On Putting Time in Its Place: Landscape History in South India
Kathleen D. Morrison Abstract: The landscapes of southern India, as elsewhere, are complex palimpsests of natural and anthropogenic features, structures, names, erasures, and memories, some contradictory, some concurrent. Developing an understanding of how such places were made, experienced, and understood presents a significant challenge. This paper examines some aspects of the long-term construction of a particular South Indian landscape and the ways in which local, regional, national, and epic spaces were deployed in arguments about power and history, continuity and rupture, and distinction and belonging, among others. I make the case that place-making requires long-term, intensely local analysis, focusing here on the construction, uses, and transformations of Hindu temples and their sitting in time and space. |