Dr. Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural and intellectual historian of early South Asia. She is Associate Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has also been the Malathy Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University, USA; the Jan Gonda Fellow in Indology at Leiden University, The Netherlands; and the DAAD Visiting Professor at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany.
Her books include The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini (Oxford University Press, 2018), Cultural History of Early South Asia: A Reader (Orient BlackSwan, 2014), Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early India (Permanent Black and Seagull Books, 2010), and, most recently, Eloquent Spaces: Meaning and Community in Early Indian Architecture (Routledge, 2019) and Looking Within: Life Lessons from Lal Ded, the Kashmiri Shaiva Mystic (Aleph, 2019).
She has also contributed over two dozen articles to international volumes and journals, including Cambridge World History, Encyclopaedia of Historiography: Africa, America, Asia, History and Theory, Encyclopaedia of Indian Religions, and Indian Historical Review.
Abstract of the Lectures
Historical Methods/Traditions in Early India
Against the backdrop of the tenacious misconception that early Indians did not and could not write history, this set of lectures first investigates the political and intellectual conditions under which this misrepresentation of early India and her intellectual cultures was born in the 19th century at the hands of European orientalist scholars and, ironically, for all practical purposes carried along by Indologists and historians of India in the 20th century. In the process of this critique, the very discipline of history as we practise it across modern academies in India and the world today will be opened up to scrutiny and its narrowly Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment lineages and compulsions unraveled. Thereafter the fundamental necessity and logic of allowing for alternative, culture-specific, premodern notions, methods, purposes and visions of history from the non-European world will be asserted. This will be then illustrated by a representative survey of historical traditions that originated and flourished in early India across a host of texts and inscriptions, regions and genres, concepts and forms. This will demonstrate the spectrum of ideas, practices and scales of historiography that operated in early India, as well as some overarching functions and values that the representation of the past was meant to serve in early Indic culture.
Readings
Shonaleeka Kaul, “ ‘Seeing’ The Past: Text and Questions of History in the Rajatarangini”, History and Theory 53 (May 2014), pp. 194-211
Shonaleeka Kaul, “Historical Methods”, in P. Jain et al. (eds.), Hinduism and Tribal Religions, Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, Springer 2018