Viewing the world from the Karnatak: Place and caste in Kannada and Persian warrior narratives in the long eighteenth century

Abstract

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the publication of Textures of Time (2001), this article returns to the question of ‘history’ in South Asia. It counterposes two unlikely suspects: textual traditions in Persian and Kannada—tārīkh and campū kāvya, respectively—from the Karnatak region of southern India to show how caste concerns, specifically of warrior groups, shaped literary production in the late eighteenth century. It puts into dialogue genres from the literary cultures of these two languages that had a continuous set of conventions and themes since at least the medieval period. The two texts we analyse are Munshi Muhammad ‘Azimuddin’s Tārīkh-i Dilīrjangī (The Chronicle of Dilir Jang, completed ca. 1839), which was produced for the Miyana Afghan Nawabs of Savanur at the time when many such little kingdoms were increasingly beholden to the authority of the English East India Company, and Linganna’s Keḷadinṛpavijayaṃ (The Victory of the Kings of Keladi, ca. 1762–1804), written during or after the dissolution of the nāyaka kingdom of Keladi. Written from geographic zones located at the interstices of multiple political formations, both texts offer sites for intertextual readings of the intersecting social domains of elite martial groups and the literary cultures they fostered. Specifically, we pay close attention to parallel ways of narration and modes of recording contemporary politics, and build upon previous attempts to compare a regional vernacular like Kannada with transregional, imperial Persian. The article demonstrates how texts from two putatively different literary traditions show features of continuity in their respective genres while sharing concerns about the region, political genealogy and caste. The article makes the case for why the two texts—and by extension, the two literary traditions they are thought to be representing—should be seen as intertextually related, rather than dissimilar. In doing so, it opens up fresh avenues for historicising the region by questioning the long-standing practice of associating a region with a monolingual literary tradition.