Deborah Sutton’s pathbreaking study Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the British Imperial Imagination offers a new understanding of the modern history of the Hindu temple in India. She reconstructs its pervasive presence as a charged sacred space at the intersection of many different relationships in colonial India and in British imperial culture. The study is arranged chronologically over six case studies, and richly illustrated with company paintings and engravings, colonial architectural drawings, early stereoscopes, historic photographs of temple carvings, images from imperial exhibitions and film stills.
Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the British Imperial Imagination, Deborah Sutton, Permanent Black and Ashoka University, 2024
Temples in Madras presidency after the mid-eighteenth-century Carnatic wars furnish the starting point of the study. Many of the presidency’s wealthy temples had been brought under company control. This was a policy decision made in ignorance of the complexity of local rights to temple property, and of the many different caste and service communities who had a stake in the structure of worship, not to speak of the rights of temple deities themselves as “owners” of temple property.
Sutton offers an absorbing analysis of fumbling official struggles to understand these rights, to decide whether jurisdiction lay with the local courts or Madras’s board of revenue, and to limit the powers of what were always assumed to be “corrupt” local officials. It was not until 1863 that legislation freed the Madras state from the responsibility of temple management, while keeping some lien on temple revenues.
The subject of Sutton’s second case study, the British architectural scholars of the later nineteenth century were little better informed. Sutton offers a wonderful portrayal of the scholar James Fergusson. Notwithstanding the competing insights of contemporary Indian scholars, Fergusson declared temple design and iconography to be open stone books, entirely legible without recourse to Sanskrit texts, and expressive of India’s racial character. With the omniscient eye of the victorian orientalist scholar, he developed his own map of religious building styles across the world, within which, he suggested, Indian forms of temple decoration could be satisfactorily located.
Emerging out of decades of such archaeological and architectural scholarship, Curzon’s 1904 Ancient Monuments Preservation Act created a vast panoply of state rights over sites and structures that were to be registered as “Ancient Monuments”. This initiative is the subject of Sutton’s third case study. Having withdrawn from temple management in the 1860s, the 1904 Act took the government of India right back into it. In an effort to sidestep the earlier entanglements, the Act effectively sought to “museumise” the temple monuments so registered, declaring them defunct and unused for any religious purpose. But within the many extensive temple complexes across India eligible for such treatment, it proved impossible to identify and sequester individual structures and which were “disused” and so covered by the Act.
Instead, local devotees, sevaks, pujaris, religious entrepreneurs, communal advocates and political activists looking for confrontation with the colonial state were able to retain the initiative and to pursue agendas of their own. Focussing on the great medieval temple complex in Bhubaneshwar, Sutton shows how pious activists of all kinds were able to covertly re-introduce deities and worship, declaring that no holy site ever lost its sacred character, even though human devotees might be absent from it for a period. The miraculous energies of Lord Shiva in particular were central to these episodes of discovery or recovery of the divinity immanent in holy places.
The ‘swayambhu’ or self-created Shivalinga was well-known known for its sudden emergence out of the earth to reveal the god to his eager devotees. Here, Sutton’s analysis really comes into its own. Set amid vibrant local networks of devotees and claimants to rights of many kinds, the Bhubaneshwar temples emerge as dynamic and unpredictable spaces, exerting their own field of force in a setting where local issues could quickly take on broader national significance.
Not surprisingly, the political reforms of 1920 passed responsibility back to provincial governments. This meant in practice prolonged and often uneasy negotiations between public works departments and parties with devotional custody of temples. The shared responsibility also gave rise to profound disagreements over the physical care of sites. Devotees pressed for the repair and colourful rejuvenation of still-sacred sites, which profoundly offended the austere Protestant sensibility of British archaeological superintendents, who preferred the purity of timeworn stone and shuddered at what they considered the crudity of modern ‘repairs’ to temple deities. By the 1930s, the archaeological department was working alongside the sevaks and pujaris of most temples, having been effectively co-opted into Hindu devotional practice.
Also read: Reclaiming the Hanuman Chalisa: A Timeless Poem for Turbulent Times, Reborn in Translation
The drive to complete the building of imperial Delhi during the interwar decades intensified this contest between government and the protectors and advocates of local temple sites. In her fourth case study, Sutton focusses on the Shiv Mandir temple in interwar Delhi, describing the clearance of huge swathes of land around the city, including many small shrines in older neighbourhoods. But the clearances themselves opened new opportunities for spontaneous divine energy to reveal itself, and demand the protection of self-appointed sanyasis, pujaris and would-be devotees. The building of railway stations and barracks often unearthed the remains of what might be older temple structures, or, even more ominous for communal strife, the remains of a mosque, whose rumoured presence alone was enough to attract intense public concern.
