BOOK REVIEWS—SOUTH ASIA 541

successors were. In the eighteenth century, merchant capitalists withdrew their

support of regional states, such as Bengal, and allowed the British to take over these
territories. In the period that followed it was the support that merchant capital
provided to the British that enabled them to become masters of India. The villains
were the merchant capitalists (p. 58).
Jalal and Bose also differentiate between negative Orientalism and positive
Orientalism. They particularly single out the work of Sir William Jones and the

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Asiatic Society of Bengal as an example of what is positive Orientalism since Jones
"did not regard Indian culture and civilization as inferior" (p. 78). At the same time
the authors soft-pedal the idea that the British were the basis of all modern social
categories in India. But they still feel that the idea of the "Indian Muslim" nonetheless
comes from this Orientalist environment. Because the category was both religious and
political, it "encouraged them [Muslims] to lay emphasis on their religious identity
in putting forward political claims" (p. 109). But the authors conclude that not all
the political and social stirrings in modern India are attributable to the colonial
stimulus.
They are against Partha Chatterjee's idea of "colonial difference." They show, for
instance, that Indian intellectuals of the early twentieth century "were clearly seeking
alternative routes of escape from the oppressive present, not all of which lay through
creating illusions about our past and denouncing their [i.e., Western} modernity" (pp.
112—13, emphasis in original).
This book proceeds on the assumption that juridical power (economic, violent,
or legal) is in the hands of the state at the top. We can call this school the "sovereignty
school." Another school suggests that power or knowledge that has been constructed
comes from below. We can call this school the "pastoral school." This school suggests
that there are points where society and the state become identical and seek to "protect
itself," either for good or for evil. The point is that discourse does the work, not the
state. The enhanced position of women in Kerala (and elsewhere) was not a direct
result of state behavior. Nor is the fact that Tamil Nadu is approaching zero
population growth a result of state action. Finally, the enormous social, religious, and
bodily transformation that occurred in the Gangetic core in the last three centuries
was the result of knowledge and self-defenses produced from the bottom up.
E U G E N E F. IRSCHICK
University of California, Berkeley

Tipu Sultan's Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain. By
KATE B R I T T L E B A N K . Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. xxii, 184 pp.
Rs. 450 (cloth).

As Kate Brittlebank suggests, Tipu Sultan (1750—99) may well be one of the
best-known but least understood figures in the history of modern India. Colonial
British historiography has represented the powerful ruler of Mysore as a tyrannical
villain and usurper, an assessment clearly tinged by the memory of four Anglo-Mysore
wars against Tipu and his father Hyder Ali and by the knowledge that the latter—
for all his military genius—was ultimately an upstart who had opportunistically
wrested power from the state's legitimate Wodeyar dynasty. Alternately, an opposing
heroic image of Tipu has been constructed by nationalist historians in South Asia—
both in Pakistan, where he has been appropriated as a shahid who died resisting the
542 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

infidels, and in India, where he is often represented as an enlightened ruler who

embraced the West's industrial technology in an attempt to modernize the nation. In
this welcome study, Brittlebank rejects all such modern representations and sets out
instead to examine Tipu's representations of himself, particularly as they relate to "his
search for legitimacy and his adoption in the mid-1780s of the grand title of Padshah"
(p. A). Brittlebank's focus on legitimacy is especially productive, given the status of
Tipu and his father as parvenu rulers for whom questions of authority and legitimacy

