| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800. (Cultural Studies.) New York: Other Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 296. $30.00.
This book was first published in 2001 by Permanent Black, a Delhi-based publisher, but was difficult to obtain and therefore little read. The new edition by Other Press makes this important work easily available to a global audience and should help it receive the scholarly recognition it deserves. The book is a testament to the advantages of joint scholarship in the humanities, for the three authors together command numerous languages and the disciplinary perspectives of both history and literary studies. In this second collaboration between Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the abrupt changes in topic or style that occasionally marred their previous endeavor, Symbols of Substance (1992), have been eliminated, resulting in a more consistent voice and tighter argumentation.	1
This volume is also a more ambitious work, whose aim is to recover "as history a significant body of literature from late medieval and early modern South India" (p. 3). Taking a middle path between the stance that historical writing only emerged with the advent of colonialism and the view that all indigenous traditions dealing with the past should be considered historical, the authors instead assert that "the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in South India saw the emergence of a new and specific historical awareness" (p. 136). As evidence for this claim, they examine upward of twenty texts, composed (primarily) in the languages of Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, and Persian. Only one of these texts is available in English translation and some have never been discussed in print before; the book thus introduces a substantial corpus of Indian writing to the world of Engish scholarship, no mean achievement on its own.	2
This book will be remembered chiefly for its provocative theses, however. One is that historiography in India, unlike in Europe, was written in a variety of literary genres. Because history writing might appear in the guise of a folk epic, courtly poem, or diplomatic report, its existence was overlooked by earlier scholars, according to Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam. But, they argue, the distinction between a history and a fictional work was understood by authors and their audiences in early modern South Asia and encoded within texts by sub-generic markers. These subtle markers are part of what make up the "texture" of a written work and texture is what ultimately determines whether a particular text should be considered a history or not. More and more writing that is historiographical in nature was produced in South India from 1600 onward, by a growing class of service gentry encompassing scribes, minor court functionaries, and village-level officials who are collectively referred to by the Telugu term karanam.	3
After laying out their basic arguments in the introductory chapter, Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam proceed to support them with fine-grained case studies. Their favorite method is to analyze a cluster of works dealing with the same historical event, supplying translations of select passages in the process. In chapter two, they focus on three texts that cover the Battle of Bobbili, fought in Andhra Pradesh in January 1757. All three were written within a half century of this minor battle occasioned by the growing power of the English East India Company, and they offer a fascinating counterperspective to the more familiar colonial accounts. Because they differ in genre, this chapter convincingly illustrates the point that genre cannot be used as the primary means to identify Indian historiography. Chapters four and five examine a considerably larger set of works relating to the defeat of Tej Singh (or Desingu Raja) at Senji fort in Tamil Nadu in 1714. The range of languages and genres represented in this literature on Tej Singh leads to a correspondingly more complex analysis, one that touches on issues as diverse as models of heroism, Indo-Persian historiography, and the use of varying temporal modes.	. . .

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