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 MYTHS AND PLACES

This volume explores the dialogic relationship between myths and places in the
historically, geographically, and culturally diverse context of India.
Given its ambiguous relationship with ‘facts’ and empirical reality, myth has
sufered an uncertain status in the feld of professional history, with the latter’s
preference for scientifsm over more creative orders of representation. Myths and
Places rehabilitates myth, not as history’s primeval ‘Other’, nor as an instrument
of socio-religious propagation, but as communitarian mechanisms by which
societies made sense of themselves and their world. It argues that myths helped
communities fashion their identities and their habitat/habitus and were fashioned
by these in turn. This book explores diverse forms of territorial becoming and
belonging in a grassroots approach from across India, studying them in culturally
sensitive ways to recover local life-worlds and their self-understanding. Further,
challenging the stereotypical bracketing of the mythical with the sacred and the
material with the historical, the multidisciplinary essays in the book examine myth
in relation to not only religion but other historical phenomena such as ecology,
ethnicity, urbanism, mercantilism, migration, politics, tourism, art, philosophy,
performance, and the everyday.
This book will be of interest to scholars and general readers of Indian history,
regional studies, cultural geography, mythology, religious studies, and anthropology.

Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural and intellectual historian of early India. She is

Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India,
and has also been the Malathy Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies
at Yale University, USA; the Jan Gonda Fellow in Indology at Leiden University,
The Netherlands; and the DAAD Professor of History at Heidelberg University,
Germany.

She has authored The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the
Rajatarangini (2018) and Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early
India (2010) and edited Retelling Time: Alternative Temporalities from Premodern
South Asia (2021), Eloquent Spaces: Meaning and Community in Early Indian
Architecture (2019), and Cultural History of Early South Asia (2014). Translations
by her include Hitopadesha (2022) and Looking Within: Life Lessons from Lal Ded,
the Kashmiri Shaiva Mystic (2019).
MYTHS AND PLACES
New Perspectives in Indian
Cultural Geography

Edited by Shonaleeka Kaul

First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Shonaleeka Kaul; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Shonaleeka Kaul to be identifed as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-71200-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-06985-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-20484-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003204848
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 Śrīkr. s. nārpa
. namastu
.

For Jim . . . always

 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix
List of Contributors x
Preface xii

Introduction 1

1 Reclaiming Myth, Emplacing History 3

SHONALEEKA KAUL

Hills and Mountains 17

2 The Mountain Numen: Myth and Everyday Life in Kangra

and Chamba 19
JYOTI BALA

3 Toponymic Tales: Myth, Memory, and Place-Making

in Monyul 36
SWARGAJYOTI GOHAIN

Plains and Deserts 51

4 Ecology, Mythic Imagination, and Kṛṣṇa Worship in

Early Mathurā 53
SHONALEEKA KAUL

5 The First Rajput Hero: Hammīra and the Making

of Rajasthan 75
SANDER HENS

vii
 CONTENTS

Rivers and Forests 103

6 Myths of Purity and the Miracle of Water by the Banks of

the Ganga-Yamuna 105
LAV KANOI

7 Between Earth and Sky: The Kuinka Narrative of Origin

and Self in Belgar 126
SAVYASAACHI

Cities and Coasts 143

8 Kāśī as Space and Notion in Hindu, Buddhist, and

Jaina Myths 145
ANAGHA KINJAVADEKAR

9 Tales of Two Cities: Valabhī and Dhārā as Narrated in the

Prabandhacintāmaṇi 165
MANA SHAH

10 The Patriarch King: Myths from a Jewish Homeland in

Kodungallur 183
SHANTO SANKAR

11 Myth as Palimpsest: Performance and Provenance of the

Tamil Śilappadikāram 200
SEETHA VIJAYAKUMAR

Supra-Region 215

12 Peregrination as Pedagogy: Ādi Śaṃkarācārya’s Digvijaya

and the Idea of India 217
SHONALEEKA KAUL

viii
 ILLUSTRATIONS

2.1 The Shrine of Pahāṛiyā, Maniala Village, Hamirpur. 25

2.2 The Idol of Pahāṛiyā, Maniala Village, Hamirpur. 27
3.1 Frozen Sela Lake, Tawang. 44
3.2 Restored Old Name, Dirang, West Kameng. 47
4.1a Govardhan Hill, Mathura. 57
4.1b Bird’s-Eye View of Govardhan Hill, Mathura. 57
4.2 River Yamuna, Vrindavan. 59
4.3a Kinship Triad, Kushana Period, Mathura. 64
4.3b Kinship Triad, 9th Century, Atranjikhera. 65
5.1 Hammīra Receives the Mongol Mahimāśāhi (Mehamā,
Right Corner), Illustration to Hamīrhaṭha (ca. 1840, Guler). 84
5.2 ‘Third Jauhar’ of Chittor (1568), Illustration to
Akbarnama (ca. 1590–5). 88
8.1 Kāśī Maṇḍala. Sacred Yatras: Directional Deities. 155
8.2 Kāśī Maṇḍala. 56 Vināyakas and 3 Khaṇḍas. 156
9.1 7th-Century Nandī Excavated from Valabhī. 169
9.2 10th-Century Śiva Temple Built by King Bhoja at Bhojpur. 172
10.1 Kodungallur Rāja Welcomes the Jews. 189
12.1 Some Places Associated with Ādi Śaṃkarācārya and His
Digvijaya. 225
12.2 Shankaracharya Temple, Srinagar. 229

