A pragmatic response

History and Theory

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 409-427

  Rao, Velcheru Narayana ^a   Shulman, David ^b   Subrahmanyam, Sanjay ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN   (United States)

^b HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM   (Israel)

^c UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149580053     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00418.x     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001: New York: Other Press, 2003).
2. Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980);
3. Stein, "State Formation and Economy Reconsidered," Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985), 387-413;
4. Stein, Vijayanagara (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
5. Noboru Karashima, South Indian History and Society: Studies from the Inscriptions, AD 850-1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984);
6. Karashima, Towards a New Formation: South Indian Society under Vijayanagar Rule (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
7. David Dean Shulman, The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);
8. Hank Heifetz and Velcheru Narayana Rao, For the Lord of the Animals-Poems from the Telugu: The Kālahastīśvara Śatakamu of Dhūrjati (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
9. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
10. Subrahmanyam, Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1700 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
11. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-period Tamilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
12. A. K. Ramanujan, Velcheru Narayana Rao, and David Shulman, When God Is a Customer; Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
13. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
14. Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (Delhi/Ann Arbor: Oxford University Press/University of Michigan Press, 2001);
15. Pingali Suranna, The Sound of the Kiss: Or the Story that Must Never be Told, transl. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002);
16. to these, we should add Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, A Lover's Guide to Warrangal: The 'Krīdâbhirāmamu' by Vinukonda Vallabharāya (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002).
17. Annamayya, God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati, transl. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005);
18. Pingali Suranna, The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India, transl. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006).
19. Ashis Nandy, "History's Forgotten Doubles," History and Theory, Theme Issue 34 (1995), 44-66;
20. Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002);
21. Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003);
22. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Time of History and the Times of Gods," in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 35-60.
23. "History, one might thus conclude, is not simply absent from or unknown to Sanskritic India; rather it is denied in favor of a model of 'truth' that accorded history no epistemological value or social significance"; see Sheldon Pollock, "Mīmāmsā and the Problem of History in Traditional India," Journal of the American Oriental Society 109, no. 4 (1989), 610.
24. Nicholas B. Dirks, "The Pasts of a Pālaiyakārar [sic: for Pālaiyakkārar]: The Ethnohistory of a South Indian Little King," Journal of Asian Studies 41, no. 3 (1982), 655-683;
25. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
26. Phillip B. Wagoner, Tidings of the King: Translation and Ethnohistorical Analysis of the 'Rāyavācakamu' (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993).
27. Sumit Guha, "Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400-1900," American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (2004), 1084-1103;
28. Talbot's review appeared in American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (2005), 1477-1478.
29. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures du temps: Écrire l'histoire en Inde, transl. Marie Fourcade (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
30. "Choix des annales," Annales HSS 59, nos. 5-6 (2004), ix;
31. also see the review by Gilles Tarabout in Annales HSS 60, no. 2 (2005), 331-333.
32. The Barthesian rhetorical figure centering on "death" still seems to mark Pollock in works such as his controversial essay "The Death of Sanskrit," Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 2 (2001), 392-426. The term "pretextures" in his title also seems to be a Barthesian turn, a nod in the direction of Prétextes.
33. On the scope of the śāstras, see, for example, Shastric Traditions in Indian Arts, ed. A. L. Dallapiccola, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1989).
34. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "A Note on Narsapur Peta: A 'Syncretic' Shipbuilding Centre in South India, 1570-1700," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 31, no. 3 (1988), 305-311.
35. Kappal cāttiram, ed. T. P. Palaniyappa Pillai (Madras: Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, 1950).
36. Joseph Needham (with Wang Ling), Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1954-2004);
37. compare this massive enterprise with Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, History of Science and Technology in Ancient India: The Beginnings, 3 vols. (Calcutta: K.L. Mukhopadhyaya, 1986-1996)
38. and A Concise History of Science in India, ed. D. M. Bose, S. N. Sen, and B. V. Subbarayappa (New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1971).
