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Two things that cannot be avoided when writing about Apparao are colonialism and modernity. I will address these issues in this afterword and move on to a critical reading of the play in the context of the social and political conditions of South India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I hope to provide a new interpretation of the play in the process. If one looks at most general accounts of the Indian past, one finds a broad and persisting consensus that India became “modern” only because of its conquest by the British in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historians of the colonial period, including Indian nationalists, are still quite content to divide Indian history into three periods—classical, medieval, and modern—with a subtext for the labels that read Hindu, Muslim, and British. For most Hindu nationalists , India had a great ancient past with dazzling poets, philosophers, and thinkers which was ruined by the invasion of the Muslims. In this view, things began to deteriorate badly in the medieval (especially the late medieval) period. Modernists and modernizers did not dispute this position, and many of them even believed that the arrival of the British gave rise to nothing less than a “renaissance” of Indian culture. According to this view, whatever the economic or political disadvantages of colonial rule might have been, it was under colonialism that Indian literature began a genuinely new era of openness and creativity . For the great Indian literary leaders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was stultified under the weight of literary conventions, making it dull and uninteresting. To top it off, it was also considered decadent and immoral. These writers and thinkers had no lack of admiration for great poets such as Kalidasa, but they firmly believed that the creativity of Indian civilization was in a state of decay and that their own present was deplorably depraved and lost in the maze of an unimaginative adherence to tastras—prescriptive ancient codes. Poets The Play in Context: A Second Look at Apparao’s Kanyasulkam had lost their originality, creativity, and ability to reflect and represent the dynamism of life. A truly new era in society and literature began, according to this view, in the twentieth century. In contrast to this view, one of my collaborators, the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam, has in the last fifteen years proposed and strongly defended the introduction and use of the idea of the early modern in the context of Indian history. Presenting evidence of historical changes during the period from 1600 on, Subrahmanyam argues in his book Penumbral Visions (2001) that the longer period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries was a time of unprecedented historical change both in South Asia and in the regions with which South Asia was in close contact. It was a period of extensive travel, not just between Europe and Asia but also between the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. It was also a period of violent conflict between agricultural societies and pastoralists. Finally, while it was a period when the volume and range of long-distance trade increased signi ficantly, it was also a great epoch of empire-building that preceded the rise of the British Empire in India.1 Subrahmanyam, David Shulman, and I have questioned in our recent work entitled Textures of Time the easy assumption that there was no real history written in India before the colonial encounter. We suggest that by using more nuanced and appropriate techniques of reading that are sensitive to the texture of the text, which is often lost in translation, we are able to identify historical narratives among texts that are either overlooked as bad literature or misread as fiction. We also argue that from the sixteenth century on, a distinct group of literati, whom we call karanams, emerged who were multilingual and secular and who helped create a new historical awareness. If history is an indicator of modernity, then such modernity emerged for South India well before the British presence, which has been credited with that achievement.2 Shulman and I have also discussed in several of our publications elements of modernity in various fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Telugu literary texts.3 We have demonstrated that modernity in literature was already flourishing during the period from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The colonial modernity that had its beginning with the British rule...

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