Farina Mir, an Associate Professor of History, will be giving a talk considering the literary history of Indian vernacular tradition, Punjabi, to interrogate assumptions about the temporality of literary history embedded in today's normative mode of writing the history of literature, assumptions critically linked to notions of modernity. Identifying at least two types of temporality in existing literary history, an even temporality, on the one hand, and one that emphasizes rupture, on the other, it argues for the adoption of a third mode: lumpy time, a concept drawn from the work of Sociologist, William Sewell. The broader aim of the talk is to show assessments of modernity in literary history mirror a broader tension in South Asian historiography between indigenous agency and colonialism.