ix
 CONTRIBUTORS

Jyoti Bala is Assistant Professor of History, DAV Kangra College, India,

and a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi.
Swargajyoti Gohain is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India, and author of Imagined Geogra-
phies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Place.
Sander Hens is a postdoctoral candidate at the Department of Languages
and Cultures (South Asia), Ghent University, Belgium, and is a member
of the research group SANGH (South Asia Network Ghent).
Lav Kanoi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology and
the Yale School of the Environment at Yale University, New Haven, USA.
He is the translator of The First Book of Virgil’s Aeneid to English and
Sukumar Ray’s Pagla Dashu and Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea to
Hindi.
Shonaleeka Kaul is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaha-
rlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She is the author of The Mak-
ing of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini and
Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early India and has edited
and translated fve other volumes.
Anagha Kinjavadekar is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Historical
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
Shanto Sankar is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History, Sree
Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kaladi, India.
Savyasaachi is a former Professor of Sociology at Jamia Millia Islamia, New
Delhi, India, and editor of Intractable Conficts in Contemporary India:
Narratives and Social Movements and Between the Earth and the Sky:
Penguin Book of Forest Writings.

x
 CONTRIBUTORS

Mana Shah is Assistant Professor of Sanskrit at the Indian Institute of Tech-

nology, Gandhinagar, India.
Seetha Vijayakumar is Assistant Professor of English at N.S.S. College
Pandalam, University of Kerala, India. She is the translator of Sylvia
Plath’s The Bell Jar and Pablo Neruda’s Love Poems into Malayalam
and co-editor of Writing Lives, Rewriting Times: Mapping Women’s
Responses from South Asia.

xi
 PREFACE

The fascination that mythology traditionally holds for people at large in this
country is often in direct contrast to the suspicion with which it is regarded
by historians. Caught between a colonial high history that has disowned
it and a popular fction that has assimilated it to fgment in recent times,
myth’s recovery as a historical vector and epistemic mode in its own right
has been imperilled. Myths and Places is a deemed response to this situation.
It arises from two decades of my being in and thinking about the discipline
of history, and also pondering over the cultural and emotional signifcance
of places and what Robert Goldman called the ‘realities of fantasy’ that
were often more keenly felt than those of history and geography. Myths are
efective in so far as they are afective, as Ernest Renan once said, yet they
had been considerably stripped bare of this content in academia to serve a
philosophy of history that preferred value judgments and reduction of cul-
tural forms to power.
Dubbed irrational, primitive, superstitious, un-dateable, and untrue, myth
has often been discredited either as relaying an unhistorical obscure past
of little value or relevance today or as mediating relationships of inequity
between and within communities. It has tended to be seen not as the self-
expression of a people, but typically as a veiled, ulterior project – a result
perhaps of the modern historian’s ‘perturbation at their own inheritance’.
As the Introduction explains, this volume proposes departing from these
approaches and rehabilitating myth, not as history’s primeval Other, nor as
an instrument of power and acculturation, but as communitarian mecha-
nisms by which societies made sense of themselves and their world. Myths
and Places recovers local self-understandings from mythicized narratives of
landscapes. In the process, it redresses history’s cultivated disconnect from
a cultural construct that was – and is – obviously central to the beliefs and
practices, the imagination and lived lives, of diverse groups of Indians across
space and time.
Now, taking such a critical and emic perspective, that too on an issue
as emotive as myth relating to real places, may well be vulnerable to the
casting of extra-academic aspersions today. This became unexpectedly

