About the BookAbout the Author

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 this 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.

VELCHERU NARAYAN Rao is Krishnadevaraya Professor of South Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. SHULMAN, DAVID, Professor of Indian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. SUBRAHMANYAM, SANJAY, Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.