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It is a general belief that when a person undertakes any business enterprise, he calculates profit as his ultimate aim. Profit is defined as the monetary gain made by a person by selling something for more than it costs him. As per the norms of the economic concept of medieval Europe, moral scruples such as greed and avarice were associated with the notion of profit. This in turn acted as a hindrance to pursue profit while undertaking the profession of business. In the sixteenth century, due to Calvinism, the life of business was given a new sanctity. In the context of India, we can anchor the fact that the calculation of profit was an integral aspect of the existence of the community of bania. This can be established with the help of a study of the Ardhakathanaka —an autobiographical memoir. It was written by Banarasidas in A.D. 1641 (V.S. 1698) when he was living at Agra. Banarasidas was a middle-class Jain merchant. While understanding the notion of profit, the present article looks into the aspect of whether religion acts as a restraint or promotes business as a profession. It enables us to seek an insight into the mercantile world of the early sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. This was also the time when the Mughal Empire was in its heyday. The Ardhakathanaka is an invaluable contemporary source; hence, it has great historical value. Profit being an integral aspect of mercantile life, this feature is explicitly highlighted in the Ardhakathanaka. We get to know about the motives and methods employed by the bania community to earn profit. Despite providing immense, crucial information associated with mercantile life, historians have not highlighted this aspect of the Ardhakathanaka. The article is an attempt to draw the gaze of historians to a primary source providing vital first-hand information regarding the motives and methods in the pursuit of profit during the medieval period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Farhat Hasan, Paper, Performance, and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, xv+155 pp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Aurangzeb's reign for 50 years from 1658 to 1707 CE is an indelible part of the history of India. The Mughal Empire grew in the east and south of India, so did the religious persecution of the infidels. Their temples were demolished and their religious practices were put to end. The objective of this article is to carry out a geographical study of desecration of temples during his rule and find the possible reasons behind it. The study takes help from books written during his reign by the office bearers in his administration translated into English. Aurangzeb was of the view that temples can be desecrated any time as they cannot walk. He did issue several orders, specific as well as general, for the destruction of places of worship of the worthless infidels. The study concludes that the state of Rajasthan has witnessed the highest number of temple desecrations under his rule. From the first Muslim invasion till the modern times, the vandalism and desecration of places of worship of infidels seems to be inspired by the Islamic concept of Sunnah —which means following the sayings, teachings and doings of the Prophet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The category of 'military labour' has traditionally been used to designate 'combat labour' – the labour of soldiers. Focusing on the case of early modern South Asia, the present essay argues that this equivalence is misplaced and that it is a product of a distorted view of war defined primarily in terms of combat. The essay discusses the roles played by the logistical workforce of Mughal armies in conducting military campaigns and facilitating imperial expansion. It calls for broadening the category of 'military labour' to include all types of labour rendered consciously towards the fulfilment of military objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mughal Era witnessed a ceaseless movement of people, money and resources, which paved the way for a strong interaction between different provinces of that time. The desire to oversee a solid political domain by the Mughals brought forth a progression of urban focuses in various parts of the realm for their productive control. Urban Centres performed a distinctive sort of function by becoming either administrative, commercial or religious centres. Among these, Lahore was one which gloated the economy of Mughal Empire through its inland and overseas exchange. In the present article, an attempt has been made to assess the geographical location of Lahore, with its water and land transport facilities as a supporting factor for trade and to know the commodities of which there was a great demand, both inside and outside of the Mughal Empire. This article highlights the attributes of power in Mughal India; the interdependence of trade and politics; the impact on other towns of Lahore suba as well as on other subas of empire also. Furthermore, to examine the overall commerce of Lahore Suba (reflected from travelogues) is the part of paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News reporting was an essential part of the administration of the Mughal Empire. Many sources such as biography, autobiography, court chronicles, akhbarat and travelogues indicate that