I first met Velcheru Narayana Rao some time in late 1987, in Philadelphia, when he was fifty-five. He looked even then almost exactly as he does now, all of twenty-five years later. Perhaps he has lost a bit of hair since then, but not much. Before I met him, I had heard of him through David Shulman – who was also in Philadelphia that year, and I had read some of his essays and works of translation, notably of Dhurjati. From David’s description and various anecdotes, and from reading his acknowledgements to VNR in his The King and the Clown, I had expected a formidable and eccentric figure. But the person who I saw in Philadelphia was instead very shy, and also gave the impression of great modesty. His talk, which was part of a series organized by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai on Indian folklore studies, was really quite understated, unlike those by a number of American speakers in the same series. There was a reception that evening in Arjun’s house, and VNR appeared very uncomfortable in the crowd that was milling around him. We found a bare five or ten minutes to talk in the middle of all that. But David and he had already been discussing the germ of the project that eventually became our first joint book Symbols of Substance, which appeared in 1992.

That book was written with three authors, but around two distinct work-axes; the three of us were never in the same place at the same time while the writing was being done. VNR and David talked and worked together on some materials which were largely literary in character, and David and I discussed and worked on others which included archival, visual and related sources. In short, David was at the centre of the whole project, as a kind of hinge-figure, even though many of the important ideas came from VNR, who at that time strongly disagreed with the turn that South Indian historical studies had taken in the wake of Burton Stein. Eventually, when we had a first draft done, which must have been in late 1990, we exchanged several rounds of floppy disks (which were really floppy in those days) by mail. We rewrote the chapters several times until we had them polished to our own satisfaction. But I don’t think I actually met VNR again until Symbols of Substance had finally been published by Oxford University Press and he visited Delhi. That must have been in late 1992 or 1993, I would think, and we had a leisurely breakfast of idli and vadai in Sagar restaurant in Defence Colony market. Here, we talked about a number of possible ideas and projects on which we imagined we could work again as a trio. VNR is the same age as my mother (only two weeks younger actually), but it was very interesting to see that we immediately established a non-hierarchical relationship. In contrast, it is so often the case – especially in India but also elsewhere — that such an age difference generates a sort of teacher-student conversation. If that did not happen, it was because it was not what VNR wanted. He was very aware of what he knew, but also had a keen sense of what he did not know. My first impression of modesty was then a false one, but it did reflect something real, albeit a more complex quality.

So, though our working relationship dates back to the late 1980s, our personal relationship in terms of working closely together only dates to about 1993. From then on, we met regularly, in a variety of places: Delhi, Hyderabad, Jerusalem, Paris, Berlin, and Madison. Sometimes all three of us had the good fortune to be in the same place for an extended period, as in Berlin in 2000-2001 when we were finally finishing Textures of Time. At other times, VNR and I have worked together in David’s absence, sometimes in relation to a project that has involved all three of us, and on other occasions to write about half a dozen essays we have done as a duo on subjects like niti.

The work we have done together has followed different modes and logics. Some of it is closely focused on a set of texts which are at the core of an essay. Some of it is quite wide-ranging, and asks a broad set of questions which we then address using a spectrum of materials. And finally, as with Textures of Time, sometimes we look at a quite large idea or argument without being entirely certain at the start of the process what the body of relevant materials to deal with it is. I think the conversation with regard to that book started in Jerusalem in early 1995, at a time when VNR was living there for a whole year and I came to spend a couple of weeks. David was quite busy then, as he had both teaching and administrative work. So, he would usually join us only for a couple of hours a day. But VNR and I would spend the whole day together after breakfast, sometimes walking around the city, and at other times sitting in his apartment, or cooking dinner at the end of the day. I was just finishing some work on the story of Desingu Raja, and VNR was reading the Kumara Ramuni Katha. As we talked about these matters, all three of us saw that the germ of a book was there in relation to the received wisdom on the absence of historical consciousness in India before colonial rule. The heart of the matter was the concept of ‘texture’, which VNR came up with within a day or two and which we spent several days discussing at length. The concept as he saw it was key to distinguishing texts of a historical character from others, and could work efficiently where concepts like ‘genre’ failed. VNR’s point was simply that the same formal genre could be – indeed almost always was – used to very different ends. It was in the execution and the consequent feeling of the language that the real differentiation came about between the historical and the non-historical. At the same time, one needed a discerning eye and ear to grasp this, and confusions could arise when a naïve reader looked at a text.

