[రమా సుందరి మంతెన (Rama S Mantena) ఇల్లినాయ్ యూనివర్సిటీ – షికాగో, చరిత్ర విభాగంలో అధ్యాపకురాలు. మిషిగన్ యూనివర్సిటీ నుంచి 2002లో పిహెచ్.డి పొందిన రమా సుందరి, వలసపాలనలో, వర్తమానంలో దక్షిణాసియా, భారత సంస్కృతి, చరిత్రలను ప్రత్యేకంగా పరిశీలిస్తుంటారు. 2004 లెడెరర్ పోస్ట్ డాక్టరల్ ఫెలో – బ్రౌన్ యూనివర్సిటీ. 2005 క్లూగ్ ఫెలో – లైబ్రరీ ఆఫ్ కాంగ్రెస్‌. ప్రస్తుతం వలసపాలనలో భారతదేశంలో వచ్చిన ఆధునిక రాజకీయ దృక్పథంపై ఒక పరిశోధనా గ్రంథాన్ని వ్రాస్తున్నారు.]

I have been engaged in the study of everyday practices surrounding the acts of collecting, surveying, and antiquarianism in the early colonial period in south India. It is through this study that I have come to argue that new practices of history were disciplined by an intellectual encounter, rather than suggest that there was a diffusion of ideas and concepts as a result of the imposition of colonial rule. In other words, the discipline of history was not simply a European ‘import.’ The modern idea of history and history writing was not a neatly packaged body of knowledge that had been formed back in England and had then been simply transported and disseminated in India. Instead, it might be more apt to view historical practice as undergoing profound change and as a culture of historicism that was taking root simultaneously in England and India in the last decades of the eighteenth century[1]. In England, antiquarian practices converged with the practices of philosophical history to produce a new emergent historicism[2]. In India, precolonial practices of history were being appropriated by colonial antiquarian practices, which produced a new historical method that was embraced by both Indians and colonial officials. Conceptualizing it as such disrupts the narrative that colonialism in India was a rule of simple domination[3]. If we consider colonialism or colonial rule to be solely about a rule of dominance, then we might neglect to unravel the discourses that surround practices of history in precolonial India in all their complexity and overlapping allegiances. The explanatory power of the rule of dominance would be at a loss to demonstrate the emergence of new practices of history taking shape in the encounter itself.

In the past few decades, in our zeal to overturn earlier assumptions that colonialism successfully undermined Indian intellectual traditions and practices through the introduction of English education and European knowledge systems, we may have neglected to pay attention to the particular ways in which colonialism enabled Indians to creatively reconfigure Indian traditions and cultures after confronting Western modes of intellectual inquiry. The questions that animate my inquiry are concerned with how we can understand these encounters to get at the emergence of new ideas and concepts while still keeping attuned to the strength of colonial power and the asymmetrical relations that it fostered and sustained. In other words, how do we give weight and power to new ideas without succumbing to the binarism of imperial logic that posits impenetrable differences between European and Indian traditions? One significant practice (amongst multiple enduring practices that emerged in this productive intellectual encounter between Britain and India) was the modern practice of history—especially so its positivist variant.

In my book, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), I examine the work of Colin Mackenzie and his Indian assistants, especially the Kavali brothers, to illuminate the generative nature of the intellectual encounter in the making of an archive for South India. Mackenzie, a Scotsman, was sent by the then governor-general to conduct topographical surveys of the regions after the Mysore wars. Mackenzie’s primary duties were to map the territories and to report on the conditions of the lands. Mackenzie became very intimate with the geography of Hyderabad and the Carnatic regions and therefore played a central role in the military campaigns against the Mysore state. His surveying duties required him to inquire into the revenue systems and the actual state of the lands. Still, over and above these duties, Mackenzie began to amass an archive for writing south Indian history. His collection included manuscripts, transcription of inscriptions, translations, and sketches of archaeological curiosities. Mackenzie’s collections ran into hundreds of journals and manuscripts that are currently spread across India and Britain. He exemplified the antiquarian impulse with his focused energy on collecting all textual and material objects relating to the diverse pasts of south India. Mackenzie took an interest in philological researches as he was tied closely with some prominent philologists in Madras, such as Francis Ellis and John Leyden and also maintained correspondence with such renowned philologists as H. H. Wilson and Charles Wilkins. However, Mackenzie himself was not a philologist as he lacked training in languages.

