Rural Violence and Warfare in Medieval South India

This paper explores the problem of rural violence in medieval South India through a study of hero-stones collected from the districts of lower Karnataka between the 9th and 13th centuries. These documents reveal a world of everyday violence in which the countryside emerges as a space of potentially open-ended belligerence, and the peasant an armed agent. Furthermore, hero-stone inscriptions suggest that localized rural violence was continuous with, and only partly distinct from, what historians often characterized separately as ‘state violence,’ and in fact existed in a heuristically ‘intermediate realm,’ a point that has serious implications for understanding the nature of state, society and conflict in medieval South India more generally.