Aya Ikegame

Why do backward castes need their own gurus? The social and political significance of new caste-based monasteries in Karnataka

Jati matha, as people of Karnataka call it, is a monastery that culturally and religiously represents a specific caste or sub-caste group, most of which are non-Brahmin, backward castes. From the Kuruba (shepherd caste, the largest amongst other backward classes) to Dalits (former untouchables) and Adivasis (tribals), the number of such caste-mathas is believed to be more than 100 in the state. This phenomenon presents interesting but problematic issues for conventional understandings of religious leadership and renunciation that regarded renunciation as a negation of the caste system. How can a renouncer represent a caste to which he/she belongs at the same time as claiming religious authority? It also reveals dynamic relationships between religion and politics in post-Mandal India. Is this a demand for spiritual reservation? While more backward class renouncers are receiving initiations, the distribution of resources through such caste-matha has become a tactic for the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state government to consolidate their support bases. The paper examines the complex negotiations and politics behind the emerging caste-mathas of Karnataka.

THE CAPITAL OF RAJADHARMA: MODERN SPACE AND RELIGION IN COLONIAL MYSORE

Mysore Fort, now situated in the centre of Mysore city, former capital of Mysore princely state, was effectively the city itself in pre-modern times. During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, however, the fort changed its form from a residential town into a modern garden or empty space where now only the palace and several temples remain. This transformation was intended to serve not only to improve the sanitation and hygiene of the city but also to beautify and glorify it as the capital of a Hindu kingdom. In the process, the modern western idea of “improvement” and the traditional Hindu idea of dharma (moral order) were somehow reconciled and mutually strengthened. This paper aims to demonstrate how the two concepts worked together during the period of indirect rule. More broadly, the transformation of space in Mysore city reveals the nature of Hindu kingship under British rule. The colonial power did not simply diminish the authority of the Indian kings, but rather enhanced their presence at a supra-local level. The fundamental paradox of Hindu kingship, in which kings have to be transcendent, above society, and at the same time to be rooted in society, remained a conundrum for Indian kings to resolve.

Mathas, gurus and citizenship: the state and communities in colonial India

This article is an attempt to acknowledge various forms of citizenship whose existence as political subjectivity has been systematically subjugated by Eurocentric political theory. Indeed, these forms were not simply ignored but regarded as an obstacle to the development of modern civil society. Strong religious, communal and kinship ties in non-European societies were treated as evidence of their inability to produce modern citizenship. How then, after examining this orientalist tendency of Eurocentric political theories, can we look at such ‘citizenship’ as a form of political subjectivity? This article examines how religious and caste communities, especially religious institutions called mathas, in South India in the early twentieth century went through colonial intervention and modern democratic aspirations and successfully articulated their political wills through the act of devotion for their gurus.

Space of kinship, space of empire

This article centres on perceptions of ‘space’ amongst members of the Mysore royal caste from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. There were several perceptions of space coexisting at the time. One was based upon a traditional idea of space that prohibited the aristocracy, especially the king, from travelling beyond a certain area. Another was the imposed perception of empire, which gave Indian royals the idea that parts of their world were connected horizontally through the expansion of empire. The Mysore royals tried to embody perceptions of both spaces through restrictions on kinship and strategic matrimonial alliances beyond their territories. On the one hand, one of the royal clans insisted that they had the right to receive women from the royal house by using a Dravidian kinship language of ‘reciprocity’, which had in practice never been fully exercised between the clan and the royal house in the pre-colonial period. On the other hand, some royal caste members were keen to embody the Imperial hierarchy, in which Mysore occupied the second highest position, by establishing marriage alliances with the Rajputs in northern India. By doing so, they could re-assert their status, both in terms of Imperial hierarchy and of Kshatriyaness. The article argues that both perceptions of spaces helped a national class of Indian aristocracy to emerge, and that that class of aristocracy still influences the political culture of India in the twenty-first century.

Introduction: Princely spaces and domestic voices: New perspectives on the Indian princely states

In the past few years, the princely states have emerged as a new terrain for both historians and social scientists to explore. The discovery of previously untapped local archival sources and the use of oral histories, together with an interdisciplinary re-reading of the well-thumbed colonial archive and the application of postcolonial methodological and theoretical perspectives to all of the above, have contributed to the continuing development and expansion of new scholarship on princely India. Yet, studies of the princely states still often have to begin with clichés, in order to remind readers of the extent and nature of the forgotten areas of the Indian subcontinent. This special edition is no exception. The map of colonial India was marked in two colours that represented two supposedly separable Indias: ‘British India’, which after the Uprising of 1857–58 was controlled directly by the British Crown, and Princely India, which was often understood as an ‘Indian India’ and was only indirectly influenced by British imperial power. This Princely India covered two-fifths of the territory and contained about one-fifth of the population of the subcontinent. It was comprised of about 600 states, ranging from large kingdoms like Hyderabad and Mysore to small patrilineal holdings of a few square kilometres. At the moment of independence, this divided subcontinent was both partitioned once again, into India and Pakistan, and unified, as the princely states were subsumed into these newly created nation–states. The political and scholarly bifurcation of the colonial subcontinent into British and Princely India has not been an equal process, of course, as the political, social and cultural importance of the princely states has, until recently, been largely

Overlapping Sovereignties: Gurus and Citizenship

Political anthropologists have been arguing that the actual working of the state or sovereign-like figures such as big-men and gangsters are quite different from a normative understanding of a compact, centralized, and unifying sovereignty. The distinction should not, though, be drawn between a Western norm and an Eastern anomaly, as political orientalism has tended to do. The difference should instead be found between molar and molecular forms of sovereignty. While molar sovereignty insists on its own exclusive and indivisible nature, molecular sovereignties connect each other and constantly change their original forms. By examining an ethnographical example of an informal arbitration court run by a religious ruler, or guru, in southern India, this chapter argues that the ways in which a guru as a sovereign performer interacts with other performers — in this case, the state, politicians, mining companies — opens up a space where a more inclusive and possibly democratic ethos could emerge.