Virtual Relations. Little Kings in Malabar
Margret Frenz

Analyzing the concept of rule in late 18^th century Malabar, everything points in the direction that the rulers there acted as little kings. However, one major element of the model seems to be missing: the great king with whom the little kings maintained a mutual relationship to legitimate their rule – Malabar did not have such an overlord since the 9^th century. I will argue, that the model of the little kingdom nevertheless applies to Malabar as the little kings frequently referred to an imagined great king, whom I term a “virtual” great king. The context in which such a relationship could be established will be investigated in the paper.

 

Territory and Place of a Little Kingdom   Ranpur's Pancadolayatra
Niels Gutschow

On the concluding day of Pancadolayatra (in March) 108 gods (Mahadeva or Krishna) convene on a large field at the northern end of Badadanda, the ritual axis of the town to pay homage to Maninagesvari, the tutelary goddess of the King. The gods are brought from villages within the kingdom's territory, they represent the totality of revenue villages with the subjects of the King. The divine gathering after fullmoon in spring has to be understood as a ritual of renewal: the 108 gods bear witness of the wellbeing and continuity of the kingdom.

 

Raja and the Rebels: Kingship and Tribal Rebellion
in a Princely State of Orissa
Chandi Prasad Nanda

The paper primarily attempts to map the nature of Kingship and traditional authority in the context of Keonjhar state of Orissa during the 19^th century. It also explores into the Rebel consciousness of the Bhuyan tribals who sought to oppose the very authority in the shape of a rebellion. While dealing with these twin aspects, the paper focuses on the elements of reverence and assertion as reflected in the popular consciousness vis a vis Kingship.

 

A Little Kingdom From Below. The Aghria as Local Gaunti or Village Headmen
Uwe Skoda

The objective of my paper based on an on-going field research among the Aghria in Sambalpur-District of Orissa is to introduce the little kingdom of Bamra from the perspective of village headmen. The Aghria immigrated - most likely from a north-western direction - into a predominantly tribal area and became local headmen known as Gauntia forming the lowest administrative level of the kingdom. Apart from being landlords and justices of peace their main function was to collect the revenue for the King. Rights and obligations of Gauntia were fixed in deeds known as patta, which I would like to present here.

In addition to this internal administrative structure of Bamra state the ritual centrality of the headman – most visible in his role as sacrificer for the whole village -, but also his role as agent of religious changes by building temples etc. will be elaborated. His economic significance in launching new methods and technologies such as intensive forms of agriculture, building ponds and developing new styles of architecture will be amplified too. Besides the role of the Gauntia-System in integrating castes as well as tribes into a regional culture will be addressed. A case in point is the way in which Gauntia used apparently tribal symbols to govern – so-called ”khu Gauntia” representing the authority of the headman in form of wooden posts and landlords reigning on behalf of them. Finally I would like to elaborate on questions of change – or rather decline – of Gauntia after abolition of the Gauntia-System at the time of Indian Independence.

 

Little Kingdoms under Indirect Rule
Peter Sutherland

Analyses of the Hindu state generally go hand in hand with center-periphery geometries of power. Despite the admitted variety of tropes employed by historians and anthropologists to characterize precolonial Hindu polity -- segmentary, exemplary, theatrical, mandalic, processual, jajmanic, or theophanic, to name a few -- all are conceptualized in centrist terms of relations between king and local groups. This is no doubt due to the dominant concern with sovereignty and administration inscribed in surviving forms of historical evidence, which was generally the product of royal patronage -- archives, coins, epigraphy, architecture, religious texts, and monarchical ritual. But what alternative geometries of interaction characterized the midfield of power between center and periphery and, beyond that, the outfield of competition and conflict between royal centers and their cosmologies of legitimation? How and where should we look for evidence? While elite sources and orientalist thought may have obscured other spaces of historical Hindu political life, new approaches reveal unsuspected evidence. Based on multi-sited ethnography and archival research in the Simla Hills and neighboring parts of Jaunsar-Bawar and Garhwal, and using a cartographic approach to analysis, my paper complicates the category of the little kingdom by locating it in a scale of west Himalayan divine polities of varying size and rank, each ruled by a territorial tutelary god or goddess referred to as its king or queen. Frozen under British indirect rule, the precolonial political life of the region is reproduced in the travel movements of these royal divinities at contemporary local festivals called yatra. Paying close attention to the spacing, timing, and flow of power (Ñakti) defined by their processions in the festival round of the Bashahr kingdom, largest of the Simla Hill States, my presentation charts three distinct geometries of interaction (circumambulation, exchange networks, and central assembly) and their temporal sequence in the annual calendar. In this calendrical order, I shall argue, a complex Hindu geopolitics of local, royal, imperial, and cosmic formations is linked to an equally complex Hindu chronopolitics of festival cycles with periodicities from one to one hundred years by means of a military trope used in oracular discourse: the ”conquest of the year.”

