South Asian studies are underpinned by a coherent set of ideas about its spatial form, which do more than set the stage for historical epochs. It begin with the assertion that there exists a territory roughly coterminous with something called "Indian civilization." The rest of the world is outside. From this outside world, invaders have repeatedly come, most famously in ancient times, Alexander the Great, but more influentially, medieval Muslims and modernizing Christians -- Turks, Afghans, Persians, and Europeans. Every history book says that conquering invaders moved South Asia from one epoch to another. After the Europeans launched modern history in South Asia, nations took shape in the territory of Indian civilization; nationalists mobilized to represent natives, to drive out foreign rulers, and to protect natives from further invasions. But even today, invaders threaten from neighboring states and from the wider world of globalization.

This crude thumbnail sketch of the very big-picture of South Asian history reflects the fact that History in general is broadly constituted by tales of insiders and outsiders, natives and foreigners, invasion, impact, and resistance, and thus, by the narrative representation of essentially territorialized human identities and cultures. It is a short step to political struggles over who is the natural child of the motherland or fatherland, who belongs in national territory, what to do with minorities and aliens, and how best to protect the History-land from its foreigners. Spatial ideas are thus more important for History than the innocuous term "geography" suggests, because history's spaces are not merely sites or locations, places for history to happen; the embeddedness of human experience, agency, and identity in territory is substantially what history is about; writing the human past into the landscape is what historians do. As history finds the human past inside appropriately bounded spaces, it nourishes territorial sensibilities. And of course, unearthing people's past in its own territory is a part of the project of nationhood as much as it is an academic endeavor.

Ideas about territoriality -- about spatial identity, control, belonging, inclusion, exclusion, boundaries, protection, border-crossing, aliens, invasions, and such -- and the practices of territoriality that effect social control over geographical space, are themselves historical entities. Historicizing territoriality as a general process is not a simple task. Where to begin? One useful point of departure is to look at routines of border definition and boundary enforcement; and here we can quickly see that territorial ideas do instrumental and affective work in everyday discourse.

The idea of "partition" is, for instance, a prominent feature of modern territoriality. Its application to the partition of Africa marks a turning point in its career, and in South Asia, its meaning changed rapidly after 1945, when Dr.Ambedkar used it in his amazing book, Pakistan or Partition of India to refer dispassionately to a reallocation of government authority among new territorial jurisdictions. In 1950, the same term could not be used dispassionately, for it evoked trauma for millions of people resulting from government decisions in 1947. Since then, it has acquired potently different meanings in the phrases "partition of India" and "partition of British India," one of which implies that India was hacked up; the other of which refers to the birth of two new states by division of territories under British authority. The word is not typically used, however, to denote the "liberation of Bangladesh" or "the loss of East Pakistan," phrases that indicate two distinct national perspectives on 1971.
The term "partition" does not to apply to revolt or secession; and its application to 1947 but not to 1971 make these two moments of national state formation nominally different. Bangladesh was liberated; Pakistan, born; India, partitioned. The modern meaning of the term is secured theoretically by Michel Foucault, who used it in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison to label a strategy of governmentality. Thus we do not speak of a partition of Mughal territories during the eighteenth century among Mughal successor states; or of the partition of India and Nepal in 1816; because before the invention of modern state's territoriality, political space was not partitioned, it was divided by and among rulers. In South Asia, the implication is that pre-modern political territories were collected together and divided up by emperors whose power expanded and crumbled before modernity arrived. The "partition of British India" does not evoke a crumbling empire but rather a centralized, planned division of territories among successor states. Ironically, partition implies the reproduction of imperial authority at the foundation of national states.

Historians use of the term "partition" encodes an easy conceptual transition from empire to national formations of modern state power. It wholly obscures the complexity of means by which people took control of the territories that became national by focusing our mind on one dramatic moment of state decision-making, and concentrating our attention on state boundaries. It rejects the useful analogy with the eighteenth century and the possibility that disparate powers inside South Asia redefined territoriality during a dispersal of imperial authority from the 1940s onward. After Aurangzeb's death, the reterritorialization of South Asia consumed many decades; but in accounts of Partition, one moment dominates all others. This domination represents a worldview that prevails inside the centers of national authority, which rejects the idea that non-national territories could have been formed inside national boundaries or across them as distinctive historical domains. National territories overshadow and encompass all others; and in the decades after 1950, they covered the world so that virtually every square inch of the planet today officially belongs to one nationality or another.