It is clear that Mackenzie provided for south India a monumental colonial archive. However, because he was not well versed enough in any of the south Indian languages to be able to read and translate them, he relied on native assistants to provide him with translations and summaries. Mackenzie employed numerous Indian assistants to help him collect manuscripts of literature and history in the region, which resulted in over 200 fascinating journals in English. Beyond these journals, Mackenzie amassed a vast manuscript collection encompassing the languages of the Dekkan: Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Marathi. There were also in his collection over 2000 sketches and drawings of ruins and archaeological remains of religious sites. Indeed, the archive comprised both visual and textual material resulting in a unique and immensely rich collection. It was Mackenzie’s belief that there were valuable texts and material objects spread across the villages in south India—remains of a rich political and religious past—that led him to amass a vast archive in order to make historical sources available for narrating a more accurate history of south India. The archival project was to precisely centralize those historical sources and to make them accessible for the British and Indians.

The Kaifiyat

With an assumption that the Indian textual record is mired in poetical forms and sometimes even in legendary tales, Mackenzie set out to wade through the textual record to find the truest historical record that was free from legend and myth and that could consequently come the closest to resembling its counterparts in European historical traditions. The memorandum of 1804 that the Madras government sent to its district officers lists carefully the kinds of records that Mackenzie was seeking: Vamsāvali (genealogies); Dandakāvali (chronological registers); Charitra (historical tales); Mahatyam and Purāanam (religious legends); Sāssanum (inscriptions); Dāna Patram (grants); ancient coins; and sculptures from temples and other historical buildings[4]. As an antiquarian, Mackenzie certainly did not want to exclude any document, whether relating to legendary tales or historical tracts, whose sole purpose was to preserve information for posterity. Furthermore, the list indicates that Mackenzie was highly aware of what kinds of documents were circulated in and were preserved in south India. The emphasis was laid on those records that were solely devoted to preserving historically useful information. The primary written documents that were highlighted concerned village records—land grants, deeds and genealogies of prominent families, etc.

Not surprisingly, Mackenzie’s search for authentic Hindu history led him to the institution of the village karanam (accountant) in the Telugu speaking regions of the Madras Presidency and the kaifiyat (village records). Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam have convincingly proposed that a distinctive style of history emerged under the influence of karanams[5]. They have called this karanam historiography. This historiography is defined by the particular prose that it generated. Karanam prose paid close attention to the constitution of historical facts and historical truths. They argue that history was in fact written in many genres throughout south Indian history, which demonstrates that there was a longer tradition of forms of historical consciousness or awareness in south Indian textual traditions. Karanams in particular were centrally placed to take on the mantle of the preservation of historical memory because of their critical bureaucratic roles that gave them access to and placed them in intimate proximity with record-keeping practices.

In light of Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam’s analysis of karanam historiography and the shaping of a particular mode of historical representation within different genres in the Telugu textual tradition, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the kaifiyats that Mackenzie and his assistants collected can be linked to these wider historiographical practices that they propose. If we take the kaifiyats as representing these wider historiographical practices, then the question to ask is whether the kaifiyats absorbed these wider practices or whether they were in fact the origin of a particular karanam historical sensibility, which went on to be cultivated in the higher textual traditions. If we take the latter to be true, we can propose that there is more to it than simply the village karanam’s record-keeping practices that exemplified the desire of early modern states to preserve records concerning land use and rights to land. The karanam kept records that were useful for maintaining land rights, but the act of preserving documents from generation to generation—especially of genealogies of leading families—must have given the karanam the responsibility and power not only to preserve historical narratives but also to compose them and to innovate and embellish them if needed. In other words, the karanams played a central role in creating and shaping new forms of historical writing.

