Asia 813
than third) on the left, Ayatollah Golpaigani’s name is Ghur. After initial victory over the sultan, Prithviraj is de-
misspelled on page 46 and again in the index (yet a cor-
rect but different entry for the same name is also given in
the index), Ayatollah Mahallati’s name is misspelled on
page 129 and again in the index, and qollabi is misspelled
on page 133.
ALI GHEISSARI
University of San Diego
ASIA
CYNTHIA TALBOT. The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj
Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200–2000. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. x, 316. $99.99.
In The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the
Indian Past, 1200–2000, Cynthia Talbot seeks to excavate
the layers of memory sedimented around the celebrated
Indian king Prithviraj Chauhan (1166–1192). Defeated
by the armies of Shihab al-Din (Muhammad Ghuri) at
the end of the twelfth century, Prithviraj came to be the
subject of numerous story cycles beginning shortly after
his own life and continuing down to the twentieth cen-
tury. In this important book, Talbot presents us with a
sophisticated and compelling account of the complex
changes in these narratives through the centuries by ex-
amining their particular historical contexts, agendas, and
audiences.
Talbot begins by reconstructing Prithviraj’s life from
broadly contemporary sources, including inscriptions,
Indo-Persian histories, and Sanskrit literary accounts.
Talbot’s aim here is not to present the “true” or “histori-
cal” Prithviraj but to provide a kind of biographical
“baseline” from which to trace changes in later narratives.
These early accounts, often partial or highly convention-
alized, give a picture of Prithviraj as a rather unremark-
able ruler from a lineage of former Pratı̄hara vassals,
based in the city of Ajayameru (Ajmer), in modern-day
Rajasthan. Talbot next turns to several brief accounts of
the king’s life from Western Indian Jain texts, composed
in Sanskrit, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
These texts portray him as a neglectful and impetuous
sovereign, whose defeat by the Ghurids was attributed to
his moral flaws. Such early representations are important
for Talbot because while they do not represent Prithviraj
as the heroic figure of later textual traditions, they do in-
troduce narrative elements that would be built upon in
later representations, suggesting that stories about the
king were circulating in Western India during sultanate
times.
The core of the book revolves around a courtly poem
called the Prthvı̄r
aj R
aso, composed in Brajbhasha (with
_
regional Rajasthani elements) at the end of the sixteenth
century in the penumbra of the Mughal court. The R aso,
which survives in four major recensions, was the forma-
tive text in building Prithviraj’s heroic reputation, and is
ascribed to Chand Bardai, who appears in the story as his
minister and bard. After recounting Prithviraj’s rivalry
with the king of Kanauj and the abduction of his daugh-
ter, the poem turns to his conflict with Muhammad of
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feated, blinded, and carried off to Ghazni. Learning of
this indignity to his master, Chand Bardai travels to
Ghazni and “there he talks Shihab-al-Din into allowing
Prithviraj to perform a daring feat of archery.” When
asked by the sultan to pierce seven bells, Prithviraj,
though blind, “aims [his arrow] at the sultan’s voice and
instantly kills him” (14). Though Prithviraj himself is
soon killed, he has avenged his honor. The R aso introdu-
ces many new elements to the king’s life (like his killing of
the sultan), but also continues features that seem to have
accreted to the king’s reputation sometime in the
fifteenth century—most importantly, his association,
through his maternal line, with the city of Delhi. This was
significant because Delhi had become the political center
of northern India in the thirteenth century, and linking
Prithviraj with the city increased his political relevance.
And it is in Delhi during the reign of the Mughal emperor
Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that the patrons of the earliest R aso
manuscripts may be placed. It is in the context of Islami-
cate rule in Delhi, Talbot argues, that the R aso helped
mobilize martial sentiments to create a regional military
identity among a nascent class of warriors known as Raj-
puts in the regions around Delhi, Haryana, and Rajas-
than—who could identify with the heroes of Prithviraj’s
army. The longest and best-known recension of the text
may be dated to the late seventeenth century in the Ra-
jasthani kingdom of Mewar, where, in a milieu of intense
competition, the R aso narrative became a paradigmatic
emblem of Rajput filiation (and opposition) to Islamicate
rule.
The book’s final chapters examine the fate of Prithviraj
under colonial rule. Talbot begins with James Tod, whose
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829–1832) intro-
duced the R aso to Western scholarship and helped the
work achieve canonical status as the most reliable histori-
cal source on the life of the king (despite the continued
existence of alternative narratives). Moreover, the claim
that it was the earliest specimen of literature in the Hindi
language, which was fast becoming a rallying point for
North Indian elites in the latter half of the nineteenth
century, helped to widen its relevance beyond Rajasthan
to the whole of North India, now cast in a nationalist and
sometimes communalist frame, and it reinforced Tod’s
claim that Prithviraj was the “last Hindu emperor.” As in-
fluential as it was, this interpretation of the R
aso was se-
lective, ignoring numerous features of the text itself. With
the growth of historical studies in India, the consensus on
the value of the Raso slowly broke down. Treatment of
Prithviraj became divided between, on the one hand,
scholarly writing, often in English, which tended to push
aside the Raso in favor of sources deemed more reliable,
like Indo-Persian chronicles and inscriptions, and, on the
other, more popular writings, often in the vernaculars,
where the Raso’s heroic depiction of Prithviraj continued
to flourish, with Prithviraj being represented as a selfless
patriot who resisted foreign oppression.
