This chapter will present a general overview of early South and Southeast Asian historiographies, with a particular reference to the problem of cultural interaction between the regions across the boundaries of the “classical” and “early modern” periods. It will attempt to trace the existing paradigms of interaction against the more general contexts of social history and chronology developed in the historiographies of these regions, noting similarities and differences along the way. The chapter reviews the state of play in these fields regarding this problem, emphasizing the immense possibilities that the emphasis on “networks” and “connective histories” has opened in the last two decades, and continues to offer in both fields for rethinking relations between the regions.

THEMES AND EPOCHS IN PRE-COLONIAL SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY

Colonial scholars and administrators in the latter half of the nineteenth century were the first to subject South Asia to modern historicist scrutiny. Using coins, inscriptions, and chronicles, they determined the dates and identities of numerous kings and dynasties within a scrupulously empiricist framework. With the widespread rise of nationalist sentiment from the 1930s, South Asian scholars began to write about their own past. However, although they began working on new interpretations, these for the most part merely extended the empirical horizons of colonialist historiography. Such nationalist scholarship lasted well into the 1950s, producing some of the subcontinent's most learned and talented historians. Their particular configurations of colonial and early nationalist historiography of South Asia have proved immensely consequential for subsequent generations of historians. Not only did this historiography value certain types of evidence, particularly Indic language epigraphy, Persian chronicles, and archaeology (while at the same time devaluing others such as literature and religous texts), but it also set some of the enduring thematic and topical parameters that have shaped the course of the field. The initial focus was on the careers and personalities of rulers, or the genius of races as the key causitive forces in history, but eventually dynastic history became the dominant mode of writing about the past.