Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case by Arjun AppaduraiReview by: Pauline KolendaJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 103, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1983), pp. 666-667Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602077 .

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666 Journal of the American Oriental Society 103.3 (1983)

(p. 174). These divisions were unranked internally and repre- sent alliances of non-Brahman specialist castes; the division were supra-local networks of lower Shudras (p. 182). As military divisions they sometimes were and sometimes were not subordinate to nattars or to the Chola king. They had other functions besides fighting, often making donations to temples. One last segment of the Chola society was the supra-local itinerant guilds, linking "scattered advanced agrar- ian communities of the period" together (p. 39).

Thus, the Chola kingdom, according to Stein, was com- posed of a small centralized state surrounded by hundreds of micro-regions that looked to the Cholas as a model of culture and to its king as a ritual sovereign. Within each nadu, rule was in the hands of dominant families, usually of the same caste (thus, a dominant kindred), allied with learned Brahmans, to rule through assemblies the lower castes, who, in turn, were sometimes allied into supra-local left and right hand divisions, or possibly into itinerant guilds.

During later times, the Vijayanagara period, local leaders were stronger because of advances in weaponry, and they were often Telugu-speaking naiaks who invaded Tamil coun- try. The Vijayanagara was also a segmentary state, but its integration seems to have been stronger, the naYaks tied to the Vijayanagara kings more firmly than the nattars had been tied to the Chola kings. Brahman brahmadevas de- clined. Stein sees the more warrior-centered society as brought about by internal processes within the Tamil polity, rather than by pressure from Muslim forces to the north.

Scholars before Stein had viewed the Chola as a central- ized state with tight control over an empire; Stein's segmen- tary state is only loosely integrated and integrated culturally, it would seem, rather than militarily. Such an interpretation is consistent with that of anthropologists who have looked at indigenous rule in Africa; Stein himself is strongly influenced by Aidan Southall who studied an African kingdom. But Elman Service in Origins of the State and Civilization has seen such ritual states in both the Indus Valley Civilization and in earliest Egyptian kingdoms, and Clifford Geertz has seen it in pre-Dutch Bali in his book, Negara. A common feature of all of these is the lack of militarism and the presumed ritual or religious leadership of the chief or king.

Stein's study, excellent as it is-and it is immensely read- able as well as being highly scholarly-leaves many unan- swered questions. We still have little understanding of the Sanskrit-Dravidian synthesis, nor of the process by which the cultural dominance of Brahmans came about, both pre- Chola phenomena, nor even what it was that made the Chola ritual king so very magnetic, nor why the Telugu navaks were able to insert themselves so easily in post-Chola times. But the Chola dynasty represents the epitome of south Indian culture, and Stein tells us how it was structured, if

not too explicitly how it worked, limited as he and other scholars have been by the character of their sources.

PAULINE KOLENDA

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-CENTRAL CAMPUS

Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. By ARJUN APPADURAI. Pps. 266 + x. Preface, note on transliteration, bibliography, index. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS. $34.95.

One way to get around the vague omnibus terms, moder- nity and tradition, is to analyse cases of interaction between seemingly-traditional indigenous institutions and seemingly- modern ones. This is what Arjun Appadurai has done in his brilliantly analysed, soundly argued, and densely documented study of the changes in the governing of the Sri Partasarati Svami temple in Triplicane, Madras city over 300 years. He depends upon epigraphical and archival primary sources, as well as his own ethnographic field work during 1973-4, and a plethora of published works by historians, Sanskritists, cul- tural anthropologists, political scientists, religious and legal scholars. A cultural anthropologist, he asserts that his is an ethnohistorical study, since it relates present circumstances to past history-"all traces, structural or cultural, that the institution under study has left on the past" (p. 4). He accepts both Victor Turner's assumption that the principles of a social-cultural order are revealed during conflicts, and Clifford Geertz's method of thick description-"descriptions generated in narrow spatial confines of aspects of social life (seen' as discourse) whose strength is their specificity, their cir- cumstantiality, their density, and their particularity" (p. 4).

Chapter I presents a description of a 1960's litigation between the Hindu Religious Endowments Department and the Tenkalai sectarian community of Triplicane over the means by which temple trustees should be chosen, whether, following rules laid down in 1951, the HRED should appoint trustees, or whether, going back to an act of 1925, the Tenkalais should elect trustees. A lower court supported the Tenkalais, a higher court favored the HFRED, and the Su- preme Court of India dismissed the case on a technicality. However, the HRED did agree that henceforth the trustees of the Sri Partasarati Svami temple must be from the Tenkalai community of Madras. Such disagreement about the rights of the government versus the rights of the Tenkalai community in selecting trustees goes back to the nineteenth century and even to the founding of temples in south India and to the development of SrT Vaignavism. Appadurai takes the reader back to these earliest origins in Chapter 2.

