Organizer and Chair: Daud Ali, School of Oriental and African Studies, London
Discussant: Cynthia Talbot, University of Texas, Austin
This panel will seek to gain a more nuanced understanding of the ideological positioning of war and violence in ancient and medieval South Asian society. It will focus upon courtly representations, our chief source in reconstructing the meanings of war in early India, and will span the ancient, early, and later medieval periods. The papers will analyze the depiction of violence in order to understand various problems, including the relation of war poetry to other themes that concerned the court, the evolving meanings of war itself, and the spectacle of battle as envisaged by courtly and royal audiences. Martha Selby will focus on the interlocking representation of love and war in the Tamil cankam texts of early south India to explore the significance of imagery and symbols of warfare in the realm of early erotic poetry. Aditya Behl will examine the Islamic conquests of northern India in both Muslim and Rajput courtly poetic texts, showing how tropes of romance negotiate ideological and political discontinuities between communities. Daud Ali, looking at a twelfth-century Tamil poem, will discuss the changing ideological context of depictions of battle in early medieval India, focusing particularly on the association of battle with feasting and laughter. Jennifer Howe will examine the visual and iconographic dimensions of the representation of battle. She will look at the spatial employment of battle frescoes within palace architectural programs both in terms of the meanings of warfare itself and within the larger courtly ideologies of "inner" (akam) and "outer" (puram). The South Asian focus and chronological expanse of the papers will allow us to ask questions of a historical and comparative nature which will lead to new understandings of particular continuities and disjunctures in not only the representation of war, but in the ideologies of courts themselves across time and space in South Asia.
Martha Ann Selby, Southern Methodist University
Images and symbols from cankam-period battle poems and panegyrics are often found in romantic poetry in skillful inversion or, more blatantly, in direct quotation. In this paper, I will explore the subtle exportation of public battleground imagery into the interior worlds of romantic love, motherly affection and pride, and sexuality through close analyses of the cankam akam/puram dialogue. These cross-genre exportations of symbol and idiom have been largely ignored by modern interpreters of Tamil literature, in spite of the fact that the late medieval Tamil literary establishment understood akam and puram as mutually defining. "Akam and puram are like the inner palm of the hand and its back." Thus wrote Naccinarkiniyar, author of a fourteenth-century commentary on the Tolkappiyam, the oldest extant Tamil text on poetics. Even though Naccinarkiniyar understood these two main genre distinctions in cankam poetry to be interlocked in a seamless continuum, many contemporary scholars have understood akam (the inner or love context) and puram (the outer context of war and public life) as mutually exclusive, concluding that the list of the seven puram landscapes found in the Tolkappiyam are there only to mirror the seven listed akam landscapes thereby suggesting that the function of the puram list is one of artificial structural symmetry, having little to do with poetic concerns. Through an examination of individual poems written in two structurally parallel sets of landscapes, the akam landscape of palai (separation) paired with the puram landscape vakai (victory) followed by the akam neytal (lamentation) paired with the puram tumpai (battle frenzy), I will demonstrate the intersecting fluidity of the semiological and dialogical dynamics of these two overarching generic categories.
Daud Ali, School of Oriental and African Studies, London
Through the analysis of a twelfth-century war poem, the Kalinkattupparani of Cayankontar and its antecedents like the Kalavali, the paper will explore the changing representations of battle at the courts of early south India. I will suggest that the association of warfare with violence, and by extension, with various other concepts like terror, feasting and heat, in addition to the association of battle with the goddess Korravai or Kali with their hosts of demons in early medieval south India had emerged from a gradual re-location of certain elements of the older Vedic sacrificial ideology and practice to a new ideological and sociological positioning within the Saiva and Vaisnava courts of medieval India. Specifically, feasting and "violence" became associated with locales like the graveyard and wilderness which in turn formed a necessary but dystopic "underworld," both sociologically and ideologically, of courtly life and royal sovereignty. Moreover, this underworld was represented in courtly circles through grotesque humor and comedy, evident as early as the Sanskrit farces of the Pallava court. In the Kalinkattupparani the battlefield is incorporated into this realm of death as the feasting ground of the ghosts who live in the wasteland (katu). Together these elements form a comic inversion of sovereign and kingdom. The paper will conclude by exploring the possibilities and limits of understanding this comic grotesque in terms of Bakhtinian notions of "popular culture," antinomian practices, and the more overarching ideological functions of representations of war in pre-colonial south Indian society.
Jennifer Howes, School of Oriental and African Studies, London
The most complete examples of South Indian murals which depict historical battle scenes are in two eighteenth-century palace buildings: the Daria-daulat Bagh at Srirangapattnam (c. 1785) and the Ramalinga Vilasam at Ramnathapuram (c. 1725). This paper will explore the meanings of battle and warfare as depicted in these paintings, and will then regard them within the broader material context of South Indian courts. Warfare played similar roles in these two kingdoms, as can be seen through a comparison of the paintings. These similarities are further highlighted when the murals are regarded alongside contemporaneous Western representations of battle, which portray the heroic actions of individuals and provide detailed descriptions of geographical space. By contrast, the south Indian paintings show battle as a unified spectacle of incalculable grandeur which takes place within a different temporal and spatial framework. Because the murals were created within a larger painting and architectural context they must be regarded as pieces of a larger iconographic programme. Only certain parts of the palace would have been decorated with paintings, and the subject matter of the murals would have related to the function of those spaces. For example, "outer/public" areas are decorated with battle scenes, while "inner/private" areas contain paintings of the king as bhoktr. The relationship between the subject matter of the murals and the function of palace space can be compared to the poetic concepts of akam and puram as found in classical Tamil literature.
Aditya Behl, University of California, Berkeley
The first accounts of Islamic conquests in northern India have two remarkable features: detailed descriptions of military warfare, together with the articulation of romantic desire between opposing sides. One of the major figures in the military struggle over northern India was the Khalji sultan ‘Alauddin, who came to the throne of Delhi in 1296. ‘Alauddin’s court poet Amir Khusrau (d. 1325) commemorated his patron’s campaigns by depicting his advances into territories such as Gujarat, Malwa, and Telangana as the transformation of India into an Islamic land (dar ul-Islam). Among the Sultan’s opponents were the Rajput kings of Jalor and Ranthambhor and the rulers of Gujarat and Warangal. The bards of these rulers and their descendants also composed their versions of the Muslim conquests, including poems such as the Kanhadade Prabandha of Padmanabha, the cycle of the Prithviraj Raso, and related tales. Padmanabha’s poem sets the Rajput ruler within a ritual economy of kingship in which political rule and legitimacy is intrinsically bound up with saving the images of God which are being smashed by the iconoclastic Muslims. These works eroticize the politics of conquest, intertwining the military conflicts over territory with the romances, real and imagined of ‘Alauddin Khalji’s children Khizr Khan and Princess Furuzan. Conquest, erotic desire, and religious ideology intersect in these texts in a complex way: both poets use the figure of crossing over to the other side in a fantasy in which conflicts over political borders are transcended by romantic love. Territory and desire come together in one central trope in both stories—the erotic fetishization of the woman belonging to the enemy, who becomes the repository of symbolic honor for her own side and the object of romantic desire and fascination for the other side.