The idea of "partition" thus conceals struggles to remake territory and to imbue homelands with histories. Partitions of India into linguistic states, in 1956, did the same, though without much violence. The meaning of the term "India" changed immediately in August, 1947; but its interpretations continued to spill over new national boundaries. This ambiguity did not stop with Kashmir. In the heartland of Nehru's India, the map displayed at the start of the film "Mughal-i-Azam" identifies Mughal India with British India and reiterates the legacy of Delhi's authority over Pakistan; and today, maps of Akhand Bharat in Indian schools and on the worldwide web reiterate India's inclusion not only of Pakistan and Kashmir but also of parts of Afghanistan and Burma. In opposition, the map of Bangladesh in the National Museum represents the rocks of the Nation as geological constituents of the nation's territory. Inside national territories, a growing swarm of contradictory historical territories have appeared in Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Punjab, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Assam, Mizoram, and elsewhere. Dr.Ambedkar had foreseen this in the 1940s, when he weighed arguments for Pakistan and predicted that Pakistan would face autonomy movements based on the same logic that justified Pakistan, that is, the need for national minorities who are regional majorities to protect themselves from anti-democratic, national majoritarianism.

Because countless groups could become territorially ambitious "minorities" around the world, national regimes everywhere have used a range of weapons against anti-national ideas about territoriality. Scholars are deeply implicated in this endeavor. Broadly speaking, it can be said that from roughly 1920 until about 1980, modernization and development theories were effective intellectual tools in the historical unification of national territory; but both before and since, an immeasurably more powerful tool has been the idea of "civilization," which has been widely used to reinforce national boundaries and is impervious to criticisms that rise up from abundant national failures to develop and modernize.

Nationalized histories of civilization bristle with contradictions. Do Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan lie inside the territory of "Indian civilization"? The answer is both "obviously yes" and "obviously no," and the question itself is both irreverent and insulting at the same time as it is also reasonable and innocent.

We do not normally fret over such matters but rather work inside national histories, where national cultures model civilization territories on themselves. History Land is an elaborate theme park of national heritage, in which scholars do their esoteric research. Inhabiting its own little corner of History Land, South Asian history uses the same basic ideas that other histories do. South Asian nations have their own place in the world of civilizations and take their modern form like others do during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. National uniqueness has the same genealogy everywhere.

History Land owes a lot to the globalization of modern transformation theory as developed by Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Lenin, Polanyi, Foucault, and the rest of the pantheon. Following their tracts, historians have focused on showing how much, to what extent, and in what kind of unique way South Asia changed during its colonial rite of passage -- like other parts of History Land in Europe, China, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Latin America -- from one form to another, or, broadly speaking, from tradition to modernity, or feudalism to capitalism. This bipolar conceptualization of modern transformations around the world is based on a set of older assumptions about civilization difference, which posit the occurrence of a self-generated change in Europe that could not happen elsewhere, and contrasts between Europe and the rest of the world have been played out empirically in endless empirical research.

Thus the layout of History Land is a template of spatial separations to locate and explain the unique experience of modernity for each nation inside its own civilization territory. Every nation is unique, but they are all designed in the same way, and despite some blurring here and there, each civilization territory has its own ambience, its own style and decor -- some call it culture -- which unify the histories of all the nations that arise in every civilization space. Historians complicate history primarily by adding detail. Their territories seem unproblematic. Wherever they work, they always manage to retrace lines on modern maps. South India is always South India. Old maps showing the peninsula and Sri Lanka as a huge island in the Indian ocean seem quaint. Ancient and medieval trends foreshadow states invented in 1956. Epochs divide at the invasions of Indian civilization territory, especially by the Muslims and the British.

