South Indian History Research Articles

Analyzing foveal slope and retinal thickness in diabetics and healthy individuals with and without diabetic family history in South India for early neuronal damage prediction

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the clinically “healthy subjects,” identified as being at “risk” of developing diabetes, show significant changes in retinal thickness using optical coherence tomography(OCT) and foveal slope patterns. Methods: A cross-sectional, comparative study was conducted among the subjects who attended the hospital from December 2022 to April 2023. Subjects were included after obtaining written informed consent and were divided into three groups: Type 2 DM, healthy subjects with a family history (high-risk group), and those without a family history of diabetes. Foveal, parafoveal, and perifoveal thicknesses were measured using OCT. The fovea slope pattern was calculated using Image J software. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and ANOVA were performed for statistical analysis. Results: The study group had a mean age of 45.7 years, 95% of whom were female. The mean central foveal thickness (CFT) for the three groups was (CFTDM: 270 ± 33 μm; CFT FHD+: 254±19.6 μm; CFTFHD−: 255.4 ±19.2 μm; P = 0.118). The mean AUC (ILM-RPE) for (DM: 94577 ± 118905) pixel2 was significantly different from healthy control (FHD−:183705 ±156139 pixel2; P = 0.030) but was insignificant (P = 1.000) from subjects with family history (FHD+: 112749 ± 130451 pixel2). Males with diabetes had a greater foveal thickness than females (male: 277.8 ± 39.5 μm vs. female: 242.0 ± 41.7 μm, P = 0.05); however, no significant gender disparity was reported in the foveal slope. Conclusion: Decreased ILM-RPE thickness and foveal configuration were identified in subjects with family histories who do not meet the clinical criteria of diabetes but showed trends similar to diabetics.

Migration: Language, bereavement and re-birth

Abstract This article aims to capture certain emotive consequences of migration, after its geographical and physical occurrence. It deals especially with the selection of the English language, by myself and other writers, to try to integrate the challenge of transposition of references across cultures, that could get lost in translation. The context for the bi-lobial nature of migration here is British colonial history in south India or the Madras Presidency 1857–1916, and ancient or undated myths of oral and literary texts as illustrated in my novel The Sari of Surya Vilas (Naidu 2017). While acknowledging the medicinal and other benefits, I also propose the history of colonial plant hunting, and especially the trade in chocolate and tea, as an appropriate paradigm for the forgotten account of migration.

Book Review: Noboru Karashima, A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations

Noboru Karashima, A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014, 472 pp.

Book Review: Noboru Karashima, ed., A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations

Noboru Karashima, ed., A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2014, pp. xxi + 396 (double-columned), 130 Illustrations, 30 maps, ₹ 995.

Book Review: Noboru Karashima (ed.), A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations

Book Review: Noboru Karashima (ed.), <i>A Concise History of South India: Issues and Interpretations</i>

The Dark Period: Myth or reality?

This article is an attempt to reconsider the widespread concept of a Dark Period in the Tamil-speaking South between the third and sixth centuries of the Common Era. Archaeological, epigraphical and literary evidence from the first few centuries before the common era to the seventh century are gathered here and carefully analysed, showing no actual interruption. A decrease in the amount of data may easily be explained as the result of a change of practices—such as the use of perishable materials for buildings, for example. An important part of this article focuses on the Kaḷabhra dynasty, often thought to have been responsible for this so-called Dark Period. However, in the light of an accurate reading of peculiar passage of the Paṇḍyan copper-plates of Vēḷvikuṭi on which K.A. Nilakantha Sastri elaborated, probably for the first time, the concept of a Kaḷabhra interregnum responsible for the Dark Period, and after recontextualising this passage in the eighth-century South Indian history, it appears that the notion of a ‘break’ in the history of South India, as well as the three-century rule of an obscure dynasty, does not withstand a fact based investigation.

The “Fall” of Vijayanagara Reconsidered: Political Destruction and Historical Construction in South Indian History

Abstract The eponymous capital of Vijayanagara was largely abandoned following the defeat of the imperial army at Talikota in 1565. The city was burned and looted and its monumental temple complexes, gateways, and images left in ruins. Despite large-scale damage to architecture in the city, however, the level and focus of destruction was strikingly variable. In this paper, we draw on the material record of late Vijayanagara temple complexes and other archaeological evidence to examine patterns of differentially distributed political violence. We suggest that these patterns may be understood, in part, in terms of the contemporary politics of sovereignty, incorporation, and reconstitution of elite authority. Drawing on these observations, we discuss the role of commemorative destruction as well as post-1565 temple rededications and abandonments in the afterlife of Vijayanagara as a social space. In particular, we examine the potential of monumental violence to act as a symbol or to index social memory through a creative and fluid process of instituting claims about the past, heritage, authenticity, and the nature of the present.

