Agreeing to Disagree Burton Stein on Vij

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    soon as it came out in 1980, being acclaimed by some (mostly outside India), and

    reviled by others (mostly in India). The book itself I found very hard going,written in a convoluted and hermetic style that was extremely difficult for an

    economist like myself to penetrate; but the ’segmentary state’ model was finally

    there, as fully fleshed out as it would ever be after the bare bones of the

    historiographical essays that had preceded it. In any case, it took me a very longtime to reconcile myself to the fact that the same person who had written this book

    (in somewhat rebarbative ’social science’ language), was the very humorous,

    denim-jacketed, character who showed up on appointment at the India Office

    Library, looking like a sort of ageing Clark Gable playing the White Hunter inMocambo (a fairly awful film I had just seen two days before on TV, in the seedy

    lounge of my Polish hotel).

    Now, as is well-known, Peasant state and society is mostly about the Chola

    dynasty, even though there is a long, last chapter on later times. In contrast, the

    Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, which appeared just as I was

    beginning my research, included several chapters by Stein on precisely this later

    Vijayanagara period, that coincided with the focus of my own dissertation (which

    was on South India between 1550 and 1650). Besides, since my main interest was

    trade, there was also the paper that Stein had written, titled ’Coromandel Trade in

    Medieval India’, in a volume edited by John Parker of the James Ford Bell Library,

    entitled Merchants and scholars (1965). I managed to obtain a xerox copy of this

    paper in Delhi with great difficulty, and read with interest its theory concerning

    how the so-called ’merchant guilds’ in South India had been smashed by the

    expansion of the Vijayanagara polity into south-eastern India.

    Let us recall where matters stood in

    Vijayanagarastudies in the mid-1950s,

    when Stein began his own thesis work on the Tirumala-Tirupati temple at the

    University of Chicago, even if this means partly rehearsing ground touched on by

    him in the introduction to Vijayanagara. The classic work was that of the British

    administrator Robert Sewell, and its title, A forgotten empire (1900), tells its own

    tale. Sewell had begun by doing research on epigraphy and numismatics, to

    establish clear ’lists’ of south Indian dynasties; in some sense, this was a

    continuation of Colin Mackenzie’s unfinished project to the same end, although

    Mackenzie had had a rather different set of materials in mind. Sewell’s enterprisewas completely altered though, by the chance re-discovery by the Portuguese

     Arabist David Lopes of some detailed accounts by Portuguese of Vijayanagara (or

    ’Bisnaga’, as they prefer to call it), in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Lopes

    published the texts, anonymously authored, but attributed by him to Domingos

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    Paes (c. 1518) and Fernao Nunes (c. 1535), in his book Chr6nica dos Reis de

    Bisnaga (’Chronicle of the Vijayanagara kings’) in 1897, as part of the publication

    programme for the fourth centenary of Vasco da Gama’s voyage; his edition also

    carries a long eighty-one page introduction, including references to Sewell’s Lists

    of inscriptions, and sketch of the dynasties of Southern India ( 1884). Sewell seized

    upon this Portuguese publication and used it extensively in his own work publishedthree years later, as he also did the early seventeenth-century text authored by the

    Portuguese Jesuit Manuel Barradas, concerning the Vijayanagara ’Civil War’ of

    the 1610s. Since Sewell published complete translations of these texts, the names

    of Paes and’Nuniz’

    (asNunes came to be

    spelt),entered

    Vijayanagarahistoriography in a definitive fashion; the less fortunate Barradas for his part was

    largely consigned to the dust-heap.The next two generations of work then extended the documentary basis of

    Vijayanagara studies considerably. S. Krishnaswami Ayyangar (for some of

    whose other writings Stein had a particular fondness), published excerpts from

    literary texts relating to Vijayanagara in Sources of Vijayanagar history (1919),

    following it up some years later with an extensive work on the Tirupati temple;

    then, two historians, B. A. Saletore and N. Venkataramanayya, began the processof reintegrating Sewell’s view with the inscriptional record, which had in the

    meantime been published in fits and starts, in the Archaeological Survey’s annual

    summaries, as well as in some cases with the entire texts. The Portuguese, Italian

    and Latin materials continued to be exploited by the Bombay-based Spanish Jesuit,