Despite all our inventiveness in historical theory and method, history remains embedded inside a spatial template of nations-inhabiting-civilization-territories. The nationality of history is not deeply theorized; it is simply assumed in everyday practice. In South Asia and elsewhere, its basic narrative scenario goes something like this:

First: Before modernity, there was a time of tradition, a vague string of centuries that witnessed only one great structural transformation, that is, the rise of civilizations that define civilizations. Post-antiquity and feudal history sit inside civilization histories and their relatively changeless traditionalism make modernity history's central problem. Modernity's rapid, singular, and universal transformation of the world stands out like a sore thumb; and the question of its origin and driving force seems obvious in the context of civilization history: modernity arose in Europe and spread around the world.

Second: Old civilizations underlie national cultures. Civilization territories contain the elements that define the precise character of modern transformations in each national history. Civilization-spaces change shape -- most dramatically, during Muslim and European expansion -- but they retain their essential character across transitions to modernity. Thus they define the character of domains within which modern nations and national states emerge. All history is thus variety of area studies operating within assumed geographical boundaries in which historians imbue modern national geographies with traditional roots as they narrate national histories of modern transformations. Every nation has venerable traditions and its own unique experience of modernity. Nationalities and national states thus support the permanence of civilization-space in historical studies.

There is no escaping the idea that traditional cultures, each inside its own territory, underwent a distinctive modern rite of passage provoked by Europeans. Durkheim might say that this idea is necessary for social cohesion in a world of nations that each need cultural coherence. Obscure writings by odd historians will not dislodge this idea. Its permutations and fascinations seem inexhaustible. History Land is a big commercial hit.

But we must note that national histories are incommensurable and incompatible, necessarily incomplete and inaccurate, excluding and twisting whatever undermines their coherence. Note the difficulty of defining where this thing called "Indian civilization" actually is. Note that overseas Indians escape Indian history as surely Indians disappear from histories of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania; that Tamil history excludes Tamils outside Tamil Nadu; and that the world's only Hindu kingdom, Nepal, is missing from India's Hindu history. On the other side of the border, where Nepali state boundaries were established in 1816 (with British India) and 1856 (with Tibet), modern boundaries have come to mark civilization territory from ancient times.

Failures and inconsistencies in national historiography multiply as national territories proliferate and subdivide, projecting more political boundaries onto the past. Now we have ancient Karnataka and Tamil Nadu to go with ancient Nepal and Pakistan, all equally anachronistic. Perhaps we will someday read that Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, and Andhra were partitioned by the British.

Contradictions multiply with so-called regional movements among the likes of Kashmiris, Tamils, Sikhs, and Baluchis, and in Assam, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Uttarakhand, Baluchistan, Chittagong Hill Tracts and elsewhere. Do territories enclosed by national boundaries only qualify for regional histories that are implicitly part of some other, bigger history? Must little historical territories inside national borders be national fragments? Or is it possible to imagine that South Asia might include many separate histories that do not compose national narratives?

The same question pertains even where there have not been movements for political autonomy: for instance, Ajay Skaria argues that Bhils in the Dangs of Maharashtra have always had a separate history; and the same is being said by and for people in many other mountain environments. Do all of these histories fit into civilization territory of national histories? Or could they stand on their own? Sumit Guha suggests that his history of tribal societies in Maharashtra is part of a worldwide mountain history as much as of Indian history. This is a promising suggestion: Indian history may not contain the history of mountain people living inside India.

The problem deepens when Kancha Ilaiah proclaims that Dalits are not Hindus. If they are not Hindus, might they have a separate history, though they live in the same land as the high castes. In 1945, Dr.Ambedkar harked back to his struggles with Gandhi over separate electorates for Untouchables when he noted that, "...Mr.Gandhi, who is determined to oppose any political concession to the Untouchables, [is] ready to sign a blank check in favour of Muslims ..."; and he goes on to say that "the Shudras and the Untouchables" have more claim for special treatment and for protection than do Muslims with whom "the Hindu governing classes seems far more ready to share power." [pp. 352-3.] Dalits are in fact separated by more than untouchability from Hindu society. Dalit politics has a distinctive territorial grounding in very old partitions of social territory in the countryside. Comparable to Bhils, Gonds, and other mountain people whose environments are detached from caste society in the plains - or as Sumit Guha shows, semi-detached, interacting with plains people, but still remaining separate -- caste power had partitioned localities everywhere to produce separate living environments for Dalits.

