Friday’s child: Or how Tej Singh became Tecinkurajan Sanjay Subrahmanyam Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris You were born on Friday, Tecinku my son. The Rani was born on Friday, Tecinku my son. Your horse too was born on Friday, Tecinku my son. This fight too began on Friday, Tecinku my son. This very day too is Friday, Tecinku my son. Stay today, and go tomorrow, Tecinku my son. Then you will win the fight and return, Tecinku my son. Tecinkurājan Katai 1 Introduction The eighteenth century has, it has often been remarked, a paradoxical place in the historiography of South Asia. It is a century that is often seen exclusively through the lenses of the archives of the expanding English East India Company, when in fact it is remarkably rich in terms of a diverse and multilayered documentation in a number of Asian and European languages. Shorthands such as ’prosperity’ or ’decline’ are still used by historians to sum up a century, the main characteristic of which is complexity, and where a great deal of fluidity characterises the very identity * Acknowledgements: A version of this text was presented at a seminar on Sources and Time at the Ecole Française d’Extreme-Orient, Pondicherry, in January 1997. I am grateful to Muzaffar Alam, Stewart Gordon, Alf Hiltebeitel, Sunil Kumar, Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sulochana Subrahmanyam for help in preparing this text. 1 Cu. Canmukacuntaram, ed., Tecinkurāja n Katai, Madras, 1984, lines 1,695-1,701.