Everyone has a past: the question is what one does with it. If earlier scholars are to be believed, South Indian society before colonial rule showed an indifference to its past - or approached the past through myth, legend and phantasmagoria. This book sets out not merely to disprove this idea, but to demonstrate the complex forms of historiography produced in South India between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries.

It argues that the usual division between Indo-Persian and vernacular historiographis is artificial. It demonstrates the existence of a group of literati (karanams), who passed with ease from Telugu and Tamil, to Marathi and Persian. Through a careful reading of and extensive translations from the relavant texts, this book thus sets out to shake some of deepest-rooted prejudices in the received wisdom on medieval and early modern India.