Modern South India

IN THIS MONUMENTAL STUDY, the first in over fifty years, historian and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi brings us the story of South India in modern times. The history attempted here is of a peninsular region influenced by the oceans, not by the Himalayas. Yet it is more than that.

It is a story of facets of four powerful cultures-Kannada, Malayali, Tamil, and Telugu, to name them in alphabetical order-and yet more than that, for Kodagu, Konkani, Marathi, Oriya, and Tulu cultures have influenced it, as also other older and possibly more indigenous cultures often seen as ‘tribal’, as well as cultures originating in other parts of India and the world.

With South India’s Malayalam region being (in modern times) the most ‘balanced’ in terms of religion and also the most literate, its Kannada zone occupying South India’s geographical centre and containing the sites of the Vijayanagara kingdom and also the kingdom of Haidar and Tipu, its Telugu portion the largest in area and holding the most people, and its Tamil part the most Dravidian and possessing the oldest literature, the four principal cultures are, unsurprisingly, competitive. But they are also complementary.

This is a Dravidian story, and also more than that.