Religion, Art, Literature, and Society in Early Modern Rajasthan

This essay reviews seven recently published books on religion, art, literature and society in the early modern period in the western Indian region of Rajasthan. Two books address courtly and non-courtly painting in the long eighteenth century in the princely state of Mewar, and especially its capital city of Udaipur. The paintings present the ways that courtly connoisseurs pursued deeply sensuous (and multi-sensorial) emotions corresponding to season and place. These affective responses to the natural and social environment revolved in part around an active cycle of annual religious festivals involving the worship of multiple Hindu deities, and in support of several major lineages of renouncers and religious teachers. Two books focus on state documents from the princely state of Marwar, with its capital in Jodhpur, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the state administrators and bureaucrats belonged to Jain and Vaiṣṇava trader castes. These officials used their authority to attempt to spread their caste-based moral values, such as vegetarianism, sexual restraint, and teetotalism, amongst the population at large. These studies show that while religion was certainly a social factor in these interactions, caste was much more central to the identities of the various actors. Many of the administrative actions were aimed at Muslims in the region; but the actions tended to view the Muslims as untouchables due to their dietary practices, and so even here the creation of a more bureaucratized definition of social mores based on caste weighed more heavily than those based on religion per se. Three books study sixteenth and seventeenth century bhakti poets in the Sant tradition, most of whom wrote in the vernacular and were associated with the locally important Dādūpanth. These studies of religious poetry show that any adequate treatment of the poets and their works must bring economic, social, literary and intellectual factors to bear in the analysis. This study of books on painting, state politics, and bhakti literature leads to two conclusions. First, the books show the extent to which the detailed study of religion in South Asia needs to pay close attention to region, for to a significant extent regional specificities outweigh seeming pan-subcontinental continuities. Second, they demonstrate that the study of “religion” is greatly enriched by a multidisciplinary approach.