Violence, Gastronomy and the Meanings of War in Medieval South India

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This essay argues that the imagery of battle in Cayankontā r's twelfth-century poem, the Kalinkattupparani, composed at the court of Kulō ttunka Cō la, may tell us little about the practicalities of warfare in medieval India, but it does help us understand the meaning of war for medieval south Indian courts. Its imagery, corroborated by inscriptional accounts, at first suggests linkages with earlier notions of agonistic sacrifice, but on closer examination, as this essay demonstrates, it produces a world of feasting, death and laughter that occupies a more contrary and autonomous space within conceptions of sovereignty in early medieval India.