the Mughals had an organised system of intelligence and espionage. The Mughals ruled over a vast territory which made it necessary to organize a system whereby news and information could be conveyed rapidly over great distances. News writing in Mughal India was closely connected with espionage and postal communication. For this reason, Historians who have studied the communication system of Mughal India, discussed the information system in a limited manner and paid greater coverage to the communication system. With the help of the news reports, the Mughal emperor issued orders and many other communications related to administration. The information system was important also for the economy. Till now, not much is known about the Mughal information system, notably the news reporting system related to the state. The present article deals with the information system of the Mughal empire particularly from the reign of Emperor Akbar to Aurangzeb. In this article, effort is made to discuss the types, levels, importance, structure, procedure and mechanism of the news reporting system during Mughal empire along with the rank, qualifications and work ethics of the news reporters. This article also analyses the nature and the role of the information system of the Mughal state along with how this information system evolved over a period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The region known as South Asia today emerged as the locus for order-building only in the early modern period (~1500–1750) as a "region" of Islamicate Asia. I demonstrate this through a cognitive-strategic process based on the interactions between polities and resources within and outside of South Asia. While the practices associated with the primary institutions of warfare, great power management, diplomacy, and political economy did not meaningfully differentiate South Asia from Eurasia in the pre-Mughal millennium, the deep rules associated with them marked South Asia off from Islamicate Asia after the rise of the Mughals. The practices of these four primary institutions were co-constituted with Mughal hegemony. Unlike recent scholarship, I show that the regional level existed before the emergence of a global-scale international system. My analysis has two major theoretical implications. First, I clarify the distinction between hegemonic and imperial orders, and argue that coercive hegemony must be understood as a primary institution of an international/regional society. Since all hegemonies are not alike, I explain why some hegemonic orders are based on coercion while others mix coercion with legitimacy/acquiescence by elucidating the structural differences between Mughal and Ming/Qing hegemonies. Second, I advance the debate on balance of power versus hegemony by providing a historically grounded explanation that demonstrates why the injection of extra-regional resources into early modern South Asia produced hegemony while fostering systemic balancing behavior in Europe (post-1500). My findings raise questions related to regionalization (order-building) without regionalism (shared identities/threat perceptions), while showing that region (trans)formation effects order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The celebration of Nauroz, being one of the most well-defined events of the Mughal Court, finds ample space in their records. Yet, its story was not just about grandeur and magnificence, but touches several aspects of what made and sustained the empire. Building on the multiple identities of the festival, which emerges from a brief overview of its antecedents, this article examines the ways in which the sources have presented each of the emperors to have negotiated with it. However, it is on stringing them together and noting the changing nature of references that the layers begin to reveal themselves, discerning not only what the sources voiced but also may have attempted to suppress, in our endeavour to understand the cultural functioning and articulation of power in the Mughal Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores whether the concept of ‘friendship’ is a useful and basic category for the analysis of South Asian history. It begins with a variety of characteristics of relationships that social science has identified as friendship. It then explores the Baburnama, focusing on the social closeness or social distance of several groups and individuals, such as queens, allied leaders, blood kin, clerics and recruits. None were socially close enough to Babur to merit the term friendship. In contrast to these more distant relations, some of the men in proximity to Babur were, indeed, very close. Babur uses two Turkish terms to describe these men. The first term is Içki, which translates as ‘Inner men’, that is, the small group of men (perhaps fifteen in number) who fought next to Babur in battle and often ate with him. They formed his guard at night. The second term is kukäldash, which translates as ‘breast brother’, meaning the few men who shared the same wet nurse as Babur. These men grew up with Babur and were his closest friends. He mourned bitterly when one was killed. Overall, Babur did have friends and companions who were loyal through thick and thin. They formed the very centre of his household troops and the centre of his army. