Matter of Time: Ceramics and Historicity in Medieval South India

Abstract

This article examines how people formed and negotiated relations to time in routine engagements with materials and places in medieval South India. Questions of history and memory, which have become central to our understanding of precolonial Indian social and political practices, are frequently considered in relation to courtly epigraphical and textual production or monumental building projects. Positing that experiences of time are formed in everyday acts of production, consumption and maintenance, this article problematises the term ‘social memory’ to propose an alternative framework for exploring temporal relations: the concept of historicity. Historicity provides a robust analytical vocabulary for discussing how historical actors inhabited their own present, how they oriented themselves towards pasts and futures, and the kinds of timescales that both framed their actions and were formed in action. Operationalising this framework, I build on an analysis of excavated ceramics from a twelfth- to thirteenth-century settlement at Maski (northern Karnataka) to foreground the diverse ways in which individuals and communities drew upon available pasts and acted with initiative within an intersubjective present world of tasks and activities.