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TIDINGS OF THE KING: A Translation and Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Rayavacakamu. By Phillip B. Wagon. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1993 ix, 263 pp. (Photos, maps.) US$38.00, cloth. ISBN 0-8248-1495-9.
DURING the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new vogue in literary genres of a "historical" or semi-historical type seems to have overtaken the literati of southern India. Rather suddenly, in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Sanskrit, there emerged chronicles of various colourings, courtly narratives, even individual biographies. In this respect, the south Indian sources form part of a much wider series attested to by surviving works in other south Asian languages (e.g., Marathi and Oriya) and in the contemporaneous traditions of Southeast Asia as well. Needless to say, terms like "history" or "historical literature," or the corresponding neologisms in south Asian languages (Telugu caritraka-vanmayamu), fall somewhat wide of the mark; they inevitably tend to impose an analytical category on a reality in which Western notions of history are entirely exotic. This, indeed, is the challenge implicit in...