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to analyse the double-edged social relationship between the merchant communities and the state beyond the technicalities of the economic considerations. It is generally argued that post-Akbar, the Mughal state saw a gradual shift from ‘spiritualism’ to ‘materialism’ vis-à-vis its engagement with the Jain community. Now Jain merchants were gaining prominence as the representatives of their community while interacting with Mughal royalty. The dominance of the merchants over the Jain sanghas and the importance given to these merchants by the Mughal state substantiates this argument. However, as a prelude to my future research, I argue that Mughal hegemony was being built more through everyday engagement and social relationships with the various communities rather just through structures like Mansabdari and Jagirdari. With a paramount control over the political and economic structures, the Mughal state ensured its stability and longevity through everyday interaction with the leadership of the various social groups. A farman issued by Shahjahan for the Jains of Bikaner and the everyday experiences of Seth Shantidas Jauhari of Ahmedabad show that the Mughal state under Shahjahan continued with the policies of his Mughal and pre-Mughal predecessors to maintain social harmony to expand its own social base. The Jain elites were as much active in the religious affairs of the community as their individual business interests to maintain their hold over the community. Their status of being community leaders was very important for these elites to acquire social legitimacy from the Mughal state as well as the community. Otherwise the medieval state and its local representatives never bothered about the ‘individual’ persona and stakes of these elites. An attempt has been made to reconstruct the processes of formation of medieval Jain community and its interaction with the larger apparatuses involved in the everyday making of the Mughal state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the history of Sikhism it has been firmly established that the Khatri caste played a significant role in the development of the medieval Sikh community. Moreover, the Khatris in the Mughal period grew into a prominent commercial and scribal caste. However it has never been considered why Sikhism, in the context of the Khatri’s medieval commercial expansion, attracted a large Khatri following. In this article I endeavour to explore the appeal of Sikhism to the medieval Khatri community by examining early Sikh thought on trade and commerce. In addition, I attempt to embed the influence of Sikhism within the development of the medieval Khatri merchant family. And consider how the growth of the Khatri merchant network resulted in the spread of Sikhism across Mughal north India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of the speaking subject that fundamentally underlay all Perso-Arabic discourses on language came to be constituted as a problem in mid-eighteenth-century Mughal India when a certain Persian ghazal stylistics called ‘Speaking Anew’ (tāza-goy’ī) came to be criticised. In defending this stylistics against its detractors, Sirājuddin ‘Ali Ḵẖān Ārzu, an Indo-Persian polymath of the period, responded in a variety of genres to this problematisation of the subject of speech, retrieving in Persian traditionally authoritative Arabic theories of mimesis and reinterpreting traditional Perso-Arabic ethico-aesthetic attitudes for his purposes. Central to the older discourses on language that Ārzu interpreted was the category of ‘linguistic purity’. Ārzu marshaled his treatises, dictionaries, commentaries and poetry to demonstrate that the trans-temporal and trans-spatial criteria of this category had always had local content peculiar to pedagogically trained peoples in each period and across periods of Persian literary history. This article discusses the motivations for Ārzu’s oeuvre and explicates its conceptual grid, focusing in particular on Ārzu’s historicisation of the concept of ‘linguistic purity’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the intertwined literary and political processes that moulded the texts of Mughal sovereignty and shaped the lives of Mughal sovereigns. In historical terms it considers the lives of Babur (d. 1530) and his grandson Akbar (d. 1605) and the ‘books’ associated with them, the Baburnama and Akbarnama. However, in order to connect the two pairs, this article follows an unconventional and less trodden path through Safavid political history, Iranian Sufism and the Persian epic and storytelling tradition. By doing so, it reveals new, less intuitive perspectives on the cultures that produced these texts and their protagonists. Specifically, it shows how Babur’s work and others like it were not only products of new literary tastes and reading practices but also participated in the making of new institutions of kingship and sainthood that evolved together in Mughal India and Safavid Iran over the sixteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Arab conquerors of Iran found Bimaristan there functioning as a centre of public health care. Later, the Muslim rulers in Central Asia and Khurasan changed its Persian name to Arabic Dārul-Shifa. The Sultans of Delhi also built dārul-shifas. Another development that took place in India was the beginning of the process of synthesizing Muslim system of medicines and the indigenous Ayurvedic system. This process