    H. Heras, and thus by the mid-1930s, a substantial body of work existed on

    Vijayanagara. Yet this work remained curiously shorn of a framework, often

    reflecting no more than dull quarrels between regions (thus, the Karnataka lobby

    versus the Andhra lobby, each vying for the pride of having ’founded’

    Vijayanagara). Venkataramanayya’s Studies in the history of the third dynasty of

    Vijayanagara (1935), which I myself consider the best work of that generation

    (though Stein did not share my view), faithfully reflects the strengths and

    weaknesses of the approach in vogue. The book is repetitive, often organised

    almost like a district gazetteer (a trait that is even more pronounced in T. V.

    Mahalingam’s unreadable work of the next generation), and this is not a

    coincidence. Though Venkataramanayyawas

    a very talented scholar and

    philologist, who edited a number of important Telugu texts from the Mackenzie

    collection, he typically insisted on seeing Vijayanagara as an empire in the mould

    of the British Raj in India. A major part of his enterprise was thus to classify taxes,

    lands and other aspects of the ’land-system’ in a way that would be recognisable to

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    a British revenue official.  Atop this system sat the (as it turns out, somewhat

    bogus) category of a sort of Vijayanagara military fief-holder, the arnarandyaka,the description of whose activities seems to derive essentially from Nunes’s

    account of the 1530s. Indeed, as Stein himself noted in his chapter in the

    Cambridge economic history, while Venkataramanayya surely knew the materials

    at first hand as well as anyone, the real ’theoretical’ statement was that of K. A.

    Nilakantha Sastri, who in his general work, History of South India, described

    Vijayanagara as a confederation of military chieftains, perhaps unconsciously

    borrowing the early British description of the Marathas in the closing years of the

    eighteenth century.These monographs, and a few other works devoted to the Nayaka

    principalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (R. Satyanatha Aiyar on

    Madurai, V. Vriddhagirisan on Tanjavur, C. HayavadanaRao on Mysore), defined

    the baseline from which any analysis might be attempted in the baseline from

    which any analysis might be attempted in the late 1950s. The last major

    publication in English at that time was the three-volume work (Further sources of

    Vijayanagar history) edited by Sastri and Venkataramanayya in 1946, and as its

    title indicates this was really a source-publication, even though one volume of thethree tried to establish a clear chronology of political ’events’, which was then

    extensively used as background material by such historians as Tapan Raychaudhuriin his Jan Company in Coromandel, 1605-1690 (1962).

    Stein’s doctoral thesis thus tries to set itself apart from this received wisdom,

    while at the same time making use of it for the empirical detail it provided. The

    focus of the thesis was the Tirupati temple, and the research was facilitated by the

    existence of still another coherent source-publication, that of the Tirumalai-

    Tirupati Devasthanam epigraphical series in six broadly chronological volumes

    (1931-38). The main thrust of Stein’s argument was a ’modernist’ and

    ’developmental’ one, which is quite adequately brought out in two very well-cited

    papers published by him in the early 1960s; since they represented the core of the

    thesis, it is probably no surprise that the thesis itself remained unpublished. In

    retrospect, echoes can be found between Stein’s position of the time, and some

    aspects of his occasional collaborator Morris D. Morris’s views of the same period;

    in particular, both insistedon

    downplayingthe idea of Indian

    ’other-worldliness’,and argued (Morris explicitly, Stein implicitly) against ’values’ as an obstacle to

    social and economic change in South Asia. To Stein, writing in the Economic

    Weekly in the early 1960s, it appeared clear that Vijayanagara was a state that was

    oriented towards ’agricultural development’, and that the patronage of temples was

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    part of a strategy towards this end. Ingeniously, he showed how donations to

    temples had to be invested fruitfully, yielding a certain minimum rate of return if

    the puja that was to be conducted in exchange for the donations could be sustained.

