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Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of

Mysore from 1799 to the Present. By Aya Ikegame.
London: Routledge, 2013. xvi, 216 pp. \$145.00 (cloth).

Barbara N. Ramusack

The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 73 / Issue 04 / November 2014, pp 1151 - 1152
DOI: 10.1017/S0021911814001430, Published online: 20 November 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021911814001430

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Barbara N. Ramusack (2014). The Journal of Asian Studies, 73, pp 1151-1152 doi:10.1017/
S0021911814001430

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 Book Reviews—South Asia 1151

reduce the entire history of popular Hindi cinema to the desire for distinction among its
makers is to grant too much to capitalism and its inherent logic of differentiation.
Such criticisms notwithstanding, this is an important contribution to studies of Hindi
cinema, as it traces and observes a fundamental transformation while it is going on.

JYOTSNA KAPUR
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
jkapur@siu.edu

Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to

the Present. By AYA IKEGAME. London: Routledge, 2013. xvi, 216 pp. $145.00
(cloth).
doi:10.1017/S0021911814001430

Although some stellar monographs exist on South India and the princely states, these
topics hover at the periphery of South Asian historiography. This analysis of the Wodeyar
family of Mysore state persuasively argues that these South Indian princes adroitly syn-
thesized Hindu orthodoxy, outreach to low-caste groups and their deities, and moderni-
zation projects to reestablish and maintain their autonomy within the British imperial
structure and into the early decades of independent India. This historical narrative
over two centuries is enriched by an astute assessment of the caste structure within a
princely state where distinctively south Indian practices existed.
Because the British restored Mysore state to Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar III after
they defeated Tipu Sultan in 1799, administered it from 1831 until 1881 when they re-
turned it to the minor Chamarajendra Wodeyar X, and retained the state administrative
offices in Bangalore while the Wodeyar princes were sequestered in Mysore city, Mysore
state and its rulers are sometimes dismissed as British creations. By untangling complex
and evolving relationships among castes, major religious rituals, and the sacral and urban
evolution of Mysore city, Ikegame emphasizes the agency of the Wodeyar family within a
modified segmentary state that Burton Stein argued was the basis for the earlier Vijaya-
nagar empire.
As political leaders, the Wodeyar rulers intertwined Brahmanic Hindu orthodoxy
with village deities of lower castes, strengthened their relatively small Urs caste group,
courted the dominant landowning non-Brahman Lingayats and Okkaligas, and utilized
modern modes of urban planning and industrialization to enhance their political
agency. Primarily focusing on the palace complex in Mysore city, Ikegame analyzes
how the Wodeyar princes practiced rajadharma (duties of kings) with gifts of land,
money, and symbols of honor such as banners, carts, and seating at their durbars. The
sacral recipients were primarily Brahman and to a lesser extent non-Brahman temples
and their gurus but even included Christian mission hospitals. The most prominent
secular beneficiaries were members of the Wodeyars’ Urs caste group. Besides providing
monetary stipends, the Wodeyars established schools to educate elite Urs boys to
produce a social and administrative class to replace the Tamilian Brahmins whom the
British had installed in the state administration.
Carefully mining the Palace Records held in Mysore city and the state administrative
records in Bangalore, Ikegame incisively documents how the Wodeyars retained their
Hindu orthodoxy while achieving their reputation as progressive in the secular realm.
Their modernizing initiatives ranged from a Representative Assembly established in
1152 The Journal of Asian Studies

1881 and the Krishnasagar Dam that provided electricity and public lighting to Bangalore
city to support for indigenous manufactures such as sandalwood soap and silk crepe saris.
As in European and American cities and Bombay, in the early twentieth century the
Wodeyar family cleared the congested Fort area to provide better light, air, and sanitation
for its inhabitants and established suburbs called extensions. Simultaneously Maharaja
Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV (r. 1894–1940) manifested his orthodoxy with diverse temples
within the newly opened spaces surrounding his new palace. More dramatic was his
sacral participation in the Dasara festival that celebrated the village goddess Chamundi’s
slaying of the buffalo demon. The Wodeyar synthesis of sacred and secular, orthodoxy and
modernity is evident with the Representative Assembly convening immediately after
Dasara and the European Darbar where the Wodeyar ruler received British officials
and other Western guests after his sacred duties ended.
Although Ikegame skillfully engages with the extensive debates among anthropolo-
gists on caste in South India, her chapter on “Marriage Alliances in Imperial Space” is
particularly innovative. To gain new blood for the royal family and possibly affirm their
kshatriya status, shortly before his death Chamarajendra Wodeyar X sought a north
Indian, Rajput bride for his son, the future Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV. Utilizing the colonial
network, his widow Vani Vilas asked the British resident to solicit his colleagues in north
and western India for suitable candidates. Because of their custom of uncle-niece mar-
riages, the Wodeyars were unwilling to send a bride north in exchange for the desired
Rajput bride to come south. Consequently Krishnaraja had to be content with a bride
from a miniscule Kathiawar state who triggered some popular dissatisfaction because
of her “foreign” blood.
Although not all Wodeyar initiatives, such as their marriage negotiations or steel mill,
were successful, Ikegame has cogently demonstrated that the acceptance of colonial
practices, such as Western education and urban planning, by the Wodeyar princes
enabled them to recast “traditional” practices into new forms of sovereignty. Her mono-
graph is a theoretically sophisticated, accessible, and significant contribution to the histo-
riography of princely states and South India.

BARBARA N. RAMUSACK
University of Cincinnati
Barbara.ramusack@uc.edu

The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan
Divide. By AYESHA JALAL. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013. xv,
265 pp. $27.95 (cloth).
doi:10.1017/S0021911814001442

Ayesha Jalal’s first book changed the way historians understood “high politics” sur-
rounding India’s partition. Saadat Hasan Manto, the subject of this book, is arguably
one of the best chroniclers of the human drama of partition. In The Pity of Partition,
Jalal seeks to meld her earlier interests and those of her subject, to “connect the micro
history of an individual and a family with the macro history of communities and states”
(p. xii). Manto is also special for the author because he was a close family member. Al-
though he died a year before Jalal was born, she grew up “with Manto’s conspicuously
absent presence in our joint family” (p. xi). That relationship also makes this book a
family history of sorts. Subjects as controversial as Manto or partition, particularly