Deborah Sutton, Ruling Devotion: The Hindu temple in the British Imperial Imagination
Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2024, pp 260
Keywords:
Hindu temples, monumentalisation, temple public, bureaucratisation of religion, colonial archeologyAbstract
Deborah Sutton’s Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the British Imperial Imagination interrogates the colonial construction of Hindu temples through bureaucratic governance, architectural discourse, and literary representation. Drawing on archival and artistic sources, the book traces the temple’s evolving role in imperial ideology while critiquing colonial jurisprudence and Orientalist narratives. Though it illuminates tensions between state intervention and indigenous agency, Sutton’s analysis neglects caste and gender dynamics, leaving unexplored key struggles such as Dalit temple-entry movements. A significant contribution to temple studies, this work reframes the Hindu temple as a contested site of colonial power and devotional resistance.
References
Appadurai, Arjun. Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Banerjee-Dube, Ishita. Divine Affairs: Religion, Pilgrimage, and the State in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2001.
Fergusson, James. Archaeology in India: With Special Reference to the Works of Babu Rajendralal Mitra. London: Trübner and Co., 1884.
Kramrisch, Stella. The Hindu Temple. Vol. 2. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976. Originally published in 1946.
Raman, Bhavani. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Reddy, Deepa, and John Zavos. “Temple Publics: Religious Institutions and the Construction of Contemporary Hindu Communities.” International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, no. 3 (December 2009): 241–60.
Stein, Burton. “The Economic Function of a Medieval South Indian Temple.” Journal of Asian Studies 19, no. 2 (1960): 163–76.
Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Vishnupal Panwar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
