A large proportion of Indian histories are focused on Delhi and northern India. In his seminal 1955 book, A History of South India, KA Nilakanta Sastri provided a much-needed chronicle of India below the Vindhyas, covering it in detail from prehistoric times till the 17th century—the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire. However, the post-Vijayanagara period has never been covered in detail. Rajmohan Gandhi, with his new book Modern South India, is working to fill this gap.
He begins from the scattered kingdoms left behind by the fall of Vijayanagara—the feuding Deccani Sultanates and the various smaller kingdoms of the South. He takes us through the arrival of the various colonial powers and the eventual victory of the British company out of the lot. Thence on, we proceed to the various attempts at independence in South India, down to the eventual withdrawal of the British. After 1947, the book recounts the linguistic reorganisation of the states, the rise of Dravidian politics, and the story up to current times—including the murder of Gauri Lankesh.
That brief introduction will make it very clear that this book is vast in ambition and scope. Gandhi has done an excellent job of making sense of a complex narrative, creating a unified picture of a diverse region across multiple centuries of tumultuous upheaval. The cast of the story numbers in the scores, if not hundreds, and the effects of decisions, or of chance, in one strand of the tale affects multiple others.
For a layman, Modern South India will be a heady and difficult read. But it will be equally rewarding. Focusing on the south of India brings new clarity to our history. The battle between the various colonial powers started off in South India, with the Dutch, the French and the British all making their bases on the coast.
At the time, they were just one more set of interested parties in a time of political ferment. Gandhi covers in details the various moves made by the Europeans to gain a toehold and eventually take over entire kingdoms, in parallel with the Kolkata-based expansions of the British East India Company. Right afterwards, the various movements from freedom, Kittur Rani Chennamma to Pazhassi Raja, are chronicled. These fed into the eventual revolution of 1857 and thence to 1947.
In order to understand the current shape of South Indian politics, especially in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, we need to understand political movements going back decades. This book gives us that perspective to know how we got here. The roots of the Sri Lankan civil war, the democratically elected Communist government in Kerala, the fascination with film stars in Tamil politics, the anti-Hindi sentiment in multiple South Indian states... the post-independence section alone has enough food for thought.
As they say, India has forgotten more history than others have even had!
Although it feels unfair to crib, there are two minor gripes from this reviewer. The first is the sources that Gandhi relies on: they’re pretty much all either English or translations into English—whether from Indian records and books, or of Colonial narratives. Considering India’s multi-lingual heritage, one imagines that the richness of sources from South Indian languages would far exceed and enrich the English-language ones. Sastri’s book, in contrast, explicitly uses Sanskrit and Tamil sources to construct its story.
The other shortcoming is a stated, deliberate, choice by Gandhi: the decision to focus on the political narrative rather than the broader cultural one. Therefore, there is nothing of the arts, architecture, literature, or even scientific history of the region. Brief chapters on these would have rounded out the narrative well.But these are really wishes for what else the book could have been. What it already is, is quite an achievement—a volume that will be read and referenced for a long time to come.