01894nam a22001337a 4500 533643 533643 260608b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d Gunasekaran, S. 61127 The power of peasant poets: Writing rural histories in South India (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) The Indian Economic and Social History Review 63(1), Jan-Mar, 2026: p.103-132 A few centuries before the onset of colonial rule in South India, the focus of historical narratives underwent a gradual shift from the affairs of courts and temples to those of rural communities—migrations, land settlements and the political life of local chiefs. These narratives, referred to as ‘social documents’ in this article, evolved through a range of social institutions and found expression across diverse literary genres. Building on modern historical scholarship on this subject and focusing on the Kongu uplands of South India, this article explores three interrelated processes: socio-economic transformations in a frontier peasant society; shifts in the ‘social framework’ that shaped diverse modes of remembering the past; and the intersecting roles of bards, poets and scribes in recording and transmitting social memory at the local level. The opening sections examine the social function of the past in upland society, focusing on Pulavars as genealogists and custodians of peasant memory, and on the social negotiations that shaped collective and localised pasts. The subsequent sections discuss the processes of transmission and textualisation of social memory.- Reproduced https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00194646251411681?_gl=1*13ub0yp*_up*MQ..*_ga*OTIyMDkwMDAxLjE 3ODA5MTM1OTg.*_ga_60R758KFDG*czE3ODA5MTM1OTckbzEkZzEkdDE3ODA5MTQxOTQkajYwJGwxJGgzODAxNTI2NjE. The Indian Economic and Social History Review AR 0 0 ddc 0 0 408823 IIPA IIPA 2026-06-08 63(1), Jan-Mar, 2026: p.103-132 AR139116 2026-06-08 AR