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would have had a particular relevance. The book thus represents an important
departure from earlier studies of the eighteenth century, that, in accounting for the
rise of regional states, have tended to privilege socioeconomic and political-
administrative factors to the exclusion of ideological and ritual ones.
In part 1, "Path to Legitimacy," Brittlebank sets the stage for her analysis by
providing a largely descriptive account of Tipu's rise to power, beginning with a
narrative of events from the decline of the Wodeyars and the rise of Hyder Ali to
Tipu's accession and the early years of his reign (chapter 1, "Ascent"). An intriguing
counterpoint is offered by chapter 2 ("Context"), with its discussion of the religious
and cosmological beliefs that provided the context for some of Tipu's actions;
especially insightful here are Brittlebank's observations on the cosmological
underpinnings of practices that are more commonly dismissed as "superstitions"—
including the interpretation of dreams and omens, the use of calligraphic talismans,
and the wearing of astrologically significant gemstones. The narrative thread resumes
in chapter three ("Assertion") with a detailed discussion of the shifting nature of
Tipu's relationships with the deposed Wodeyars, the Mughal emperor in Delhi, and
the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid I in Istanbul. This last chapter also serves as a
natural transition to part 2, "The Expression and Dialectic of Power," in which
Brittlebank analyzes the rhetoric of kingship in another three chapters. Chapter 4,
"Influence and Control," is devoted to Tipu's use of military might (the danda of
traditional Indie theories of kingship) and of incorporative gift-giving to generate
loyalty among his subordinates; her intellectual debt to the ideas of F. W. Buckler,
Bernard Cohn, and Nicholas Dirks is clearly evident here. In chapter 5 ("Kingly
Behaviour"), Brittlebank offers what is to my mind the most original and compelling
aspect of her argument: namely, that Tipu's well-documented interest in collecting
European "curiosities" (ranging from clocks and spectacles to scientific instruments
and even a printing press), as well as his apparent obsession with what have been
called social and administrative reforms (affecting everything from revenue regulations
to the organization of the calendar and systems of weights and measures) may both
be better understood as practices intended to demonstrate the universal nature of his
sovereignty. The final chapter, "Display," turns to the ritual of the darbar and some
of the visual emblems of sovereignty used by Tipu, including the well-known tiger
motif and solar symbols. Interestingly, Brittlebank's analysis of the tiger emblem
suggests that it was this device's multivalence and the largely congruent nature of its
significance within the Islamic and Indie traditions that led to its wholesale adoption
by Tipu. Thus, the tiger had been used as a dynastic emblem by several prominent
South Indian ruling houses before Tipu, including the Cholas and Hoysalas (but not,
significantly, the Wodeyars). It was also associated with warrior deities and the s'akti
of the goddess. While on the Islamic side, the tiger stripe was used as a heraldic
device by the Ottoman sultans, and in India at least—where terms for "tiger" and
"lion" are largely interchangeable—would have been associated with Ali, who has as
one of his titles the epithet "the victorious lion [tiger} of God," asad allah al-ghdlib.
 BOOK REVIEWS—SOUTH ASIA 543

Given that Tipu was a Muslim ruling over a traditionally Hindu realm—not to
mention the fact that the book's subtitle is "Islam and Kingship in a Hindu
Domain"—one might expect Brittlebank to have dealt in a more explicit and
sustained manner with the nature of the interplay between "Islamic" and "Hindu"
strategies for legitimation. Although she poses a highly promising series of questions
at the outset ("How, for example, did he appeal to members of both religious
communities? Is such an analytical division in fact valid? What strategies did he

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adopt to assert and bolster his claims in the eyes of both his subjects and his
neighbours?" p. 5), disappointingly, answers to these questions are not developed in
a detailed or systematic way. One wonders, for example, if regular patterns can be
detected in the deployment of legitimizing strategies in those cases where there is no
natural congruence between cultural symbols (as there had been in the case of the
tiger)? Were "Hindu" symbols and practices reserved for use in cases where "internal"
legitimation was sought within the state, while a more purely "Islamic" language of
legitimacy was favored for demonstrations of legitimacy in an "external" context (to
borrow the terminology of Hermann Kulke)? Or, given the long-standing process of
Islamicization we now know to have transformed Hindu courtly culture during the
several centuries before Tipu's rise to power, might it indeed be that the distinction
between "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultural forms is—if not exactly meaningless—at
least problematic enough to demand a more pointed analysis?
This one criticism notwithstanding, Tipu Sultan's Search for Legitimacy will be
welcomed as an invaluable and highly original contribution to an important but
neglected field within Indian history. The book deserves a wide readership among
scholars and students. Thanks to its concise presentation and affordable price, one can
readily imagine it serving as a supplementary text in courses at both the graduate and
undergraduate levels.

PHILLIP B. W A G O N E R
Wesleyan University

Enslaved Daughters: Colonialism, Law and Women's Rights. By S U D H I R

CHANDRA. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. xiii, 249 pp. $29-95
(cloth).

Sudhir Chandra's book is an in-depth analysis of the Rukhmabai case, which posed
a radical challenge to orthodox Hindu and colonial opinion on the woman's question.
At the age of twenty-two Rukhmabai refused to recognize a marriage that had been
performed when she was eleven to Dadaji Bhikaji, arguing that she had not consented
to the marriage. This unleashed a long and complex battle for the "restitution of
conjugal rights" in the Bombay High Court that began on March 18, 1884 and ended
rather anticlimactically in July 1888, when Dadaji accepted two thousand rupees from
Rukhmabai and agreed not to execute a court decree for Rukhmabai's imprisonment.
In the process, as Chandra shows in this meticulously researched and sensitive work,
the ambivalent role of Anglo-Indian law as a highly compromised agent of social
change was revealed. Rukhmabai's challenge to Hindu orthodox (and oftentimes
reformist) conceptions of child marriage, conjugal duty, and sexuality was muted,
Chandra argues, due to the combined force of procedural incompetence, bureaucratic
inertia, and conservative public opinion.