Ambedkar suggests a radical break with national history by saying that Dalits could be considered a separate nation. Perhaps we can allow ourselves to imagine Dalit settlements as being fragments not of India but of "Dalit-sthan," a vast archipelago composed of many thousand islands scattered across India and Nepal. It would be a patchwork of subdivisions. In Tamil Nadu alone, Dalits in four major regions have never organized or allied across the separate territories of their residential concentration. If Dalit-sthan came into existence, under current conditions, it would certainly need to acquire a national history, like that of Tamil Nadu. Who knows, Sinhala history might even some day accommodate Tamil Eelam. Ambedkar and Ilaiah imply that, like Kurdistan, alternate historical territories really do exist, hidden by national histories, buried under ideas about traditional culture that purport to represent civilization but leave Dalits as much as Bhils, Gonds, and Santhals as being at best fragments of national history.

Can people escape History Land? Can history happen outside civilizations of national heritage? One way is to historicize the territorialization of history itself and to note that other options do exist for locating the human past on the planet. It actually does not take much effort to see that many territorial forms have occupied various parts of the planet in each historical period. National territoriality became dominant, but older, discontinuous, contradictory spatial formations of historical identity, agency, and change did not die out. Little histories and big histories of various kinds rattle around in History Land like haunting ghosts.
We can conjure the little histories of territoriality inside national territories by passing through walls erected by national cultures, moving back in time to explore shifting historical spaces that modernity has broken up with boundaries like those around Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala. These territories were invented in 1956; no state authority or cultural institution had ever before marked its borders along the contours of this very peculiar, late-modern geography, whose material and ideological basis emerged slowly in the nineteenth century as Company officials in Bombay and Madras separated Maratha territories from domains of Hyderabad and Mysore. [Mark Wilks may be the first historian of South India.]

Various kinds of historical territorialities inhabit, surround, overlap, encompass, transcend, and criss-cross national borders. Their invisibility has serious consequences. The nationalized territorialization of "Indian civilization" and "Islamic civilization" makes it plausible that Islam invaded India and that Muslim sultans ruled Muslim states in pre-modern India. Similarly anachronistic ideas about British colonialism are now being replayed in images of India's new invasion under the foreign banner of globalization. A national territorialization of world history as a whole makes globalization inside India appear to be a symptom of foreign influence rather than a driving force. But are Arundhati Ray and Medha Patkar really foreign agents? Is it really so hard to imagine globalization inside India during the eighteenth and nineteenth century also moved to the tune of Indian global activism?

There are, of course, real truths to be found and powerful sentiments to be respected in national cultures. These are modern realities fostered in modern territories that we cannot escaped. But they also can never fully comprehend the world in which the operate, because they construct national spaces and territories ahistorically. Other spatial histories put national territories in better perspective.

What I am struggling to do at this point to develop a framework for exploring variously constituted and changing forms of territoriality which connect people with space. I look at territoriality as a process of spatial control. It includes many strategies and media. It has various material elements, including not only systems of transportation and communication but also physical features like mountain forests that form territorial environments. A space is composed of places, locations, and set of relations among people and things in two dimensions, like this room. Territory is an aspect of space -- it is space viewed from another angle -- through which people exert some kind of control over the space, making it their own.

Writing histories of territoriality exposes power over people-in-space that make territories of social life. With this in view, we can better appreciates that reading historical data from centuries past into the boundaries of national state territories is never merely a methodological convenience: it is also a technology of power over space. Territorial power mediates between the human experience, perception, and use of space, on the one hand, and authoritative representations of geography, on the other.

With this in view, we can appreciate that area studies research and reference works like Joseph E. Schwartzberg's Historical Atlas of South Asia are technologies of boundary enforcement. Prying open gaps between claims over national space and human histories inside it or moving across its boundaries provides breathing room for opposition. Relaxing controls over history exercised by national sensibilities might provide political leverage against exploitation under the banners of globalization, Hindutva, and swadeshi alike.

National territoriality has always been challenged, permeated, formed, undermined, transected, and encompassed by very different and differently constituted territories, both large and small, whose form and content have changed over time, and which are, in this sense, more historical than national territories, because they are older, more dynamic and often shifting. By comparison, national territory is static; the insistence that national maps be imposed on all forms of knowledge make it even more so, and indicate its insecurity. Most of the history of territoriality escapes the nation. We need non-national eyes to see it and to read its recorded documentation outside the self-contain nationality of civilization-history.

