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RamyaSreenivasan,TheManyLivesofaRajput
Queen:HeroicPastsinIndia,c.15001900.Seattle:
UniversityofWashington,2007.276pp.,ISBN:
9780295987606(pbk.).$24.95.
NeileshBose
Itinerario/Volume34/SpecialIssue01/March2010,pp139141
DOI:10.1017/S0165115310000227,Publishedonline:01April2010

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NeileshBose(2010).ReviewofRamyaSreenivasan'TheManyLivesofaRajput
Queen:HeroicPastsinIndia,c.15001900'Itinerario,34,pp139141doi:10.1017/
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REVIEWS

139

ity, a manipulable flow of feeling along with others (28). Here, state plans surrounding
modern irrigation worksthe Periyar project of 1895, in particularare discussed and compared with the medieval irrigation works for which Tamil Nadu is famous. In this as in other
chapters, however, the material focus is never far removed from the qualities and virtues
which those materials symbolise. Almost seamlessly, irrigation is tied to notions both of sympathy and civility, and sympathy in particular to the painful process of nurturing and facing
historical memory. We learn, for instance, how the expulsions, burnings, and killings of 1896
live on in Kallar memories, both individual and collective.
Pandian holds to his stated focus throughout, with little repetition and almost no pedantry
or jargon; instead, the reader is constantly surprised by new twists of argument, new information, and new perspectives, the whole embedded in a philosophical background that
embraces both the Western and South Asian traditions, quite apart from a continuous but
unobtrusive engagement with earlier anthropological works on the Kallars, including, of
course, the pioneering studies of Louis Dumont. Pandians own achievement, in Crooked
Stalks, is surely one of the best and most important works on the anthropology of the Tamil
people published during the last hundred years, and it certainly will form part of the canon
of the subject for decades to come.
doi: 10.1017/S0165115310000215

James Frey, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh

Notes
1 An earlier version of chapter two appears as the following article: Anand Pandian, Securing the Rural
Citizen: The Anti-Kallar Movement of 1896. Indian Economic and Social History Review 42:1
(2005): 1-39.
2 An earlier version of chapter four appears as the following article: Anand Pandian, Devoted to
Development: Moral Progress, Ethical Work, and Divine Favor in South India. Anthropological
Theory 8:2 (2008): 159-79.

Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India,
c. 1500-1900. Seattle: University of Washington, 2007. 276 pp., ISBN:
9780295987606 (pbk.). $24.95.
Ramya Sreenivasans The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India, c. 15001900 describes and analyses early modern literary cultures in India, a field that is currently
receiving an infusion of contemporary critical refashioning. In this compact work,
Sreenivasan demonstrates a wide range of expertise in early modern and colonial Indian history by looking at the circulations of texts and ideas across various borders of time, region,
religious community, and ruling ideologies, as well as the complex changes in official policy
and in actual literary form that occasion the making of nationalist, religious, and, ultimately,
modern Indian political identities. Sreenivasans title humbly hides the far-ranging nature of
her analysis. At one level, her work is a literary and social history of the famous story of
Padmini, the Rajput queen of the fourteenth century, told and re-told in many fashions in historic and contemporary South Asia. Padminis beauty, according to the popular narrative,
struck the then Sultan of Delhi, Alauddin Khalji, with so much force that he determined to
have her. In a series of intrigues between Rajput soldiers and Khaljis men, before facing ultimate defeat, the queen and her women immolated themselves and the men were killed in
battle. The story currently occupies the status of legend not only in Rajasthan but throughout northern and eastern India. Like most legends and myths, the details of social and
literary history complicate what may appear to be a straightforward story with which notions
of idealised traditions of honour, sacrifice, and nation are cemented. Unlike many myths and
legends which remain under-historicised in early modern and modern South Asia, Ramya
Sreenivasan has initiated the daunting task of giving this narrative historical and sociological