continued during the Mughal period as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines a seventeenth-century text that attempts to reconcile Hindu and Muslim accounts of human genesis and cosmogony. The text, Mir’āt al-Makhlūqāt (‘Mirror of Creation’), written by a noted Mughal Sufi author Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti, purportedly a translation of a Sanskrit text, adopts rhetorical strategies and mythological elements of the Purāna tradition in order to argue that evidence of the Muslim prophets was available in ancient Hindu scriptures. Chishti thus accepts the reality of ancient Hindu gods and sages and notes the truth in their message. In doing so Chishti adopts elements of an older argument within the Islamic tradition that posits thousands of cycles of creation and multiple instances of Adam, the father of humans. He argues however that the Hindu gods and sages belonged to a different order of creation and time, and were not in fact human. The text bears some generic resemblance to Bhavishyottarapurāna materials. Chishti combines aspects of polemics with a deft use of politics. He addresses, on the one hand, Hindu intellectuals who claimed the prestige of an older religion, while he also engages, on the other hand, with Muslim theologians and Sufis like the Naqshbandi Mujaddidis who for their part refrained from engaging with Hindu traditions at all. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines through a historical lens, how the emasculated body of hijras takes on different and often contrasting meanings embodied in social roles, statuses and identities. It follows the trajectory of the historical space occupied by hijras since the beginning of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century and traces the roles and identities of hijras that have continuously been in a state of dynamism through their construction, reconstruction and reinvention in time and space. It is argued in the article that the corporeal act of emasculation performed on the body of hijras is a medium through which identities have been imposed, resisted and negotiated. From eunuch-slaves to cultural performers, religious ascetics and followers of Bahuchara Mata, the differentiated bodies of hijras have served as the single most important vehicle of their identity formation and their social interaction with society. What is essentially brought out then is the interplay of traditional and rational action through the retention of the ritualised practice of emasculation centred on the worship of the goddess Bahuchara, and the redefinition of traditional roles in response to changing social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By 1745, the Persian ruler Nadir Shah (also known as Tahmasp Quli Khan) had made a name for himself as a conqueror in Asia. In the same year, the Dutch playwright Frans van Steenwyk scripted a play titled Thamas Koelikan in Amsterdam. The play not only chose Nadir for protagonist, but also identified his conquest of Mughal India as the backdrop to the drama. Just as Van Steenwyk’s drama reflected the curiosity of his peers in Nadir Shah, another image of Asian rulers circulating in Europe at the same time also featured in the play—the image of the Oriental Despot. Although the theme of Oriental Despotism was a generic appli-cation to Asian rulers, the relationship of this label with Nadir Shah was more intimate. From the late eighteenth century onwards, any mention of Nadir Shah meant a reference to Oriental Despotism. This article analyses the nature of representation of Nadir Shah in Van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan. It studies the means by which the notion of Oriental Despotism features in the play. It argues that the observations made in this regard should be seen in the light of the sources that the playwright employed in penning his play. This related closely to the world of the Dutch East India Company in South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the history of madrassahs (Islamic seminaries) in South Asia from their inception in the 12th century until the end of colonial rule in 1947. The paper argues that many of the pre-colonial rulers of South Asia, including the Mughals (1526—1857), played key roles in promoting education and providing patronage of various educational institutions, including madrassahs. The policies of British colonial rule (1757—1947), however, made the most indelible marks on madrassah education, not only directly, wherein their policies have impacted on the structure, functions and curriculum of madrassahs, but also indirectly, through the prompting of responses from the ulama and the Muslim community that determined the contours and the content of madrassah education. The paper examines the roles of various strands of madrassah education, and the interplay of politics and curriculum of various major madrassahs. The paper demonstrates that madrassah as a concept and as an institution has come a long way, that its contents and contours have undergone changes, and that as an institution it has largely remained embedded within the society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The eclipse of Mughal power as the central authority began from the second half of the seventeenth century. By the time of the eighteenth century, and particularly from its second half, the local potentates