39. Sheldon Pollock, "Pretextares of Time," History and Theory 46 (2007), 372 (this issue). Subsequent citations to this article will be made parenthetically in the text.
40. Jonathan D. Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (New York: Viking, 1978).
41. Guha, "Speaking Historically," 1090-1091. Thus for Guha, history is still eventually a simple "genre," but one whose characteristics do not require comment, definition, or elaboration. We find this silence on his part eloquent.
42. Pollock seems unaware of the fact that this is precisely what has usually been done by many Indologists; cf. Alf Hiltebeitel, Rethinking India's Oral and Classical Epics: Draupadi among Rajputs, Muslims, and Dalits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), which treats materials on Desingu Raja in exactly this fashion. From time to time, Pollock also seems to read texts that we have clearly indicated are nonhistorical as if we had defined them as historical (see his discussion of Desingu Raja).
43. 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).
44. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century," Representations 91 (2005), 26-57.
45. Donna Haraway, cited in Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 21.
46. Roland Barthes, "La mort de l'auteur," in Barthes, Œuvres complètes, Tome II, 1966-1973, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 491-495.
47. Barthes, "Le discours de l'histoire," in Barthes, Œuvres complètes. Tome II, 1966-1973, 417-427.
48. Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire; The Historian Mustafa Âli (1541-1600) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
49. Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004);
50. Zaid Ahmad, The Epistemology of Ibn Khaldūn (London: Routledge, 2003).
51. Umberto Eco (with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose), Interpretation and Overinterpretation: The Tanner Lectures, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
52. also the useful discussion in Lars-Olof Åhlberg, "Understanding and Appreciating Art: The Relevance of Experience," Journal of Aesthetic Education 33, no. 1 (1999), 11-23.
53. Barthes, "Le discours de l'histoire," 427.
54. Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof, 38-40, passim.
55. Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900, ed. Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
56. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
57. nd ed. (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monographs, 2001).
58. Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate, ed. Thomas N. Headland, Kenneth L. Pike, and Marvin Harris (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990).
59. On Hazin and his views, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 226-239.
60. For a development of the distinction between the "recorded text" and the "received text," see Velcheru Narayana Rao, "Purāna," in Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby, eds., The Hindu World (London: Routledge, 2004), 97-115.
61. Indeed, Guha's attempt at a sarcastic riposte to us ("Where does one get a domiciliary certificate for an eighteenth-century culture?") might better be read as a plaintive admission of the poverty of his own reading practices, which apparently cannot begin to approach the texture of the materials he addresses; cf. Guha, "Speaking Historically," 1090.
62. Pollock's profound ambivalence is nowhere clearer than in his essay "New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-century India," Indian Economic and Social History Review 38, no. 1 (2001), 3-31.
63. Christopher Chekuri, "Writing Politics Back into History," History and Theory 46 (2007), 383 (this issue). Subsequent citations to this article will be made parenthetically in the text.
64. Margaret C. Jacob, "Factoring Mary Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact," History and Theory 40, no. 2 (2001), 280-289.
65. nd ed. (Vijayawada: Adarsa Granthamandali, 1965), 1-17;
66. and Veturi Prabhakara Sastri, ed., Cātu-padya-mani-mañjari, 2 vols. (Hyderabad: Veturi Prabhakara Sastri Memorial Trust, 1988)
67. (reprint of the 1913 edition), sabhāpati-vacanamu, in vol. I, 283-289;
68. section entitled mantrulu, vol. II, 251-308.
69. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia," Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997), 735-762;
70. Subrahmanyam, "Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400-1750," Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998), 75-104.
71. Chekuri is apparently unaware of important, recent work that renders his views on the history of modernity questionable, such as that of Alexander Woodside, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
72. Velcheru Narayana Rao, "Print and Prose: Pandits, Karanams, and the East India Company in the Making of Modern Telugu," in India's Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 146-166.
73. Phillip Wagoner, "Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 4 (2003), 783-814;
74. Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
75. See, in this context, Rama Sundari Mantona, "Vernacular Futures: Colonial Philology and the Idea of History in Nineteenth-century South India," Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, no. 4 (2005), 513-534.
76. For an essay prefiguring the larger work, see Kumkum Chatterjee, "Communities, Kings and Chronicles: The Kulagranthas of Bengal," Studies in History 21, no. 2 (2005), 173-213.
77. Christian Lee Novetzke, "The Subaltern Numen: Making History in the Name of God," History of Religions 46, no. 2 (2006), 99-126, especially 113-116.