In an epilogue on the postcolonial Prithviraj, Talbot
notes that while official representations of the king after
independence were often minimalist, the persistence of
JUNE 2017
 814 Reviews of Books
the divide between scholarly and popular representations
has persisted, posing an important dilemma for profes-
sional historians today. It is clear that a century of schol-
arly skepticism and restraint remained in “cultural isola-
tion,” failing to “percolate” downward through the lan-
guage divide. Moreover, the rise of Hindu nationalism
has meant that certain colonial-era interpretations, repre-
sented as unproblematically authentic, have often been
celebrated with new confidence and stridency in the con-
temporary public sphere. While Talbot suggests that
scholars spend more time exploring alternative versions
and remembrances available in the “collective memories”
of different communities and in versions that have been
marginalized since the nineteenth century in order to
counteract the popular versions of Prithviraj’s life, it re-
mains unclear how such alternative accounts and inter-
pretive dispositions could be communicated to the newly
energized proponents of a communalized past given their
hostility to the historical “establishment.” These are im-
portant questions entailing not simply the politics of rep-
resentation but the role of the historian as public intellec-
tual in an age of political cacophony and digital media.
Talbot’s book helps us understand the urgency of this di-
lemma, and highlights the continued relevance of medie-
val history in the politics of the past.
DAUD ALI
University of Pennsylvania
DAVID ARNOLD. Toxic Histories: Poison and Pollution in
Modern India. (Science in History.) New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2016. Pp. ix, 241. $49.99.
In Toxic Histories: Poison and Pollution in Modern India,
David Arnold sets out to trace the complex and contin-
gent processes that have shaped the shifting knowledge
and practices relating to poisons and poisoning in India.
Arnold’s aim is to establish that local toxic cultures have
distinct histories, and these histories need to be explored
in an age of deepening “global toxicity,” even while he in-
terrogates Orientalist stereotypes that in the western
imaginary associated India and Indians with an “Oriental
appetite for poison” (7).
Arnold’s book begins with an introduction that is nu-
anced and compelling in its broad sweep. It discloses how
toxic histories have multiple, overlapping genealogies
that are anchored in questions of knowledge and power
and that serve also as critical precursors to recent social
and environmental concerns about poisons and pollution
in India. Arnold argues that these histories are embedded
in the politics of inclusion and exclusion of bodies, popu-
lations, and identities, which in turn have shaped knowl-
edge of poison and its uses. In the first chapter, he traces
the knowledge of poisons in precolonial India from early
poison lore going back to antiquity and from mythologies
that shaped understandings of body physiology and of
poisons as cures; he explores the invocation of poisons in
Hindu myths and Sanskrit scriptures, which were rich in
poison narratives; and finally, he looks at the political im-
agery of nationalist and reformist writing in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries.
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Colonialism, however, figures at the heart of Arnold’s
narrative, as colonialism shaped interpretations and ra-
cialized notions about poisons’ toxicity, its categories and
organization in medical jurisprudence, and its social and
scientific relevance. Arnold further demonstrates that In-
dian subjects responded to and engaged with these moral,
medical, and legal framings with scares and controversies
about poisons, resulting in reconfigured local narratives
and languages of toxicity that also influenced metropoli-
tan ideas. In order to probe those concerns, Arnold care-
fully dissects events and scientific developments at vari-
ous levels of society—which events and developments
were mediated by colonial administrators, jurists, scien-
tific experts, and Indian researchers—and skillfully ties
together public trials and intimate histories.
In the initial chapters, Arnold explores the consolida-
tion of colonial administration from the 1830s, and he
notes that this led to a greater systematization of toxico-
logical knowledge through colonial governance, creating
an epistemic community of European and, later, Indian
experts, and it stimulated new areas of scientific research
and practice, such as forensic chemistry. New bureaucra-
cies, spaces, and institutional frameworks emerged, and
also led to conjunctures of unusual reciprocity and dia-
logue between Indian medical practitioners and Euro-
peans about Indian pharmacology and poisons that de-
veloped against a backdrop of broader distrust of local
humoral theories and therapeutic practices. New sites
and policies to define and shape this emerging knowledge
appeared, such as municipal laboratories to test food and
legislation, and poison laws to check quack druggists or
to seize highway brigands (Thugs). The latter formed the
focus of British preoccupations with native criminal toxic-
ity. These experts were sometimes deployed to stabilize
panics, and to offer scientific proofs at court trials in the
face of unrest and outcries about poisons during epi-
demics, and they also grappled with fears of adulteration
in urban settings.
By the early twentieth century, debates over poisons in
British colonial India closely reflected the evolution of ur-
ban public health and hygiene and changing public per-
ceptions. Arnold tells a fascinating account of the career
and engagements of an Indian chemical examiner work-
ing for the government of Bengal, Chunilal Bose, and de-
scribes what was termed the Bhowanipore food poisoning
case (1903). That case resulted in several deaths among
the city’s elite after a feast in “a prosperous suburb of Cal-
cutta” (164). The case exposed the tensions between Cal-
cutta’s health officer, J. Neild Cook, who attributed the
incident to native negligence and lack of hygiene, and
Calcutta’s respectable classes. Bose led efforts to ques-
tion stereotypes about native hygiene voiced by Cook,
and he set out to identify the roots of the infection, in
turn exposing the “contours of class” (166) that shaped
concerns regarding poisoning, specifically, concerns cen-
tered on insanitary food and food adulteration.
It is in the last chapters, though, that Arnold delivers
fully on the promise he makes at the beginning of the
book. He explores the social and economic shifts that un-
derlie these shifting tropes about poisons, focusing on the
JUNE 2017