Introspection and Insight: South Indian Minds in the Early Modern Era

Beginning in the late fifteenth century, a large literature-- also musical and graphic artistic works-- focused on the empirical introspective self begins to appear in all the south Indian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Persian, Marathi, Oriya, and more). This book explores this corpus of diary-like, first-person, autobiographical materials and its distinctive features, in contrast with the metaphysical (meditative, Yogic) introspective states familiar to us from much earlier South Asian sources.