Organizer: Rama Mantena, Library of Congress

Discussants: Velcheru Narayana Rao, University of Wisconsin; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California - Los Angeles; Harry D. Harootunian, New York University; Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia, Canada; Sheldon Pollock, University of Chicago; Christopher Chekuri, San Francisco State University

History, that is the writing of history, has been a contested field ever since the British declared that Indians possessed no historical consciousness at the turn of the nineteenth century. Narayana Rao, Subrahmanyam and Shulman’s second co-authored book, Textures of Time, takes a fresh look at the practice of writing history in southern India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before colonial historiography propped up positivist method as the true model for historical writing. The authors contest the charge that there were no valid historical traditions in southern India before the British.

We propose a Roundtable discussion of Textures of Time at the AAS annual meeting as an opportunity to engage with historical traditions in South Asia (and more broadly in Asia) and the question of historical consciousness and historical methodologies. The primary aim of the Roundtable is to generate productive conversations between scholars of South Asia as well as other parts of Asia (and the respective historiographical traditions). We have asked a historian of Japan, Harry Harootunian, a historian of China, Timothy Brook, and a scholar of Sanskrit literary history, Sheldon Pollock to address the issues surrounding Textures of Time from their own specific geographic area and disciplinary point of view. Two of the authors, Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, will respond to the questions posed and discussion opened up by their interlocutors.

It is our hope that all the participants of the roundtable will address the burden of inheriting positivist historiography (from European traditions) and its effect on Asian historical traditions (broadly defined traditions of representing the past in textual and oral genres).