I am currently working with a five-part analytic scheme of spatial types, or zones, within which territorialities have come and gone historically: in addition to national space, these are global, continental, regional, local. Each kind of space has its own kind of historical chronology; they have different temporal rhythms. They have their own "spatial temporality" -- to use Fernand Braudel's phrase.

Price movements illustrate the idea of spatial temporality. Prices must be measured within space. A space must be enclosed to measure its prices. With exterior places excluded, and internal sites subordinated empirically (usually by averaging), a space comes into view as an organized entity. Such control of space represents territoriality. Price movements over time thus appear in territories and mark a mode of their temporality. Analytically, we can define territories any way we choose, but historical data comes pre-packaged by territory. I call territorial types, "zones." Prices that pertain to economic life in South India have moved in different rhythms in different spaces. Locally, agricultural prices move to local weather conditions that bear most immediately on the harvest. Nationally, they move to the rhythm of monsoons. The closure and permeability of marketing territories -- for example, opening or closing national markets -- is regulated to alter the spatial framework within which prices are determined. Globalization is substantially about getting prices to move in a coordinated way within a global space; and national resistance comes from people who want to control the territorial setting within which price movements are determined.
Like prices, other measures of change -- many of course unquantifiable -- need to be defined inside analytical territories. They can be used to depict spatial temporalities in distinctive territories and types of territories, or zones.

History moves simultaneously and separately in all five zones, which have their own styles of spatial temporality and distinctive records of territoriality. We have copious time-series data for global, continental, national, regional, and local zones; and we can stereotype different methods of history writing according to the zone they operate within, whose operations they take to be most important. Global histories take the global zone to be dominant, to encompass all the others; and the study of globalization is typified by people's preference for the ways of life that make the global zone a kind of historical territory. The same holds for other zones.

We can look at South India through all these zones of history; which become, I would argue, more deeply entangled with one another as time moves along in each one. Their temporal rhythms become more synchronized over time, but never collapse into one temporality determined in one zone.

My own preference is to study articulations among zones and to focus on sites and processes of articulation. These have been imbued ideologically with material, cultural, and discursive inequalities. Smaller zones are taken to be of a "lower order." Localities are at a "lower level" of analysis. Local dialects and little traditions pertain in villages. In pursuit of upward mobility, people who live in small towns move to higher order urban centers where high culture concentrates. In addition, elites formed and thrive at sites of articulation. India's urban elite and middle classes are more "in tune" with globalization than poor farmers in villages.

Keeping all our historical zones empirically "in play" at the same time presents an impossible expository challenge. My own work concentrate on factors that pertain most directly to the historical formation of territorialities in agrarian South India.

I should note that by linking space and time inside analytically disconnected realms in this way, I am building on the proposal of Fernand Braudel that the space-time of the early-modern world economy was separate and distinct from that of other economies, touching them at particular points. I call the points of connection between our spatial zones sites of articulation. Braudel proposed that the world economy missed some regions of space-time altogether; disarticulations also occur, as when economic territories become more self-sufficient during times of crisis, rebellion, or secession, or when investors flee regions of high risk or low returns. Gobalization is a very long process, but its pace has never been continuous, nor its spread uniform across historical space -- some smaller scale places-in-time are always connected more intimately to the world economy than others. Places have distinctive historical chronologies not only because they inhabit different spatial domains but also because they articulate variously to other domains.

In this view, then, each zone is a space-in-time for territoriality. People who inhabit each zone work to make it their own, naming it, theorizing it, mythifying their own powers within it by writing histories. Territoriality has no single, over-arching chronology. The articulation of zones provides the links in the chain connecting its local and global histories, rather than global history being dominant or the national zone forming necessary building blocks for global history.
Territorialization emerges from the work of social powers inhabiting each spatial zone, powers that move over the space, contesting other powers within it. The vehicles, instruments, and institutions of territoriality provide historical data, as they leave their traces behind.

