The pasts of a Pālaiyakārar : the ethnohistory of a south Indian little king
- Creators
- Dirks, Nicholas B.
Abstract
This paper examines a text which is the family history of a line of south Indian "little kings," or pālaiyakārars. Beginning with a discussion of different modes of history, I analyze this text as both a statement of a particular history and a cultural representation of a more general modality of history. As a particular history, this text enables me to talk about conceptions of royal appropriateness and sovereignty, of political relations, and of kingly privileges; as a cultural form the text provides clues about the relations of these cultural conceptions to a structural form of narrative emplotment with all its underlying assumptions about time, causation, and process. Finally, I consider how a hermeneutical exercise of this sort is very important for Western analysts who wish to reconstruct the "history" of south Indian politics.
Attached Files
Published - HumsWP-0065.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 15049
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20090814-140850806
- Created
-
2009-08-17Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2019-10-03Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Humanities Working Papers
- Series Name
- Humanities Working Paper
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 65