The record-keeping practices that karanams were skilled in helped to foster ‘little’ practices of history, which went on to shape historical prose in the ‘higher’ genres. It is more apt to see the interaction of the ‘high’ literary forms and bureaucratic prose as traveling both ways[6]. Because the prose contained in the kaifiyats fell outside the well-established literary genres in Telugu, I suggest that kaifiyats were amenable to easy manipulation and were transformed into historical record and made legible by colonial antiquarians. By this, I suggest that there was a convergence of interests between the colonial antiquarian and the village karanam. Because colonial antiquarians and their assistants were specifically looking for historical sources, they sought out texts that they believed contained clues to the chronology of south Indian history. The karanam’s main role was the preservation of village records, and for this reason the kaifiyats came to be seen as the primary sites for extracting factual data.

The kaifiyats, more broadly—as recorded and preserved by the village karanam—were village archives (collections) that appropriated the genealogical traditions alongside the tradition of recording village ‘particulars.’ It is for this reason the kaifiyats were held in such high regard by Mackenzie and his assistants. Indeed, Mackenzie singled out the office of the village karanam as holding the key to unearthing new historical sources because the karanams preserved both historical narrative and other property-related records[7]. In that respect, the karanam’s office was a gold mine of potential historical sources for the colonial antiquarian. As such, the kaifiyats were privileged, by colonial antiquarians and historians and later on the earlier generation of Indian historians, over literary sources precisely for their attention to details of genealogy and village economy—two important sources for the new historiography.

The kaifiyats that were compiled and collected under Mackenzie’s supervision were compositions that reflected the polyglot heterogeneous nature of kaifiyat records. The kaifiyats, as documents, moved from genealogical recording of important families and their lineages to origin stories of the village names and finally often to a detailed accounting of land use in the village. Historical narrative, as memorialized in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres, shows that it was central to the textual traditions of south India. Furthermore, as evidenced from the prevalence of historical narrative and the genealogical mode in the kaifiyat collections, we can assert that the importance of historical narrative as a privileged practice of preserving memory clearly filtered down to the kaifiyat collections. The kaifiyat collections that Mackenzie and his assistants put together contained historical narratives along with land records, agricultural information, and sociological information on the caste groups prevalent in a particular village, which demonstrated that narratives (in the genealogical and historical mode) were treated as historical record. This explains why the village karanams preserved genealogies of principal families along with other records of village information. When Mackenzie and his assistants asked village karanams to give them access to what historical records they possessed, the karanams, by providing kaifiyats, indicated that they maintained village accounts in their families for generations even if the accounts were not uniformly and regularly maintained by all karanams. The village karanam then was key in procuring material for Mackenzie and his assistants for their antiquarian projects. For Mackenzie, the colonial antiquarian, the kaifiyats and the record-keeping practices of the village karanams represented “raw” material that he was searching for in his quest for an accurate historical record. The kaifiyats presented the antiquarian with traditions of genealogy as historical narrative that was present in Telugu textual traditions high and low along with the broader record-keeping practices of preserving and maintaining land grants.

The Kāvali Brothers

Mackenzie’s most prominent assistants undoubtedly were Kāvali Venkata Borayya and Kāvali Venkata Lakshmayya[8]. The two worked very closely with Mackenzie from the very beginning of Mackenzie’s survey tours in southern India. Borayya was his primary interpreter/translator, and when he died in 1803, his younger brother Lakshmayya took his place. Borayya anticipated and carefully prepared for Mackenzie’s arrival in different towns and villages by appeasing the local Brahmins and assuring them that the knowledge that Mackenzie was after was neither dangerous nor detrimental to them in any way. Borayya also provided structure to Mackenzie’s historical researches. Plans drawn up by Borayya himself give us a glimpse into what he thought was useful historical knowledge. Judging from the translations he provided for Mackenzie, he was fluent in Telugu, Marathi, and Kannada.