Broadly speaking, global space came into being in the sixteenth century, as travels by sea allowed specific groups to territorialize global space that spanned the whole world. Europeans territorialized this zone. They theorized global time-space in their own terms, and still do. In the twentieth century, global territorialism has become more multicolored and polyglot, but its Western elements are still most prominent.

Territorialities last and leave traces because their powers become institutionalized in human social relations. So I want to identify an institutional nexus in which powers of territorialization in each zone are concentrated. At the global level -- the terminology of levels encoding an ideology of spatial hierarchy -- I want to identify an institution that accommodates both emerging European dominance in the older periods and multi-centered globalization in more recent times. The best I can come up with is capitalism -- an institutional nexus that theoretically and materially aspires to the highest level of global expansion, and which, at the same time, depends upon articulations with lower levels of space-time for its territorial power.

National space emerged within global space, and national territoriality has always defined itself analytically in opposition to global territoriality. But a continental zone of spatial history also encompasses national space. It is much older than the global zone. It spread along routes of mobility across Afro-Eurasia from ancient times. Shelly Pollock's "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" occupies a continental territory that sprawled along routes running inland and overseas in the first millennium of the Common Era. Buddhism and Islam also inhabit continental space and their territories left better traces of their linear composition as their activists moved visibly along routes of mobility and power among regional territories that formed around major centers. The major institutions of continental territoriality are empires running across Eurasia from East to West. The Ottoman, Mughal and British Empires occupied continental space across land and sea. Epochs of empire in Afro-Eurasia are actually still not well historicized, in part because the national territories that emerged inside continental spaces carved up territory in modern ways that empires never did. The discontinuity between national space-time and continental space-time has yet to be bridged by historians.

It is certainly obvious that the centuries from 1300 to 1600 are critical in the history of continental territorities. Sultanic powers were strung across routes from Istanbul to Vijayanagar and they define imperial territories that defy containment within national history. These continental territories left legacies that globalization will not erase for a long time to come. Their institutional force was organized around huge urban centers, under which were ranked centers of power along routes running into vast, shifting peripheries. Along their linear sinews of territoriality, hierarchical transactions among men of lower and higher rank conveyed resources to the center through intermediaries who formed the apex of ranks in their own regions.

Territoriality in South Asia now came to include routine transfers of state revenue resources over long distances within agrarian political economies. The articulation of global territories with continental territories especially at strategic sites on their peripheries along the ocean's edge became increasingly profound in its influence on agrarian South Asia as new kinds of regions formed around urban centers at their spatial intersection. Early centuries of European occupation of coastal South Asia are time in the space of new regional formations within global history and continental history. South Indian sites are very prominent in this period, because of the prominence of the coast, where new modes of power over space emerged at the articulation of where continental lands and global seas. Our famous portfolio capitalists represent distinctive territorial powers at this intersection.

What we call South India emerged with the tightening of the temporal fit between zones of history. South Asia as a whole became intellectually globalized. When we study modern South India, we are also necessarily studying a region of globalization.
In this context, my negative argument is that neither globalization nor modern South India can be understood accurately as a one-way process of change caused by global forces or by the activity of Westerners wielding global wealth and power. My positive argument is that the globalization is a long-term historical articulation of global with regional and local zones within which national territories emerged. Modern South India came into being around points of articulation between regional histories going back many centuries and a global history of industrial capitalism that began in the nineteenth century.

What I call regional and local zones of territorialized space-in-time are most promiscuous and elusive. My general argument is that localities formed around farming and that regions formed around cities. Regional territories began very small. Early empires in South Asia were predominantly formed by an ideological bundling of linear into networks centered on specific sites of agrarian power. Around the routes and sites that defined nodes of territorial identity, most of the landscape in southern Asia was occupied by pastoralists and agro-pastoralists whose local barely appear in the historical record primarily as their spaces are engulfed by agrarian states.

