Reddit reviews A History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar
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A History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar - Amazon Link
The Illustrated History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar - Amazon Link
Foreign Notices Of South India - Google Archives
Rashtrakutas And Their Times - Google Archives
The Wonder That Was India: 1
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Not Cholas alone, but this book gives factual information of the entire South Indian empires.
Welcome. I would recommend you start with A History of South India by Sastri, gives you a good overview (be prepared to get a lot of your existing ideas changed though). Move onto A history of medieval India by RC Majumdar. Feel free to dive into Romilla Thapar's History of India series - don't start the other way though with Thapar. Majumdar is THE Indian historian, Sastri, THE historian that chronicled South India, the later historians like Thapar draw heavily on their books anyways. You want a better understanding of medieval India - Jadunath Sarkar is the only source you need to consider. His The Fall of the Mughal Empire covers over some 1500 pages, extensively the period from 1650 to 1800.
There you go, for just Rs 2,000, about 2,500 pages and seriously you would know more about Indian history than idk 95% of the people out there. You can after this branch out into western authors, the Thapars, Habibs etc.
About Kulothunga, well I cracked open my History of South India AND Colas by Sastri - no dice. If anything my memory was correct, till 500 AD all these religions existed in peace though Buddhism was in terminal decline thanks to how dogmatic it had become. Jainism was running rampant, when Saivism and Vaishnavism countered it with the Bhakti movement. The Bhakti movement was mostly saints running around circle jerking each other to death with really high funda arguments - take the schism in the Vaishanavites as an example for how...pointless these arguments were. The Vadakalai branch believed the grace of god had to be earned, the Tenkalai believed by...believing in Vishnu, his grace was a given. That was it, I am picturing a bunch of these guys wearing namams, sitting in a thinnai and arguing each other to the death.
Sastri has nothing on any persecution, and honestly I would rather trust Sastri than Kamal.
Oh, in re-reading these parts, some bonus fun facts - Kulothunga built a Vishnu temple, he sent a trade mission to fucking China and made a huge profit, he lost Sri Lanka (the last Indian king to hold SL) to Veerabahu. On religion, there was some sect called the Radha sect whose only ambition was to be gopis in heaven and get banged by Krishna. They prepared by having monumental orgies on earth - we had hippies before hippies were cool yo! That is 'avar kulcha' :p
Incidentally I was just about to buy this book. http://www.amazon.in/History-South-India-Prehistoric-Vijayanagar/dp/0195606868