The history of South India has, till late, been rather neglected. After J. Tallboys Wheeler’s ‘Madras in the Olden Times’ (1862) and H.D. Love’s ‘Vestiges of Old Madras’ (1913), virtually nothing was done till Tapan Raychaudhuri’s ‘Jan Company in the Coromandel’ (1962). In recent years, however. South Indian history is beginning to be rescued from the back burners, and it is no longer con'ect to say that South India is studied only by South Indians, or that historians andstudents of history alike ignore the history of the peninsula.