In the first millennium, inscriptional documents record transactions around sites of sanctification from which radiated the power to conquer, subordinate, and assimilate non-sedentary peoples. Historical maps that show ancient and medieval states as spread evenly across the landscape are quite deceptive. Medieval territorialism looked more like an archipelago of sacred sites and centers of agrarian power strung along routes of mobility and surrounded by what they construed ideologically as empty space, land to be territorialized into civilization. The expansion of agrarian territoriality in South Asia thus has many similarities to the expansion of agricultural frontiers in other parts of the world; it was a violent process in which territorial communities produced localized systems of domination over the landscape, one step at a time. Pallava, Chola, Chera, Pandya, and Hoysala territories seem in this view to have been less kingdoms or empires in the generic senses in which these terms are used than ideological systems connecting locally dominant elites whose steady progress in domesticating the land produced hundreds of tiny medieval agrarian regions around sites of sacred power. What David Shulman called "the localization of divinity" was perhaps the most critical element in creating medieval territories in South India.

Regions developed as institutionalized territories around the major central places, whose centrality in medieval agrarian territories was much more symbolic than material. Their material centrality boomed after 1300, in the context of continental empires, the most important in the South being Vijayanagar, which in this respect should not be seen as it has been by K.A.Nilakanta Sastri, Burton Stein, and most others as a South Indian empire but rather as an emerging hierarchy of central places ranked under a supreme authority along networks of tribute collection like those that proliferated in continental space after 1300. The dispersion of migratory agro-military power that spread out from Vijayanagar and retained little allegiance to it generated a new kind of centrality for urban sites along routes of military conquest colonization. By the seventeenth century, a urban hierarchy becomes visible in South India for the first time, and it is to this period that I would trace the formation of larger, more enduring forms of regional territorialism, which dramatically accelerated the conquest of formerly empty land inhabited by pastoral peoples and reduced them finally to agrarian authority.

A new lexicon of territoriality emerged from conquest states in the interior uplands whose territorial ambitions eclipsed those of rulers along the coast. Medieval inscriptions generally had listed places of conquest, but later medieval rulers paid more attention to describing the extent of territorial authority, marked by places on the borders of competing imperial claims. Royal domains now took on more of the appearance of demarcated territories, replete with landmarks that served to mark their extent in much the same way as watercourses, hills, rock outcrops, and named places had served to mark the boundaries of ur and devadana land in early-medieval grants. Shelly Pollock reports, for instance, that Hoysalas described their territory as stretching from the mountains in the west, to Kolar in the East, to the River Krishna in the north, to Salem in the south.
Vijayanagar territorialism was expressed in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Grantha, as well as Sanskrit epigraphy, and was in addition marked by the novel claim that Rayas were "Lords of the Eastern and Western Oceans"(Filliozat 1973: xvi), expressing the "idea of maritime lordship."3 As Phil Wagoner points out, quoting Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "throughout most of the 15th and 16th centuries, Vijayanagara remained essentially an inland state ... a 'massive, agrarian-based imperial formation,'" (Subrahmanyam 1993:11), with little direct political or economic involvement along the coast. Wagoner argues convincingly that it was not direct control over the coast or the sea trade that justified this title, but rather the Rayas' personal power to adorn themselves with precious commodities from overseas trade, specifically, unguents and other precious objects that came to Hampi from overseas, including Chinese porcelain. The capital city as an apical site for the accumulation of commodities was being institutionalized.

By 1600 cities forming a triangle from Aurangabad to Hyderabad and Mysore dominate the history of regional territorialism, but none controlled the sea trade or much of the coast for very long, though they all accumulated wealth from the Indian Ocean. There was thus a disjuncture between their need for and claims over trade along the coast and the physical reality of their control over resources. Localities along the coast retained a visible separateness even as representations of imperial authority turned the coast ideologically into parts of inland empires. This kind of disjuncture between the interior and the coast continued into the modern period, when political power expanded upland into the interior from the coastal plains under the banner of East India Company Raj. Coastal regions inhabited a different world, at the intersection of continental and global territories.
Modern territoriality emerged slowly, beginning in the sixteenth century, when more and more rulers, like the Rayas of Vijayanagar, defined territories in South Asia through relations among men of rank who were spread over landscapes that they conceptualized as being under their authority. Although participants knew full well that their power ran along the marches and linear routes between forts and towns that connected their individual sites of power to one another, they envisioned their territory as spanning all the space in between. This vision accompanied conquest of the land. Earlier medieval empty spaces in-between sites of power were slowly but steadily filled in by imperial claims and conquests, and by more-and-more regular payments of tribute that became territorial systems of agrarian taxation and entitlement.

