II - South India: Some General Considerations of the Region and its Early History

Summary

The term ‘south India’ denotes that portion of peninsular India beneath the Krishna river and the watershed of its major tributary, the Tungabhadra. There is an arbitrariness in this delineated territory which is as egregious as any geographical convention adopted for expository purposes. Looked at in a contemporary light, this division of peninsular India partitions two of the modern states of India, leaving their northern portions out of the present discussion. Were modern states of India merely constitutive units of administrative convenience, this mutilation would require little comment. However, the modern states of Andhra and Karnātaka are taken as significant cultural regions, a consideration which justified the demands for separate statehood two decades ago when they were created in independent India. Valid as the arguments of those who demanded and suffered for the creation of these states may have been in the 1950s, these modern states are not valid spatial units for the study of many historical questions of the middle period of south Indian history. Northern Karnātaka – called by the British ‘the Bombay Karnatak’ – and Telengana may be excluded from the purview of this discussion on the basis of the former area's historical association with the northern portions of the Deccan peninsula and the latter area's very late development as a region of any sort. Malabar might have been excluded from the macro-régime of south India on equally valid grounds, but most particularly because after the tenth century this region, along with the rest of Chera country (Kerala) was a region of extreme isolation from other parts of the southern peninsula.