Chapter 3. Cultivating problems and politics: Precarious fields and the social history of the Medieval Deccan, southern India

Abstract

This paper assesses the shifting locations and social significance of agricultural spaces through analyses of intensive pedestrian survey results, multi-spectral remote sensing data, and Medieval Period inscriptional records around the site of Maski (Raichur District, Karnataka). In doing so, it challenges a longstanding historiographical trope about the social history and essential “fertility” of the Raichur Doab, a region of the central Deccan of southern India that was ostensibly contested for its rich agricultural resources by numerous imperial polities throughout the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. The results suggest that cultivation was extended into the region's more marginal production environments between the 11th and 14th centuries. Moreover, the process of agricultural expansion appears to have partly contributed to fomenting social concerns about the effects of temple patronage as many of the region's underclass farmers faced multiple modes of precarity, including those engendered by new labor and cultivation conditions in the semi-arid Deccan. In that sense, the paper also expands on contemporary notions of precarity and highlights the significance of a variety of ways through which conditions of precarity might emerge in other historical contexts.