Hero-stones

The change in style of hero-stones seems to refleg a change in the status of the hero being memorialised. Many of the earlier stones from Tamil Nadu come from the North Arcot district which is known to have been at that time q area of Livestock breeding, where cattle-raiding would be one method of increasing wealth. Later, elaborate stones commemorated heroes who claimed to belong &I the upper caste groups, often claiming Lshntriya status. The indication of the hero's religious sect may have been due to the influence of the bhakti sects. The following is suggested on an impressionistic basis: topographically and ecologically there is a frequency of such memorials in upland areas, in the vicinity of passes across hills, and in areas regarded traditionally as frontiers zones which often included primarily pastoral region the outskirts of forests and the edges of what have to be called trial areas or central India.

 

Hero-stone are relatively Infrequent in the large agricultural tracts of the Indus and thc Ganga valleys a& in the agriculturally rich delta areas of the peninsula. Frontier .tones were often majntalned as buffer regions where political security was transient and where roya! armies did not necessarily guarantee protection to local inhabitants. They would, therefore, inevita hly have recourse to their own arrangements for protection, in which the village hero or the local chief played a major role. This would suggest a differentiation of military functions in a decentralised political syktem. Further, since these relics proliferated in the post-sixth century period, it would be worth finding out the correlation and correspondence, if any, between the distribution of land grants on the one hand and that of the memorial stones on the other. This is particularly desuable in view of several assumptions:

a) the phenomenon of the lanJ grants is associated with the expansion of agriculture,

b) both memoriai stones and land grants are considered -to be useful mechanisms of cultic integration- the cult of Vithoba in Pandharpur (Maharashtra) is in itself a case of the hero-stone being transformed into a deity, and

c) both the phenodena have also been instrumental in the processes of state formation.

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