Die Dschungelkonige: Ethnohistorische Aspekte von Politik und Ritual in Sudorissal/Indien.

• Author: KOROM, FRANK J.
• Position: Review

Die Dschungelkonige: Ethnohistorische Aspekte von Politik und Ritual in Sudorissal/Indien. By BURKHARD SCHNEPEL. Beitritge zur sudasienforschung, vol. 177. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1997. Pp. viii + 343, list of illustrations, acknowledgments, introduction, bibliography, index. DM 88.

European scholars often state that American researchers do not make sufficient use of European resources. The reverse, however, cannot be said of Schnepel's ethnohistorical study, for he situates his own work in dialogue with a well-known east of American historians and anthropologists of South Asia. The geographical area of his research on former "little kingdoms" is present-day Koraput District, the southernmost region of the state of Orissa. After an unnecessarily lengthy overview of works by Cohn, Stein, Wink, Dumont, Dirks, Hocart, Tambiab, Geertz, Kulke, and Berkemer (pp. 13-73) to establish his own intellectual lineage, Schnepel introduces the reader to Jeypore, a five-hundred-year-old dynasty led by the Suryavamshis that ended only in 1952. Because Jeypore had important links to the empire of the Orissan Gajapatis, he uses it as his focal point to explore interactions with other contiguous little kingdoms in the region. Drawing on colonial documents, archival resources, and ethnographic interviews wi th members of the Jeypore royal family, Schnepel reconstructs patterns of economic, religious, and political interaction between various levels of governance to chart center--periphery relationships.

Building on the works of his predecessors in the Heidelberg project on Orissa, Schnepel's study yields a number of interesting points. First and foremost, he identifies a sub-type of little kingdom that he terms a "jungle kingdom." Of the approximately twenty little kingdoms identified in southern Orissa, he notes that roughly half were located on the coastal plains, whereas the other half, including his target site, Jeypore, were in remote mountainous areas of the hinterlands. According to the author, such jungle kingdoms are characterized by their location in the heavily forested and inaccessible hill tracts of the Eastern Ghats as well as by the high population density of people claiming "tribal" origins (pp. 108-20). The relative isolation from their Gajapati overlords allowed these jungle kings to rule in a semi-autonomous manner but set limits on the availability of fertile lands at their disposal for rice cultivation, which, in turn, both shaped...