Adiga Malini. The Making of Southern Karnataka: Society Polity and Culture in the Early Medieval Period, AD 400-1030

Orient Longman, 2006. — 450 p.Southern Karnataka emerged as a regional entity between the fourth and eleventh centuries AD. Although interest in the nature of early medieval states and their social formations has defined much historical research since the 1970s, studies have until now been limited to clarifying only the political dynastic history of the region. In this path breaking new study, malini adiga reveals the political social and cultural features that characterized the region. Its distinct identity is explored by examining the processes that created this political and cultural entity: the various social strata, the nature of the socio political structure the developments in the field of religion and the manner in which the early medieval state patronized and utilized the various religious cults and sects to legitimize itself. Based on an extensive analysis of the inscriptions from the region and period under study the book also draws on the region's literary sources to explain its characteristic social ethos. Exhaustively researched carefully analysed and richly descriptive this book is essential reading for all those interested in early medieval Karnataka.Malini Adiga is currently a university grants commission post doctoral fellow at the department of history Mangalore University. She earned her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1996 for her thesis society and religion in southern Karnataka in the early medieval period. She was awarded a post doctoral research fellowship by the Indian council for historical research for the project women and kinship in early medieval Karnataka (1998-2000), and is currently working on inheritance rights of women in early medieval Karnataka. She presented the papers entitled gavundas: landlords and officers and dharmashastras, Dravidian kinship and female inheritance in medieval Karnataka at the Indian history congress sessions in Bangalore (1997) and Mysore (2003) respectively. She is also the author of a book in Kannada sivalli brahmanas: a historical analysis of their origins (shivalli pratishthan 2001).