Indian Historical Writing, c.600–c.1400

Abstract

This chapter illustrates how the rise of renewed interest in precolonial South Asian history and literature has rendered the idea that South Asia lacked traditions of historical writing or historical consciousness. The only exception to this trend is the ‘indigenist’ position, heavily indebted to postcolonial studies, which argued that India's lack of historical consciousness should be seen as a virtue — history being an alien, European concept implicated in epistemic and material violence. Scholars working more closely with early materials, however, have developed a number of more refined positions on the question of historical writing in early India. For instance, scholars have claimed that historical consciousness and historical writing were not so much absent in early India as ‘denied’ by the epistemological assumptions of Brahmanical orthodoxy and its ideological quest to place the Veda outside of history.