Pretextures of time

History and Theory

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 366-383

  Pollock, Sheldon ^a  

^a Columbia University ^*

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EID: 51349155305     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00415.x     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). Parenthetical page references are to this book. All diacritics have been omitted.
2. "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose," in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 52 and n.
3. A sampling of the millennium-long discourse on India's historiographical failings is offered in Sheldon Pollock, "Mimamsa and the Problem of History in Traditional India," Journal of the American Oriental Society 109:3 (1989), 603;
4. some of this is repeated but also supplemented in Roy W. Perrett, "History, Time, and Knowledge in Ancient India," History and Theory 38:3 (1999), 308-311.
5. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 4 (he strikes out twice here).
6. One could also refer to Paul Veyne, Writing History (Middletown, CT: Wesley an University Press, 1984), who has the same narrow European conception of "history," though a larger appreciation of the capacities of the "Indian soul" (80, cf. 292-293).
7. See Ashis Nandy, "History's Forgotten Doubles," History and Theory 34:2 (1995), 44-66.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 3 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 397 (transi. M. Knox, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 2: 1095).
9. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 18-19.
10. Recent scholarship complicates these contrasts; see, for example, the discussion of the beginnings of history in Homer in François Hartog, "The Invention of History," History and Theory 39 (2000), 384-395.
11. Auerbach, Mimesis, 19-20. To complicate things further, we are informed that, "to write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend."
12. Roland Barthes, "The Discourse of History," Comparative Criticism. A Yearbook (1981 ), 7 (the essay was originally published in 1967).
13. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 178.
14. James Wood, "The Blue River of Truth," The New Republic (August 1, 2005).
15. Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana, ed. Pattabhirama Sastry (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1940), 3.10.
16. See also Walter Slaje, Medieval Kashmir and the Science of History (Austin: South Asia Institute, 2004), who makes a strong case for the empirical authenticity of Kalhana's successors.
17. For some reflections on this problem, see my "Empire and Imitation," in Lessons of Empire, ed. Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin Moore (New York: New Press, 2006).
18. The first binary is common in the Dhvanyaloka; the second citation is from the seventh-century Kavyalankara (Ornament of Literature) of Bhamaha, ed. B. N. Sarma and Baldeva Upadhyaya (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1928), 1.15.
19. For the Ramayana, see Srimadvalmikiramayana, ed. Gangavisnu Srikrsnadasa (Bombay: Venkatesvara Steam Press, 1935).
20. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 105-114.
21. On Hegel and history, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 11-12.
22. Several of these other topics are explored in their earlier collaborative volume, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
23. See, for example, John Richards, "Early Modern India and World History," Journal of World History 8:2 (1997), 197-209.
24. There is a large and growing bibliography on some of these questions. For an overview of some key contributions and questions, see Sheldon Pollock, "We Need to Find What We Are Not Looking For," International Association of Asian Studies Newsletter (Leiden) 43 (2007), 1,4;
25. The Ends of Man at the End of Premodernity (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Stichting J. Gonda-Fonds, 2005), 83-90.
26. Reinhart Koselleck, "The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity," in The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 154-169.
27. An intellectual history of the early modern tipping point is offered in Anthony Grafton, What Was History? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 188-254.
28. On-Cho Ng, "The Epochal Concept of 'Early Modernity' and the Intellectual History of Late Imperial China," Journal of World History 14:1 (2003), 37-61.