Mackenzie employed five Kāvali brothers in all: Borayya, Lakshmayya, and Ramaswami were the most prominent, and two others—Narasimhalu (Naraseemoloo) and Sitayya (Seetiah)—appear in Lakshmayya’s journals as assistants working directly under him. However, it seems that Mackenzie was only aware of four brothers[9]. He may not have had contact with the latter two as much as with Borayya, Lakshmayya, and Ramaswami. Mackenzie’s researches also involved other relatives of the Kāvalis. Lakshmayya mentions relations of his at the Arcot court (Seetaramia), his father-in-law in Kondapalli and another relation named Pavane Venkcata Soobia, who was prominently placed in Kalahasti. Clearly, Lakshmayya’s familial ties stretched to a number of administrative posts around the Madras Presidency.

The Kāvalis were Niyogi Brahmins settled in Ellore, in West Godavari District of present-day Andhra Pradesh[10]. However, it seems Borayya was schooled in Masulipatam, where he also took up his first official post as a writer in the Office of the Military Paymaster[11]. Ellore and Masulipatam were part of the territories known as the Northern Circars in northeastern Andhra Pradesh. The Northern Circars also included Kondapalli, where Lakshmayya’s father-in-law resided and from where he sent historical information. Masulipatam had become an important port city during the reign of the Qutb Shahi Sultanate of Golkonda (1518–1687), but when it declined in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the Europeans had shifted their commercial activities to other ports in the Bay of Bengal. Because the brothers were from the coastal areas of Andhra, they would have witnessed the competing political and commercial interests that characterized the area during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The Northern Circars came under the rule of the Sultanate in the sixteenth century, and in 1687, when the Golkonda Sultanate was defeated, they came under the control of the Mughals and were passed on to Asaf Jahis of Hyderabad in 1724. When the Nizam of Hyderabad was in cooperation with the French, the Northern Circars were virtually handed over to them in 1754. The principle zamindars of the coastal regions (the Rajas of Vizianagaram, Bobbili, and Peddapur) acquiesced to French power when they were made mansabdars (a rank greater than a mere zamindar landholder’s—mansabdars were ranked nobles in the imperial system developed by the Mughals). Soon the alliance between the French and the coastal zamindars fell apart, and the latter called in the British to help them defeat the French: one of the battlefields was Masulipatam, in 1759.

Kāvali V. Borayya’s name appears frequently in Mackenzie’s journals and letters. Mackenzie wrote with glowing praise of Borayya’s dedication to the archival project, “the deceased C.V. Boria Bramin, the principal Interpreter, on the Mysore Survey, and previously in the Dekan, to whose ingenious conciliatory talents, much of the successful results from Native intercourse, may be fairly referred[12].” It seems likely that Borayya, and after his death, Kāvali Venkata Lakshmayya, Borayya’s younger brother, may have directed much of the historical researches. Mackenzie writes, “to the zeal and Fidelity of the surviving Brother, C.V. Lechmyah Bramin, I consider myself indebted for following up with effect, the Plan traced and by his Brothers for investigating the Civil and Religious Institutions of these Countries.” The Kāvali brothers were indispensable for Mackenzie in his quest for a diverse set of historical materials. These principal assistants had their own assistants who were sent out to different villages, towns, and cities to gather material. Two important assistants of Lakshmayya (who appear frequently in his journals) were Narrian Row and Nitala Naina. Besides the translators, who became prominent in Mackenzie’s historical researches, he also employed Eurasian draftsmen, copyists, and surveyors trained at the Madras Observatory School run by Michael Toping[13].