So it was from that idea, and those materials that we started, and only later did we begin to look into the texts having to do with Bobbili which are the key to some of the early chapters. With regard to those texts, all three of us managed to find time together in Madison a couple of years later, and surrounded by books in VNR’s basement office, we worked out a first reading. What this meant was by the time we reached the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in October 2000, we had drafts of the central chapters in place. It was then a matter of writing the chapter on karanams and kings, the last-but-one chapter, the introduction, and conclusion. Then, we could spend several months polishing the text, this time in far more comfortable circumstances than for Symbols of Substance. Working with a master set of files which we moved between two computers, we could revise, change, add and polish, working for several hours a day. At other times, VNR and David would work on other translation projects, some for their classical Telugu poetry anthology. While they did so, Muzaffar Alam and I would work together on still other texts, such as the Persian translation of the story of Nala and Damayanti. It was very intensive work, made possible I suppose only by the relative isolation of Grunewald, where we all resided. We managed all this despite the fact that VNR was in great pain for some of the time, having to stand, pace the room, or only sit only a large and flexible ball, to give him relief for his back.

In the year we spent in Berlin, I came to know VNR even better than I had in the course of the 1990s. I also developed an understanding of his intellectual drive, and his desire to bring about a fundamental change in how Indian culture and history were understood, both in India and outside. His issues were at times with western interpreters of Indian culture, but more often they were with contemporary and modern Indian readings of older materials which he found false, unsound or based on prudishness. (One of his words of dismissal is ‘Victorian’). But it also became clearer to me why many of his colleagues had difficulties in understanding him. For instance, John Richards – who was his colleague for a time in Madison, and with whom he wrote an important essay on Sarvayi Papadu – once told me that he found VNR largely inscrutable, which in my view had as much to do with John’s concept of top-down administrative history as anything else. Or again in the late 1980s, Burton Stein assured me that he found VNR sympathetic because he read literature as a Marxist; no doubt VNR had once been influenced by Marxism, but this was hardly the key to his thinking by 1985. Many others who have worked with VNR, including some for extended periods of time, have had difficulty in seizing his way of looking at matters, because of the fact that he does not primarily work from a set of familiar theoretical references in the western canon. Rather, he has a particular relationship with texts and a received tradition, which he can treat quite irreverently because of a confident relationship with it. This is quite the opposite of modesty. He also has a very great clarity to his interpretations, even when they are paradoxical. And he does sometimes change his mind, though less as a result of an argument with someone else than from a shift in his own thought-process. All of this depends on the fact that in the case of Telugu, he can control the literature from its historical origins to today, and can also confidently work across the spectrum from the oral to the written, as well as in relation to different social registers and locations.

At the same time, such deep knowledge is hard to communicate. It is easy, especially in the western academy, to underestimate someone like VNR, and think he is a mere language specialist who works on obscure or arcane material. What became clear in Berlin was the extent to which VNR detested social formalities, and the sort of pretentious socializing that one can come across in so many western academic settings. The Kolleg in Berlin had a formal dinner every Thursday, preceded by a reception where many prominent socialites from Berlin would appear. I have rarely seen VNR more miserable than when faced by the need to make such small talk, often requiring him to explain what Telugu was, and where Andhra was located in India. He would have made a very bad diplomat. On the other hand, he seems to flourish in small groups, where he can be in his comfort zone. Unusually for someone of his generation, and especially one who moved to America quite late, he is equally at ease with both sexes. It is my observation that most male Indian academics of a certain age in the west are only comfortable with other males, but that is not his case.

So, I suspect that for all that he seems the same to me since 1987, VNR has changed a great deal over the years, and especially since he left India for the US. He is not one of those who talks of exile, but it is rare to find someone who is as immersed as he is in the culture of a place where he no longer lives. When we were in Berlin, Narayana Rao’s apartment was burgled one night while he was asleep. If the burglar had woken him up, I am sure he would have spoken to him in Telugu.