Periodic Reporting for period 4 - NEEM (The New Ecology of Expressive Modes in Early Modern South India)
Reporting period: 2023-04-01 to 2024-09-30
The study of South Indian cultures, history, and history of ideas has undergone major revisions in the last several decades, as new sources and novel perspectives have appeared. The NEEM project aimed from the beginning to produce a strong cultural-historiographical synthesis of the early modern period (sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries), to expand the data base of textual and other sources, and to offer analytical tools and arguments for the strong links between political, social, and economic domains and the expressive arenas in which a new conceptual order was articulated. The operative hypothesis—that a civilizational shift occurred in all the regions and languages of the south in this period—has been amply verified and documented. We can now define the new vision of reality, of the human being, of the mind, of aesthetic beauty, of individual experience, of the natural world, and of novel forms of temporality that took hold, with important variations, in all the regions of the south and all the major languages (Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic). We have shown how this emergent vision, or a radically re-imagined sensibility, is embodied in music, an immense literary corpus, graphic arts, theater, dance and ritual, and in theories of language and grammar. We have conducted research expeditions to India, mostly to Kerala, where we studied full-scale performances of the Kūṭiyāṭṭam theater tradition—a rich laboratory for cultural and conceptual experimentation from this period. Our publications address the social and political contexts that generated these expressive sources and the changing conceptual order that they reveal. We have also shown that the far-reaching shifts in the cultural, cognitive, and aesthetic realms have an internal, organic logic that pre-dates the appearance of the European colonial powers in South Asia.
In the course of the last six years (we received an extension because of the covid period), we have studied together entire libraries of literary, musical, theatrical, historiographical, artistic, and philosophical texts, most of them hardly known to scholars of South Asia. We concentrated at first on literary texts in Tamil, Sanskrit, and Malayalam; close, careful reading as a team is the key to our work and to the publications it generates. In our weekly seminars and periodic conferences (2019, 2020, 2021), we read the newly emerging sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and to some extent in Persian and Arabic. We identified the new elite that produced and consumed these works and initiated a prosopography of the authors, musicians, grammarians, and philosophers. Several texts, such as the pivotal Sanskrit text on Kūṭiyāṭṭam theater, the Naṭāṅkuśa, are in the process of being critically edited and published by the NEEM scholars. But the main channel for dissemination of our results is the series of NEEM monographs with Primus Publications in Delhi: so far, three volumes have appeared, with a fourth due to be published in 2025 and a long line of further volumes scheduled for the next five years at least. In addition, we have published and are continuing to publish edited volumes on all the primary themes of the NEEM project (a special issue of Cracow Indological Studies, 2020; an issue of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, 2022; volumes of essays published by University of California Press, Routledge, and others) as well as individual studies in the scholarly journals. We have uncovered and explored a mostly forgotten corpus of major Tamil literary texts from Sri Lanka from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We have documented and analyzed the large-scale Kūṭiyāṭṭam performances that we witnessed in our research expeditions to Kerala and published our research (including a volume on Kūţiyāṭṭam by the PI; the video archive of all the performances—some five hundred hours-- is now housed in the National Library of Israel).
We have made several significant, unanticipated discoveries. Thanks to the work of the NEEM team, and particularly the work of Abhilash Malayil, we can now identify with confidence the new elite audiences and consumers, and also many of the artists and poets, of the expressive works from this period. Several breakthroughs have brought to light hitherto unknown or neglected texts and their intellectual-historical contexts. Abhilash Malayil’s Malayalam monograph (soon to appear in English) on eighteenth-century economy in Malabar has radically revised our understanding of Kerala history and enabled us to articulate the early-modern sensibility throughout South India. Zoë High’s work on seventeenth-century Bijapur has revealed the great poet Zuhūri and the cultural revolution at the court of Ibrahim Adil Shah II. We studied the mostly forgotten seventeenth-century Tamil grammarians with Dr. E. Annamalai, a senior scholar in our group. We were surprised to find, inductively, a large literature of empirical, subjective introspection—a new departure in South Asia—embodied in autobiographies, diaries and diary-like musical and literary works, and historiographical texts in all the languages and literatures. The Malayalam autobiography of Apatt’ Adīri, from central Kerala of the early eighteenth century, is the focus of a book soon to be completed by the PI and Abhilash Malayil. The collective reading sessions in Telugu, Malayalam, Sanskrit and Tamil are continuing and will no doubt continue for years on Zoom. Taken together, these scholarly projects can be expected to change the field of South Indian history of ideas as well as the political and social histories of the southern regions of India and Sri Lanka as a whole. Our work has also extended to Java and Bali and to hitherto unstudied textual sources such as late Javanese kakawin, also autobiographical travelogues; Java particularly is an intrinsic part of the NEEM research program. This breadth of vision and the scope of scholarly focus have already opened up new avenues for further research in future, given the textual corpora we have discovered and begun to explore and the analytical modes we have developed for studying these works in the historical contexts in which they were created.