Symbols of substance: court and state in Nāyaka Period Tamilnadu

386 Pages·024.618 MB·English

by  Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Dean Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam

SYMBOLS OF SUBSTANCE
Court and State in Nayaka
Period Tamilnadu

SYMBOLS OF SUBSTANCE
Court and State in Nayaka
Period Tamilnadu
VELCHERU NARAYANA RAO
DAVID SHULMAN
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
DELHI
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD NEW YORK
1992
Oxford University Press, Walton Stree1, Oxford OX2 6DP
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© Oxford University Press 1992
SBN 0 19 563021 1
Typeset by Rastrixi, New Delhi 110030
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and published by S. K. Mookerjee, Oxford tlniversity Press
YMCA Library Building, ]ai Singh Road, New Delhi 110001
For A.K. RAMANUJAN
master of friendship
nu7J.ailkiya ke{viyar

Contents
Preface ix
List of Abbreviations XV
Acknowledgements xvn
List of Maps and Illustrations
XVlll
I. Introduction 1
1. A gandharva's-eye view of South India
2. The Subahdar of the Cot
II. From Vijayanagara to the Nayakas 23
1. Outlines of Political History
2. Nagama Niyaka Creates a State
III. The Cultural Economy of Nayaka Rule 57
1. The Structure of Enjoyment
,
2. The Spendthrift Siidra King
3. Resources and their Circulation
IV. Nayaka Anthropology 113
1. First Instrument of Dharma
2. Sarangadhara: Hesitant Hippolytus
3. Ahalya and Tara: The Ideology of Violation
v.
The Rhetoric of Kingship 169
1. Marriage-broker for a God
2. Virasrngara: The King as Avatar
3. Love in the Soup-Kitchen
viii SYMBOLS OF SUBSTANCE
VI. The Art of War under the Nayakas 220
Vll. On the Periphery: State Formation and Deformation 242
l. The North: Yacama Nayaka and the Velugoti Line
2. The South: Maravar, KaUar and Marailliyar
VIII. Conclusion 305
1. Visions of the Fall: Tanjavur, September 1673
2. Towards the Marathas
Bibliography 319
Note on Sources 334
Index 341
Preface
This book began with a happy coincidence. Two of the authors
found themselves in Philadelphia, under the gracious auspices of
the Department of South Asian Regional Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania, in 1987-8. Mutual interest in sixteenth-and seventeenth
century Tamil Nadu soon elicited areas of complementary fr1:1stration:
the literary historian looked longingly toward the 'hard' analytical data
of the economic historian, while the latter found the Telugu and Tamil
sources from the royal courts engaging and vivid in a way quite
different from the Dutch, English and Portuguese records. Internal and
external perspectives converged, and a picture slowly emerged of the
region as viewed by its own articulate elites as well as by those foreign
observers who had arrived, with a view to staying, on its shores.
The Nayaka period in the history of Tamil Nadu, with which this
book is concerned, extends roughly from the early sixteenth century to
the 1730s, when the last of the' great' Nayaka states, Madurai, fell. The
three major Nayaka states-ruled respe~tively from Senji, Tanjavur
and Madurai/Tiruccirappalli-had differing life-spans, de
velopmental patterns, geo-ecological environments, and, inevitably,
distinct forms of historical experience; they also shared salient struc
tural features and cultural dynamics. At their height, in the early
seventeenth century, they encompassed the greater part of the Tamil
country. It is evident though-even from this summary description-
- that we are dealing with states far smaller than, say, the Mughal empire
(which was roughly contemporaneous with the Nayakas), or the Kar
nataka (Vijayanagara) empire, from which the Nayaka kingdoms
X SYMBOLS OF SUBSTANCE
derived. In general, these states have been unduly neglected by modern
historians: most general histories of India written in the last two
decades do not even mention the Nayakas, treating the period from 1565
(the defeat of Vijayanagara at the hands of the Deccan Sultanates) to
1761 (the rise of Haidar Ali in Mysore) as something akin to a black
hole in south Indian history. Only recently has this neglect begun to
give way to a new interest in the Nayakas and their time; were it not
for these slowly accumulating studies of our scholarly colleagues
working in this field-Susan Bayly, Carol Appadurai Breckenridge,
Nicholas Dirks, Noboru Karashima, David Ludden, George Michell, R.
Nagaswamy, Pamela Price, Burton Stein, Joanne. Waghorne, Paul
Younger, and others, to all of whom we are indebted in manifold
ways-the present work would surely not have been possible.
It is our thesis, set out at length in the following pages, that the
Nayakas witnessed (and partly produced) a profound shift in the
conceptual and institutional bases of south Indian civilization. This
monograph does not set out to document that shift in a definitive way,
for we are only too aware of how far we still ren1ain fron1 the possibility
of a Burckhardtean synthesis for this period, to say nothing of our. own
limited powers. Moreover, as just noted, Nayaka south India has been
largely ignored, its cultural universe devalued and disdained, until
very recent times. One of the major reasons for this is surely that the
immense wealth of sources from this period remains to a very large
extent unexplored. This is partly a question of the heavy linguistic
demands made by the materials-in Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Por
tuguese, Dutch and Italian-but it also stems from deeper method
ological roots. Still regnant prejudices ensure that some of the richest
sources are treated as somehow illegitimate: for if inscriptions and
travel accounts continue to provide the historian's staple fare, literary
materials are often regarded with considerable suspicion.
We have sought to redress this imbalance in an experimental
mode. To attempt at one and the same time to explore the rich diversity
of source materials in Indian and European languages and to structure
these around unitary themes has proved difficult; if there is any major
unifying force to this work, it remains largely methodological, i.e. the
Rashomon-like refraction of diverse materials to focus on a single
'screen'. Nor have we pushed the integration of the several chapters