The Hollow Crown
Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom

The Hollow Crown reconstructs the sociocultural history of a warrior polity in south India between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries.

Nicholas B. Dirks (Author)

9780521053723, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 December 2007

500 pages
21.5 x 14 x 2.5 cm, 0.594 kg

A pioneering piece of ethnohistory, The Hollow Crown uses a variety of interdisciplinary means to reconstruct the sociocultural history of a warrior polity in south India between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries. Central to the book is the belief that comparative sociology has systematically denied the importance of the Indian state and obscured the political basis of Indian society by representing caste as fundamentally a religious system. In reconstructing the history of the polity that eventually became the colonial princely state of Pudukkottai, Dr Dirks therefore raises a whole series of issues concerning the methodologies of history and anthropology, the character of Tamil kingship and social organization, the relationship between politics and ritual, the impact of colonialism and 'modernization', and the dynamics of the whole last millennium of south Indian history.

List of illustrations
List of maps
List of tables
Preface
Glossary of terms
Map of the Madras Presidency, 1900
Map of Pudukkottai State
The Tondaiman line of Pudukkottai
Part I. Introduction: 1. The study of state and society in India
Part II. History and Ethnohistory: 2. The historical context of the old regime
3. The discourse of kingship: representations of authority in the old regime
Part III. A Little Kingdom in the Old Regime: 4. Pudukkottai and the old regime: gift, order, and authority in a south Indian little kingdom
5. The early history of the Pudukkottai region
6. Tondaiman Raj: 1686–1801
Part IV. Social Relations of a Little Kingdom: 7. Royal Kallars
8. Political hegemony and social relations: caste in Pudukkottai
9. Temples and society
Part V. Colonial Mediations: Contradictions Under the Raj: 10. Agrarian rebellion? Last gasp of the old regime
11. The colonization of the political order: land settlements, political intervention and structural change
12. Temples and conflict: the changing context of worship
13. The theatre state: princely politics in colonial south India
Part VI. Conclusion: 14. Ethnohistory and the Indian state
Appendix: land and privilege: inams in Pudukkottai
References
List of records and abbreviations
List of archives and record offices
Index.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM]