In light of Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam’s analysis of karanam historiography and the shaping of a particular mode of historical representation within different genres in the Telugu textual tradition, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the kaifiyats that Mackenzie and his assistants collected can be linked to these wider historiographical practices that they propose. If we take the kaifiyats as representing these wider historiographical practices, then the question to ask is whether the kaifiyats absorbed these wider practices or whether they were in fact the origin of a particular karanam historical sensibility, which went on to be cultivated in the higher textual traditions. If we take the latter to be true, we can propose that there is more to it than simply the village karanam’s record-keeping practices that exemplified the desire of early modern states to preserve records concerning land use and rights to land. The karanam kept records that were useful for maintaining land rights, but the act of preserving documents from generation to generation—especially of genealogies of leading families—must have given the karanam the responsibility and power not only to preserve historical narratives but also to compose them and to innovate and embellish them if needed. In other words, the karanams played a central role in creating and shaping new forms of historical writing.

The record-keeping practices that karanams were skilled in helped to foster ‘little’ practices of history, which went on to shape historical prose in the ‘higher’ genres. It is more apt to see the interaction of the ‘high’ literary forms and bureaucratic prose as traveling both ways[6]. Because the prose contained in the kaifiyats fell outside the well-established literary genres in Telugu, I suggest that kaifiyats were amenable to easy manipulation and were transformed into historical record and made legible by colonial antiquarians. By this, I suggest that there was a convergence of interests between the colonial antiquarian and the village karanam. Because colonial antiquarians and their assistants were specifically looking for historical sources, they sought out texts that they believed contained clues to the chronology of south Indian history. The karanam’s main role was the preservation of village records, and for this reason the kaifiyats came to be seen as the primary sites for extracting factual data.

The kaifiyats, more broadly—as recorded and preserved by the village karanam—were village archives (collections) that appropriated the genealogical traditions alongside the tradition of recording village ‘particulars.’ It is for this reason the kaifiyats were held in such high regard by Mackenzie and his assistants. Indeed, Mackenzie singled out the office of the village karanam as holding the key to unearthing new historical sources because the karanams preserved both historical narrative and other property-related records[7]. In that respect, the karanam’s office was a gold mine of potential historical sources for the colonial antiquarian. As such, the kaifiyats were privileged, by colonial antiquarians and historians and later on the earlier generation of Indian historians, over literary sources precisely for their attention to details of genealogy and village economy—two important sources for the new historiography.

The kaifiyats that were compiled and collected under Mackenzie’s supervision were compositions that reflected the polyglot heterogeneous nature of kaifiyat records. The kaifiyats, as documents, moved from genealogical recording of important families and their lineages to origin stories of the village names and finally often to a detailed accounting of land use in the village. Historical narrative, as memorialized in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres, shows that it was central to the textual traditions of south India. Furthermore, as evidenced from the prevalence of historical narrative and the genealogical mode in the kaifiyat collections, we can assert that the importance of historical narrative as a privileged practice of preserving memory clearly filtered down to the kaifiyat collections. The kaifiyat collections that Mackenzie and his assistants put together contained historical narratives along with land records, agricultural information, and sociological information on the caste groups prevalent in a particular village, which demonstrated that narratives (in the genealogical and historical mode) were treated as historical record. This explains why the village karanams preserved genealogies of principal families along with other records of village information. When Mackenzie and his assistants asked village karanams to give them access to what historical records they possessed, the karanams, by providing kaifiyats, indicated that they maintained village accounts in their families for generations even if the accounts were not uniformly and regularly maintained by all karanams. The village karanam then was key in procuring material for Mackenzie and his assistants for their antiquarian projects. For Mackenzie, the colonial antiquarian, the kaifiyats and the record-keeping practices of the village karanams represented “raw” material that he was searching for in his quest for an accurate historical record. The kaifiyats presented the antiquarian with traditions of genealogy as historical narrative that was present in Telugu textual traditions high and low along with the broader record-keeping practices of preserving and maintaining land grants.

The Kāvali Brothers

Mackenzie’s most prominent assistants undoubtedly were Kāvali Venkata Borayya and Kāvali Venkata Lakshmayya[8]. The two worked very closely with Mackenzie from the very beginning of Mackenzie’s survey tours in southern India. Borayya was his primary interpreter/translator, and when he died in 1803, his younger brother Lakshmayya took his place. Borayya anticipated and carefully prepared for Mackenzie’s arrival in different towns and villages by appeasing the local Brahmins and assuring them that the knowledge that Mackenzie was after was neither dangerous nor detrimental to them in any way. Borayya also provided structure to Mackenzie’s historical researches. Plans drawn up by Borayya himself give us a glimpse into what he thought was useful historical knowledge. Judging from the translations he provided for Mackenzie, he was fluent in Telugu, Marathi, and Kannada.

Mackenzie employed five Kāvali brothers in all: Borayya, Lakshmayya, and Ramaswami were the most prominent, and two others—Narasimhalu (Naraseemoloo) and Sitayya (Seetiah)—appear in Lakshmayya’s journals as assistants working directly under him. However, it seems that Mackenzie was only aware of four brothers[9]. He may not have had contact with the latter two as much as with Borayya, Lakshmayya, and Ramaswami. Mackenzie’s researches also involved other relatives of the Kāvalis. Lakshmayya mentions relations of his at the Arcot court (Seetaramia), his father-in-law in Kondapalli and another relation named Pavane Venkcata Soobia, who was prominently placed in Kalahasti. Clearly, Lakshmayya’s familial ties stretched to a number of administrative posts around the Madras Presidency.

The Kāvalis were Niyogi Brahmins settled in Ellore, in West Godavari District of present-day Andhra Pradesh[10]. However, it seems Borayya was schooled in Masulipatam, where he also took up his first official post as a writer in the Office of the Military Paymaster[11]. Ellore and Masulipatam were part of the territories known as the Northern Circars in northeastern Andhra Pradesh. The Northern Circars also included Kondapalli, where Lakshmayya’s father-in-law resided and from where he sent historical information. Masulipatam had become an important port city during the reign of the Qutb Shahi Sultanate of Golkonda (1518–1687), but when it declined in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the Europeans had shifted their commercial activities to other ports in the Bay of Bengal. Because the brothers were from the coastal areas of Andhra, they would have witnessed the competing political and commercial interests that characterized the area during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The Northern Circars came under the rule of the Sultanate in the sixteenth century, and in 1687, when the Golkonda Sultanate was defeated, they came under the control of the Mughals and were passed on to Asaf Jahis of Hyderabad in 1724. When the Nizam of Hyderabad was in cooperation with the French, the Northern Circars were virtually handed over to them in 1754. The principle zamindars of the coastal regions (the Rajas of Vizianagaram, Bobbili, and Peddapur) acquiesced to French power when they were made mansabdars (a rank greater than a mere zamindar landholder’s—mansabdars were ranked nobles in the imperial system developed by the Mughals). Soon the alliance between the French and the coastal zamindars fell apart, and the latter called in the British to help them defeat the French: one of the battlefields was Masulipatam, in 1759.