Velcheru Narayana Rao

Forms of knowledge in early modern Asia : explorations in the intellectual history of India and Tibet, 1500-1800

In the past two decades, scholars have transformed our understanding of the interactions between India and the West since the consolidation of British power on the subcontinent around 1800. While acknowledging the merits of this scholarship, Sheldon Pollock argues that knowing how colonialism changed South Asian cultures, particularly how Western modes of thought became dominant, requires knowing what was there to be changed. Yet little is known about the history of knowledge and imagination in late precolonial South Asia, about what systematic forms of thought existed, how they worked, or who produced them. This pioneering collection of essays helps to rectify this situation by addressing the ways thinkers in India and Tibet responded to a rapidly changing world in the three centuries prior to 1800. Contributors examine new forms of communication and conceptions of power that developed across the subcontinent; changing modes of literary consciousness, practices, and institutions in north India; unprecedented engagements in comparative religion, autobiography, and ethnography in the Indo-Persian sphere; and new directions in disciplinarity, medicine, and geography in Tibet. Taken together, the essays in Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia inaugurate the exploration of a particularly complex intellectual terrain, while gesturing toward distinctive forms of non-Western modernity. Contributors . Muzaffar Alam, Imre Bangha, Aditya Behl, Allison Busch, Sumit Guha, Janet Gyatso, Matthew T. Kapstein, Francoise Mallison, Sheldon Pollock, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Sunil Sharma, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India

This essays deals with a neglected and significant strand of Indian political thought by describing and analysing the corpus known as nīti in the context of medieval and early modern South India (in particular with reference to the Telugu-speaking region). Works of nīti are presented here within a larger context, as they evolve from the medieval Andhra of the Kakatiyas into the Vijayanagara period, the Nayakas, and beyond. They are also opposed and contrasted to other texts written within the broad category of dharmashāstra , which seem to deal with a far more conservative project for the management of society and politics within a caste-based framework. Authors and compilers dealt with include Baddena and Madiki Singana, but also the celebrated emperor-poet Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509–29). An argument is made for the continued relevance of these texts for the conduct of politics in South Asia, into and beyond the colonial period.

Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu.

The book looks at the three major Nayaka states--ruled from Senji, Tanjavur and Madurai, Tiruccirappalli--as well as at minor states located at their periphery. While these states had differing life-spans, developmental patterns, geo-ecological environments, and distinct forms of historical experience, they also shared salient structural and cultural features. At their height, in the early seventeenth century, they encompassed the greater part of the Tamil country. Early chapters set out the fundamental tensions of the period: the social flux caused by the resurgence of certain groups, which had either intruded into the area from the Telugu country, or entered the mainstream of Nayaka society from a marginal position. Related to this is the central paradox of Nayaka kingship-- the tension between inflated claims and the limited scale of kingship. Later sections set out these themes in some detail, and also delineate how such states were founded, what their resource base was, and how this base was portrayed and managed. The books ambit extends considerably beyond the economic and political, to consider how the social flux of the epoch also found its counterpart in the central themes of Nayaka literature. Specifically, there is a focus on perceptions of the body and bodily mutilation and regeneration (here termed Nayaka anthropology), and on the parodic dialectic that underpins the rhetoric of kingship. Other chapters deal with contestation and war. The final chapter looks to the post-Nayaka transition, focusing once again on the kingdom that appears most of all to epitomize the Nayaka spirit: Tanjavur. What is distinctive about the Nayakas? How do they fit into the wider realities of their time? From what do they derive? How can we understand the emergence of new institutional patterns, of the striking artistic and especially literary creations at the Nayaka courts, of a novel historiography and culture? Supplementing standard sources by an imaginative use of Dutch, Portuguese, Tamil, Sanskrit, and Telugu sources, the authors show how the Nayakas witnessed, and partly produced, a profound shift in the conceptual and institutional bases of South Indian civilization.

