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.