Lakshmayya’s trip, which uncovered a wealth of historical material in the seaside temple town of Mahabalipuram, illustrates the productive relationship between Mackenzie and his principle assistants. Mackenzie advised Lakshmayya on his visit to Mahabalipuram in May 1803 to “make yourself however acquainted at first with the most respectable people of the place & of the Pagodas; & the Mootadars managers of the district & endeavor with civility to get their good will & carefully avoid to give offence by any indiscreet interference beyond your own business.” He urged him to “keep a journal during your absence for my information of your journey & your remarks on the country, buildings, temples, sculptures, & every remarkable objects.” Mackenzie instructed his assistants to follow a ‘method’ in conducting their historical researches. After following the social protocols of a given region (‘country’), Lakshmayya is asked to seek ‘written accounts’ if they are preserved and to obtain the ‘originals,’ if possible. Beyond the written accounts, Mackenzie asks him to make copies of inscriptions. In addition to historical records, Mackenzie asks Lakshmayya to inquire with the locals about “any curious or ancient customs, laws or historical facts.”[14]

The Indian assistants of Mackenzie traveled to far corners of south India armed with questions such as “Who was Durma-Vurma[?]” and “What is the meaning of the title Vurma?” or to find out the “List of names of the 20 kings of the south …said to have ruled 1119 years . . . is any history preserved of them & of their transactions?”[15] They translated manuscripts and provided summaries of those that were too long to translate in their entirety. Certainly, Mackenzie knew a great deal in order to formulate an outline for his Indian assistants to fill in the blanks. In 1804, Mackenzie wrote a memorandum on the kinds of information needed from Brahmins in southern Tamil Nadu[16]. The memorandum was intended for his assistants to use in their inquiries into the histories of the region. He asks for a “list of the names of the ancient kings of Cholla or Sora & their dates & reigns” and instructs his assistants to look for “any accounts of their transactions, their capitals & their endowments with dates? Which of them & at what period erected the first works on the Caavery—the great anicut?” The series of questions was supposed to bring “the ancient history of the south down to the 13th century & to the first appearance of the mahomedans.” Mackenzie lays out a clear framework for the assistants. The memorandum frames a history of south India and indicates to what extent Mackenzie was familiar with rulers, places, climates, religious sects, and the history of land tenure in the region. He lists three headings that are also of primary importance for Mackenzie: ‘Ramanoojoo,’ ‘Sankar-Achary,’ and ‘Establishment of the Pandarums.’ Mackenzie states in advance that he was looking for accounts of distinguished figures in religious history and, more importantly, that the most useful accounts would be those that could give weight to information gleaned from other sources. This emphasis on corroboration—of assessing the veracity of native Indian accounts through comparison—was a method favored by Mackenzie (rather than the kind of uncompromising “objective” historical method advocated by James Mill).

The regional textual traditions that colonial antiquarians confronted were rich and complex. When perusing the journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, especially the first two decades of its publication, one is inevitably struck by the sheer volume of material that colonial scholar-officials were collecting and with which they were engaging. It is in the pages of these journals and the discussions held at institutions such as the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the College of Fort St. George that we encounter the assessments and judgments of colonial antiquarians and philologists. However, a careful examination of the archival records of the collectors and their assistants, in this case, Mackenzie’s journals, letters, and notes, reveals a more complex picture of the transactional nature of the intellectual encounter than what is apparent in the published material of the time. The published record displays a self-confident Orientalist scholarship that seemed very much a product of individual European efforts. However, we learn from a broader source base that native Indian assistants were quite prominent in the day-to-day work of traveling to villages, introducing themselves to karanams (village accountants) and other important figures, inquiring into manuscripts, inscriptions, and genealogies and finally reporting back to their colonial mentors. Moreover, what we learn from the broader historical record is that native Indian assistants were in constant interaction with and carried on complicated transactions for colonial scholars (philologists and antiquarians). Ultimately, we learn of how native Indian assistants did not simply imbibe new practices of history but also shaped them while immersed in daily collection, collation, assessment, and translation activities.

