New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. 301 p.*

Noboru Karashima, well-known scholar, founder of a whole school of historians of South India, since 1989. The President of the International Tamil Studies Association, now retired (Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo), continues to work actively. He has recently published a book dealing with several controversial issues in the history of South India.¹ This is not a monograph, but a collection of articles (some of them were previously published), grouped into three sections ("sections") - "Changes in land ownership and the production system", "The emergence of new Jatis and social changes", "Maritime trade and Chinese Sources" - and united by an introduction called "The Emergence of the Medieval World". states and social formation in South India". By "South India" the author means Tamilnadu. It is a kind of tradition in historiography to think that South India is reduced to Tamilnadu or that Tamilnadu represents all of South India. It is fair to say that some material on other regions of South India-Karnataka, Andhra and Kerala-is sometimes included in the book.

The author believes that the period of approximately 200 years between the mid-13th and mid-15th centuries is a transition period from the "ancient" society and state to the "medieval formation" and does not give them a name. This should be noted, because in his previous monograph he still used the terminology associated in the minds of historians with the concept of "formation": "The social formation of the Vijayanagara period... It bears some resemblance to the feudalism that characterizes medieval Europe and Japan." He suggested that this system should be considered "state feudalism" (Karashima, 1992, p. 8, 37-38, 70). In this case, the author decided to do without a binding label.

In the first two "sections" of the paper, Karasima focuses on "changes in the land ownership system, as land was the most important means of production in ancient and medieval Tamil society, and changes in people's attitudes to it, or the relationships between different groups of people mediated by their attitudes to land, seem to have caused changes in the land ownership system." state and social formation" (p. 2).

The polemical charge of the book is directed against the concept of a "segmental state" put forward by the American historian (who lived in England for the last years) B. Stein (1926-1996), who at one time drew attention to the significant role of large territorial communities of Nadu in the South Indian early medieval states of Pallavs, Cholas, Pandyas, etc. The collective bodies of these communities (nattar) managed the land, exercised local self-government, repaired the court, and executed royal decrees on donations. At the same time, there is practically no information about the existence of a state tax or other apparatus. Stein came to the conclusion that the state was amorphous, consisting of "segments", actually controlled only the ancestral lands of the ruling clan, and over all the rest of the space that was considered to belong to this dynasty, it exercised only "ritual sovereignty"². The large role of territorial communities, which by definition are peasant communities, as well as the belonging of the ruling dynasties to the" agricultural "vellala caste allowed B. Stein to name his book" The Peasant State and Society " (Stein, 1980).

The concept of a "segmental state" has caused discussion in the world's indological historiography and rather harsh criticism.³ Our author objects throughout the book

* Noboru Karashima. From Antiquity to the Middle Ages. South Indian society on the move. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 301 p.

¹ Previous books by N. Karashima, whose conclusions are widely used in peer-reviewed work, see: [Karashima, 1984; Karashima, 1992]. Both books are published under the same cover: [Karashima, 2001 (1)]. For more information on the role of Karashima in Indian historiography, see [Alaev, 2011, pp. 39-41, 630].

² B. Stein later clarified his position, explaining that the phrase "ritual sovereignty" does not mean that there were no other types of power functions [Stein, 1997, p.160].

³ For a more detailed description of the concept of B. Stein and an overview of the discussion caused by it, see: [Alaev, 2011, pp. 33-38].

Stein mainly on two points: the question of the existence of an extensive administrative apparatus (including the tax one) during the Chola period, and the question of the stagnation of society. According to Karashima, " Stein's theory was nothing more than a new version of the old theory of stagnation of Eastern society based on unchanging village communities, with the replacement of the village community from the old theory by a segment (nadu)" (p.3).

Karashima proves that the Chola state was a centralized and powerful power by referring to the fact that the Cholas at one time conquered all of Ceylon, that Rajaraja I (985-1016), having built a grand temple in his capital Thanjavur, gave him 56 villages located not only in the ancestral lands of the Cholas, but also in Karnataka. Andhra and Ceylon. He also mentions that the lands in the center of the empire were carefully measured, as well as the officials listed in the inscriptions. Finally, the power of the state is shown by the fact that Rajendra I Chola (1016-1044) organized a naval expedition to Sumatra.