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Reviews of Books 667

The great twelfth century south Indian acariya, Ramanuja, introduced a devotional movement which accepted the prin- ciple that the spirit of a god could reside in an image, and the Sri Vaisnavites who were his followers greatly increased the number of temples and enlarged their religious calendars. In this view, the ruler of a Hindu temple is the principle deity enshrined there; he is thought of and treated like a king. The servants of this god-king share in the offerings made to him, along with donors and other worshippers. Thus the "econ- omy" of the Hindu temple is redistributive. Its organization is not hierarchical, since all are equally subject to the god- king. Hindu kings shared in this redistribution by receiving first-shares and other honors; they were thus legitimized as deity-blessed kings; their role, in turn, was to protect the temple and to make donations to it; and by their gifts to the temple, they often established their rule in new regions. They did not involve themselves in the actual management of the temple, however, which was carried on by members of a religious sect, except when they were entreated to do so by the temple personnel who needed arbitration either of a quarrel among themselves or one with some segment of the surrounding and often dependent community.

In chapter 3, when the British came into Triplicane in 1676, they had no temple policy. The chief donors of the temple ceased to be the king and became local merchants. In 1789, though, the jurisdiction over temples was assigned to a newly-established Board of Revenue which later took over the collection of temple rents and other income. In the 1820s there was a struggle between the head of the Sri Pdrtasdrati Svami temple, the Board of Revenue, the local Collector, and the Supreme Court over the management of temple personnel. After a decade of dispute they were made subor- dinates of the Collector. From 1843, when it became British policy to withdraw from the management of indigenous institutions, the courts, still hearing cases involving temple personnel, became thereby the agency regulating them, and (chapter 4) through a series of court decisions between 1878 and 1925 the Tenkalais of Triplicane were increasingly recog- nized as the keepers of the SrT Pdrtasdrati Svami Temple.

We can thus see in the 1960s the two trends developed in the nineteenth, the government's intrusion via the courts in the running of the temple and the increasing recognition of the Tenkalais of Triplicane as the templekeepers.

Appadurai sees this process as one in which the British never understood the Hindu king's detachment from the internal affairs of the temple, nor his role as its "protector," nor his context-specific administrative style in settling dis- putes. The British believed in precedents and codification and introduced a legislative style for settling cases; Anglo- Indian courts, therefore, repeatedly spawned one litigation out of another, and despite a policy of non-involvement in

native institutions intruded more and more into the gover- nance of the temple because of the availability and use of a hierarchy of courts.

There are no personalities in this ethnohistory, even in recent times. Impersonal trends assert themselves first in stone inscriptions and then in British court records. A strik- ing feature of Appadurai's analysis is his deemphasis upon motivations of deriving financial profit from involvement in the temple as a major factor in the endless temple disputes, either on the part of the British Board of Revenue or the Collector, or on the part of the many candidates for trustee- ships or the temple personel themselves. The quarrels among the latter are presented as concerned with honors and shares in the blessed offerings. In such an analysis, Appadurai thus comes down on the side of those, like Louis Dumont, who sees Hindus and Hindu culture as predominantly religiously- oriented rather than economically-oriented.

A feature of the nineteenth century record that is not adequately explained is the violence and corruption accom- panying the several Tenkalai elections of trustees. Appadurai says at one point (p. 195) that the difficulty is the imposition of a western institution, democratic elections, upon an indige- nous institution unacquainted with it. Such a cliche seems inadequate, especially given the interpretation that the con- tention was for religious honors.

This is an important book, that can serve as a model, demonstrating the fruitfulness of combining anthropology and history in a thick description of a small cultural place.

PAULINE KOLENDA

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-CENTRAL CAMPUS

Glimpses of Ancient Egypt. Edited by JOHN RUFFLE, et. al. [Essays in Honour of Prof. H. W. Fairman.] Pp. 212 + 40 plates. England: ARIS AND PHILLIPs LTD. 1979. ?12.50 $48.00.

This collection spans most of Egypt's history from the Old Kingdom through the Coptic period and touches on a wide variety of subjects in its 30 articles, only a few of which can be dealt with here.

Included is an article by P. J. Watson entitled "Consonantal Patterning in Egyptian Triliteral Verbal Roots," a study encompassing phonology, verbal structure, and position within the Hamito-Semitic family, and based on statistical analyses from the three major phases of the Egyptian language,-the object being to point out similarities between Egyptian and Semitic.

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