Development of Agriculture Under Kakatiyas

The Kakatiyas of Warangal occupied a place of paramount importance and interest in the history of South India in general and that of Deccan and Andhra in particular. They were the next to establish their sway over the entire Telugu speaking area after the fall of the Satavahanas and before the rise of the Vijayanagara empire. They presided over the destinies of Telugu speaking people from the tenth century A.D. to the first quarter of the fourteenth century A.D. The period can very well be styled in the medieval history of Andhra country as the “ The Age of the Kakatiyas of Warangal” The Kakartiya rulers paid much attention to land management and development of agriculture. They had excavated a large number of canals and constructed tanks. Many of the tanks and lakes at present supplying water to some thousand of acres in the Telangana region were originally the works of the Kakatiyas. They attempted to increase the extent of the cultivable land by clearing forests and bringing large tracts of fresh land under the plough. Land was surveyed and measured. Cultivable land was classified into two types namely wet and dry. The government took sufficient care for the proper upkeep of the tanks and canals. Annual repairs of the bunds, removal of silt deposits on the bed and repairs of the canals and sluices are the main items of maintenance they undertook. Thus, the Kakatiya age witnessed the development of agriculture and prosperity. With Orugallu (Warangal) as capital, the Kakatiyas ruled over the Telugu country from about A.D. 1150 to 1323 A.D. They occupied a place of paramount importance and interest in the history of South India in general and that of Deccan and Andhra in particular. They were the next to establish their sway over the entire Telugu speaking area after the fall of the Satavahanas and before the rise of the Vijayanagara empire. The period of Kakatiyas can very well be styled in the medieval history of Andhra country as “The Age of the Kakatiyas of Warangal”.The Kakatiyas devoted much of their energies in promoting agriculture and safeguarding the land. It is an admitted fact that population in general was not so dense in ancient and medieval times as at present. The feature is more predominant in the Deccan. Most of the villages in those days were primarily the settlements of peasants who under the benefaction of the concerned chiefs brought as much land as possible under the plough. The topography of the region provided innumerable streams, small and big, which were harnessed to fill the tanks for irrigation purpose. Therefore, the kings and their dependents had necessarily a tough task before them, in clearing the jungle for cultivation with the co-operation of the people. Founding of new villages in the region at suitable places with water resources became more necessary during the Kakatiya period. Several villages in Andhra desa named Ganapavaram , after Ganapatideva, Rudravaram after Rudradeva and Muppavaram after Muppamamba have come into being by reclamation of the waste and forest lands by the respective kings and queens of the Kakatiya family. To construct a village in those days was a pious deed. Similar was the sanctity attached to the digging of a tank.

Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (review)

Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism. By Mary E. Davis. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music, 6.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [xix, 336 p.ISBN-10: 0- 5202-4542-3; ISBN 13: 978-0-520- 24542-6. $39.95.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index. Mary E. Davis's dissertation examined Erik Satie's esprit gaulois, and her first book required a decade of perusing lavishly illustrated magazines at height of their haute couture alliance with music. Her suggestion in this journal last year to consider that something fun may have been going on here (review of The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940, by Jane Fulcher, in Notes 63, no. 2 [December 2006]: 358-62) comes from a true expert in French musical gaiete. Musicians-Clothing-20th century is library catalog subject heading for Classic Chic, though what readers learn is not very much about musicians' clothing, but about how audiences for concerts and ballets in France before and soon after World War I were encouraged to dress. Davis contends that in early days of French modernism (ending in 1925), was art equal to music and painting, and she shows how its creators worked hand in glove, so to speak, with composers and painters (and its promoters with theatrical impresarios) to produce, for well off, encompassing style of universal participation. Nancy J. Troy's Couture Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) linked with modern art, and Davis builds upon similar work from a variety of scholars of early modernist musical and material culture, meticulously annotating her numerous sources. Her singular exploration of nexus of and music reminds me of a book she does not mention: Bonnie Wade's Imaging Sound (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), which also studied national costumes and music. Wade looks for mutual influences of Mughal and Hindu musical cultures over several centuries of South Indian history, drawing some conclusions by noticing changes in dress. Davis focuses on cultural force of modernism as expressed in French music and in first decades of twentieth century. Both scholars use illustrative art to make their points. Mughal rulers supported workshops where artists turned out officially sanctioned depictions of court events and common social activities; French and American magazine publishers of period Davis studies commissioned highly trained artists to draw or photograph trendsetting styles that would sell. Both cultural propaganda endeavors pictured ideal, stylized worlds, larger-thanlife even in miniature. What raises these images to status of art is their continued ability to communicate the moral and aesthetic feeling of their time and place, as Davis tells us Baudelaire wrote of illustration (p. 9). From them we may draw conclusions about their underlying reality, not least of which is that sartorial beauty and music were important to both societies, not only on formal occasions, but also in daily life. Consistently documenting musical events that were instigated by or important to them, Classic Chic centers a chapter each on designers Paul Poiret, Germaine Bongard, and Coco Chanel, and magazines La gazette du bon ton, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. An introductory chapter traces link between and music (both necessary for elegant living) to French publications of seventeenth century, when fashion plates first appeared. Early French periodicals published piano pieces but by end of nineteenth century, commentary on public concerts replaced sheet music, for music now was an art ripe for consumption rather than practice (p. 13). Poiret established himself as a designer of neo-classical styles and host of musical soirees where old music was played on early instruments. Davis notes that he created a taste for such historical authenticity in music a decade before Nadia Boulanger's similar salons began. …

3. THE QUESTION OF HISTORY IN PRECOLONIAL INDIA

ABSTRACTThis essay considers an important and enduring problem in the writing of Indian history: how do we historians approach precolonial narratives of the past? A rich and suggestive new study of South Indian modes of historiography, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800, by Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, has positioned itself at the center of this debate. For a variety of reasons, precolonial narratives have been demoted to the status of mere information, and genres of South Indian writing have been dismissed as showing that South Indians lacked the ability to write history and indeed lacked historical consciousness. Textures of Time responds to this picture by proposing a novel historical method for locating historical sensibility in precolonial narratives of the past. The authors ask us not to judge all textual traditions in India, especially narratives of the past, on the basis of the verifiability of facts contained in them. Rather they suggest a radical openness of the text, and they argue that a historical narrative is constituted in the act of reading itself. They do this by examining the role of genre and what they call texture in precolonial South Indian writing.This essay examines the strengths and limitations of their proposal. It does so by examining the formation of colonial archives starting in the late‐eighteenth century in order to understand the predicament of history in South Asia. Colonial archives brought about a crisis in historiographical practices in India; they not only transformed texts into raw information for the historian to then reconstruct a historical narrative, they also delegitimized precolonial modes of historiography. A better understanding of these archives puts one in a better position to assess the insights of Textures of Time, but it also helps to highlight the problems in its solution. In particular, it reveals how the book continues to use modern criteria to assess premodern works, and in this way perhaps to judge them inappropriately.

Beyond exceptionalism

Despite many institutional restraints, several independent strands of research on south Indian history have developed and flourished in ways that significantly revise older and influential historiographical formulations. This article explores the ways in which historians of the geographical south have made productive use of the ‘incommensurability’ of geography and history. To begin with, I briefly sketch some of the historical and historiographical constructions of the ‘south’, usually as a space of difference from the dominant north (Section I). This has produced a series of ‘inclusions/exclusions’ vis-à-vis not just the north, but within the geographical south itself. I discuss three somewhat disparate sites in new and largely unpublished work on south India that move beyond the trope of ‘exceptionalism’ to generate new insights on Indian history: new modes of fashioning the self, as in new scholarship on Keralam; a new way of conceptualising a region such as Karnataka; and finally, new perspectives on even such well-known and researched historical figures such as Tipu Sultan. Such scholarship is relatively unencumbered by earlier laments either about the paucity of sources for histories of the geographical south, or about the ‘politics of mention’ in broader ‘Indian’ histories.

:Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800.(Cultural Studies.)

:Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800.<i>(Cultural Studies.)</i>

‘The Formative Phase in South Indian History: The Earliest Tamil (Brahmi) Writings and Recent Archaeological Discoveries’

‘The Formative Phase in South Indian History: The Earliest Tamil (Brahmi) Writings and Recent Archaeological Discoveries’

Reflections on State-Making and History-Making in South India, 1500-1800

AbstractThis paper is concerned with early modern southern India, and in particular, the areas ruled over by Vijayanagara, the Nayakas of Senji and the Nawwabs of Arcot. Its primary intention is to point out that states as diverse as these produced important narratives that served as points of self-definition. Positivist historians have often struggled to understand what to do with these texts, asking in effect whether they are “truths” or “lies,” and often rejecting them wholsesale for the ostensibly more “reliable” stone and copper-plate based inscriptions.The paper argues against the divide in south Indian history between “textualists,” who read narrative texts, and “epigraphers,” who prefer the “hard” evidence of inscriptions, and contends that any general historical analysis must of necessity be based on a reading of both forms of materials. In this context, the paper develops the argument for the emergence of a certain historical self-consciousness in early modern south India, both in the Perso-Islamic and the vernacular traditions, and in their interface. It would naturally be tempting to see matters in terms of a succession of expressive forms, each one successfully and finally displacing its predecessors, but it is proposed that the realities one encounters are rather more complex than this model would suggest.

Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcberu Narayana Rao. Edited by David Shulman. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. xii, 478 pp. $29.95 (cloth).

This collection of essays by outstanding scholars of South India introduces the work of Velcheru Narayana Rao, who has revolutionized our understanding of classical literary theory and culture. The essays provide an overview of recent research in various fields - Telugu literature and religion, South Indian history, Indian folklore and mythology, Dravidian linguistics, temple architecture.

Sakti and Barakat: The Power of Tipu's Tiger

A figure who walks larger than life through the pages of eighteenthcentury south-Indian history is Tipu Sultan Fath Ali Khan, who held power in Mysore from 1782 until his death at the hands of the British in 1799. In general, scholars of his reign have taken a mainly Eurocentric approach, essentially concentrating on his external relationships and activities, particularly with regard to the French and the British, while more recently there has been some examination of his economy and administration. Recent research into both kingship and religion in south India raises issues which suggest that it is time this ruler was reassessed in his own terms, from the point of view of the cultural environment in which he was operating.3 Little attempt so far has been made to do this.4 One matter which merits closer attention is his use of symbols, particularly in connection with the symbolic expression of kingship. Given Tipu's somewhat ambiguous status as a parvenu, whose legitimacy as ruler was questionable, this would appear to be a fruitful area for research.5 His most famous symbol was the tiger, yet while it has captured the imagination of scholars in other disciplines,6 it has not exercised the minds of historians to any extent.7 It is the aim of this paper to restore the balance by looking at this symbol in the light of the work of Susan Bayly, who has underlined the strongly syncretic nature of religion in south India. Drawing upon both written and oral material, Bayly has described the interaction which has taken place between Muslim, Hindu and Christian traditions, the result of which is a borrowing of symbols and ideas, a frequently shared vocabulary, and an interweaving of motifs within a common sacred landscape, at the centre of which is the imagery associated with the ammans or goddesses of the region.8 It is my contention that an examination of Tipu's tiger symbol will reveal that it is firmly rooted in this syncretic religious environment and that this should emphasize to us the importance of placing the Mysore ruler within his cultural context in order to understand his actions, particularly from the point of view of kingship.

&lt;sc&gt;david ludden&lt;/sc&gt;. &lt;italic&gt;Peasant History in South India&lt;/italic&gt;. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1985. Pp. xix, 310. $45.00

Journal Article david ludden. Peasant History in South India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1985. Pp. xix, 310. $45.00 Get access Ludden David. Peasant History in South India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1985. Pp. xix, 310. $45.00. Sugata Bose Sugata Bose Tufts University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 92, Issue 4, October 1987, Pages 1019–1020, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/92.4.1019 Published: 01 October 1987

Peasant History in South India

This study of the Tirunelveli region of Tamil Nadu challenges the conventional view that subsistence, isolation, and immobility characterized village India before modern times. Examining the agrarian history of Tirunelveli during the millennium before 1900, David Ludden shows that peasant communities not only transformed rural society but shaped states and empires, including British India.

South Indian History and Society: Studies from Inscriptions, A.D. 850-1800

South Indian History and Society: Studies from Inscriptions, A.D. 850-1800

Political Authority and Structural Change in Early South Indian History

Political Authority and Structural Change in Early South Indian History