes? How much was 'inter- nal politics' free from the intervention of neighbours and superior kings? In short, all questions about the administrative process necessary before an official document like a copper plate could be handed over to its recipient and eventually come down to us, remain more or less unanswered. This is due to the fact that, with the exception of Nepal, no state archive of a medieval Hindu state has survived the turbulent centuries following the time of the Hindu regional kingdoms in the climatic conditions of the Indian subcontinent. To solve the problem of reconstructing a state administration at work, several other groups of sources from outside the political body itself may provide information. For instance, normative texts like the Arthasástra and the various treatises on rajadharma tell us how administration was supposed to work. But the authors of these texts rightly assumed that their readers or listeners were more familiar with the details of the work than we are. Therefore, they were more in need of an outline for a reputable and suc- cessful political strategy than for a painstaking description of an actual clerk's work, which the historian would like to find among his sources. Another group of texts, i.e. accounts written by foreign visitors to India, give a more detailed description of the actual circumstances the traveller found himself in, and more about the daily routine of public life may be gleaned from there. A traveller may also describe in detail the administrative processes he found himself subjected to. But this information is limited in so far as a foreigner rarely has the experience necessary to understand the customary or the perhaps uncommon behaviour of the administrative apparatus he is observing or may be subjected to. What he observes is necessarily a part of a system of political categories different from his own. He will more often see the parts of the Indian political system as similar to or different from phenomena known to him and his readers from his own country, and thus try to 'translate' his observations into the language of comparative political symbols known to him from home. In the categories of sources described so far, be they original traditional documents from a dynasty itself, normative texts, or foreign accounts, another problem arises: only rarely do we find the same set of data mentioned in more than one source or a sequence of sources of which a later one explicitly or implicitly refers to a previous document. Developments in chancellery styles and regional varieties which develop while ideas spread from the centre into its hinterland or its neighbouring regions are hard to re- construct.2 Even though I doubt that the question of the routine function of a state administra- tion in medieval Andhra and Orissa can ever be settled, one more group of sources may be taken into consideration here. I mean those texts, vamsavalis, kaiphiyats, pürvóttarams etc., which were written for the purposes of 'modern' administrations, especially as a kind of cadastral register, long after the year 1568. Most of those were written at the request of the Surveyor General of the Madras Presidency, Col. Colin Mackenzie, 2 To mention just one example: it is clear that the usage of the áaka-era in the inscriptions of Orissa was introduced from the south at approx. AD 1000. But none of the inscriptions reveals any details of the way this was done or why. Chronicle of a Little Kingdom 67 around 1800.3 1 shall describe one example in this contribution. This type of literature shows underneath a veneer of Muslim and European terminology and in addition deal- ing with the foreign overlords in an often rather modern, 'diplomatic' way, the remnants of the older systems of patronage, donations of gifts, and fluent 'segmentary' power structures of ambitious little kings, as soon as internal issues of the landholding élite are concerned. In other words: these texts may have been written in the time of Colonel Mackenzie, but they have clearly been influenced by the older regional tradition which the little king or the author of the text sees himself a part of. Before describing one of the texts in detail, let me very shortly state the characteristic features of classical and medieval Hindu sociopolitical organisations. The list is not very systematic and surely not comprehensive. In order to sum up the theoretical discussions in the context of such paradigms as the oikos and the patrimonial state (Weber),4 the seg- mentary state (Southall, Stein) and the little kingdom (Cohn, Dirks, Schnepel),5 the following points may be mentioned as characterizing a 'medieval' state system: There is a set of categories considered by all participants in the political system as normative: categories derived from the Dharmasästras. These categories form a set of traditional basic values. 3 The author owes much insight into these problems to the works of scholars like N. Dirks, V. Narayana Rao and D. D. Shulman, who did pioneering research on the local rulers of southern India and their ideology of state esp. in Tamil Nadu, and who made use of the material preserved at the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, of which the Mackenzie Collection is the most important part for historical research (cf. N. Dirks, The Structure and Meaning of Political Relations in a South Indian Little Kingdom. CIS (N.S.) 1979, pp. 169-206; Terminology and Taxonomy; Discourse and Domination: From Old Regime to Colonial Regime in South India, in: R. Frykenberg and P. Kolenda (eds.), Studies in South India: Anthology of Recent Research. Madras and Delhi 1985, pp. 127-149; The Hollow Crown. Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. Cambridge 1987; Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography as Archive, in: C. Breckenridge and P. van de Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia 1993, pp. 279-313; V. Narayana Rao, Epics and Ideologies: Six Telugu Folk Epics, in: 5. H. Blackburn and A. K. Ramanujan (eds.), Another Harmony. New Essays on the Folklore of India. Berkeley 1986; V. Narayana Rao, D. D. Shulman and S. Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance. Court and State in Näyaka Period Tamilnadu. Delhi 1992 (esp. Chapter VII); D. D. Shulman, On South Indian Bandits and Kings. IESHR 17, 1980, pp. 283-306; D. D. Shulman and S. Subrahmanyam, The Men who Would be King? The Politics of Expansion in Early Seventeenth-Century Tamil Nadu. MAS 24, 1990, pp.225-248. 4 For the term oikos cf. §7 of chapter III in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen 1980, pp. 230- 233) and passim, for the patrimonial state cf.