     Also, he analysed the changing form of donation, from a preponderance of land to

    more and more cash, as well as the changing identities of donors (amongst whom

    merchants, and related groups, appear rather more prominently in the sixteenth

    century than before). In some sense, it seems to me that the Stein who wrote those

    papers (later collected in his All the King’s Mana, published from Madras)

    represented a rather more radical (and perhaps more ’nationalist’!) view of the

    ‘modernity’ of Vijayanagara than either Sastri or Venkataramanayya. Let us stress,

    once more, that these papers privileged the inscriptional materials over all others,

    whether the European sources (which do have some rather interesting things to say,in point of fact, about Tirupati), or literary and narrative texts (from kavya to

    kaifiyats) of the type found excerpted in the two volumes on Sources and Further

    sources.

    In the 1960s, even though Stein’s unhappiness with the formulation associated

    with K. A. Nilakantha Sastri on the Cholas grew more pronounced, the views he

    held on Vijayanagara continued to stress its power, its thrusting character, itsdestruction of autonomous local institutions, and so on. The paper that I have cited

    briefly above, ’Coromandel Trade in Medieval India’, is a good example of this

    position, since it stresses the power and efficacy of Vijayanagara militaryintervention in the Tamil country in the fifteenth century, in the aftermath of the

    campaigns of Kumara Kampana. Even trade, it seems, must be seen in this

    conception in relation to state power, and is almost subsumed in a narrative where

    the Vijayanagara state holds centre-stage.It is thus surprising, in this light, to re-read the last chapter of Peasant state and

    society (1980), on Vijayanagara. Of course, in the meantime, the focus of Stein’ss

    interests in relation to Vijayanagara had shifted from the state to forms of sectarian

    religious organisation, viewed largely from a ’sociological’ (rather than a ’religious

    studies’) viewpoint. In the South Indian temples volume that he edited (1978), two

    papers represent this rather well. The first is Stein’s own, arguing from Census

    materials on the foundation-dates of temples, for a shift in the composition of

    deities to whom

    templeswere devoted in the Tamil

    countrybetween 1350 and

    1750. The other is Arjun Appadurai’s essay on the relationship between temples,sectarian leaders and the Vijayanagara state, which- while arguing for a form of

    strategic ’vote-bank’ rationality on the part of ’medieval’ actors- shifts the brunt

    of change from the state to a rather different level in society. (Incidentally, Stein

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    continued to cite this essay with approbation into the late 1980s, indeed rather

    more frequently than the essay’s author himself, for Appadurai himself had

    metamorphosed by that time into a post-modernist guru). Besides, Stein’s interestin viewing the state as held together by ritual elements had grown by leaps and

    bounds in this period; the analysis of the mahanavami at Vijayanagara as a

    constitutive ritual also dates from these interim years. It should be stressed that

    Stein was never interested in the ritual of kingship for its own sake, but for its

    function; this is the reason why his analysis, while strikingly innovative at the time

    for the Indian historiography, appears rather broad-brush in retrospect, from the

    point of view of the close reader of texts like the Amuktamälyada, from the

    Vijayanagara period.To return to Peasant state and society then, its last chapter claimed that what

    had been said for the earlier period concerning the ’segmentary’ nature of the

    Chola state broadly held good for Vijayanagara as well. Despite being providedwith considerable detail (including some limited narrative detail concerning

    Vijayanagar rule), the reader was left with the impression that a highly stable

    structural model, rooted in a far earlier past, explained all the essentials concerning

    this state. Even if the rituals had changed somewhat, ’ritual kingship’ stillremained the rule; the importance of fiscality as either constitutive or reflective in

    any way of state power was dismissed; localities preserved their autonomy from

    the centre, even if the nomenclature (and perhaps even the dimensions) of the

    ’local units’ had changed. But, curiously, the chapter at the same time reproducedthe core materials of the two papers from the early 1960s that I have discussed

    above.

    This created a major problem in Stein’s work, a tension that he himself

    recognised to an extent.  As C. A. Bayly remarks in his companion essay, the

    dynamics of historical change proved difficult to bring into the ’segmentary state’

    model, which is no surprise since the model was conceived by structural

    anthropologists whose primary concern was never historical change anyway.

