Restructuring Past Edifices
Subbiah Ganapathy
RELIGION, TRADITION, IDEOLOGY: PRE-COLONIAL SOUTH INDIA by R. Champakalakshmi Oxford Collected Essays , Oxford University Press, 2012, 643 pp., 1450
July 2012, volume 36, No 7

The decades following the Independence of India witnessed the study of early Indian history taking significant strides in more than one direction and thereby adding new and fresh dimensions in the realm of Indian historiography. In the last quarter of the last century, the study of the early history of the southern part of peninsular India—the dravidadesa i.e., the land lying south of the river Krsna, in particular—was brought under special focus by historians. Oddly, however, most of the leading historians, if not all, who were responsible for taking the study in new directions in this context were not ‘native’ scholars, but those who came from other parts of our country and even from countries outside the subcontinent. How and why did this exceptional situation emerge? There are in fact quite a few important reasons behind it and one of those was the progressive decline of interest in historical study and research in the second half of the twentieth century in the departments of higher learning in nearly all the universities in the southern States.

In order to make degrees in the discipline of history consequential and attractive to the fast emerging and ruthlessly competitive employment market, some of the established institutions of higher learning, in the closing decades of the last century, promptly tacked their departments of History with market oriented labels such as ‘Tourism and Travel Management’, ‘Heritage Management’ and so on (‘Management’ is the buzz word here) or, simply allowed their departments to incarnate themselves as department of ‘Applied’ History.

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