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.

Ultimately, there are two overarching themes that unite Textures. First, there is the important argument that we must listen more carefully to the “textures” of these works—that is, that we must explore their stylistic qualities and subtle patterns of language usage—if we are ever to get to the core of what constituted history as a distinct register of writing about the past in South Asia. Through the varied linguistic devices that together constitute “texture”, works in the historical register are able to emphasize empirical facts and chains of causation, and to dwell on the singularity of unique events. They are able to assume a distinctive mode of reporting; that is, they aim to inform their readers rather than to elicit an affective, emotional response. Their style of description is often realistic, focusing on closely observed, quantifiable details, carefully combined in ways that avoid reliance on formulas. The individual textural qualities themselves may remain elusive in the analyses offered in the book, but their collective impact on the nature of the overall discourse in these texts is clear and immediately comprehensible, thanks to the three authors’ close readings and inspired analysis.

The book’s second major theme relates to the social context within which this new mode of historical writing arose. Textures presents an inspired model of historiographic production, a “sociology” of these texts, that on the one hand, begins to account for their distinctive textural and ideological characteristics, and on the other, permits us to see and understand the common qualities running through these works produced in so many different languages. According to this model, the sixteenth century efflorescence of historiographic writing in South India is intimately connected with the rise to prominence of a new class of scribes and accountants, within which most of the authors of these texts can be situated. Narayana Rao and his collaborators employ the Telugu term karaṇam as a convenient label to designate this class, in reference to the emblematic office of the karaṇam, the village record-keeper or accountant, but members of this class in fact held many other kinds of official appointments as well, and were hardly restricted to the village level. They could be found working variously as ministers, as accountants employed in treasury and revenue departments, as writers engaged in the production of diplomatic and administrative correspondence, and as “residents” and ambassadors stationed at other courts.

What united these diverse figures was their common, shared “karaṇam culture”, which the authors of Textures of Time characterize in terms of five key attributes. First, members of this class were highly trained in the specialized skills of graphic literacy, which included not just the basic skills of writing and reading, but just as importantly, a set of higher-order skills relating to written communication, numeracy, and record-keeping. Second, the members of this class shared an orientation which privileged prose over verse, marking an important departure from the dominant literary cultures of southern India, which had valorized poetic verse over prose. Third, in the karaṇam culture, author and recorder were typically one and the same person. In non-karaṇam literary contexts, texts were of course also written down, but generally by a scribe who was different from the author, and they were consumed by being read or recited out loud again in a public setting. It is only in the karaṇam culture that we find texts that were meant not to be recited, but to be read silently to oneself. Fourth, the karaṇam culture was markedly polyglossic. It was not restricted to any one language, nor even divided meaningfully into linguistically distinct sub-cultures, but found expression in a number of different local vernaculars and trans-local cosmopolitan languages including both Persian and Sanskrit. Because members of the karaṇam class were intensely multilingual, the languages they employed developed in a state of constant interaction, and accordingly, there are continuities of genre and texture in their historiographic works that cut across linguistic barriers. Finally, the members of this class tended to stand in an ambiguous relationship with kings. Rulers depended in important ways on the services provided by karaṇams, since they effectively controlled the domains of writing, accounting, and policy making. Yet, the karaṇam class controlled these domains without claiming any public visibility. As the authors put it, “karaṇam culture modestly contents itself with manipulation behind the scenes” (p. 111).

It is doubtful that any one of the three authors of Textures would have been able to arrive at the rich formulation presented in Textures of Time working alone and independently, the impressive breadth of their individual expertise notwithstanding. Although each of the three is noted for his multi-disciplinary leanings, each at the same time embodies a distinctly different stance and sensibility. In the final analysis, this difference in orientation is just as crucial a component of their collaboration as the range of different languages and disciplinary perspectives represented by the individual collaborators. To one who has closely read their individual works, and then contemplates the substance of the inspired readings and analyses of the “karaṇam” histories presented in Textures, it is immediately apparent that there are new and otherwise unprecedented ideas that emerge only through their collaborative work. Indeed, it is a vivid case of the whole being more than the sum of the parts—much more.

In their preface to Textures, the three authors comment disapprovingly on the speculations that had been offered by some reviewers of their previous collaborative work (Symbols of Substance, New Delhi: OUP, 1992) as to which author might have written a specific section “or even a particularly masala laden sentence.” They go on to assert that “we share responsibility for the whole text and assert joint authorship over every word in the pages that follow.” Then, alluding to Narayana Rao’s above-mentioned dictum about texts “writing” authors, they continue: “If texts make authors, our model lies surely in The Chronicles of Honorio Bustos Domeq” (p.xii). The reference here is to the fertile collaboration of the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) with his younger contemporary, Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999), published under the pseudonym Honorio Bustos Domeq to represent their composite authorial identity—or “Biorges” as it has also been dubbed. Perhaps the three authors intended only to stress the merging of their separate identities in the “author function” called forth by Textures, but the reference to Borges and Bioy strikes me as equally appropriate on a deeper level as well. For, as Suzanne Jill Levine has remarked in discussing the relationship between the two Argentinean writers:

The familiar image of Bioy Casares as disciple and collaborator of Borges placed him, in the Latin American canon, under the shadow of the maestro. Even though Borges once called Bioy the “secret master”, …Borges message was, as always, double: “master” in the sense that children teach their parents. But more than mentor and disciple, Borges and Bioy were lifelong friends whose ingenious and passionate discussions of literature and their favorite writers were mutually nourishing (“Introduction” to Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, tr. Ruth L.C. Simms, New York Review of Books, 2003, p.ix)
Substitute the names of Narayana Rao and his collaborators for Borges and Bioy Casares, and one has a perfect characterization of the nature of their relationship. The formulation provides a key to understanding both the humble generosity of Narayana Rao and the deeply enticing nature of collaboration as he and his “lifelong friends” have defined it for us.