Intimations of modernity in South India

Abstract

Modernity in South India today expresses itself in many distinctive and paradoxical ways. In part, this may be explained by a colonial history that explicitly attempted to draw on tradition even while pursuing innovation. However, in greater part, it may derive from a pre-colonial past of multiculturalism, economic mobility and intense social competition. South Indian society in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries possessed many features of an 'early modernity', which have guided its trajectories into the future at least as much as have latter-day encounters with 'the West'. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.