Mackenzie’s assistants moved between the world of the Europeans in Madras, Black Town, and the many villages and towns scattered throughout the Carnatic, Mysore, and Northern Circar regions. Phillip Wagoner has rightly pointed to the prevalence of Niyogi Brahmins employed by Mackenzie, and his tracing of Narrian Row’s history with the Arcot Court is especially riveting[17]. The connections Wagoner unravels through Narrain Row’s writings help give us a sense of the ease of movement between the Arcot bureaucracy and Mackenzie’s project enabled by the administrative skills associated with the Niyogis.

Another perspective on the ‘secular’ scribal practices that developed in parallel with pundit skills is well worth mentioning. Velcheru Narayana Rao’s work in this arena offers an important contribution to an understanding of the sociology of colonial knowledge production. His analysis of the particular type of scholar the college recruited shows that the pundit was chosen over the karanam. Rao argues that a particular kind of prose was generated by this recruitment, which had a great deal to do with the particular institutional sites of production. Rao writes that karanams “were good scribes in that they could make their copy intelligible and beautiful to the eye, or, if they so chose, impossible to decipher except by the initiated.” Furthermore, he writes: “They prided themselves as being masters of knowledge of land use, dispute settlement, local history and penmanship almost exclusively.”[18] Mackenzie’s assistants were clearly not part of the pundit world and the skills associated with it. Rather, the Kāvali brothers were Niyogi Brahmins who did not hesitate to delve into the gritty, unglamorous world of the karanams. The Kāvali brothers seem to inhabit a world caught between the two, which explains the sorts of troubles both Lakshmayya and Ramaswami faced in relation to the Madras government. The Kāvali brothers were able to traverse the world of the Europeans (and the conversations with them) as well as the world of the karanams in towns and villages scattered throughout the Madras Presidency—worlds that went beyond the pristine ones of the pundits to the cutcherry [kacheri, administrative office], where unequal exchanges, charges of corruption, and levels of misunderstanding seemed to be the standard fare of everyday life.

The experience and skills gained from the work on Mackenzie’s archival project led Ramaswami to venture into the field of writing and to establish himself as an author in his own right. For Lakshmayya, the work on Mackenzie’s collection led him to pursue the building of institutions within the city of Madras for the dissemination of those intellectual practices and skills (that he himself had gained) to natives with scholarly ambitions. He clearly desired to continue historical researches begun by Mackenzie but that was evidently not his sole preoccupation. Lakshmayya spent considerable energy in trying to start a literary society (an institutional site for the pursuit of his intellectual agenda) for native scholars.

Lakshmayya established the Madras Hindu Literary Society devoted to what he saw as the particular needs of native scholars. However, he faced considerable setbacks in the process. Part of the reason seems to be that despite his prominence after the work accomplished under the direction of Colin Mackenzie, Lakshmayya was unable to pursue his intellectual agendas as he was no longer attached to a colonial patron. These setbacks that he faced, especially from the Asiatic Society of Bengal (under the direction and leadership of James Prinsep), which felt that Lakshmayya’s scholarly work did not measure up to the standards of modern scholarship, reveal the limits of colonial patronage in Madras in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In part, this confirms the thesis that Tapati Guha-Thakurta put forward that the native scholar was not able to come into his own until the later decades of the nineteenth century when there was a larger network of institutions that enabled Indians to take part in multiple scholarly communities[19].

This was partly due to the dearth of institutional encouragement of natives in the early colonial period to cultivate scholarly skills and practices. While individual colonial officer-scholars gave encouragement and the necessary patronage to their Indian assistants (pundits or otherwise), the latter were left to fend for themselves when their patrons left their posts in India. Although native scholarly authority was rarely questioned when it came to knowledge of the textual traditions (whether Sanskrit, Telugu, or Tamil), when it came to practices of history, there were lingering doubts regarding native authority in this field. Therefore there was a combination of factors that left the efforts and achievements of the Kavali brothers in relative historical obscurity in the early colonial period. First, there were institutional constraints—the lack of institutions that encouraged and cultivated native scholarly ambitions. Second, there were explicit ideological constraints working against native Indian scholars, such as the Kavali brothers, with claims that they were not capable of doing the ‘rational’ work of historical scholarship.

