ABSTRACT
The study of literary history has been reoriented today by the convergence of culture, history and literature in the discipline of literary studies. There have been increasing efforts to understand the position of literature in history, rather than simply focus on the assessment and enumeration of abstract aesthetic characteristics and periodization of literature that define conventional literary historiography in India. This has now been brought into sharp focus through studies of the socio-political conditions that go into the creation of literary texts, as well as the production of historical and cultural meaning through these texts.
The study of Indian literary history in modern time can also be traced back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it was attempted by the early orientalists. This is not to say that some forms of literary historiography did not exist in India before the advent of colonialism. There is enough proof of it in the form of medieval hagiographies of poet saints, Persian and Urdu tazkiras and also in anthologies of poems compiled in various regional Indian languages, continuing up to the nineteenth century and after.
A modern literary historical sensibility in India is said to have evolved in the nineteenth century as part of a gradual movement from simple recording of the past to rewriting it vis-a-vis the wider public sphere, centring on questions of national origins, regional and linguistic identities and also political problems. The development of Indian literary history should be seen alongside concomitant attempts to recover the past, which was also visible in the writing of historical novels or institutionalization of the studies of archaeology, anthropology and folklore.
Histories of literatures written in India have been largely based on monolingual literary models from the West. India being a multilingual country such models will work for us only partially because the growth and development trajectories of several of our literatures are intertwined with one other. Literary historiography in India must account for these trajectories, our shared literary histories and contiguities. Literary histories written in contemporary times must also try to address the inadequacies and iniquities of earlier histories.
