Those three books talk about the 1500-1700 Nayaka rule, languages in 1700-1800 and the third book's summary says it talks about the 12th-14th centuries. That doesn't qualify as evidence of anything. Here is what I'd pay to learn about -
1) Origins, dating and translations of the literature - the sangam lit, the andal songs, etc.
2) Exactly what the fuck was happening in south india from 500 BC to 500 AD? There are Roman coins found in south india and south indian coins found in Rome. One of the Ptolemies refer to a pandian king. Pliny the younger complains about the amount of money spent on indian goods by the roman people. Apparently the romans also had a huge space reserved for indian peppers. One of the chinese explorers have some descriptions of a port in tamil nadu. All this more or less sums up what we know about this period. I know I have to cite sources but it will take a lot of time to hunt them down and I'll do it over the next few days. What else was happening? How did the people dress? Did they know about the greek and the roman ideals?
3) The pallava kingdom - Why were they so into sculptures? Why did they practice so much religious tolerance unlike the later cholas, for example? How did they come to power?
4) The chola kingdom - are the names of the kings really all that we have about the early cholas who ruled around jesus's time? How come they went out of power and then came back into power after five centuries? What were the pandavas doing when the cholas were in power? Were they hunted? Why were aditya karikala's murderers pardoned by raja raja chola? Is it truly about their caste? We have a shitload of kalvettus from this time - can we translate them all and upload them online, please?
5) Do we have anything at all to go by in terms of the food they ate at any period in history? How did the language change over the two millennia?
Edit:
There simply aren't that many books published about south indian history. There isn't all that much digging up either. There is one Nilakanta Sastry who is cited by everyone who talks of Cholas, but his books have been out of publication for decades. In comparison, we have hundreds and hundreds of books published on every conceivable aspect of a number of other civilizations - about the changes in english, greek and latin over the years, the mayans, the rise and fall of rome, histories of the various european monarchies, the aztecs, etc. [all of which interest me hugely].
The problem is something like this, the government of India is currently totally disinterested in projects of this nature. What we do currently is take development work as the sole requirement and work towards that.
Indians have never shown interest towards quality research in history. Heck we don't even respect the symbols of history we have amidst us. We either demolish archeological evidences(Many demolished during new Airport road construction in Bangalore) or use them as places where lovers hang around to escape from their parents. Just look at the state of historical monuments and how badly they have been maintained, if it was not for some tourism value even those would have long vanished.
Apart from that much of the historical research comes from the archaeological work carried out during pre-independence era during British time or immediately post that. Archeological Survey of India is a joke, and much of the historical research is left to curious professors from universities who are severely underfunded.
I think even if research is carried out now, we are only likely to find out half truth and much of the story will have to reconstructed piecing things together.
> isn't that why all the cities with 'English' names were rechristened? :p
Interesting choice of words there - 'rechristened'. In any case, many of the names were reverted back to their original forms (not just cities, but things like surnames too).
The Keralans are pretty keen on the theory that Chinese tai qi and gong fu traditions derived from an ancient Keralan martial arts tradition, and do seem to have some evidence. There are also a lot of Chinese-style bamboo fishing nets still in use up the coast of Kerala and in to Karnataka. The only other place I've seen those is Zhejiang, north of Shanghai near Yangzhou, the old southern terminus of China's Grand Canal.
Also, the great era of Cambodia seems to have been founded by a family from south India, which is backed up by art historic evidence and the earliest Chinese diplomatic materials. The same goes for the Cham kingdom of Vietnam. That's a hell of a long way to sail, and further than the great Buddhist Borobodur monument on Java, Indonesia, which was also built by south Indians.
Another area of India I'm ultra curious about is Assam ... as everyone's going to Burma, Assam is clearly more interesting! (Written from Yunnan, just east of there, in southwest China)
Not adding anything useful to this, but the questions you've raised make me want to get into this - I've been playing around with this idea of capturing the oral histories that abound in the smaller towns in India and putting them up online for people to cross reference.
