Neela Bhaskar Successfully Defends PhD Dissertation

9 February 2024

Photo: CSMC

Neela Bhaskar has passed her viva voce examination, thus completing her PhD in Indology.

Congratulations to Neela Bhaskar, who defended her PhD dissertation on 8 February 2024! Her thesis, which is entitled Noting Down Oral Reports: The Accounts of Local History from the Mackenzie Collection, was supervised by Eva Wilden.

The dissertation deals with the ‘Mackenzie Collection’, which was compiled by the emissaries of the British surveyor Colonel Colin Mackenzie in Tamil Nadu in the 19th century. Today, it is the central piece of the Government Oriental Manuscript Library in Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu. Apart from many old manuscripts, it contains multiple documents (occasionally on palm-leaf, but mostly on paper) written by Mackenzie’s Indian collaborators, mostly Telugu brahmins. They noted down oral accounts of local events, customs, and institutions in the areas they visited, mixing factual reports with traditional myths and legends, often based on the earlier literary production, thus creating a new form of historiography.

After a short phase of lively interest in these documents, resulting in a number of descriptive catalogues, Europeans soon discarded them as ‘useless’ in their project of reconstructing South Indian history. Neela’s dissertation maps the manuscripts in question, provides several case studies, and explores the possibility that Mackenzie’s collaborators might have been guided by manuscripts preserving simple prose retellings of earlier high literature.