It is a quiet Saturday. In the heart of the Deccan, at the foothills of the mammoth Golconda Fort, the Qutub Shahi kings lie sleeping, eternally peaceful, in a garden. The dynasty wrapped India in a shining fable much before a political campaign, through the Golconda diamonds. The mausoleums, like pale buttercream frosting, glisten in the afternoon sun and parrots burst out in a cloud of emerald.
“They are so cosmopolitan,” says Anirudh Kanisetti, 27, a historian-in-training, as he describes himself in his first book, Lords of the Deccan. “In the sense that you can see Indian design elements as well as stuff like dragons and pineapples that came from global trade.”
It is the story of the cosmopolitan Deccan—sumptuous, exciting and lush with details—that Kanisetti’s Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas tries to capture. Paced like a thriller with the sprawl of a saga, the book is written very much for a Game of Thrones generation. This is no sanitised version of history; there is plenty of drama, blood, ambition, betrayal and family feuds to keep readers hooked. But it is not just the writing—which Kanisetti certainly has the gift for, describing the landscape and battle scenes in cinematic detail—it is the sheer depth of scholarship. The elaborate notes at the end of the book are testimony to his research.
“Almost nobody thinks about the Deccan in global history,” he says. “What exactly were the kingdoms that ruled this vast region? The size of the Deccan is two-thirds that of Iran. When it first began to dawn on me just how vast and diverse this land mass was, and how many stories remained to be told to bridge the gap between what the academics have been discovering and what the general public know, there was no going back. I knew I had to tell these stories, which is how I came to write this book.”
An engineer by training, Kanisetti pivoted to make history his focus; he had been interested in the subject and had written for a popular blog. His interest in history started with gaming. “When I was around 10 years old, my father or my uncle got me a copy of the ‘Age of Empires’,” he says. “Like the game suggests, you can build Greek, Roman and other European empires. It blew my tiny mind. I could never have imagined that. I began to realise that Greek and Roman history were fascinating, and it was very easy for me to look them up online and find all these resources. But when I wanted to do the same for the Mauryas, I could find very little. I had to read these extremely academic texts, and I soon found that I had a flair for understanding what the author was saying and then writing blogs in a very simple way.”
Written over three years, Kanisetti brings alive the Deccan from the sixth to the 12th Century. He crafts this world beautifully. It goes beyond the journey of the battlefields, though there is plenty of bloody battles, and pieces together the history of the period through the show-stopper then—architecture. He writes about the emergence of temples on the landscape, focusing less on their piety and more on their power. The book starts with a description of the Kailashanatha temple of Ellora, made by the removal of “two million cubic feet of rock”, enough to fill two Olympic-sized pools —another comparison to bring home the point of just how the reconstruction of the past has been limited to just political history.
And the remains of the day have left out the concrete evidence—often temples. “When Trailokya-Mahadevi, the younger of Vikramaditya’s two sister-wives, gave birth to his son and heir apparent in the early 720s, she embarked on a project of astonishing scale. She ordered the construction of a Shiva temple at Pattadakal, so ambitious in scale that it sucked Chalukya-employed artisans away from their other building projects in the Malaprabha valley for no less than fourteen years,” he writes. She doesn’t live to see it completed, and her elder sister Loka-Mahadevi emerges as the most powerful woman. She administered two regions and built the grandest temple of the dynasty: the Lokeshvara temple, a temple for a queen.
The past is clearly his passion—it leaps off the page. It is littered with references from literature, including the incredible Dasakumaracharitam (Tale of the Ten Princes) written by Dandin to teach his ward—the Pallava king, Narasimha-Varman II—the ways of morality and dharma. “It immediately shows you from the get-go that this is not a world that is like ours in any way,” he says. “Our compass of morality, even in the way we think of sex or duty, let alone the way we think about religion or history, has been completely transformed by colonialism. Reading about how different the world of medieval India is just hits you in the face. I will give you one example, of a long-lost prince coming back to his ancestral kingdom. There is this old couple who used to serve his deposed father with whom he stays. When the elderly wife meets him, the poet says milk welled up in her breasts. I was not expecting that turn of phrase. When she hugs him, she snips his hair. These two unique descriptions of body language are not even that racy. It just tells you the way that these people thought. Even the body language was so different from ours.”
But more than anything else, the medieval world also has lessons for the present. The biggest: tolerance. “We know of Shaivite teachers, monks and poets who came and settled down here,” he says. “The only reason they could do it is because they knew Sanskrit. The reason they were being invited was because they brought with them a knowledge and a skill that local poets did not really have. I will give you the example of the one who bears the Sanskrit title of Madhumati—it was Mohammad Ibn Cheriyar, a Persian who was hired by the Rashtrakutas. They did this because of a rational calculation that being tolerant makes a lot more sense, and is more profitable than blindly hating on the basis of religion. They were proud of being globalised. They thrived at being multicultural.”
Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas
By Anirudh Kanisetti
Published by Juggernaut
Price Rs699; pages 460