Textures of Time : Writing History in South India 1600-1800

Contents: Preface. I. Introduction: a palette of histories: 1. Listening for history. 2. Matters of fact. 3. Letters traced on paper. II. On the battle of Bobbili, January 1757: 1. Introduction: tiger town. 2. Bobbili yuddha katha 1: Bussy's Blunders. 3. Bobbili yuddha katha 2: intersecting frames. 4. Playing with fate: the Pedda Bobbili Raju Katha. 5. 'This tragic ground' : colonial perspectives on Bobbili. 6. Ranga raya caritramu 1 : prehistory. 7. Ranga raya caritramu 2: 'Why should the greedy think nobly?' 8. Reviewing Bobbili. 9. Excursus: the Padmanabha War, 1794. III. Of Karanams and Kings: 1. Remembering and recording. 2. The Kakatiya retrospective. 3. Kumara Rama and Polika Rama. 4. Minister and King : The Raya vacakamu. 5. The too clever Karanam: on the Tanjavuri Andhra Rajula Caritra. 6. Conclusion.IV. Senji, 1714: 1. A Bundela among the Tamils. 2. On fame : two empirical essays. 3. History transformed : the Desingu Raja Katha. 4. The Hero's empty field. 5. Teyvika Rajan and the Shatter zone state. 6. Conclusion: on synchronicity. V. Tarikh, Caritra, Bakhar: 1. Senji revisited. 2. Jaswant Rai: a Brahmin from Ghazni writes Arcot's history. 3. Jawant Rai on Tej Singh. 4. From Arabic to Persian. 5. From Pawn to queen: the rise of the Bakhar. 6. Karnataka Rajakkal: flattening the loops of time. 7. Conclusion: the sphere of circulation. VI. Conclusion: 1. History's Warp and Weft. 2. Mistaken identity: Kalhana's Raja tarangini. 3. Gangadevi's pseudo history. 4. History from below: Dupati Kaifiyatu. Bibliography. Index.

"Everyone has a past: the question is what one does with it. If generations of scholars are to be believed, south Indian society in the centuries before colonial rule showed an indifference to its past-or, at best, approached the past through myth, legend and phantasmagoria.

This book sets out not merely to disprove that idea, but to demonstrate in some detail the complex forms of historiography that were produced in South India between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Following an earlier work by the same three authors, Symbols of Substance (1992), the present book uses a diversity of languages to draw upon a variety of sources that are considered unconventional.

The authors argue that the usual division between Indo-Persian and vernacular historiographies is artificial. They demonstrate the existence of a group of literati (karanams), who passed with ease from Telugu and Tamil to Marathi and Persian. Through a careful reading of and extensive translations from the relevant texts, the book thus sets out to shake some of the deepest-rooted prejudices that exist in the received wisdom on medieval and early modern India.

The approach and arguments within this book will interest historians of other parts of the world who study the same period, since the problem is posed in an explicitly comparative framework." (jacket)