6 SOCIAL SCIENTIST People registered protests by killing themselves in public. A dancing girl threw herself from the temple tower to fight for the right of her relations to till the land assigned to her for her maintenance. More importantly a brahman immolated himself to establish the right of the temple guards and servants who also died for the same thing.5 Many Jamas believed that they would attain salvation by subjecting themselves to physical hardships leading to the end of their lives. Perhaps these religious methods of ending life for the sake of salvation adopted by the Jainas were repeat performances of the actual methods adopted by the peasants to articulate their protests against the exploitation of feudal landlords in south India. It seems that self-immolation prevalent in south India till recent times such as one on the occasion of the death of M.G. Ramachandran is a survival of the practice of protest against unbearable conditions of life. Several instances of violent conflict between the landlords, who were brahmanas, and the peasants in the eleventh-thirteenth centuries in Kamataka and Andhra Pradesh have been cited. The peasants launched armed attacks on brahmana landlords, and the landlords burnt a whole village and the standing crops, and carried on war against peasant villages.6 Many commemorative stones were raised in south India in order to record the acts of bravery performed by those who laid down their lives in defence of the brahmana's land or those who died in violence unleashed by the landed religious elements or others. Such stones are called viragala or virakala (hero stones) and are found not only in Kamataka but also in many other parts of southern India. An inscribed hero stone from Hasan district in Kamataka shows that in 1212 the Chief of Hanche fell fighting against the people of Kerehalli for a pond, for which a stone was raised in his memory.7 In the eleventh-fourteenth centuries many inscriptions in Kamataka mention not only the endowment, construction and maintenance of tanks but also speak of battles for their possession. All this was natural since the tank formed the chief means of irrigation. The case referred to above suggests that the peasantry in the whole village was pitted against the chief who wanted a larger share of water for himself. It would be worthwhile to map such *hero stone* inscriptions areawise and periodwise and to work out their implications from the point of view of rural conflicts. Numerous instances of peasant protest occur in the Cola and other inscriptions found in Tamilnadu and the neighbouring areas. I have consulted the summaries of these inscriptions published in the Annual Reports of South Indian Epigraphy (ARE). Even these summaries give a fair indication of the strong reaction of the peasants to the oppression of the landlords and occasionally of the royal agents during the first half of the thirteenth century under the Cola King Rajaraja III. We find that his vassals benefited from the discomfiture of the Cola monarch at the hands of the Pandyas. The Pandya invasions were followed by troubles^and agitation (ksobham) marked by insecurity and