[New post] Summer Read #8: The Majesty of History (of the Deccan)
Sukanya Ramanujan posted: " Lords of the Deccan by Anirudh Kanisetti, published by Juggernaut Books (2022) History is a bit like the proverbial storm in chaos theory, an accumulation of butterfly effects, where seemingly small actions provoke a larger than life legacy. History i" Sukanya Ramanujan
Lords of the Deccan by Anirudh Kanisetti, published by Juggernaut Books (2022)
History is a bit like the proverbial storm in chaos theory, an accumulation of butterfly effects, where seemingly small actions provoke a larger than life legacy. History is not a monolith that stays unchanging. It is a fabric that is woven from an infinite number of strands and every generation of observers and chroniclers notice the patterns and designs that most resonate with them. It is impossible to have a complete history of anything as there are almost always an impossible number of factors that have an influence on history. Does that mean it is useless to study history? Far from it. Imperfect as it may be, history is probably our best bet to learn from both the successes and failures of people who lived before us. If history tends to look like it repeats itself, it is almost always because we refuse to learn from the past.
In our STEM obsessed societies, humanities and history have been forced to take a back seat. The way we teach history in schools builds an automatic aversion for the subject into most people who believe that history is boring and will not be convinced otherwise. It is also not helpful that there are no accessible and credible accounts of our history that can be understood and relate to a broad audience. The best book about any segment of Indian history was probably written 50-60 years ago or written in a heavy academic style and published in a book or journal that is almost impossible to access.
This is such a tragedy as history can be so interesting. Humans are intrinsically drawn to stories. So how can our collective story be boring? We ignore history to our loss.
It's not all doom and gloom though. There is an attempt by a recent generation of authors in India to bring well researched history to a large and general audience. Anirudh Kanisetti's 'Lords of the Deccan' is a stellar book that falls into the category. The book presents a broad sweeping (well over half a millennium) narrative tracing the history of the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas and their spheres of interaction with other major dynasties in South India.
Kanisetti uses clear language in an engaging style which makes reading over 360 pages a breeze. This could have been a monotonous book given that it covers such a large time period and talks about historical figures that not everybody is familiar with (given the cursory treatment given to dynasties such as the Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas in high school textbooks), but Kanisetti keeps the reader interested with his lively descriptions of the key players, their motivations, all the while setting the narrative within a broader socio-political context. Overall, the book traces not just the history of the rulers, but also how they shaped and were shaped by forces that were acting in South Asia including and most importantly, religion and trade (that great driver of economies and cultural exchange). It also gives interesting information on other characters who lived in these times whether these were the stapathi architects of the temples that reflected imperial aspirations or the powerful clan of merchants who probably weilded as much influence as any royal or the grammarians and poets who made medieval India the colourful place it was.
The book is also very well researched and extensively referenced. The author mentions over three years spent in researching the material. I always love a book with a robust bibliography and this book offers not only endnotes for various discussion points (please publishers, can we use footnotes so I don't have to juggle multiple bookmarks) as well as a list of primary and secondary reference works. Anybody who is interested with the specifics can always research topics in more detail.
I think that books such as these are also important because they enrich your general experience of these places. Thousands of people visit Ellora caves every year. I myself visited Aurangabad in 2016 and wandered around (in the crazy April heat) the vast groups of caves, some of which were Buddhist, others Shaivaite and so on. While I could on the surface appreciate the skill of the craftsmen and the enormous number of labourers who would need to have worked on a site to convert a mountain into a massive temple, I had little or no background to who had ordered the building of these structures or why. At least there is hope for my someday visit to Badami, Pattadakal and Aihole. (It's not all bad, at least I had my own images for the post!)
We've also all been well schooled in the Western European worldview and a point that the author makes which I completely agree with is the fact that we shouldn't look at the medieval period as the dark ages. While it might have been truly dark in Western Europe (was it though?), that was hardly the case in India and especially in the South where rival kingdoms not only competed against each other for military might, but also for prestige in arts and culture. If you think about it, the magnificent Kailasanatha temple in Ellora was built in the 8th Century CE. The Cholas who were forever feuding with the Deccan dynasts built the world famous temples around Tanjore in the 11th Century CE, all of it before the Norman conquest had even taken place. More than for any kind of patriotic chest thumping, books such as 'Lords of the Deccan' tell us that there are many more stories, many more worldviews than just the dominant narrative.
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