I have had the privilege of knowing Velcheru Narayana Rao – as teacher, friend, and colleague – for over thirty-five years, ever since I first began studying Telugu language with him in 1975. He was a marvelously talented and inspiring language teacher, and his enthusiasm proved to be irresistible and infectious. Within a few years, I had myself become obsessed with Telugu and its culture, and decided to enter the South Asian Studies graduate program at UW-Madison to work under his guidance. There were only two or three of us who were studying Telugu at the time, as most of the members of my graduate student cohort in fact worked with other South Asian languages, such as Hindi and Urdu or Sanskrit. But regardless of their language and region of specialization, everyone was partial to Narayana Rao, not only because of his outstanding courses and seminars on Indian literature and poetics, but even more so because of his ready accessibility and his warm gregariousness.

Narayana Rao showed little interest in staying secluded in his office, working away in solitude like most of his colleagues. Instead, it seemed that he preferred to prowl the halls, always searching for the delight of conversation. Often, he would appear at the doorway of the graduate student lounge, eagerly joining in on whatever casual conversation was underway, and within minutes, the conversation would become both more serious and more excited in response to some provocative statement he would make, such as: “Authors don’t ‘write’ texts; it’s the text that ‘writes’ the author.” It was in these impromptu conversations that I gained some of my most important and memorable insights in those days, and quite frankly, I suspect this may have been as true for Narayana Rao as it was for his graduate student interlocutors.

I mention this quirky habit of Narayana Rao’s because I have long thought it was an early and partial manifestation of what has since become his signature mode of working – that of collaborative scholarship. Although collaborative research is well established in the natural and social sciences, it is still relatively uncommon among American academics within humanities disciplines such as literature and history. In these fields, the norm still tends to be that of the solitary, individual scholar, working alone with his sources, focusing intently on his own small area of specialization, and struggling valiantly to publish his findings quickly, so as not to be “scooped” by someone else. Within such an intellectual culture, competition becomes the norm—not co-operation—and this often leads to intense pressure and a lonely malaise that can envelop the whole enterprise. But what better way to overcome the solitude of the ivory tower than to sit for hours working together with like-minded colleagues, sharing insights and asking questions, dissecting arguments and reassembling them ever more tightly, and then writing it all down together as a unified work of joint authorship? Collaboration of this nature not only serves to restore a healthy measure of camaraderie to the work of scholarship; it also brings more purely intellectual gains, generating new forms of knowledge and confirming the truth of the old adage that “two heads are better than one.”

It may well be that South Asian Studies is more open to collaborative scholarship than some other fields of inquiry, due to its inherently multidisciplinary and multilingual nature. Like other “area studies” fields, South Asian Studies was developed in the 1950s to provide a new paradigm for understanding the full range of human experience in its particular region of the non-European world, without automatically falling back on the established methods and assumptions of the modern academic disciplines—history, anthropology, economics, and so on—that were first developed in Europe and which still serve as powerful agents of European intellectual hegemony. One way of breaking the spell of the disciplines was to insist on the necessity of interdisciplinary dialogue as a way not only to reveal the artificial nature of disciplinary boundaries, but also to call attention to those phenomena that do not conform to such boundaries, and thus resist full comprehension from any single disciplinary perspective. Simultaneously, another hallmark of the area studies approach was to insist on a deep, “inside” knowledge of South Asian languages, texts, and literary traditions as a means of opening up the various conceptual categories and theories that have been applied in South Asia itself as a means of understanding the nature of human experience. Seen from this perspective, the kind of scholarly collaboration pioneered by Narayana Rao and his various interlocutors represents the perfect fulfillment of South Asian studies and its promise. This is because it has generated productive dialogues not only between different disciplinary perspectives but also between scholars embodying a deep knowledge of literary and intellectual traditions in a formidable range of different languages.

To my mind, one of the most important examples of this may be seen in Narayana Rao’s collaboration with David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). This book marked a major milestone in the study of pre-colonial Indian writing about the past, taking as its point of departure the question of whether southern India possessed its own traditions of history writing before the colonial era, when European conventions of historiography were introduced to the region. It is well-known that from as early as the time of al-Biruni in the early eleventh century, outsiders have decried what they understood to be the lack of historical sense among the Indians. But as Narayana Rao and his collaborators show, at least for southern India, this was largely because history-writing was not confined to a single distinctive literary genre as it was in early modern Europe, but instead existed as an overarching mode of thinking and writing about the past that could be realized in any number of distinct literary genres, from the courtly mahākāvya to the prose caritramu of Telugu, none of which were inherently historical and all of which were also employed for other, non-historical purposes. Moreover, they argue that this historical mode appears as something new in the sixteenth century, and that its rise was intimately connected with the contemporary expansion of a literate, scribal class whose members served the various early modern states of the region as accountants and record keepers. The book introduces and analyzes an impressive array of such works – some twenty of them — written in varied genres and in a range of different languages lying well beyond the normal linguistic competence of any one scholar – from Telugu and Tamil to Marathi and Persian. After reading Textures of Time, one can no longer doubt that South Asia was home to an indigenous tradition of history writing in the early modern era. In its conventions and assumptions, this mode of historical writing differed from those of contemporary Europe, China, or the Middle East, but it is undeniably and shares many important qualities with these other traditions even as it remains formally and conceptually distinct.