“Krishnadevaraya was a healthy
man, with medium height and weight who used to drink a glass of gingelly oil
every morning and makes himself sure that he used to exercise until he could
burn it out completely!”
– a vivid description of the entire south Indian
history through relevant facts sans myths and fiction yet, feels exciting than
a Bahubali movie for real!
A History Of South India - From
Pre Historic times to the fall of Vijayanagar' by KA Nilakanta Shastri- One of
those must read books for every history enthusiasts out there. For every
reader/ history enthusiast, it would be a revelation to realize that India, is
not just about the northern plains of Mahabharatha, but also the landmass
towards the south of Godavari which has played a vital role in formulating the demographic,
religious and cultural shape of the nation in its entirety. Shastri’s work is
to be appreciated pretty well since it was initially written in the late 40’s
or probably early 50’s. (However, a revised edition was released in 1975). His
bibliography itself extends to a bulk of reference books. Searching and finding
such voluminous information from varied sources and rearranging and editing
them with very less biased interpretations is really a tedious task in the
pre-internet age as one could imagine. Shastri had done an appreciable job. It contains
16 chapters which includes detailing on the Survey of the sources, the land
history from the period of Aryanization and then from the age of the Mauryan
Empire. The book takes us through the Satavahanan Era before jumping into the
Sangam Age. I don’t want to make any remarks or mention any quoting from the
book since it would be non-sensical to pluck out few beautiful gems from a
great piece of ornament.
The conflicts between the Badamian
Chalukyas, Pallavas, Pandyas and the
Cholas and the inception of the Rashtrakutas from the arrival of Dantidurga,
all has has been described pretty well. The Epic part deals with the entire
history of the Vijayanagar Empire and their unending fights with the Bahamani
Sultans. To begin with Harihara and Bukka, it goes through Krishnadevaraya and
Achyuta Raya.
The book not only deals with the
historic part, but also discusses about the entire history of the South Indian
languages and literature as well. It describes in detail about the Sangam
Literature, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam Literature as well. Nilakanta Shastri
is very clairvoyant and assertive when it comes to facts and interpretations.
The author never tries to force one with any sorts of ideas or ideologies, but,
it just feeds the reader with immense source of knowledge regarding the
inception of religion (from the intervention of Jainism and Budhism, the alvars
and nayanars to the inception of Islam and Christianity as well), culture,
language, art and architecture across the Southern part of India.
Personally, it took me pretty
long time to complete this elegant piece of non-fiction. I had started reading
this a couple of years back on my way to Bangalore. Somehow, during my read, I was pretty blessed
enough to visit and travel through many of the places like- Mysore, Bangalore, Krishnagiri,
Hosur, Madurai, Chennai (including the areas like Chengalpet, Arcot, Kanchipuram etc), Madurai,Pondicherry, Chidambaram,
Cuddalore, Pondicherry, Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram), Nellore, Chittore, Kalahasti
etc. which are subject to strong mentioning in the book. As a result, I could
relate all those historical manifestations described within the book to those
fictional imaginations that I had in my mind during my travel. It would be hard
to control one’s desire to travel across South India after reading the book and
it is better to make a travel so as to engross the entire history into one’s
mind. The thoughts imbibed with realization could place the reader at a
different level of time-zone, where the past gets deducted to future and the ‘present’
becomes just a mere and unimportant flick of existence.
- Rahul Sankalpa
No comments:
Post a Comment