This lucidly written and clearly argued monograph traces the narrative career of Prithviraj Chauhan, the ruler of Ajmer (southwest of Delhi) in the twelfth century, who was defeated by the Turkic ruler from Ghur, Shihab al-Din, in 1192 CE. Cynthia Talbot traces how the memory of Prithviraj evolved from historical fact, through multiple retellings and refashionings, to become an emblem of the Rajput warrior ethos by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Less than a hundred years later, by the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Prithviraj came to symbolize heroic Rajput resistance to Mughal and Muslim overlordship. By the early nineteenth century, the English colonial administrator and scholar James Tod described him as “the last Hindu emperor,” a designation that Talbot demonstrates to be “manifestly untrue” (p. 3). By the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one kind of nationalist tradition—largely in Hindi and Bengali, as Talbot traces it—was bent on recovering a heroic, anti-imperial past, and zeroed in on this particular version of the Prithviraj story, of heroic Rajput (Hindu) resistance to imperial (Muslim) overlords. The book ends by tracing the postcolonial afterlife of the Prithviraj legend, down to the inauguration of a theme park in his putative home town of Ajmer in 1996.
Talbot aims to trace “the genealogy of his [Prithviraj's] history as a symbolic figure from the medieval era to the present time” (p. 3). Following the influential precedent of the French historian Pierre Nora, she seeks to identify the key “junctures in time at which memories of the king [Prithviraj] were reformulated in novel ways” (p. 7). This helps her to identify key moments at which new patrons and audiences inflected the memory of Prithviraj in new ways, to resonate with new solidarities in the present, embodied in new visions of a shared past.
Talbot also draws from a growing body of historical scholarship on the changing meanings and representations of events, objects, and people from the precolonial South Asian past to modern times. And she is as interested in tracing key mutations in the image of Prithviraj Chauhan as she is in how older narrative tropes and symbols persisted and recolored newer versions of the legend.
Chapter 2 lays out clearly the full range of contemporary and near-contemporary evidence between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries about the Chauhan king. Talbot draws on a range of sources, all produced at various courts of northern India, in Sanskrit or in Persian. She shows how courtly dynastic histories of the period in the Persian language, typically read as factually reliable by many professional historians today, each inflected their accounts of the conflict between Prithviraj Chauhan, the ruler of Ajmer, and Shihab al-Din, the ruler of Ghur, from the perspective of their own, distinct agendas. Equally, highly embellished courtly epics about the Chauhan king, written in Sanskrit between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, as well as exemplary biographies in the Jain tradition, all provided a cumulative, if not entirely coherent kernel, for the legend of Prithviraj that seems to have emerged in its most elaborate version yet, the Prithviraj Raso, by the late sixteenth century. It was some version of this Raso narrative, which must have been already known, that was then repeated as the history of the Chauhan past at the Mughal Emperor Akbar's court, both in Persian by the Mughal historian Abu'l Fazl and in Sanskrit as commissioned by a Chauhan Rajput vassal of the Mughal emperor.
In chapter 3, Talbot shows how the locale with which Prithviraj was identified changed from Ajmer to the political center of Delhi by the later sixteenth century. This change, she argues, was key to the symbolic elevation of the Chauhan king from a regional ruler to a much more politically significant adversary for the Delhi sultanate.
Chapter 4 then examines the congealing of particular traditions about Prithviraj into an elite regional epic, the Prithviraj Raso. As Talbot shows, the emergence of the Raso narrative helped and was aided in turn by the emergence of a Rajput aristocratic elite characterized by its warrior ethos. The narrative structure of the Raso, episodic and including several major battles, allowed for the incorporation of an expanding number of Rajput lineages that rose to prominence by the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Chapter 5 traces how this elite regional epic acquired a distinctive, anti-imperial, anti-Mughal, and anti-Muslim character at the Mewar court in southern Rajasthan, precisely when its rulers were defying incorporation into the ranks of the Mughal military-administrative apparatus. As Mughal power waned over the course of the eighteenth century, it was this version of the memory of Prithviraj that emerged as dominant, so that when James Tod was the resident of the East India Company to the Rajput courts of the Rajasthan region in the early decades of the nineteenth century, it was the Mewar perspective that made its way into colonial knowledge.
In chapters 6 and 7, Talbot traces the paradoxical career of the Prithviraj Raso into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even as a new and modern consensus emerged about the historical unreliability of the Raso, which aided its scholarly marginalization, Prithviraj Chauhan made his way into modern nationalist, historical memory through creative retellings of the Raso legend in the literature in the modern Indian languages, especially in Hindi and Bengali. In the process, other perspectives on the memory of Prithviraj, both medieval and modern—and on the memory and historical reality of Rajput lineages as constituting a fractious, internally riven polity—have been firmly marginalized.
Talbot's monograph is exemplary in carefully tracing these major stages in the journey of the Prithviraj legends. However, it also shares in some of the limitations of the broader field. Thus, it is far easier to trace the emergence of one memory tradition to dominance than it is to trace the history of how other memory traditions about the same figure disappeared. Such methodological obstacles thus end up reinforcing, in this instance, the marginality of traditions such as the Alhakhand, about the little Rajput chiefs of the localities whose legends cast a different light on the memory of Prithviraj Chauhan. Furthermore, scholarship on South Asian literary cultures and traditions is currently poised at a particular conjuncture. While a reinvigorated philological method, located largely in the North American and European academy, is bringing us fresh insights into the aesthetic and literary traditions of, especially, the second millennium CE, scholarship on the sociology of these literary formations has not kept pace, except for some notable exceptions (see, for instance, the various contributions of Vasudha Dalmia and Francesca Orsini). This is in contrast to the scholarship on early modern Europe and England, or even on second-millennium Japan, where much more is known about the historical sociology of literary genres and traditions. While Talbot is exemplary in citing the more politically sensitive Hindi-language scholarship—especially the scholarship of Namwar Singh—she has no secondary scholarship to rely on, neither on the sociology of Hindavi literary communities in the second millennium, nor on the political formation of Hindi literary criticism from the late nineteenth century onwards. We emerge with a rich understanding of the textual genealogy for modern and postcolonial celebrations of Prithviraj Chauhan, but, owing to the shortcomings of the field, with little additional understanding of any caste and class coordinates that might be relevant to understanding the perpetuation of this memory tradition in the Hindi social world.
A list of manuscripts that Talbot has located in various collections and repositories would have made for a useful appendix, particularly because of the size of the corpus of Raso manuscripts.
That said, this monograph would be a wonderful resource in courses on historical method—on the reading of different genres of historical evidence—as well as in comparative courses on history and memory, and in courses on history and memory in colonial and postcolonial worlds.
