Book Review

Asia

Most immediately, this work focuses on a single dynasty: the Kakatiyas, who ruled in the Andhra region of southern India between 1175 and 1325. It is based on a comprehensive corpus of about 1,500 inscriptions, in Telugu language, carved onto the stone walls of Andhra temples during this 150-year period. Limited though this might initially appear, Cynthia Talbot earns the broader title she gives the book. From her far-reaching exploration of the Kakatiya material, Talbot offers an important critique of existing scholarship in medieval Indian history and suggests promising directions for reenvisioning this history.

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While the historical study of colonial India has been invigorated by post-Orientalist and subaltern approaches over the past two decades, the same post-Orientalist attention to the colonial period constructedness of "traditional" India, by which such Indian phenomena as caste, the self-sufficient village, and even Hinduism come to be seen as creatures of British taxonomic invention, has cast precolonial India into a historical backwater. Among scholars who specialize on medieval India, Talbot argues, reliance on literary and religious sources produced by elite segments of society (brahmins, court literati, and religious specialists) has also produced a socially limited and dehistoricizing view of the precolonial Indian past. These elites most often sought to portray their own social worlds as harmonious, unchanging, and universal, based on pan-Indian values and practices. Their visions of a stable world order were certainly important to the cultural imagination of their own times, but they distorted the realities of those worlds.

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