I will not go into the details of the analysis of all these data, I will only point out that all of them do not have indisputability ⁴. Land cadastres are mentioned in the reign of Rajaraja I, but their results are not traceable. The tax system under the Cholas, as well as under other dynasties, was characterized by haphazardness.⁵ It is likely that the Cholas sought to subjugate independent district communities and tried to introduce a new administrative unit, Valanadu, for this purpose, but they did not succeed. There are some inscriptions in which a huge court apparatus is recorded, but there are thousands of others where this apparatus is completely invisible. Several inscriptions that indicate the area of land with extraordinary accuracy raise doubts and even confusion among researchers, since this area is expressed, according to Karashima's own calculation, with an accuracy of 0.1 square mm (!) (p. 92)⁶. Karashima tries to find a rational explanation for these fractions and expresses the opinion that they are the result of converting real land measures into some standard (conditional) measures (p. 91-96). However, even if this is pure mathematics, its practical significance is questionable.

To understand this contradictory information, it is necessary to take more into account the features of South Indian inscriptions as sources, to get into their spirit. In one of his articles, Karashima himself expressed himself elegantly and at the same time accurately: one should hear that the inscriptions "whisper" (Karashima, 2001). Indian inscriptions are not "documents" in the usual sense of the word. They must, of course, report very real facts about the donation of property by one individual or legal entity to another. But their task is much broader: to create genealogical, administrative, social myths, an idea of the immense power of the sovereign, his huge court, careful measurement of land, etc. ⁷ It is this feature of the main source that makes historians of South India very cautious about certain information contained in inscriptions.

A significant step forward in understanding the problem of land relations in India is the author's clear separation of the two types of land ownership (the same land): as a farm object and as a territory with a tax-paying population ⁸. Karashima shows this difference with the example of a series of inscriptions that mention gifts "with the removal of farmers" (kudinikki) and " without the removal of farmers "(kudininga) (p.31-51). He could also support his conclusion by using other series of inscriptions: those that mention "land value" (vileydravyam) and "tax value" (ireydravyam) or "land payment" (vileyporul) and "tax payment" (ireyporul) when selling land [Alaev, 2011, p.72, 143].

Karashima sees the main changes in the transition from "antiquity" to the "Middle Ages" in the development of private ownership of land, which is understood as hereditary (kani,

⁴ For example, the evidence of an expedition to Sumatra is not very convincing, see [Zakharov, 2012].

⁵ This is well shown in the works of N. Karashima himself, see [Karashima, 1984, pp. 69-93, 105-127].

⁶ The first publisher of inscriptions of this type, V. Anya, calculated that the land in them was measured with an accuracy of 1: 52,428,800,000 veli (a large land measure used at that time) [Vcnkaya, 1916, p. 6]. According to T. V. Mahalingam, this means 0.00186 sq. cm (Mahalingam, 1967, p. 162).

⁷ For a source analysis of South Indian inscriptions, see [Alaycv, 1985; Alaev, 2004; Alaev, 2006; Alaev, 2011, pp. 20-30].

⁸ The author of this review has long proposed such a solution to the problem (distinguishing between superior and subordinate property [Istoriya..., 1968, p. 107 - 112, 113 - 123, 152 - 158; Alaev, 1992]. Karashima also noted in 1984 that the donation of land actually involves two substances: the donation of land itself or the right to levy a tax (Karashima, 1984, p.XXXI). In this book, he deals closely with this problem.

Kaniyatchi), and the emergence of a layer of large landowners (Kaniyalars) from landowning (non-Brahmin) castes. All of his conclusions in this case are based on mass calculations of the facts of donations and sales that make up chronological series and tables, and therefore cannot raise objections.

Only one remark is necessary. Having discovered communal land ownership "in ur-type villages "(i.e., vellala villages, not Brahmin villages) in the tenth century, Karashima states that the village council members "were themselves farmers on the land they owned" (p. 9). This follows, in his opinion, from the phrase "ur itself must cultivate this land" that he once encountered. In the book under review, the author mentions the peasant status of early communists in passing, as a circumstance long established by his previous works. However, reference to these works shows that this understanding is not indisputable. In a 1984 book, he also mentions another inscription that says: "Let the temple priests cultivate the land themselves." He is forced to explain this phrase somehow, because it clearly contradicts reality. "The priests themselves usually did not cultivate the land," he writes, " so [in this case] the land may have been farmed by temple servants or, more likely, by landless workers other than temple servants" (Karashima, 1984, p.11). But if the expression "self-processing" should not be taken literally in one case, it should probably not be taken literally in the other. It is necessary to take into account the peculiarities of the phraseology of the inscriptions mentioned above.

