The conventional practice of historiography is always mediated by structures of power that determine and decide the Chronos and Telos of enlightenment modernity. Therefore, local historiographic practices and traditions have always found it hard to 'fit' into the logic of 'modern' history writing as these practices and traditions often involve myths, legends and various other lives and 'stories' that would hardly fit into the rationalising logic of the former. This complex entanglement of various affective notions not only occupy space in the local textual traditions but also the local people embody the very ethics of this historic consciousness. By looking into the local historical accounts and historiography of Kayalpattinam, a coastal town in the Southern Coast of Tamil Nadu, this paper tries to look into how these histories and historical consciousness are shaped,formed and used as points of authorization and valorization. By doing that, it will try to look into the gaps of conventional historiographic writing and how Anthropology and the tool of ethnography can be a point of access to untangle these complexities. Thus, it will try to look into such untangled, complex accounts as forms of subaltern episteme, which doesn't often find place in colonial and conventional historical accounts.
