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Violence, Gastronomy and the Meanings of War in Medieval South India

Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London WC1X OXG

This essay argues that the imagery of battle in Cayankontr's twelfth-century poem, the Kalinkattupparani, composed at the court of Kul ttunka Cla, may tell us little about the practicalities of warfare in medieval India, but it does help us understand the meaning of war for medieval south Indian courts. Its imagery, corroborated by inscriptional accounts, at first suggests linkages with earlier notions of agonistic sacrifice, but on closer examination, as this essay demonstrates, it produces a world of feasting, death and laughter that occupies a more contrary and autonomous space within conceptions of sovereignty in early medieval India.

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