Beyond exceptionalism

Despite many institutional restraints, several independent strands of research on south Indian history have developed and flourished in ways that significantly revise older and influential historiographical formulations. This article explores the ways in which historians of the geographical south have made productive use of the ‘incommensurability’ of geography and history. To begin with, I briefly sketch some of the historical and historiographical constructions of the ‘south’, usually as a space of difference from the dominant north (Section I). This has produced a series of ‘inclusions/exclusions’ vis-à -vis not just the north, but within the geographical south itself. I discuss three somewhat disparate sites in new and largely unpublished work on south India that move beyond the trope of ‘exceptionalism’ to generate new insights on Indian history: new modes of fashioning the self, as in new scholarship on Keralam; a new way of conceptualising a region such as Karnataka; and finally, new perspectives on even such well-known and researched historical figures such as Tipu Sultan. Such scholarship is relatively unencumbered by earlier laments either about the paucity of sources for histories of the geographical south, or about the ‘politics of mention’ in broader ‘Indian’ histories.