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.
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