began to empower themselves to defend as well as to expand their power. For this, they resorted to strengthen their armed forces. Thus, they employed Europeans as mercenaries in their armies. These mercenaries were considered superior in artillery and better in organizing the militia. Their interests also affected the colonial powers. In this article, the social and geographical background of the mercenaries has been discussed. An important part of the study is their role in the armies of their employers. The salaries and perquisites received by them have been taken into account. These payments were an additional channel of drainage of Indian wealth to Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to contribute to a growing body of scholarship on the cultural world of the early modern Indo-Persian state secretary, or munshī. Our guide will be the celebrated Mughal munshī, Chandar Bhān Brahman (d. 1662-63), whose life and career shed considerable light on the ideals of administrative conduct that informed political and intellectual culture during the reigns of the emperors Jahāngīr and Shāh Jahān. After examining Chandar Bhān's background and socio-intellectual milieu, we will focus in particular on a section of his prose magnum opus, Chahār Chaman (_The Four Gardens’), which served as both a memoir of his career in Mughal service and a didactic guide for exemplary ministerial theory and practice, or wizārat. Chandar Bhān's ideal wazīr, embodied by ministers like Afzal Khān Shirazi (d. 1639), Sa’d Allāh Khān (d. 1656), and Raghūnāth Rāy-i Rāyān (d. 1664), was not only tolerant and humane in the exercise of power, but also an expert in the secretarial arts in his own right, and a model of civility (akhlāq) and mystical awareness (ma’rifat) for others. In modern historiography such virtues tend to be primarily associated with Akbar's court, but at least in Chandar Bhān's eyes, they continued to have lasting relevance throughout the Mughal seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The essay sets out to re-examine the relations between Catholics and Muslims in the Mughal court in the early seventeenth century, during the reign of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27). It does so by confronting two sets of source—materials, namely the letters of the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier and Persian—language texts from the Mughal court. In particular it focuses on the important and neglected figure of Maulana Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri, an intellectual who worked with and also studied the Europeans. The recent publication of a hitherto unknown text by him, under the title of Majālis-i Jahāngīrī is in part the occasion for us to return to this classic theme in the historiography of cross-cultural encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the social and attitudinal changes in medieval India in the thirteenth through the seventeenth century. According to the author, there has been little discussion on the processes of social and attitudinal changes following the arrival of the Turks. Topics include the impact of state effort to maximize revenue collection and the improvement of cultivation, including the emergence of rich farmers among the khud-kasht, which was the social basis of Mughal peace. Also discussed is Mughal peace, which was based on a tripartite alliance between the state, zamindars, and khud-kasht, how the aspirations among the three groups led to dissident movements and political instability, and the growth of mercantilism.

This article explores a phase of cultural efflorescence characterised by temple construction, the cultivation of music, scholarship, the copying and embellishment of manuscripts in the kingdom of Bishnupur in south-western Bengal from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The inspiration for these cultural accomplishments is traced to a combination of Mughal-Rajput and Vaishnava influences. The article traces the historical factors that made possible the complex inter-relations among these strands of culture and argues that the rulers of Bishnupur initiated this cultural programme with the aim of assimilating cosmopolitan, elite practices associated with Northern Indian courtly society. The discussion highlights the role of Mughal-Rajput courtly culture in creating a concept of cosmopolitanism in tandem with the devotional culture of Vaishnavism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mughal historian 'Abd al-Qadir Badauni wrote his work of history Muntakhab al-Tavarikh in the last decades of the sixteenth century. This work has been closely read only in its latter parts, and the resulting image of the author as derived from the text, is one of a venomous and fundamentalist theologian who had opposed the conciliatory policies of the emperor Akbar towards his Hindu subjects. However, by analysing the first volume of this work, which deals with the pre-Mughal history of India, and comparing it with the work of the contemporary historian, Nizam al-Din Abroad, one can detect a systematic pattern of editing by Badauni with far-reaching implications. Badauni was staunchly anti-absolutist and had displayed a kind of identification, with India and its population from diverse status and perditions that superceded dynastic und even strictly religious affiliation. To properly evaluate Badauni's