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texture by documenting and historicising its travels throughout a range of social, literary, and
political contexts.
She begins with the first iterations of this recorded narrative in the early sixteenth century
by the Sufi poet Jayasi writing in Avadhi, a dialect of Hindi, to the late nineteenth-century
Bengali Hindu nationalist versions by luminaries like Rangalal Bandopadhyay and
Abanindranath Tagore. Her work also engages the social history of literary production,
contextualising the quite detailed changes in form, characterisation, and meaning in the
narrative within specific historical readings of political change. She also intervenes in current
debates about the role of gender in legitimising power relations as well as the status of colonial influences inside of the active nineteenth century. She argues that the colonial-era
methodology of selectively shaping narratives for present-ist political purposescouched in
languages of authenticity, historicity, or religious truthwas actually a process in which ruling groups always re-imagined their past to legitimise their authority in the present (205-6).
In addition to showing how such ruling groups over the four centuries she covers constructed their version of the Padmini story, Sreenivasan also investigates how and where ruptures,
contestations, and divergences from the increasingly nationalist versions in the nineteenth
century occurred.
In four chapters, Sreenivasan narrates the creation, circulation, and range of meanings
and audiences for the Padmini story. She begins by introducing her readers to the worlds of
both Rajasthan, from the actual era of Padmini, in the early fourteenth century CE, to the
broader north Indian world from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. In this chapter, Sufi Tale of Rajputs in Sixteenth-Century Avadh, she conducts a lengthy analysis of the
first Padmini text, by the Sufi Malik Muhammed Jayasis Padmavat, dating to approximately
1540 CE. From this chapter, Sreenivasan sets up an ancillary strand of her argument regarding reading publics and audience communities, as she shows how Jayasis work and other
texts of the period addressed multiple types of readers, and also incorporated all sorts of fascinating combinations of styles and purposes. The original Padmavat was cast into a clearly Sufi idiom, yet reflective of a political and cultural ethos that shatters any easy connections
between religious identity and the identities of those in power, as Jayasis celebration of
Rajput heroism, and his skepticism about Alauddins triumph, as a conjunction of a Sufi mystical quest with local political anxieties about sixteenth century imperial expansion (58).
Sreenivasan proceeds chronologically, providing the next chapter about the story as it manifested in the Mughal period from the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. Here she
shows the sheer diversity of Padminis during the period, from those authored by Jains,
Rajput Hindus, and in a region far from Rajasthan, in the Arakan court at the fringes of
Bengal (now current-day Myanmar) by Bengali Muslims. In her fourth chapter, she narrates
how Persian language versions continued to appear until the ground-breaking replacement
of Persian with English as Indias official language in 1837. About a decade before this
pivotal shift occurred, James Tod, the Resident of the East India Company to the Rajput
states, published the huge Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, a multi-volume collection of
histories and chronicles of Rajputs. This chapter also offers a lengthy discussion of how, and
from which materials, Tod constructed his famous work. Sreenivasans final chapter ends the
journey with a discussion of the storys manifestation in post-1857 Bengali nationalist circles
in the form of famous versions like Rangalal Bandopadhyays Padmini Upakhyan, which
recast Rajput history in a newly nationalist vein.
Sreenivasans book is a richly documented exposition and sharply argued analysis of a
vibrant and multi-lingual set of literary cultures. In addition to leading her readers through
the history of the story in easily digestible prose, she also includes two appendices that list
both excerpts of the more famous versions and a list of all known versions of the story. Rather
than demonstrating a one-sided case of Indian continuity or a rapacious change emanating
only from British colonial officialdom, the historical stories of Padmini over generations
embody the early modern South Asian literary past, as the storys presence in so many dif-

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ferent regional, religious, occupational, and political contexts that its trajectory provides us
with glimpses of the varied affiliations within any of these groups (205).
The author enters debates about literary cultures by arguing for a balanced approach to
great historical transitions in modern South Asian history, such as the nineteenth-century
cultural and intellectual world of Indian letters. She attempts to give substance to the claim
that whether in reshaping social institutions and hierarchies, or in transforming cultural
practices, the transitions were neither abrupt nor absolute (17). On one level, she certainly
achieves this goal, as she shows how authors of all shades selectively appropriated tropes
and various markers in the endeavour of presenting a unified, and authentic, story. She also
presents much needed analysis of Bengali Muslim versions of the story, starting in the
seventeenth century and continuing even through the period of high Hindu hegemonic
constructions of a nationalist Bengali language and literature, aided and abetted by the
Padminis of Bengali Hindu nationalists. However, as she repeatedly states, the 1837 end of
Persian and installation of English appears as the main event that serves as a boundary
between the seemingly multivalent Padminis and the increasingly rigid, Orientalist, and then
nationalist Bengali Padminis, which all seem to be modelled after Tods Annals. Though she
admirably includes excellent and original analysis of the non-nationalist, non-Orientalist
Padmini stories that continued to appear in the early nineteenth century, they are analytical
footnotes to the broader story.
Sreenivasan has produced a nuanced and inventive work of South Asian history combining disciplined textual and archival research with compelling historical arguments. Her book
places literary production and changes in literary form firmly into a social history framework
that enlivens the South Asian historical field. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen, given its
range, detail, and originality, is destined to occupy a familiar place on the bookshelves of not
only South Asian historians, but scholars of literary culture, early modern literary history, and
the sociology of literature.
doi: 10.1017/S0165115310000227

Neilesh Bose, University of North Texas

Alan Tansman, ed., The Culture of Japanese Fascism. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2009. 450 pp., 24 illustrations. ISBN: 9780822344681 (pbk.).
$27.95.
Alan Tansman provides a stimulating collection of essays subsumed under the rubric of The
Culture of Japanese Fascism. Wisely eschewing the definitional squabbles of American
scholars twenty years ago in favour of a consistent if multifarious focus on the cultural
aspects of Japanese society from the late 1920s through World War II, Tansman brings
together approaches from an impressive group of experts. Indeed, the unevenness of chapters that is an oft-cited problem with multi-author books, is in this case a strength. Fascism
evokes diverse and sometimes contradictory opinions, and to its credit this rich volume does
not attempt to paper over these significant fissures.
The book includes a foreword, an introduction, and seventeen unnumbered chapters,
divided into five parts. Marilyn Ivys Foreword, Fascism, Yet? links the twentieth-century
roots of fascism to our own time, as well as to the ongoing unevenness of capitalism (x).
In Alan Tansmans eloquent Introduction, The Culture of Japanese Fascism, he gently
argues for fascism as a tool for comprehending the culture of Japan and for the presence
of fascistic ways of healing the crisis of interwar modernity (1).
Part I, Theories of Japanese Fascism, includes three chapters. In Fascism Seen and
Unseen: Fascism as a Problem in Cultural Representation, Kevin Doak engages the significant shared territory between fascism and nationalism. Rather than privileging his own deep
understanding of these concepts, he ponders: what did Japanese at the time understand
fascism to be, and to what extent did they consider their own political and cultural forms to