For some unknown reason, Karashima considers the existence of land shares and allotments (pangu) in the village to be proof of conducting a joint communal economy (p. 86). But the division of rural land into shares means that each household gets its own plot of land, on which it can run an individual farm or rent it out - also individually.

Karashima notes inscriptions that indicate the presence of tenants on the lands of Ur, but remains convinced that "there should not have been many of them (agricultural workers - L. A.)" (Karashima, 1984, p. 11). This conclusion is not based on sources and is explained only by the belief (I must say, widespread) that communal landowners are by definition peasants.

However, this is far from the case in India. Numerous materials from many regions of this country indicate that community taxpayers are often not farmers, but use the labor of dependent tenants and workers [Alaev, 2000, pp. 296-333]. In addition, collective farming conducted jointly by several families has never been recorded anywhere in India. If the nature of land transactions shows that the land was jointly owned by the community, then it should be understood that it was leased, and the community members shared among themselves only the rent received from the tenants. Just as it was observed in villages like Zamindari in Northern India in the 19th century. As for the villages whose land was divided into shares, they resemble North Indian collective estates of the pattidari type (Alaev, 1962).

Karashima casually admits that shared land ownership was "an arrangement made only between landowners who formed a group separate from the farmers", but insists that where there were no shares in the village, the landowners were farmers (p. 88).

Thus, the evolution revealed by Karashima during the X-XIII centuries from communal ownership to individual ownership should be understood as the transformation of collective rent recipients into individual ones. However, this clarification does not undermine the main conclusion of the author: during this period, there was a development of a layer of large landowners who bought up the plots of small community members, who acquired the magnificent titles of araiyan ("raja"), udeyan ("lord"), nadazhvan ("leader of the territory"), etc. The author's idea that the strengthening of local magnates led to the decline of the Chola state is also convincingly confirmed.

The author of the book also traces the emergence of relations typical of feudalism on the materials on the development of the institute of "protection" (padikaval). Magnates, who appeared in large numbers in the thirteenth century, began to impose "protection" on communities, for which they charged an additional fee. It is possible that in the conditions of feudal freedom, communities turned to the local leader for protection and on their own initiative. This kind of phenomenon is similar to the European commendation. These relations became permanent, hereditary (kaval-kani). Software analysis-

such relations of dependence and the proof that they developed is another new word in the historiography of South India.

Among other communities in early medieval South India, a prominent role was played by urban communities, urban self-government bodies (nagaram). They have long attracted the attention of researchers, but mainly in relation to their role in foreign and domestic trade (Hall, 1980; Champakalakshmi, 1999). It is difficult to judge their internal structure and the degree of independence from the central government. But there is no reason to claim, as the author does, that the cities were "under strict state control" (p. 172). This conclusion is based on only two examples, and both of them speak not about the control of cities, but about the verification of temple budgets by the royal people. It is known that the state took care of temples in every possible way and periodically checked temple farms [Alaev, 2011, pp. 273-279]. It is also known that temple funds were often actually managed by the surrounding communities: district (nadu), village (ur, sabha) and city (nagaram). In these two cases, members of the city assembly and other citizens were fined for abusing temple property, rather than for actual city affairs.

Pages 199-223 contain comprehensive information on the structure and activities of trade associations, and offer interpretations of the terminology used for them, but all this remains at the level of relatively convincing assumptions. So far, the inscriptions do not allow us to go beyond the logical conclusions based on etymological reasoning.

A definite puzzle in the social evolution of Tamilnadu is the emergence in the 12th and 13th centuries of a new organization that called itself the Chitrameji Periyanattar ("Great Nattars of the Beautiful Plow"). Many researchers understood this institution as an association of many rural communities, led by the dominant landowning Vellal caste. I joined this opinion [Alaev, 2011, pp. 116-123]. According to Karashima, these are organizations of new dominant castes, tribes originating from mountainous areas that descended to the plains, enlisted in the imperial Chola army, and seized agricultural territories. This part of the monograph is not as convincing as the others. It is based on a relatively free interpretation of individual inscriptions. Meanwhile, the strength of the method of working with inscriptions proposed by Karashima and his colleagues is precisely based on complete bodies of inscriptions (databases) and their statistical processing.