    (Aidan Southall’s self-congratulatory essay of the 1980s in Comparative studies in

    society and history, reflecting in part on Stein’s work, is typical of this). Thus,

    between 1980 and 1985 (when he published several further important essays on

    Vijayanagara),Stein had time to reflect on these

    problems.One of these later

    essays, in a collection from the Journal ofpeasant studies on the applicability of

    ’feudalism’ as a concept to India and other ’non-European’ societies, returns in

    some respects to the position of the 1965 essay on ’Coromandel trade’.

    Vijayanagara warriors are seen as powerfully intruding into the Tamil countryside,

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    but Stein also nuanced the analysis by suggesting that the situation in Karnataka

    was rather different (and more stable), than that which obtained in the Telugu and

    Tamil country. The other essay, presented at the review conference on the

    Cambridge economic history of India, went even further. Influenced in part byFrank Perlin, with whom he briefly contemplated a collaboration on the subject

    (their essays, with very similar titles, appear side-by-side in Modern Asian Studies,

    1985), Stein now posited a considerable change between the medieval state of the

    Cholas, and the late eighteenth century state of say, Haidar cali and Tipu Sultan.

    From the work of Perlin, Stein appears to have seized the importance of

    eighteenth-century ’magnate’ figures in determining rural power relations,as

    distinct from his insistence in the case of the medieval system on collective bodies

    of peasants (even if not all peasants were represented in these bodies). The

    solution he found was to apply the idea of ’military fiscalism’ taken from the earlymodern French historiography to southern India in the long transition from the

    Cholas to the British. Thus, Vijayanagara now appears as part of a transition to

    ’patrimonial’ regimes (here, the reference was to Max Weber on ’Sultanism’),

    powered by military-fiscal changes.

    This also brought Stein to another problem that he grappled with in the late

    1980s, and especially the early 1990s, without however coming to a verysuccessful resolution. I refer to the status of Islam in South India (discussed at

    length for the eighteenth century by Susan Bayly in her 1989 book), and

    conversely, the extent to which states like Vijayanagara could be looked at as

    ’Hindu’ kingdoms, as quite a lot of the Indian historiography tended to do. To the

    extent that Stein’s own focus on ’ritual’ kingship had tended to bring out the role

    played by ’Hindu’ ritual, there was obviously a drift in that direction. At the same

    time, he was also aware, in particular after an important essay by Hermann Kulke

    published in the 1980s, that from the fifteenth century onwards, the image of

    Vijayanagara had been manipulated for posterity by a series of powerful

    ideological agents, such as the Sringeri matha, for example. The Vijayanagaravolume thus veers somewhat uncertainly between rejecting the ’communalist’

    characterisation of Vijayanagara, and accepting that it was indeed a ’Hindu’

    kingdom fighting its ’Muslim’ rivals. On balance, I believe, the reader of Stein is

    left with the first impression, among other things because of the manner in whichthe narrative for the sixteenth century is constructed. Both Krishnadevaraya and

    especially his son-in-law Aliya Ramaraya are shown as strategic actors, practising

    a form of realpolitik (and here we hark back once more to the formulation of the

    late 1950s). They are as ready to ally with the Deccan Sultans, as to fight against

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    them; power, not religious ideology, dominates their actions, when all is said and

    done.

    The first of the 1985 papers, in the ’feudalism’ collection, does address this

    problem of a ’Hindu nationalist’ reading of Vijayanagara in passing; on the other

    hand, the preoccupations of the ’State formation and economy reconsidered’ paperlie elsewhere. The main interest of this rather schematic essay is that it proposes a

    solution to the problem of change, and an escape route from the homeostatic, self-

    reproducing model of the ’segmentary state’. This is by producing a technologicalmotor from the outside, in the form of firearms in particular, and military

    technology more generally. For Stein, Vijayanagara began a process of ’thrustingcentralisation’ using these technologies, which at one stage he suggested were

    essentially brought in by the Portuguese. Various rounds of change are said to

    have followed, with resistance continually being offered by earlier community-based political structures to the new dispensation. The period of Krishnadevaraya

    (r. 1509-29) was identified by him as one such key period of change, a formulation

    that he carried forward into the monograph on Vijayanagara. Then, there was a

    rather long hiatus, but centralisation is said to have resumed with Chikkadevaraja

    Wodeyar in late seventeenth-century Mysore. Finally, Haidar and Tipu were

    thought to have represented highly sophisticated forms of centralised rule, a view

    in which Stein believed he was confirmed by his own researches in the second half

    of the 1980s into the papers of Sir Thomas Munro (and by Devdas Moodley’s

    unpublished research of the same period in SOAS).

