"Premodern" pasts: South Asia

Book section : Chapter

Over a very long period, India's rich literary landscape did much to shape the ways in which its clerkly strata wrote and thought about the past. “Histories” were written in a range of literary genres in oral form – bardic tales, puranas, and in written form – Persian chronicles, Sanskrit court poetry. The great chroniclers of the Delhi sultanate worked in different genres, and the moral vision of Islam shaped their histories. Even as the Mughal Empire created a pan‐Indian Persian literary culture, its scribal communities focused their attention increasingly on the local states they served or observed. Karanam histories depicted vividly observed kings and warriors very much as agents of their own destinies. The coming of colonialism brought tremendous change to the social and literary landscape, with its progressive drive to create new institutions for the production of “useful” knowledge.

Authors: O'Hanlon, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Host title: A Companion to Global Historical Thought
• Pages: 107-121
• Chapter number: 7
• Series: Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History
• Publication date: 2014-02-14
• DOI: 10.1002/9781118525395.ch7
• EISBN: 9781118525395
• ISBN: 9780470658994
• Language: English
• Keywords: South Asia; Karanam histories; Persian; colonialism; India; Sanskrit
• Subtype: Chapter