Despite the exclusions the three Kāvali brothers faced, they managed to contribute a great deal toward expanding the scope of historical knowledge in early colonial Madras. The boldness of Ramaswami (as manifested in his published works), the confidence of Borayya’s plans for histories, and finally the meticulousness of Lakshmayya’s documentation of his own historical researches may all have been the result of the expansive intellectual world to which the Kāvali brothers had access, initially through Mackenzie but later through their own persistent efforts. Mackenzie’s archival project enabled Indian assistants, such as the Kāvali brothers, to make significant contributions toward producing historical knowledge of south India by collating and assessing a historical record.

Notes and References

1. I am not suggesting that the modern idea of history took shape in the colonies first and was then brought back to England, either. This kind of argument was made very persuasively by Gauri Viswanathan with her Masks of Conquest back in 1989 in which she argued that the subject of English literature was formulated in colonial India and was then instituted back in England as a subject that was equivalent to the study of Greek and Latin. See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
2. An argument that is most clearly articulated by J. G. A. Pocock in Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3. Ranajit Guha in “Dominance without Hegemony” argued that the colonial state exercised dominance rather than hegemony in the sense that colonial subjects could not possibly consent to colonial rule. However, Guha’s argument regarding political dominance in colonial India might not be adequate for understanding the porous nature of the intellectual encounter. See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
4. British Library, Oriental and India Office Collection (OIOC), Mackenzie Collection, General, 1, 367–9.
5. Velcheru Narayana Rao, Sanjay SubrahmanyaM and David Shulman, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001.
6. See Sumit Guha, “Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan, 1500–1800,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24, no. 2 (2004).
7. J. Sinclair went to villages in Scotland and asked questions similar to the ones that Mackenzie had asked.
8. I have used the more contemporary spellings of Borayya, Lakshmayya, and Ramaswami to replace the many different variations that appear in colonial records.
9. Madras Public Consultations (MPC): 23 February 23,. 1809, Mackenzie to George Buchan, chief secretary to government at Fort St. George.
10. Cynthia Talbot, in Precolonial History in Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), shows that already in the twelfth century a distinction between two types of Brahmins appears in the records. Brahmins engaged in ‘secular’ occupations—essentially administrative or clerical—bore different titles than the religious specialists: amatya, mantri, pregada, or raju for the former; bhatta or pandita adopted by the latter. However, the term Niyogi was a later development (57).
11. N.S. Ramaswami (1985), 72.
12. MPC: 23rd February 23,. 1809, Colin Mackenzie to George Buchan, Chief Secretary to Government at Fort St. George.
13. Jennifer Howes, “Colin Mackenzie, the Madras School of Orientalism, and Investigations at Mahabalipuram,” in The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India, ed. Thomas Trautmann. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).
14. Many of the drawings of architectural and archeological antiquities in Mackenzie’s collection were by these draftsmen.
15. OIOC: Mackenzie Collection: General 21, 26. 12 May 12, 1803, Colin Mackenzie to Lakshman.
16. OIOC: Mackenzie Collection: General 1, 38, Memorandum: Of information required from any of the learned & intelligent Bramins of Sreerungam & Trichinopoly, 1804.
17. See Appendix 2.
18. Phillip Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and Production of Colonial Knowledge,” in Comparative Study of Society and History Vol 45, no. 4 (Oct 2003).
19. Velcheru Narayana Rao, “Print and Prose: Pandits, Karanams and the East India Company in the Making of Modern Telugu,” in India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, eds. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 150.
20. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).