Interstitial emptiness was eliminated from ruling-class ideas about territoriality, despite gaps in power and real disjunctures between spatial representations and practices. Modern state territorialism developed in the eighteenth century in many regions of Eurasia, including South Asia, and it eliminated empty spaces entirely during the nineteenth century, when they formed continuous landscapes of social power over all the land and all its inhabitants. In the process, modern states and modern intellectuals erased the moving frontiers and the linear networks which had carried modern territoriality across the countryside.
The history of social power in territory is thus the secret to the history of change in claims about, beliefs in, and concepts of geographical boundedness. The activity of marking boundaries both incorporates and excludes "outsiders." It exerts power over people inside the territory, as the people who do the boundary-making fill in the gaps, so to speak, between all the individual sites and routes of power. The modern intellectual production of Indian Civilization as a comprehensive territorial entity - covering all the space of India entirely - formed a comprehensive space for native history; and simultaneously, it established the authority of the representatives of Indians over territories and histories inside the boundaries of the nation.
People who had once had interior spaces to themselves became minorities and aliens. Border crossing became a law-and-order problem. Having enforced their own control over the boundaries of India, the British, logically, became objects of exclusion themselves. Muslims, Christians, tribals, and many others have also felt the sting of otherness under nativist assertions of authority over all the territory of Indian culture.

Distinctively regional territoriality did not disappear under modernity. I want to end with a story that indicates how local perspectives and oral histories document modern dynamics of regional territoriality submerged by national history.
In 1975, a colleague of mine put his hand on my shoulder and turned me around to face north as we stood on the main street of Tirukkurungudi, a large, prosperous village nestled at the foot of the ghats in southwest Tirunelveli District, near Kanya Kumari. "Look," he said proudly, "from hear north to Madurai, it is all Marava country!"

This "country" (nadu) appears on no map. It is a discontinuous territory that runs north from Tirukkurungudi across a dry landscape dotted with irrigation tanks spanning about twenty miles across the edge of mountains and the plains below; and from Madurai it curves east down to Rameswaram. It is the territory in which Maravars or Tevars have exercised dominance for roughly 400 years. It is marked by the old fort towns founded by Marava palayakkarar under the royal Nayaks of Madurai. Its records include stories of battles against the British that becme nationalist lore. Its history also includes a very particular legacy of caste conflict, which hinges on contested control of local territories pitting Tevars against various competitors. This Marava territory was historically defined by its separation from areas of Telugu Nayak power in the east and Vellala/Brahman power in the south along the Tambraparni River.

In the 1890s, caste riots broke out regularly in the booming market towns in this territory as Maravas tried to stop the rising status of Nadars merchants who were fighting in the courts and on the streets for rights of temple entry. Keeping people out of temples, defending sacred temple precincts from pollution, expressed a wider power over space. Land ownership, access to forests, privileged house sites, places of honor in processions, a place at the table of the Raja or in the court of the British Collector - all of these constituted power by control over symbolic space. Territory obsessed Maravas, who fought one another for what British observers took to be totally worthless bits of scrubland.

In the twentieth century, generations of locally prominent Marava families, lead by the Raja of Ramanathapuram, have struggled to keep and expand their local power. They became active in the Dravidian Movement, ultimately forming a solid vote block that swung to MG Ramachandran in the 1980s and stayed behind Jayalalitha until the 1999 elections.

In the 1990s, Maravas have engaged in caste riots, often pogroms, against formerly untouchable Dalit landless laborers who have earned increasing incomes by working in the Gulf and by sending sons and daughters to school in towns rather than in villages. Dalits are installing statues of B.RAmbedkar, the symbol of Untouchable militancy in India; as Tevars fight to glorify their hero, Muthu Ramalinga Tevar, former Raja of Ramanathapuram, by erecting his statue at prominent cross-roads. Struggles focus on control of public space and access to public resources; and often riots begin with fights among children in school, on the school bus, or on the road on the way to and from school. Maravas are still fighting for Marava country, inch by inch, day by day, facing opposition all the way.

This struggle that seem to be merely local. But in the context of the long history of globalization in South India, it is part of local, regional, national, and global history, all at once..