UTERARY HISTORY. REGION. AND NATION IN SOUTH ASIA 3 literature as dominant Indian traditions have defined it, came into being at the moment in question. Evidently, what the self-conscious Indian traditions have identified as "literary" must itself be a subject of critical historical analysis as well. We know little, too, about the use of "coumerlanguages" for making literature among Jains, Buddhists, and others, which may actually antedate and stimulate the emergence of literary Sanskrit. What these developments represent is an early instance of an enduring and constitutive issue in South Asian cultural history, that of language-choice in a multilingual space. Literary language choice itself is part of a larger cultural strategy for establishing or discontinuing associations, addressing more important, or larger, or different audiences, and creating new identities. Once Sanskrit did emerge as a literary language it came to exert profound influence on other, newly emerging literary languages. This is something it seems to share with other examples of cosmopolitan languages in South Asia, especially Persian and English. It is not clear that either of these came or has yet come to penetrate the literary consciousness of South Asian writers so profoundly and so extensively as Sanskrit did, but that said, we have little analysis of where further differences lie in the careers of these cosmopolitan codes. How more regional languages interact with cosmopolitan languages remains largely undertheorized (or wrongly theorized), and certainly unexamined in a historical and comparative spirit; we have no very clear idea of the role of cosmopolitan language literary concepts and genres on the development of regional literatures; we have no well formulated conceptualizations of how such forms of cosmopolitanism—forms of'globalization," in the current idiom—differed, and so how cultural modernity and premodemity contrast. V. Narayana Rao's paper in this volume is a superb exploration of a number of these questions in the world of sixteenth-century Telugu. He shows how the very question of what language to adopt for making literature in the multilingual world of the Vijayanagar empire was at the center of consciousness of the ruling elites of the period. My own paper seeks to put this same question in a long historical perspective, touching on Sanskrit in the immigrant communities of western and northern India at the beginning of the common era, and Kannada at the kingly centers of eighth and ninth century Karnataka, as well as parallel developments in Europe, from theinvention of Latin literature with the rise of Roman hegemony to the literization of vernacular languages that marked the transition to modernity. The late medieval period is a particularly important and fertile area for examining the role of literary language and literature in the construction of regional identities, the politics and discourses of regionalization and what Pierre Bourdieu calls their "performative" dimension (which aims to impose as legitimate "a new definition offrontiers"). The essay by S. Nagaraju is a careful analysis ofsufch issues at their commencement in early medieval Andhra. He uncovers the social history in which to locate the first literizations of Telugu poetry, namely, in the challenges and opportunities presented to vernacular intellectuals in southwest Andhra during the regional struggles between the Badami Calukya polity of central Karnataka and the Pallavas of Kaflcipuram throughout the eighth and ninth centuries.