Textures of Time after 25 years: Histories of “history” in South Asia
Description
The publication of Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black) twenty-five years ago, in 2001, was an important landmark in the study of historiography in South Asia. Arguments regarding the role of history within South Asian traditions had taken a number of different but related forms in that period, representing a resurgence of interest in the question of “history” in South Asia. For example, within the work of Ranajit Guha (2002), the quest for a South Asian historical imagination represented a call to action to recover a historiography outside of the state by looking at alternative genres and forms of literature for a real “world history,” a “historicality” that is distinct from history-as-state. We can see such work as reflecting a more general effort, identified by Daud Ali (1999), to construct “a history of conceptions of the past, or a history of regimes of historicity, in South Asia” that is not simply identical to European forms. The specificity of these regimes of historicity in South Asia has been crucial in decolonizing how we know the past, and in "provincializing Europe" (Chakrabarty, 2000), to move past “questions of authenticity and historicity” (Shackle, 2014) that had impoverished our understanding of the many connections South Asian traditions have had with each other, especially in their interaction with various domains of knowledge, now treated as more or less hermetically sealed disciplines in our postcolonial present. V. Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 (2001) was revolutionary in this respect, as they sought to demonstrate that the “assertion (‘History is a post-Renaissance Western genre’) can only be sustained by willfully ignoring a vast body of materials available from South Asia" that appear in diverse genres and forms, and across languages. They thus separate “history” from a distinct historiographical genre— arguing that history is “not a matter of strict adherence to formal characteristics and types”—and a particular set of modern political relations (at the same time demonstrating a deep connection between historical representation and state-formation). This seminar seeks to bring together scholars of premodern South Asia to engage with this influential work, 25 years after the publication of its first edition. We hope to create a space for scholars working on premodern South Asia across various genres, regional, and linguistic domains to reassess the relevance of this work, reinterrogate its premises based on new archival evidence, and reexamine the continuing complex relationship between the literary, the religious, and the historical in the context of South Asia.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sabeena Shaikh is completing a PhD in the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University under the supervision of Pasha Khan. Her dissertation examines the kulliyāt of Lutf-un-Nisā “Imtiyāz,” the first woman to compile a divan in Urdu in the late 18th century. She has served as Faculty Lecturer of Urdu-Hindi at McGill and will soon begin a position as Lecturer of Urdu at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
Speaker Bio
Anne Murphy (Ph.D. Columbia) teaches in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Her work focuses on the Punjab region of India and Pakistan, with interests in language and textual cultures; religious community formations in the early modern and modern periods; oral history; commemoration; historiography; caste; and material culture studies. She is working on a translation of Waris Shah's Hīr based on the earliest available manuscripts.
Speaker Bio
Julie Vig is Assistant Professor at York University. Her research focuses on premodern Sikh and Punjabi cultural production and how it relates to wider cultural worlds and networks of early modern North India. Her particular focus is on gurbilās literature and its interactions with broader Brajbhasha literature in the early modern period. She also has research interests in the reception of early modern Sikh texts in the colonial period and women, gender, and sexuality within the Sikh tradition.
Speaker Bio
I am Assistant Professor of History at Salisbury University (Salisbury, Maryland). My research and teaching interests include the history of early modern and modern South Asia, the British Empire, Indian princely states, religious cultures, and intellectual history. I hold additional interests in visual and material cultures. My current book project is about historical imagination in modern South Asia, and its role in the religious formulation of power, agency and ethics.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Prof. Hussain Mohammed A. Alqarni,
• Professor of Arabic Literature, Department of Arabic Language and Literature, King Abdulaziz University, since 2022.
• Co-Founder of Center for Translation and Arabization at King Abdulaziz University, and the center director since 2019.
for List of works see the link: https://kau.academia.edu/HussainAlqarni
Speaker Bio
Sloane Geddes is a doctoral candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, “Writing Avadāna for the Court: Poetry, Power, and Wonder in Śivasvāmin’s Kapphiṇābhyudaya, explores how a narrative about a king’s wondrous encounter with the Buddha was recast in an erudite Sanskrit poem in early medieval Kashmir. Her research, broadly conceived, concerns medieval authors and readers' use and interactions with Sanskrit literature.
Speaker Bio
Abinash is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. His research explores Christian and Hindu mysticism in South Asia (16th–18th c.), focusing on Odisha. He examines how devotees expressed spiritual experience and identity through self-representation. His interests include autobiography studies and literary historiography, and he works across Hindi, Odia, Bangla, and Sanskrit to bring a multilingual, interdisciplinary approach.