First Draft | We spent 75 years oversimplifying our past; it’s time for a Deccan corrective

Elephant-riding Jain kings going to battle accompanied by the declamation of Sanskrit poetry; Sultans who preferred Marathi and Telugu to Persian; Hindu gods who visited Mecca to share biryani with the locals. Each of these statements might seem shocking to us in 2022, an age where it seems that all of history must exist only to confirm our modern political biases. Yet for centuries upon centuries of Deccan history, they were the norm.

The Deccan is nearly the size of Germany and is many times more diverse. It is the crossroads of three great linguo-cultural zones: Those of Marathi, Kannada, and Telugu. It is home to the subcontinent’s third-largest river valley system, that of the Godavari, and has been the base of some of its most important polities. It’s time for the history of this ancient plateau — and the way that it challenges us to think more creatively about Indian identity — to play more of a role in national conversations.

Challenging Gangetic Centrality

In the 1950s, India — a landmass stretching across dozens of unique ecologies and linguistic groups; covered in a patchwork of hundreds of princely states and colonial territories; riven by issues of caste, gender discrimination and inequality, and with a predominantly rural and uneducated population — emerged as a single nation-state. This young nation required a national mythos to tie it together. Ruled from Delhi, it needed to find common ground with the rest of the diverse subcontinent.

The way that India’s early leaders chose to do this was by selecting a handful of North Indian dynasties who managed to dominate other parts of the country — and trying to use this to portray modern India as a nation that has always existed through all of time. And so the Mauryas, Guptas, Delhi Sultanate and Mughals all became central to school history curricula — even though academic studies have since shown that their political control over the subcontinent was ephemeral, an “imperial moment”. But as comforting as this image of an unchanging Indian history that perfectly resembles our modern nation-state is, it is a complete warping of our diverse, multi-centric, morally complex past.

Perhaps the most important consequence of this warping is that the rest of India is seen as “provinces” influenced by the culture of the Gangetic Plains, rather than as distinct geopolitical entities with their own historical trajectories. The Deccan is the most important such entity. An ancient plateau over 65 million years old, it looms over the surrounding Konkan coast and Andhra plains, and has consistently been the greatest economic and political centre south of the Narmada river. Its geopolitics are intertwined with those of the Malwa Plateau to its north and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts to its south. Just as it is impossible to understand Europe’s history without Germany, we similarly cannot understand India’s history without the Deccan.

The Importance of the Deccan

There is much that the Deccan can teach us about ourselves. Through the medieval period (c. 600–1500 CE), we can see with marvellous clarity how elites made states and empires. We can see an intertwining of religion, power and art; we see the emergence of linguistic politics; we see a consistent and vibrant interest in global trade and an openness to influences from elsewhere. In many ways, the Deccan also pioneered concepts that would be adopted by the rest of the subcontinent. For example, it was Deccan rulers who first turned towards the use of vernacular languages in their glamourous courts, at a time when North Indian rulers remained obsessed with Sanskrit and refused to consider that their mother tongues could even be used for literature. It was a Deccan courtly text, the Mitakshara, that was used by the British as the basis for their interpretation of Hindu law. And it was Deccan sultans, not the Mughals, who invested in the development of gunpowder technology to the point where even the Portuguese wrote of them with awe and respect.

All these developments were crucial to the unfolding of Indian history as a whole, but there’s more. We also see in the Deccan the darker side of power in India. We see how political charisma coupled with the use of force allows rulers to escape accountability for their actions, and the consequences thereof: endless war, self-aggrandisement, inequality, and tragic violence against the underprivileged. It is challenging, morally, to consider that some of the subcontinent’s grandest architectural and artistic developments happened in such a world. But that only makes post-Independence India’s extraordinary achievements in every one of those fields, especially healthcare, education and human rights, even more precious and worth safeguarding at a time when they are under onslaught.

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The fact of the matter is that we choose what history means, and what we learn from it. For the last 75 years, we have tried to erase or ignore inconvenient portions of our past. As a result, has been reduced to something that only makes us yearn for imagined, bygone splendour, something that is meant to provoke shame or anger. But history can and should be something grander: The sum of thousands of years of activities by people like us, living in a harsher world. A grand, ever-unfolding phenomenon that teaches us about the nature of power, economics and culture, and how we can harness that to our advantage.

Learning about the reality of history does not take away from the uniqueness of our modern nation-state. Rather, by making our picture of the past more morally complex, and by challenging us to understand it in every dimension and from every perspective, it allows us to better respect the coming together of millions of diverse peoples who make up India today, and to ensure that a just future lies ahead for us all.

The author is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of the Deccan: A new history of medieval South India’, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views expressed are personal.

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