La Trident sur le palais: Une cabale anti-vishnouite dans un royaume hindou a l'epoque coloniale.

• Author: Heitzman, James
• Position: Reviews of Books

La Trident sur le palais: Une cabale anti-vishnouite dans un royaume hindou a l'epoque coloniale. By CATHERINE CLEMENTIN-OJHA. Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient, monograph 186. Paris: PRESSES DE l'ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 1999. Pp. 283.

In 1988, while the author was conducting a research project in Jaipur, she learned of a peculiar series of events that transpired there during the 1860s. A religious persecution by the government of this princely state forced some leading Vaishnava priests to convert to Shaivism, while other priests who tried to avoid the same fate had to go into exile. These events seemed so unusual that they prompted the author to further investigations, leading to a remarkable detective story that reveals features of the organizational and doctrinal world in north India during the nineteenth century. The handling of the case is a model of methodological rigor, as we follow the author through leads from newspaper editorials, palace records, religious tracts, and memoirs of administrators, on the hunt for clues to the identity and motives of players. The resulting thick description tells us much about the relationship between politics and religion, and the role of historical consciousness in the construction of a social worl d.

The first part of the book immerses the reader within the palace of Jaipur, where Savai Ramsingh II came to power in 1851 after a sixteen-year regency necessitated by the mysterious death of his adolescent father. This period coincided with the incorporation of the princely state of Jaipur within the British colonial system; the high hopes of British administrators for this young king were not disappointed, as he provided support for his colonial overlords during the "Indian Mutiny" (1857-58) and took steps to modernize his own administration. Obviously, the disturbed events of his early personal life and the dramatic changes in public life exerted a powerful impact on the king, for in 1862 he became a devotee of Shiva, shifting the palace away from the predominantly Vaishnava orientation that had dominated during his youth. The author meticulously reconstructs the matrix of temple ritual that dominated palace protocol in the early nineteenth century, and the relationship of ritual personnel to the extensive system of eleemosynary and revenue grants coordinated by the state. One of the main theses that emerges is the close relationship between attempts by the king to centralize fiscal and...