The problem that I have been dealing with over the last few years is how it might be possible to create a historical context for the study of South Indian religion. Like a number of other South Indian historians I have been concentrating on the rise and development of new states and chiefdoms during the late pre-colonial period — that is in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of European expansion in the sub-continent which preceded the consolidation of British imperial rule. My own work has focused on the role of shrines and holy places within these pre-colonial domains and chiefdoms.