2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the contributions to the multivolume series on Indian literature published in the 1960s and 1970s bytheSahityaAkademi; the History of Indian Literature currently under publication in Holland (twenty-odd books published since the early 1970s). and the nine-volume project being edited by Sisir Kumar Das, History of Indian Literature (SahityaAkademi, 1991). South Asian literary studies have yet to show evidence of their ability to address the kinds of opportunities the South Asian ^literary archive uniquely offers them. The challenge is to rethink literary history in a way that moves beyond the range of questions posed by colonial, positivist, or nationalist models of European literary history (not to speak of formalist or thematic literary history), and especially to reflect on how and why new literary languages arise, how cosmopolitan and vernacular identities have interacted (and how both the cosmopolitan and the vernacular have been transformed in the process), and importantly, what it means and has meant to'reflect on the literatures of the Indian subcontinent and their histories. In view of all this, members of the Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies in New York set out in 1991 to stimulate interest in developing a new research agenda for the history of South Asian literary cultures. The first step in this project was t0 organize the workshop called "New Literature, New Power: Literary History. Region, and Nation in South Asia," which took place at the Central University, Hyderabad in December, 1993. The Workshop invited reconsideration of any of three large features of literary cultures in history: the processes by which literary languages are created in South Asia; the narratives of literary history; and the social and political groups and institutions that constitute such languages and narr?ie the story of their literatures. A defining dynamic of the history of literary cultures in this region of the world— though it is one that most literary-histories have succeeding in occluding—is the presence of transregional literaxy languages and their dynamic interactions with more localized forms of expression. It seems to be the case here that once they emerge, cosmopolitan literary languages in South Asia enjoy sustained supremacy but then ultimately become subject to contestation from other newly emergent, and sometimes ideologically insurgent, literary languages; such contestation leads finally to compromise, co-optation, and a negotiated settlement of relative superiority. But so little attention has been paid to given cases, let alone to comparative analysis, that we remain ignorant o^most of the detail in these key processes of cultural change and identity. We are still unclear, for example, about the conditions under which Sanskrit emerged as one such literary language. Scholars have long called attention to the fact that the first kavyas derive from self-conscious movements such as S anskritized Buddhism at the beginning of the common era, but no one has offered a good argument for why this might be so, nor explored the character of the social communities—often, it appears, newly migrating into the subcontinent—that may have contributed to these developments. Another way to express this specific historical problem is not that Sanskrit became literary, but that "literature" as such.