Another mystery can be considered the appearance in Tamilnadu in the XI-XIII centuries of the division of castes into "right" (Valangei) and "left" (Idangei) and the disappearance of such a division later. The author sees in this institution "the desire of people of that time for an egalitarian society instead of a stratified caste society based on Brahmanism, in which they previously lived" (p. 22). This problem also needs further research [Alaev, 2011, pp. 123-129].

It is known that Indian inscriptions consist of stable formulas, each of which carries a certain semantic load. Such formulas include: the genealogical part (panegyric) of a dynasty or an individual king; the formula for notifying "interested persons"; the transfer of taxes or granted immunities; the formula for cursing the one who violates the gift. The genealogical parts of the inscriptions were studied especially intensively by Indian historians and epigraphists. Based on their analysis, the entire political history of South India in the Middle Ages is essentially recreated. Other formulas (their changes over time) They were also analyzed, which gave nontrivial results [Stolyarov, 1978; Alaev, 1981, pp. 90-103; Alayev, 1985]. Karashima, for the first time, as far as I know, is trying to extract information from the evolution of the curse formula that usually ends the inscription. He notes that during the Pallava and early Chola periods, these curses are in line with the Brahminical ideas about the severity of punishments: the offender who violates the gift "will become a dung worm for 60 thousand years", "will commit a sin equal to all the sins committed in the country from the Ganges to Kanyakumari", "will commit a sin equal to the murder of a brown cow on on the banks of the Ganges or on the coast of Kanyakumari." Later, such curses become more "practical" in nature: the criminal "should be killed, treated like a pig or dog, the noses and breasts of his wives should be cut off"; "the wife of such a criminal should be given to pulayar" (untouchable); "his eyes should be gouged out, his nose cut off, he should be considered a pig, he should be killed by soldiers "(p. 19-20). The author explains this change in the understanding of "unacceptable damage" by saying that in the XIII century. the lower strata of the population are increasingly taking power: mountain tribes, artisans, merchants. A chronological analysis of the" cursing formulas " would be of great interest, but in this case it is of great interest.

It has only just begun, and the proposed interpretations of such changes can only be taken as conjectural.

The book's coverage of the issue of maintaining a staff of employees and artisans in villages and temples (what has been called the Jajmani system in the sociological literature) is characterized by the usual completeness and thoroughness for this author. At the same time, it evokes thoughts about the separation of different schools of indology from each other. Karashima draws on the work of his colleagues X to study this system. Kotani [2002] and T. Mizushima [1996; Mizushima, 2006], who raised this problem based on the material of Maharashtra in the 19th century. Similarly, Soviet indologists half a century ago began studying the Jajmani system (or bara-baluta, as it was called in Maharashtra), starting from the work of I. M. Reisner (Reisner, 1953) ^.9 If Karashima could have used the work of Soviet indologists, his conclusions in this section would have been more confident.

The main part of the third "section" of the book is of independent value, but it is not related problematically and thematically to the question of the transition to a new formation, but is devoted to relations between South India and China in the Middle Ages. The author has conducted considerable research on Chinese pottery finds in South India and Sri Lanka, which showed that Chinese goods penetrated these areas from the 13th-14th to the 17th-18th centuries. A selection of references to some South Indian cities and embassies found in Chinese sources of the 13th-15th centuries is also extremely valuable. The book is provided with translations into English of several key Tamil inscriptions and excerpts from a number of Chinese chronicles, which gives the author's statements additional credibility.

The author was able to show that South Indian society during the IX-XIV centuries was not stagnant and immobile. In it, the processes of crystallization of relations, which are usually called feudal, took place. It remains unclear which system preceded the feudal one. Is it possible to call it "communal" (in no way "primitive")? But then we will get closer to the understanding proposed by B. Stein. In any case, it should be recognized that all evolutionary processes developed very slowly.

Overall, Noboru Karashima's peer-reviewed book represents a new step in the study of the early medieval history of South India.

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