Kōnkaṇ The Jigsaw Puzzle

This middle country extended from the sea to sea; its western flank consisted of Kōnkaṇ in the north and Karnātā or Kānnadā in the south; the eastern flank between Odiṣā and Tāmiḷākam was occupied by the Teḷugu country. Though broken up into a multitude of communal settlements, this region was fairly homogeneous ecologically and culturally. A vast savannah intergraded into a deciduous forest, with a tropical evergreen fringe on the west, was its distinguishing characteristic. Some have considered Deccan a collection of ‘tribal principalities’; but that term seems to be too ambiguous, for even the four Tamil kingdoms of Chera, Ay, Pandya and the Chola have been referred to as such. (Kulke and Rothermund, 1986 : A History of India, 104).

Deccan definitely presented a different civilisational paradigm in comparison with its northern and southern neighbours; it was a land of simple, unsophisticated farmers and animal herders, eking out their living from what the mother earth offered them – which was not much, given the fact that the region was not endowed with any fertile alluvial plains; and the rains failed every few years. These people grew crops like black-gram (uḷīda/ullid/उळीद), green-gram (mūṁga/mung/मूंग), horse-gram (kuḷīta/kullit/कुळीत), hyacinth bean (vāla/val/वाल), lentil (masūra/masur/मसूर), grass-pea (vāṭāṇôṁ /vattannom/वाटाणॉं), finger millet (nācaṇī/nachnni/नाचणी) and vari rice (varīcā tāṁdūḷa / varicha tandull/वरीचा तांदूळ); wheat and barley were perhaps added later; no trace of rice cultivation, however, has been found. They reared cattle, goats and sheep – and where possible, water buffaloes. (Dutta, 2006 : A Critical Review of the Economy of the Chalcolithic People of Inamgaon, 128)