1/ Pollock's model of South Asian language history, which privileges the written form, blinds us to the creation of literature outside writing and by extension, their creators (the class, caste and gender implications of this are clear). This magnifies our predilection for texts.

2/ If I hadn't added ethnography to my toolkit, I might never have seen this- and how much we are missing in the archive. Oral literary cultures leave archival traces if we know to look for them- and to look for them we need to listen to communities that continue those traditions

3/ Unfortunately there is still a need to "classicize" (and therefore, brahmanize) performance traditions in order to historicize them- a tradition is marked as indubitably "historical" if we can find "classical" textual references to it and/or it draws from the "classical" canon

4/ If we have no problems believing that Namboodiri brahmins can preserve millenia-old linguistic features in the Vedic canon through oral mnemonic devices, then why are we so averse to entertaining the idea that non-elite oral cultures can persevere across time without writing?

5/ (I should really just write the damn book instead of tweeting but this, in a nutshell, is one of the major findings from my 2019 archival and ethnographic work. If only I had the time and energy to actually write any more. Le sigh.)