Organizer: Kenneth R. Hall, Ball State University
Chair: Brian Murton, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Discussant: Noboru Karashima, University of Tokyo
During the past thirty years Professor Noboru Karashima of the University of Tokyo has provided notable scholarship and innovation in the study of South Indian history and culture. His research on early South Indian agricultural communities, which is based on his translation of early Tamil inscriptions, has been first rate. Karashima was perhaps the first among South Asia scholars to make use of computer assisted research. Working closely with scholars in India, Karashima developed computer programs that allowed the tabulation of South India's vast inscriptional remains. His data bank remains essential to anyone conducting research in early South Indian history. With the University of Tokyo as his base, Karashima also assembled a multi-disciplinary international team of Japanese and Indians who completed groundbreaking intensive studies on the historical evolution of several South Indian rural communities.
This panel's purpose is to honor Professor Karashima, who has recently retired from his history chair at the University of Tokyo. A number of scholars are preparing papers for a felicitation volume that will be published during 1996/97. We believe that the AAS meeting will provide a good opportunity for the paper contributors to conduct a "working session" that will take place around the panel "centerpiece." The selected papers to be presented on the panel are broadly representative of the variety and richness of recent and ongoing scholarship by a new generation of South India specialists. Each of the panelists will pay tribute to Professor Karashima, and will especially note how Professor Karashima's scholarship has in specific ways provided the legacy for their own. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that the "trailblazing" scholarship in early Indian epigraphic history over the past thirty years has come from among South India specialists. This panel will demonstrate how ongoing research in South India's epigraphic history continues this tradition. The presenters in this panel are as follows:
In Search of Change: Reflections on the Scholarship of Noboru Karashima
George W. Spencer, Northern Illinois University
Merchants, Rulers, and Priests in Early South India and Java Sacred Centers
Kenneth R. Hall, Ball State University
Women in the Temple, the Palace, and the Family: The Construction of Women's
Identities in Pre-Colonial Tamilnadu
Leslie C. Orr, Concordia University
The Nayakas of Vijayanagara Andhra: A Preliminary Prosopography
Cynthia Talbot, University of Texas, Austin