This book offers a deeper historical context to the interplay between the physical fortunes of climate and weather and the ways in which the Tamil society experienced it in the medieval age. It touches upon the rainfall, famines and droughts, storms and cyclones, earthquakes, floods and tsunamis, temperature and atmospheric pressure of the modern age, noticed by the Catholic and Protestant missionaries, European traders, travellers, the East India Company officials and servants using scientific instruments. Based on a greater variety of Tamil sources, missionary letters and reports, British and French colonial records, the monograph presents the reading of history through the lens of climate and provides a more complete picture of Tamil landscape and environment in South India from the ninth to the nineteenth century.

S. Jeyaseela Stephen is Directeur, Institut pour études Indo-Européennes. He was Professor of Maritime History (2001-2013) at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. He is the author of numerous books on maritime history of early modern India, his publications include, The Coromandel Coast and its Hinterland: Economy, Society and Political System ad 1500-1660; Expanding Portuguese Empire and the Tamil Economy (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries). He received the best book prize of 1999 from the Government of Tamil Nadu. His books have been translated into Chinese, Danish, German and Tamil.