Introduction

This book is about histories and historians of literature, writtenby literary scholars and historians. More precisely, it is about the historiography of literature in the modern Indian languages, excluding cases like Sanskrit, Pali and Persian, but encompassing English, a late yet undoubtedly successful arrival in the literary arena of the country. Given the great number of Indian languages-21 modern languages have been accorded the status of literary languages by the Sahitya Akademi-and setting this figure in relation to the number of contributions and length of this volume, it is all too obvious that a comprehensive treatment of this topic is beyond the scope of this volume. There is thus no attempt to ‘cover’ the output of Indian literary histories or to survey and map all these 21 acclaimed (and so many more unacclaimed) literary cultures in India. It also cannot compete in any sense with Sheldon Pollock’s monumental Literary Cultures in History (2003), its scope being far more limited; but it is this limitation and the consistent focus on issues of literary historiography that, it is hoped, will prove useful to its readership. What the contributors to this volume attempt to do, each in his or her own way, is to take a fresh and critical look at chosen aspects of the Indian literary historiography of modern language-literatures, its origins and developments, protagonists and ideological orientations, politics and constraints. In this introduction, let us then

try to take a general look at literary histories in India and put forward some of the questions that have fed into the contents of this volume.