    The problem however was in large measure very simply empirical: for Stein

    never seems to have gone back after 1980 to do primary research on Vijayanagara

    itself, from materials generated in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth

    centuries. True, he kept abreast of the secondary literature, writing reviews of

    almost every major work that appeared on Vijayanagara in the 1980s and early1990s. But, the real bases of the revision (for revision it clearly was, though he

    never explicitly said so) in views that took place between 1980 and 1985 were

    elsewhere: first, the theoretical problem of finding a dynamic of change to escapefrom falling into the trap of seeing the ’segmentary state’ as a sort of Asiatic mode

    of production; second, the research into the early colonial archives, which

    convinced him that there was more to south India in the late pre-colonial periodthan robust and more-or-less autarchic communities.

    Thus, Vijayanagara straddles several faultlines, for while vestiges of the

    ’segmentary state’ model can still be found there, the broad thrust of the analysis

    has moved towards the dynamic process of ’military fiscalism’, based in good part

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    on a technological deus ex machina. Equally, to support the ’military fiscalism’

    hypothesis, recourse has to be taken by Stein to Portuguese sources in translation

    (notably Nunes’s account of the siege of Raichur by Krishnadevaraya), even

    though elsewhere in the same book, he is dismissive of these same sources,somewhat unjustly dismissing them as no more than ’Orientalist fantasies’. It is

    rather difficult for the general reader to understand why Nunes cannot be used, say,to support the idea of ’feudalism’ in Vijayanagara (as is done by A. Krishnaswami

    and others), if he is so reliable on other counts.

    In the 1980s, in the years between Peasant state and society and Vijayanagara

    (which stand at the two ends of the decade), work by a certain number of otherauthors had also been published on Vijayanagara, so that the historiographicalconstellation had changed somewhat too. Some of this work Stein found

    unproblematic, and integrated without difficulty into his schema; in particular, the

    work done on the site of Hampi itself by George Michell and his collaborators was

    seen by him as providing useful complementary materials to his own conception.More problematic for him was a series of essays that Noboru Karashima producedon Vijayanagara and the Nayakas, culminating in his book Towards a new

    formation (1992). Stein’s review of the work appeared in this journal (Vol. 14,no. 2, 1994, pp. 226-28), and it was a rather critical discussion, tempered by some

    appreciation at the beginning and end. Karashima’s broad argument was that

    Vijayanagara in the fifteenth century was a powerful, expansive, state, which

    crushed the peasantry with fiscal levies while expanding into the Tamil country.

    However, in the sixteenth century, for unexplained reasons, this relativelycentralised and bureaucratic structure dissolved into a form of ’feudalism’

    dominated by figures called ndyakas, whose role Karashima had earlierexplored

    in

    a brief fashion. The materials from which this argument was built were, as is usual

    with Karashima, the inscriptional record which is still so rich in the period up to

    the mid-sixteenth century.

    Stein might well have found the first part of this argument congenial, althoughhe probably thought Karashima exaggerated the extent of centralisation that had

    been achieved by the fifteenth century.  At any rate, his principal critiques layelsewhere. First, he noted the ‘general framing according to rather old-fashioned

    Marxist concepts’ in Karashima’s work, combined with ’an unspecified statestructure’, which he considered strange in view of the importance given byKarashima to the state, which provided ’the major dynamic, the historical

    movement’ (indeed, rather as in Stein’s own work of the mid-1980s). A second

    objection that was raised by him concerned Karashima’s usage of the notions of

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    ’state slavery’, and ’individual property’. On the latter, he was particularly

    sceptical, though, to my knowledge, he never produced a detailed critique of Peter

     A. Granda’s thesis, which has a persuasive argument on forms of private landed

    property in Vijayanagara times.

