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.
