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2 War, Servitude, and the Imperial Household: A Study of Palace Women in the Chola Empire Daud Ali Problems in Historiography The nature and history of the forms of servitude and slavery in early medieval India are still not clearly understood. This lack of understanding is only partly due to the sources, which are fragmentary, episodic, and often obscure.More often,formulaic theories of society and colonial definitions of productive work have weighted down the interpretation of available sources. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most important discussions have taken place around the question of agrestic labor. Some of the initial assessments in this field stretch back to the nineteenth century,when colonial officials sought to understand the land-holding and tenurial systems which they encountered across the subcontinent. In south India, the situation seemed inconsistent, though varieties of agrestic servitude which bore the characteristics of both serfdom and slavery were palpable and widespread.1 Such debates formed the backdrop for the rise in south India of historical studies of the great lowland empires like the Cholas,though the results have been equally uncertain. Though the corpus of some ten thousand inscriptions2 so far recorded from the Chola period (c. 950–1250 ce) in south India (see map 3) constitute an undoubtedly rich bequest when compared with their north Indian counterparts, they by no means present us with an entirely clear picture of contemporary social dynamics. Like nearly all the lithic records from this period, Chola inscriptions are chiefly concerned with temple affairs. Most often they record various types of donations for the establishment and maintenance of services to gods in temples, and do not seek to portray social or economic relationships not directly relevant to such affairs in any systematic fashion. The names, titles, corporate bodies, and financial and revenue arrangements they record give us only an incidental and fragmentary picture of the wider dynamics of Chola society. The records also typically relate to elite groups of the social order, and information relating to the lower echelons of society is indirect at best. Despite these difficulties, most historians now concur in characterizing the lowest ranks of cultivators, mostly paraiyars and pallars, as substantially “unfree”by the tenth century. Though the precise conditions of this unfreedom are unclear, some of these cultivators appear to have been “owned” by landholders and wealthier cultivators.Yet it has not been definitely resolved whether such ownership constituted“slavery”or“bondedness.”3 At stake in this debate, following Marx, has been the “feudal” or “Asiatic” character of the early medieval state. It appears that this debate has been conducted in a partial vacuum, since there is little evidence for the Chola period which can yield a sense of the scale of unfree labor—the degree to which productive processes as a whole relied on people of such status.4 The evidence of “ownership ” of cultivators leads us to infer that such cultivating serfs or slaves were probably found in areas of intensive irrigated agriculture. However, the majority of references to slavery are not connected to the transfer of men and women between landowners. The majority refer to the dedication, sale, or gift, by men of various stations, of slaves to temples—the famous tevaratiyar (or devadasis) who have been the subject of so much interest in modern times. In many cases, these men and women seem to have been the household or personal servants of the donors in question rather than agrestic laborers granted by landlords.5 This points to an important lacuna in the historiography to date, a comparative indifference to the apparently widespread practice of domestic servitude and slavery in Chola times. Not only did many tevaratiyar probably come from domestic contexts, but they performed similar labors in the temple setting—service and attendance functions, and menial tasks. The temple was, after all, a palatial residence, the house of a god. Many temple servants mentioned in Chola period inscriptions , then, might be usefully considered a special and highly ranked subset of the larger category of domestic and personal servants whose prevalence must have been extensive. This wider world of social relations has yet to receive its due attention. Since nineteenth-century conceptions of productive work largely excluded domestic labor from the analytical field, historiography shaped by such notions has also been disinclined to study the complexity of domestic servitude in medieval south Indian society. In the case of tevaratiyar, this indifference has been compounded by the fact that War, Servitude, and...

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