    On one matter, Stein seems to have agreed with Karashima, and this was

    concerning the centrality of the inscriptional record for an understanding of the

    Vijayanagara state. Reviewing a work I co-authored with Velcheru Narayana Rao

    and David Shulman, titled Symbols of substance (1992), he cautioned (albeit in an

    uncharacteristically gentle way) against the extensive use we made of literary

    sources, which I suppose was a reflection of the position both he and Karashimaheld at that time (see this journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994, pp. 228-30). This may

    therefore be the place to issue a disclaimer, since it was never my intention (nor

    that of my co-authors) to deny the utility or importance of the inscriptional record,

    merely to argue that there are other important and rather neglected source-materials

    for the recovery of pre-colonial south Indian political culture, and to clarify besides

    that the dominant statistical (’counting’) approach to inscriptions has severe

    limitations. However, where literary materials were concerned, one also discerns a

    mild shift in position in some of Stein’s last writings. For, reviewing a work,

    namely Phillip Wagoner’s translation of the Telugu text Rdyavdcakamu, his

    judgement of it was broadly rather positive, even if he did express distress at one

    point in the review at Wagoner’s genuflection in the direction of ’the fashionable

    methodology of ethnohistory’ (this journal, vol. 15, no. 1, 1995, pp. 139-41).

     And finally, there was a new historiography on trade, that also finds a place in

    the Vijayanagara book, representing a rather nice closing of the circle from the

    1965essay.

    Whereas Stein had earlier read the

    historyof trade out of the

    historyof the Vijayanagara state’s dealings with the so-called ’merchant guilds’, now he

    devoted a good deal more attention to the articulation of ports, merchants and

    trading networks in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, issues that he had

    referred to only tangentially in one of his chapters in the Cambridge economic

    history. For this, he drew among other things (I may note immodestly) on my

    unpublished thesis, though I know from correspondence (including a long, helpful,

    and very critical letter of 1987) that he did not agree with a number of my

    formulations. Of course, this reflected anew the ambiguity with which heunderstood the place of European (and especially Portuguese) materials, a subject

    on which we had a number of verbal, and occasionally written, arguments. In

    particular, it has been (and still is) my position that the relationship between the

    Portuguese and the use of firearms in peninsular warfare is rather more complex

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    than Stein made it out to be; he, for his part, never responded in print to various

    essays I published on the subject (or to the chapter on thissubject

    in

    Symbolsof

    substance). On the other hand, since no one else seems to refer to those papers

    either, perhaps Stein was not the only one unconvinced by my arguments.Thus, to sum up, at the core of the Vijayanagara book lies a profound

    ambiguity, a paradox even. For having begun his academic career working on the

    Vijayanagara period in the 1950s, Burton Stein’s work took him to adopt different,and at times contradictory, positions in relation to this state. From the ’modernist’,

    forward-looking state of the early papers, with its sophisticated system of agrarian

    and water-management, Vijayanagara became in the middle years just another‘segmentary state’, a mere continuation of the early medieval past. Then, from the

    mid-1980s, Vijayanagara came to be transformed in Stein’s view into a state

    located in a phase of important changes, on the road to the full-blown ’militaryfiscalism’ of the late eighteenth century. I have argued in these pages that these

    different views that Stein himself held on Vijayanagara were a result of a set of

    complex processes. There was, among other factors, his anxiety to classify, not to

    have what he called an ’unspecified state structure’. This was one of Stein’s

    strengths, something that made his work accessible to both comparativists

    (especially impatient comparativists), and anthropologists, a fact that Chris Fuller

    too notes in his essay, albeit from another perspective. From many other

    historians’ point of view, this overriding desire to give the state a ’name’, is

    somewhat puzzling, and might even be construed as a weakness. In retrospect, one

    reason was probably determining in the ambivalence of Stein’s formulations: for

    Vijayanagara does lie at a cross-roads, between the medieval heritage of the

    Cholas, Kakatiyasand

    Hoysalas (witheach of which it shares some

    analyticalfeatures), and the phase of early modern innovation in south India. It is thus only

    appropriate to end this essay, I suppose, by revealing that the Polish-owned hotel

    where I stayed in 1985 was called Janus Hotel.

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