Cynthia Talbot.
The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 325 pp.
$99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-11856-0.
Reviewed by Audrey Truschke (Rutgers University - Newark)
Published on H-Asia (February, 2017)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha
Published on H-Asia (February, 2017)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha
Those looking for the true story of Prithviraj
Chauhan, an Indian king famous today for his failed stand against the
invading Ghurid army in late twelfth-century North India, will not find it in Cynthia Talbot’s The Last Hindu Emperor.
At the outset Talbot states that her interest lies not in the hard
history of Prithviraj but in the idea of him. Indeed, even the title of
Talbot’s book invokes a misleading characterization of Prithviraj. As
Talbot tells us, the appellation “the last Hindu emperor,” first applied
to Prithviraj by colonial scholar James Tod, is a patently false
descriptor.
Talbot argues that what is most interesting and
compelling about Prithviraj is not his true story (which we know little
about anyway) but rather memories of him and their development over the
centuries. She is right, and her book takes the reader on a compelling
journey through the shifting sands of stories told about Prithviraj.
Prithviraj is one of India’s longest remembered kings, and Talbot traces
remembrances of the ruler over the better part of a millennium, from
the late twelfth century until the 1940s.
The Last Hindu Emperor proceeds
chronologically. Talbot begins in chapter 2 with early mentions of
Prithviraj in texts and inscriptions, written in both Sanskrit and
Persian, in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. She devotes
chapters 3 to 5 to Rajput memories of Prithviraj from the late sixteenth
through the early eighteenth centuries, largely accessed through the
early modern Hindi work, the Prithviraj Raso. Chapters 6 and 7 narrate the colonial treatment of Prithviraj’s tale, especially the Raso,
and the epilogue provides some thoughts on memories of the king in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Talbot gives a succinct overview
of her book by chapter in the introduction, and so rather than repeat
that structure here I will draw out some of the many striking features
and threads that run throughout Talbot’s thought-provoking work.
Talbot’s sources are almost entirely textual and yet
she does an admirable job reconstructing the social world in which those
texts were written and consumed. She discusses Sanskrit and Persian
texts, especially in chapters 2 and 3 (she also discusses, in a more
limited manner elsewhere in the book, images produced in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries). But most of all she is preoccupied in the
book with the Raso, a Braj Bhasha telling of Prithviraj
Chauhan’s life, probably first written in the late sixteenth century for
the Rajput elite of Mughal India. It is difficult to get a grip on the Raso. Readers will find some information about the Raso scattered throughout the book, and the rest is outlined in an appendix on the Raso’s
textual history. The text exists in roughly 170 manuscripts, which can
be roughly divided into four recensions that vary considerably from
one another in terms of their content and length. Part of Talbot’s
project of reconstructing how Prithviraj came to be remembered as a hero
involves tracing the development of certain recensions of the Raso,
especially the long recension produced in the Mewar between 1635 and
1703. At other times, the work of reimagining Prithviraj took place
outside of the Raso and can be detected by reading texts in other traditions or, later, by reading scholarly articles.
While Talbot’s archive is almost entirely restricted
to the written word, she executes a sensitive reading that allows her to
furnish a nuanced picture of the communities that wrote and read such
works. Especially rich is Talbot’s description of the Rajput elites for
whom the Raso was a central text beginning in the late
sixteenth century. Talbot underscores that these elites lived in Mughal
India, and accordingly she turns to Mughal court texts, especially Abu
al-Fazl’s A’in-i Akbari, to help understand the value that
Rajput elites found in remembering Prithviraj (chapter 3). In chapters 3
and 4, she offers some close readings of sections of the Raso in order to delve into its Rajput martial ethos. She discusses, for example, how the text focuses on Prithviraj’s many samants
(military subordinates) who came from different Rajput lineages and
thereby consolidated an aristocratic Rajput identity. The Rajput
community was neither uniform nor stable, however, and Talbot gives
attention to such nuance especially in her discussion of how the Raso was rewritten in Mewar in the early eighteenth century to showcase Sisodiya superiority.
While overall Talbot traces the development of the historical memory of Prithviraj from the twelfth century to the Raso
to Tod and to the present, she also allows herself tangents at times,
and these are some of the most interesting tidbits in the book. Talbot
emphasizes that there were competing images of Prithviraj at any given
moment in history, and she recognizes that some images fell away as time
went on. She pauses to describe some of the failed visions of
Prithviraj, such as fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sanskrit texts
that envision him as an incompetent, even a lazy, king (chapter 2). In
chapter 6, she details Sufi hagiographical memories about Prithviraj
interfering with Chishti religious activities and oral Alha legends that
portray Prithviraj as an oppressor, rather than as a savior. Such
passages—almost asides in the grand narrative arc of the book—are rich
in detail and well worth the reader’s full attention.
Talbot stresses identity shifts throughout the nearly
eight-hundred-year period that she covers in the book. Often she talks
about how the memory of Prithviraj changed. He began as king of Ajmer
and later became remembered as king of Delhi, for example. Given the
importance of Delhi from the thirteenth century onward as a political
center in North India, this shift was critical to Prithviraj’s longevity
as a site of memory. Talbot is at her best when she discusses how the
identity of those who found it valuable to remember Prithviraj changed
over time. She traces, for example, how the Raso morphed from
being a text for elite Rajputs in the Mughal Empire to being relevant
across Rajasthan through the work of Tod, an early nineteenth-century
colonial figure who was quite taken with Rajput culture. Other British
thinkers in the nineteenth century treated the Raso as the first work written in Hindi (as opposed to Hindustani or Urdu), which made the Raso
an important work of cultural heritage for Hindi-speaking Hindus, an
even broader community. Starting in the late nineteenth century,
Prithviraj’s tale became coopted into a religious patriotism and
was recast, largely in vernacular Indian languages, as a story for all
Hindus that crystallized Hindu identity in opposition to a common Muslim
enemy. Talbot argues that these shifts were man-made, and she
identifies the relevant historical actors where possible. But she also
tells parts of the tale where the historical causality remains murky,
and thereby she allows her readers to glimpse the evolution of
historical memory even when we cannot see who was operating behind the
scenes.
Talbot offers an insightful discussion of
colonial-era views on Prithviraj, espoused by both British colonialists
and Indians from a range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, that
challenges some common assumptions about the nature of colonial
knowledge. As Talbot points out, basic identity markers do not indicate
what a given nineteenth- or twentieth-century individual thought about
Prithviraj and the Raso. Tod, a British agent, understood the Raso
as a genuine historical account of Prithviraj that dated to the late
twelfth century (chapter 6). Tod’s views held sway for fifty years until
they were repudiated by Kaviraj Shyamaldas, an Indian with no formal
historical training who could not even write in English (chapter 7). Yet
Shyamaldas used the tools of Western historiography to make a case that
most historians still accept today: the Raso dates to the
sixteenth century and is not a reliable resource on Prithviraj’s life.
Many Indians (and some Westerners) cried foul at Shyamaldas’s
revelations, and today, as Talbot points out, English-medium and Indian
vernacular histories of Prithviraj tend to treat the Raso in
distinct ways. One larger point that comes out of this discussion is
that crude ideas about colonial agents misunderstanding Indian texts and
Indians protecting their cultural heritage do not help us understand
the historical memory of Prithviraj. Talbot uses a complicated
historical toolset to make sense of this delightfully convoluted
historiographical tale.
One of Talbot’s strongest and more far-reaching arguments in The Last Hindu Emperor
is that older historical memories make claims on invocations in the
present. For instance, for hundreds of years, people have remembered
that Prithviraj ruled Delhi, and yet the older memory that he ruled
Ajmer thrives still. Talbot opens the book by discussing a statue of
Prithviraj in a memorial park in Ajmer. Prithviraj has been cast into
the unlikely role of a hero over time, but the basic story that he was
in fact killed by the Ghurids has not been altered much throughout time
(although the details have shifted in various retellings). In fact, some
versions of the Raso dwell on the costly military conflict
between the Chauhans and Jaychand’s kingdom of Kanauj—the major military
confrontation of the Hindi text according to Talbot and an all-Hindu
conflict, to use modern terms—in order to explain why such a great
warrior was weak enough to later be killed by Muhammad Ghuri. Many
modern South Asianists work with ideas about historical memory, and
Talbot usefully outlines how new memories do not unfold against a blank
slate but rather carry the weight and, sometimes, the details of prior
reiterations with them.
My criticisms of Talbot’s The Last Hindu Emperor
are few and far between. One wonders if she sells short modern visions
of Prithviraj. She says explicitly at several points that memories of
Prithviraj are never singular but rather always varied, even today. Yet
in the epilogue she seems to flatten the modern-day Prithviraj, going so
far as to say, speaking of the long recension version of the Raso,
that “its complex meanings have been muted and mutated” in nationalist
visions of the king (p. 275). Such nit-picking criticisms are a
testament to a great book that is rich in detail and even richer in its
overarching arguments about historical memory and the relationship
between social identities and texts.
