ICSSR (New Delhi) Sponsored
Two-Day National Seminar on
organized by Dept. of History, Siliguri College
in Association with
Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi
ABOUT THE SEMINAR
Much of Indian history has been written using elite court chronicles, imperial documents, and later colonial archives. While these sources are extremely valuable for understanding India’s chequered past, they represent only a limited view of our history. Most of these official historicalsources used Sanskrit-the language of the Gods or Persian- the language of the court to reveal themselves to us. However, across the Indian subcontinent people also remembered, recorded, and interpreted history in multiple vernacular languages and regional textual traditions. Unfortunately, the colonial state’s epistemological imposition of Western models of history writing- anchored in chronology, factuality and archival documentation led to the exclusion of this vast corpus of vernacular texts as serious sources of historical investigation. This historiographical legacy foregrounded Persianate and Sanskritic literary traditions to the exclusion of these vernacular forms of knowledge production. In the last two decades, critical interventions have begun to question these assumptions. Revisionist scholars through their works have demonstrated that vernacular texts encode their own methodologies of understanding time, narrating change, and commemorating socio-political transformations. Yet despite these contributions, the field remains fragmented and limited in scope. The number of regional literary traditions examined is still small, and there is a propensity to treat vernacular sources as supplementary to dominant political narratives. It is this bias that this conference proposes to change. This conference aims to shift the focus of historical inquiry from imperial centers to regional worlds by exploring how the past was imagined and articulated through numerous vernacular textual traditions. These include, but are not limited to, Bakhars in Marathi, Buranjis in Assamese, Mangalkavyas in Bengali, Premakhyans in Awadhi and a wide range of Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam narrative, devotional, and historical traditions. Through this conference, it is hoped that a wide genre of vernacular sources- ranging from narrative poems and temple records, to family genealogies, oral epics, and ballads, will be brought into the ambit of serious historical discussion. This conference serves a dual purpose. First, the conference seeks to demonstrate that vernacular sources are not merely supplements to elite political history. Instead, they offer distinctive ways of making sense of the world around them—power and kingship, economy and exchange, gender and family, religious life, social hierarchy, and the natural landscape—through their own narrative forms, symbolic vocabularies, tropes, and discursive traditions. Second, by foregrounding these regional vernacular traditions, the conference aims to explore how different regions imagined and negotiated their own relationship with larger centers of power—whether imperial courts, sultanates, or other transregional political formations. Covering a broad chronological range—from the early historical period to the late precolonial world—the conference aims to bring together historians, literary scholars, philologists, anthropologists, and cultural historians who work on vernacular sources. By foregrounding the vernacular, the conference seeks to understand how regional identities, political ideas, economic practices, religious interactions, gendered worlds, and ecological imaginations were shaped outside the framework of court chronicles and imperial archives.