Temporality, narration and the problem of history: A view from Western India c. 1100–1400

Daud Ali
Additional contact information
Daud Ali: University of Pennsylvania

The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2013, vol. 50, issue 2, 237-259

Abstract: The articles in this issue contribute to a paradigm shift in our approaches to historical discourse in precolonial South Asia. Rather than posing again the well-worn question of whether the RÄ jataraá¹…giṇī should be considered a properly ‘historical’ text or a work of poetry, they focus on the complex and often hybrid sytlistic, thematic and aesthetic ‘lineages’ of the text, to understand how Kalhaṇa was able to articulate a unique vision of the past—and one that created the space for further iterations in later times. This final article seeks to at least partly test the value of such an approach through a similar examination of largely contemporaneous materials from Western India. Long noted for its peculiar combination of tantalising historical detail with magical elements and chronological anachronisms, the prabandha literature of Gujarat has recently been interpreted as an expression of a ‘Jain’ approach to kingship, morality and biography. Without denying this obvious connection, this article approaches the prabandhas by contexualising them against the wider background of temporalities and narrational styles in Sanskrit literature. It argues that the peculiar conventions of prabandha literature in Western India may best be explained through the interaction of distinctive narrative traditions and temporal orientations in Sanskrit writing that may have broad parallels in Kashmir’s literary history.

Keywords: Historical consciousness; history writing; Jainism; prabandha; kÄ vya kathÄ; temporality; narrative; VikramÄ ditya tradition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019464613487120 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indeco:v:50:y:2013:i:2:p:237-259

DOI: 10.1177/0019464613487120

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Indian Economic & Social History Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().