contribution to Mughal intellectual and cultural history, we need to heed the older intellectual traditions to which he was heir and place him in the context of the rise of absolutism and the religio-social upheavals (such as that of the millenarian mahdavi movement)in sixteenth-century western Eurasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the first part of the memoirs of a late eighteenth-century Mugbal prince. Mirza 'Ali Bakht Azfari, who was held prisoner in Shahjahanabad-Delhi until well into his adult years. Later, after he had made his escape from there and gone on after long travels to settle in the territories of the Nawwab of Arcot, Azfari had occasion to look back on his days as an imprisoned prince in a sort of gilded cage. His backward glance takes in such questions as astrology, the thaumaturgical character of members of the Mughal lineage, and other issues--some of which are peculiar to him, while others seem to have been shared in the milieu from which he came. The work thus allows us to reflect on the mental world and categories of political reflection of a would-be Mughal statesman, who never quite managed to seize the reins of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on a diverse set of materials that constitute a part of South Asian xenology in the early modern period. Partly derived from South India, and partly from the northern Indian core of the Mughal empire, these materials deal with the problem of the 'Franks', namely the Europeans--whether seen in the context of Asia or of Europe. Initially the Europeans appear as strange, wondrous and also largely untrustworthy interlocutors in the Indian Ocean. Then, with the passage of time, an image of Europe itself emerges, which is finally sealed in the later eighteenth century with the first travel accounts by Indians to Europe. However, these images are part and parcel of a more general xenological and geographical understanding of the areas that neighbour South Asia, and should hence be analysed as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bernier's text Travels in the Mughal Empire, A.D. 1656-1708 was a primary source for certain European writers from Montesquieu to Marx far their representation and characterisation of oriental despotism. The distinctive features of oriental despotism in their eyes were absolutist and tyrannical monarchs who ruled over polities that lacked a hereditary nobility and private property in land. In this paper I have attempted to demonstrate that, when read closely, Bernier's text discloses particulars that can be shown to yield a quite different patterning. The Mughal empire of the 17th and 18th centuries, the period I am discussing, was characterised by a devolutionary distribution of authority among multiple lesser sovereignties, by a complex hierarchy of land tenure and appropriation of product, by a developed system of commerce, and by a tolerance and coexistence of pluralistic subcultures. The contours of the empire seem to conform to a model of what I have previously conceptualised in my writings as the 'galactic polity'. The current trend in theorising about post-colonial societies is that the representation of pre-colonial societies at the time of contact as oriental despotisms was a proto-colonial and colonial construction which served as a reason and justification for political intervention, conquest and exploitation. That was so. But I want to emphasize that the stereotypical image of oriental despotism also importantly served as a polemic for an internal political debate and advocacy in France as a warning against and attack on the alleged absolutist ambitions of French monarchy and a defense of feudal nobility as a break on such tendencies. Montesquieu in particular exemplifies this posture. Bernier's formulaic gloss on the Mughal empire, despise what he actually reports is one kind of tendentious representation. My own reading of Bernier's text is no doubt informed by my present day intellectual and political concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on political traditions in India. It will review the core ideas, relationships and institutions that informed three series of medieval Indian politics, in the north the Rajputs, and the Sultanant and the Mughals, in the south the Cholas and Vijayanagar. These were relatively durable politics; of considerable spatial extent, and between them they cover large parts of the medieval Indian political spectrum. Studies in social structure and social history through much of north India bear witness to the widespread dominance of Rajputs in large parts of this region. Rajput styles of dominance have been supported by socialization for inter-personal aggression. The Rajput social framework has been associated with competing principles of kinship, including the ties of both descent and marriage; the other is the tie between patron and client. Extraordinary bursts of conquering activity, covering very large parts of the subcontinent, marked the Sultanant. Numerous, mutually unrelated immigrants from central and western Asia contributed to this vigor. The medieval south Indian polities are marked with much greater complexity than those associated with the Rajputs and the Mughals. There are three major political complexes to locate in time and space. First the Pallavas beginning possibly early in the first millennium in the region of Nandivarman.