A New Imperial Idiom in the Sixteenth Century: Krishnadevaraya and His Political Theory of Vijayanagara

The 1510s were a busy time – though perhaps not unusually so -in the military life of the Vijayanagara emperor Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509-1529).1 The early years of his reign had seen this ruler, son of the great Tuluva warlord Narasa Nayaka, and his younger wife Nagaladevi, preoccupied first with wars to the north, and then in campaigns to the south-east against the Sambuvarayars. But from about 1514, a series of campaigns took him to the distant north-east, where he managed to extend his domains considerably, as far as the Godavari river and its delta. Inscriptions such as an entire series on the second prākāra of the Tirumalai temple inform us that this ruler, described by an elaborate title which includes the interesting epithet Yavanarājya-sthāpanācārya – ‘the lord who established the kingdom of the Muslims’ – set out in about 1514 from his capital of Vijayanagara on ‘an eastern expedition’, and went on to capture not only Udayagiri, but such centres as Addanki, Vinukonda and Nagarjunakonda, to say nothing of the great fort of Kondavidu, where we learn that he ‘laid siege to it, erected square sheds around the fort, demolished the rampart walls, occupied the citadel [and] captured alive Virabhadraraya, son of Prataparudra Gajapatideva’.2 He then made further substantial inroads into the kingdom of the Gajapati rulers of Orissa, captured a number of members of the Gajapati family as well as subordinate rulers (pātra-sāmantas and manneyars), but released them and having given them ‘an assurance of safety for their lives’, eventually returned to the city of Vijayanagara. A second expedition against Kalingadesa, the core Gajapati domain, is reported soon afterwards, with the ruler making his way on this occasion through Bezwada (Vijayavada) to Kondapalli, which he occupied; after another series of extensive campaigns that took him as far as Simhadri-potnuru and Rajamahendravara, he eventually returned to his capital city by late 1516. The first days of January 1517 then saw the ruler make a triumphal visit to Tirupati, where he made extensive gifts and grants of gold and jewellery to the god. He would continue to visit this great Vaishnava temple periodically, with his last recorded visit being in February 1521. At some point in the busy years of these north-eastern campaigns, perhaps during the second of the expeditions described above, Krishnadevaraya began to compose his great Telugu work, the Āmukta-mālyada, ‘the woman who gives

The Indigenous Modernity of Gurajada Apparao and Fakir Mohan Senapati

There is a broad consensus that India only became “modern” on account of its conquest by the British in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is generally agreed that Apparao and Senapati are the first creators of modernity in their respective languages, Telugu and Oriya. Apparao is celebrated as the father of modern literature in Telugu, as Senapati is for Oriya. While the consensus I refer to defines modernity as a specifically colonial modernity, one that was produced by the impact of English on Indian literature and society, I suggest in this chapter that in the two late nineteenth-century works under review, Kanyasulkam (Girls for Sale) and Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third), Apparao and Senapati present an indigenous modernity, distinct from the colonial variety.

AN ELEGY FOR NĪTI Politics as a Secular Discursive Field in the Indian Old Régime

The essay reflects in an elegiac mode on a now largely forgotten (or effaced) body of literature from precolonial India regarding the art and business of politics. This body, known as nīti , has classical roots in Sanskrit but came in particular to be popular in peninsular India between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries in vernacular languages such as Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi. Secular and this-worldly in orientation, it can be broadly contrasted to the far better known body of texts on dharma , which are concerned to preserve a normative, ritually and religiously sanctioned, order based on strict adherence to caste and gender roles. We first trace the classical roots of the tension between dharma and nīti and then set out how these two bodies of texts came to play distinct and evolving roles in medieval and early modern south India. We argue further that under the early phase of colonial rule, East India Company officials misunderstood the nature of nīti texts and that this has led to a persistently erroneous view of their role and content. We conclude by noting, however, that some astute modern observers of and participants in Indian politics, such as B. R. Ambedkar, have understood the part that nīti might play for the development of a secular language of politics in modern India.

Introduction: From Scratch

The essay discusses the presumption of one’s singularity, the uniqueness of one’s time, the picturesqueness of one actions, and the capacity of human beings, whether corporately or individually, to begin everything or indeed anything again from scratch. Such presumptions are indeed present in some varieties of contemporary fanaticism, but, more to the point, it is suggested that the feeling of doing something for the first time is the oldest feeling in the world.