 

The sacrificer state and sacrificial community: The relationship between the little kingdom and the local society in eighteenth century Orissa
Akio Tanabe

In this paper, I will try to understand the relationship between the little kingdom and local society in early modern Orissa. It is the time when the little kingdom increased its penetration and surveillance into local society. In the process, the local community became dependent upon the king as the source of legitimation for socio political order. The mechanism of "sacrifice" connected local community to the little kingdom. It was also the pivot around which the sense of duty, patriotism and devotion mutually supported each other to form the unit of regional identity.

 

Kingship and Genealogy in Medieval Western India
Ulrike Teuscher

The projected study is concerned with the particular medieval state formation of Western India and its interconnection to certain elements of royal legitimation of differential access to power. Especially interesting in this respect is the development of genealogies. Western India here comprises the group of states and lordships which were later called the Rajput states from the 10th to the 15th century; the time between the decline of the powerful early medieval dynasty of the Gurjara-Pratiharas and the ascend of the Mughals. Two neigh­bouring areas within this frame gain special focus, Mewar and Marwar, to the east and west of the Aravalli mountains (today Southern Rajasthan). For a long time these were peripheral to greater powers, especially the Caulukyas of Gujarat. Later they aspired the status of in­dependent great kingdoms, too. But most of the time their size was modest, comprising of numerous larger and smaller kingdoms and lordships, partly dependent on each other, partly not.

Western Indian polities became organized according to the lineage system which is getting more and more manifest from the 11th and 12th century onwards. By the accession of land to kin members and especially younger brothers areas emerged which were dominated by certain lineages, for instance Marwar by the Cahamanas and Mewar by the Guhilas. More and more lineage titles denoting landholdership came into being, which caused a change of meaning and recess of the older, pan-indian titles like mandalika etc. Parallel to this the written sources become completely preoccupied with the hierarchization of access to power of kin.

It is suggested that this caused a sort of independent tradition of historical writing, manifes­ted in genealogies which give evidence that the brahman authors didn't follow the pan-indian method of drawing up genealogies from pauranic sources, but developped a method of careful research among older inscriptions as their only sources, which caused a high degree of historicity, obviously a demand from the rulers who had to fight for their status among distrustful kin with own genealogical traditions. Even after the large scale destruction of the Western Indian political structure by Ala-ud-din Khalji around 1300 this did not cease to exist. When a new Rajput power, a late successor of the Guhilas of Mewar, emerged around 1400, the method was taken up again, producing a genealogy which, although compiled under difficult circumstances, is reconstructed almost to perfection down to the 7th century. But soon the authors' employers were overrun by the changed political realities. The structure of polities was not as it had been. The lineage networks didn't exist any more, and the first competitors, the Rathors of Marwar, couldn't imitate the genealogy as they couldn't connect to the rulers of the pre-1300s. Some early inscriptions show that they tried to imitate the genealogical strategy of the Guhilas, but failed. So they started to create a completely new set of traditions, employing non brahman bards and propagating huge pauranic genealogies which made them Suryavamsha Kshatriyas, a trait which had not existed before in Western India. Within 40 years the kings of Mewar also suc­cumbed to these new ways and rejected their so far built up traditions largely. One can say that the much maligned but famous 'bardic tradition' of Rajasthan had its roots in the competition between a little kingdom aspiring for independent power (Marwar) and its overlord Mewar and that its 'ficticiousness', especially for the pre-1600s stems from the inability of the bards to connect to the older brahman historical tradition.