Die Dschungelkonige: Ethnohistorische Aspekte von Politik und Ritual in Sudorissal/Indien.

KOROM, FRANK J.

Die Dschungelkonige: Ethnohistorische Aspekte von Politik und Ritual in Sudorissal/Indien. By BURKHARD SCHNEPEL. Beitritge zur sudasienforschung, vol. 177. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1997. Pp. viii + 343, list of illustrations, acknowledgments, introduction, bibliography, index. DM 88.

European scholars often state that American researchers do not make sufficient use of European resources. The reverse, however, cannot be said of Schnepel's ethnohistorical study, for he situates his own work in dialogue with a well-known east of American historians and anthropologists of South Asia. The geographical area of his research on former "little kingdoms" is present-day Koraput District, the southernmost region of the state of Orissa. After an unnecessarily lengthy overview of works by Cohn, Stein, Wink, Dumont, Dirks, Hocart, Tambiab, Geertz, Kulke, and Berkemer (pp. 13-73) to establish his own intellectual lineage, Schnepel introduces the reader to Jeypore, a five-hundred-year-old dynasty led by the Suryavamshis that ended only in 1952. Because Jeypore had important links to the empire of the Orissan Gajapatis, he uses it as his focal point to explore interactions with other contiguous little kingdoms in the region. Drawing on colonial documents, archival resources, and ethnographic interviews wi th members of the Jeypore royal family, Schnepel reconstructs patterns of economic, religious, and political interaction between various levels of governance to chart center--periphery relationships.

Building on the works of his predecessors in the Heidelberg project on Orissa, Schnepel's study yields a number of interesting points. First and foremost, he identifies a sub-type of little kingdom that he terms a "jungle kingdom." Of the approximately twenty little kingdoms identified in southern Orissa, he notes that roughly half were located on the coastal plains, whereas the other half, including his target site, Jeypore, were in remote mountainous areas of the hinterlands. According to the author, such jungle kingdoms are characterized by their location in the heavily forested and inaccessible hill tracts of the Eastern Ghats as well as by the high population density of people claiming "tribal" origins (pp. 108-20). The relative isolation from their Gajapati overlords allowed these jungle kings to rule in a semi-autonomous manner but set limits on the availability of fertile lands at their disposal for rice cultivation, which, in turn, both shaped the sociopolitical and religious contours of life in the ir kingdoms.

Schnepel views such jungle kingdoms as operating within a distinct mindset, relying as they did on links forged with powerful estate retainers (thatraja) over whom jungle kings considered themselves feudal overlords and from whom they could demand obedience. He describes this in some detail in his historical discussion of the relationship between the Jeypore kings and the thatrajas of Bissamcuttack, who were required to perform military and ritual services for the king on certain occasions. Demonstrating how power was de-centered through such lateral relationships, the author is able to follow Bernard Cohn's earlier groundbreaking work (1962) and posit a multi-centered Orissan empire in which ritual authority, legitimacy, and prestige were equally weighty issues of concern among the ruling class. Schnepel's notion of the multi-centered state derives its inspiration from Burton Stein's "segmentary states" model (1977), in which power is not hierarchical in any strict sense but pyramidal. Based on his reading of Stein, the "great" king's goal, from Schnepel's point of view, is not necessarily to establish political dominance but rather to construct an ideological framework within which legitimacy and authority are ritually valued over and above power and command. The jungle king thus could maintain his position so long as he acknowledged the superior ritual status of the great king.

Schnepel also maps the spatial interrelationships between little cum jungle kingdoms and the Gajapati seats of power in places like Cuttack and Puri to show that the smaller satellite kingdoms revolved around imperial centers, thereby creating concentric rings of dependent states (samanta) around the empire's major sites. Not surprisingly, he builds on Stanley Tambiah's "galactic polity" (1985) to explain the Orissan scenario as a mandala-like pattern of interconnected and interdependent centers. But Tambiah's work, he feels, is too territorially bounded for explaining the historical dynamics of Orissa. Therefore he turns to Ronald Inden's 1990 formulation of overlapping systems of polities. This works quite well for Schnepel, since he successfully demonstrates shifting allegiances between the little kingdoms of the region and bordering imperial powers, which is to say that any specific little king or chief could change loyalties at crucial times during contests for ascendancy.

Schnepel also provides more fresh data on processes of "Hinduization" by focusing on how jungle kings were able to incorporate elements of the tribal population into their respective folds of subjects through adopting local goddesses as personal deities (istadevata) house deities (ghardevata), or lineage deities (kuldevata). The degree to which such conversion was successful, however, often hinged on the tension between brahmin ritual specialists and low-caste priests who earlier served the now sanskritized goddesses in their original tribal forms. But through patronization and absorption into the image of Durga, these forest (vana) goddesses gradually assumed the unified and exalted position of state deity (rastradevata), albeit inhabiting a space betwixt and between forest and settled territory (ksetra). Following Gunther Sontheimer (1987) and Hermann Kulke (1993), Schnepel thus prefers to think of this process as "ksetra-ization."

Overall, Schnepel's work is a welcome addition to the literature on the inseparability of politics and religion in discussions of state formation. His rich data provide much intellectual food for thought in rethinking problematic issues such as the longstanding debate over the authority of Hindu kings, the dynamics of conversion, and the relationship between power, authority, and ritual performance. Although overly theoretical at times, which in a few places tends to obscure his data, the volume surely refines and advances our knowledge of eastern India. At the same time, Schnepel makes an impassioned plea for further cooperation between the fields of history and anthropology.

REFERENCES

Cohn, B. 5. 1990 [19871. Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: The Benaras Region. In An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays. Pp. 483-99. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.

Inden, R. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Kulke, H. 1993. Ksatra and Ksetra: The Cult of Jagannstha of Puri and the "Royal Letters" (chamu citaus) of the Raja of Khurda. In Kings and Cults: State Formation and Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia. Pp. 51-65. Delhi: Manohar Publications.

Sontheimer, G. 1987. The Vana and the Ksetra: The Tribal Background of Some Famous Cults. In Religion and Society in Eastern India: Anncharlott Eschmann Memorial

Lectures, 1978-1986, ed. G. C. Tripathi and H. Kulke. Pp. 117-164. Bhubaneshwar: Utkal Univ. Press.

Stein, B. 1977. The Segmentary State in South Indian History. In Realm and Region in Traditional India, ed. R. G. Fox. Pp. 3-5 1. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.

Tambiah. S. J. 1985, The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia. In Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective. Pp. 252-86. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.