On top of all of its other troubles during the 1930s, this was a decade of great anxiety for the late colonial state. ‘Hurt’ Hindu sentiments, as well as communal competition to claim religious sites, implied threats to public order. Religious encroachments onto ‘public’ land remained a constant worry, particularly as official intervention itself usually just amplified the significance of a site. To assuage public opinion, land was given for new temples, and management committees appointed to oversee them. But these were often high caste and orthodox bodies with considerable power to mobilise popular Hinduism against the government. Most difficult of all was the sheer volatility of such issues, which might assume the most ominous proportions one week, only to dissipate the next. As Sutton portrays it, imperial Delhi was a city of restless energy, fuelled in part by the dynamism of its sacred places.
These are important and persuasive insights. They suggest perhaps that Sutton’s title, with its emphasis on the temple in imperial imagination, does not really do the book full justice. The book also explores the deep embeddedness of the Hindu temple within its own changing colonial contexts and locales, making it clear that the energies gathered in its space constituted a unique kind of resistance to the governing strategies of the state. This was not the resistance of politicised religion, but rather that of the many small pious entrepreneurs and devotees, often with very local agendas, who found an arena for action within the temple, or a vantage point from which to challenge the bureaucratic strategies of the colonial state.
After these studies of the deep social connectedness of the Hindu temple, Sutton circles back in her last two chapters to the literature and scholarship of the imperial state. Her study of the temple in the Victorian and Edwardian literary imagination is naturally a rich one, replete with images of wealth, magic and danger as well as dirt and disorder. Against these themes, the temple could offer some explanation of the violence associated with the wider colonial enterprise, and also embody everything that seemed baffling and resistant to European comprehension. Hence literary representations did not engage with the temple as a space of divine energy, but rather presented it through glimpsed fragments of its architecture and iconography drawn from the accumulated repository of Orientalist tropes.
The theme of temple design and iconography seen as visual fragments also emerges in Sutton’s insightful study of the important Vienna-born art historian and curator Stella Kramisch. Never really accepted by the British Indian art establishment, Kramisch found her niche at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here, she was able to develop both her extraordinary erudition in the field of Hindu temple art and design, and her unique approach to their understanding.
For Kramisch, the temple was nothing less than the articulated body of the divine. Its sculpted exterior with its often wonderful tableaux of forms was to be understood as driven upwards and outwards by the energy within, in an essential unity of form and meaning that characterised Hindu temples everywhere and across time. As Sutton points out, however, Kramisch’s extraordinarily rich collections of temple art and her sympathetic close-up photographs actually presented the temple in a rather fragmentary form, the individual artifacts and images emerging as moveable commodities and objects of the art historical gaze.
Given the degree to which state-sponsored projects of temple renovation have become a cornerstone of Hindu nationalist strategy in recent decades, Sutton’s wide-ranging study offers very welcome food for comparative thought. Many of the colonial conflicts she describes are now re-emerging.
The renovations of the Shiva temple in Banaras and Ayodhya’s just-inaugurated Ram Mandir have raised conflicts with the long-established rights of temple trusts, and with the communities whose older local cityscapes have been obliterated. Seen as a colonial practice inherited by Congress ‘secularists’, the convention that temple management is a state prerogative is coming under increasing challenge, particularly from Hindus who see it as a constraint on their ability to mobilise supporters.
In her concluding remarks, however, Sutton suggests that these massive state-driven projects, with their monolithic assertion of majoritarian Hinduism, actually have little in common with the agile dynamism and spontaneous energies of the older shrines and temples studied in her book. What characterised this older ecology of religious institutions, still exemplified in the Kalkaji temple in Delhi, was the balance achieved across the patchwork of different usages, rights and service roles attached to the temple. Most who claimed rights recognised that others claimed rights too, and that all such claims were insignificant before the unstinted bounty of the goddess Kalka Devi.
In the Devi’s temple, Sutton suggests, porous boundaries, overlapping claims and a variety of usages have historically offered an equilibrium in religious community relations that now seems strikingly absent from the great state-sponsored edifices of our own time.
Rosalind O’Hanlon is an early modern historian and specialist in the colonial history of India. She is a retired Professor in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford.