xii
 PREFACE

apparent during the process of peer review of the manuscript where, while
other scholars warmly endorsed the robust project, one worthy lamented
that this volume did not serve socio-political causes after their heart! At
Myths and Places, we take this as a compliment. In the deeply polarized
times we live in, any attempt at a fresh take on India’s past, which is
invested in faithfully representing historical traditions rather than a priori
ideological positions, runs the risk of getting sucked into political battles,
which are often themselves about power in and through academia. Here
is a risk that must be defed, or we run the greater risk of not only acqui-
escing in the subjugation of history to politics but losing out on authentic
perspectives to recover a people’s history – in this case, also geography – of
the land.
*
It is perhaps ftting that tribute be paid here frst to Professor Brajadulal
Chattopadhyaya, who we lost earlier this year. He was my PhD supervisor,
and one who gave me complete freedom to chart my own way in the virgin
research terrain that literary history was in India back in 2002. BDC, as
he was fondly called, was a rather non-dogmatic, non-aligned historian of
early India – a rare breed – whose work is synonymous with rigour and a
quiet creativity, a desire to do and say something fresh almost every time,
and to let his work do the talking rather than any famboyant activism or
entourage. I would like to believe that my work in general, and this book in
particular, are infused with similar ideals.
I take the opportunity to also acknowledge Professors Phyllis Granof,
Sheldon Pollock, David Shulman, TK Venkatasubramanian, Harbans
Mukhia, the late BP Sahu, and Madhavan Palat for the cultural-intellectual
histories they have done in their own ways and for the warm support they
have extended over the years to those that I do.
Sage India kindly provided permission to reuse what is Chapter 4 here,
which frst appeared in Indian Historical Review in 2015. All the other
essays are put together for Myths and Places, for which I thank and con-
gratulate my contributors. They rose to the occasion in embracing the man-
date of this book and all my very many ideas and suggestions. Government
Museum, Mathura, arranged one of the pictures of the Kinship Triad used
in Chapter 4 for which I thank Acting Director Yashwant Singh Rathore.
Vinay Gupta, Ananta Vrindavan Das, and Bala Menon graciously provided
their consent for printing other images in the volume. Sushant Bharti read-
ily helped with the same, and Abhilaksh Verma promptly took photographs
at my behest. Shikha Rai was instrumental in executing the map carried in
Chapter 12, while Tanmay and Shaan provided bibliographic inputs. I am
grateful to them all.

xiii
 PREFACE

My father, the late Sumer Kaul, was a proud Indian. A staunchly inde-
pendent journalist of integrity, he continues to be an inspiration for not only
the daughter but the professional in me. My husband, Nachiketa, remains a
warm champion of my work. Our dogs have made the journey of life a joy
and grace. Just before this book could go to print, on 27 November, 2022,
I lost beloved Jim. Myths and Places is dedicated to this angel who kept me
alive every single day for the ten blessed years he gave me with him.
I thank God for these people and this book.
Shonaleeka Kaul
1 December 2022

xiv
INTRODUCTION
 1
RECLAIMING MYTH,
EMPLACING HISTORY

Shonaleeka Kaul

The Native American poet and literary critic Paula Gunn Allen once asked:
“Is it we who invent the stories and thus inform the land? Or does the
land give us the stories, thus inventing us?” (1997: 357). Substitute ‘myths’
for ‘stories’, and this is precisely the dialogic, disentanglable relationship
between myths and places that this volume sets out to explore in the histori-
cally, geographically, and culturally diverse context of India.
Myth may be broadly defned as the stories told by a specifc cultural group
to comprehend and articulate their experience of the world they inhabit.
From the ancient Greek ‘mythos’, meaning ‘story’ or ‘plot’, the word was
originally applied, at some variance from its modern connotations, to narra-
tives both sacred and profane, both imaginary and true. Again, contrary to
the primitivist associations lent to mythology by the rationalist anxieties of
modernity, historically all cultures – not only ‘traditional’ or non-literate or
‘socially naïve’ ones given over to superstition – gave rise to myths. Myth-
making was (and is) a crucial heuristic process of meaning-making and con-
fguring reality with its own rationale for any society.
Ironically, this would apply even to the contemporary modern era
which sports what Jason Josephson-Storm (2017) has called the myth of
disenchantment, a misplaced belief that modernity has truly shed faith in
magic, mystery, and wonder. This ‘departure of the supernatural’ (2017: 4),
believed to be emblematic of modernity, has also been a prominent element
of secularization, which has gone hand in hand with modernization based
on the Western experience of the same. Here religion and the supernatural –
and by extension myth – have been posited as opposed to the limits of rea-
son and progress.
Back in premodernity, dealing centrally with nature and with accounts of
the “origins”, “destinies”, and mysteries of humankind and the universe,
myths were sometimes deeply rooted in a phenomenology of the land and
the ecology. They could, however, invoke supernatural forces as well, usu-
ally wedding the two seamlessly. Signifcantly, even if or when a culture no
longer believed that its myths were literally true explanations, the stories
often survived as receptacles of important cultural values – and that was

3 DOI: 10.4324/9781003204848-2
 SHONALEEKA KAUL

perhaps the whole point of myth as a vector of value (Ross Murfn and
Supriya Ray 2003: 284). Myths were thus expressive, culturally accepted
ways of knowing and being.
Reaching beyond the limits of verifcation or refutation, myth then may
often have been not about the real as true but about the noble as true, as
Paul Veyne (1988) perceptively observed for the ancient Greeks. Ancient
Indians even asked: What is real and true? And their answer went beyond
the contingent to the transcendent, that is, beyond the empirical and ephem-
eral to the ethical and eternal (Kaul 2018a, 2022). Myths were thus more
than real. They were about that in which, socially speaking, “something
new, strong and signifcant was manifested” (Eliade 1963: 19). They thereby
epitomized cultural curiosity and virtuosity.
Therefore the inclusion of myth in ancient Indic narratives, far from being
a lapse in critical judgment, served a crucial purpose. Its function included
not only making sense of their world for a people but enshrining and trans-
mitting community and ultimately civilizational paragons – a seminal aspect
of identity formation for any demographic group. Here myth acted inextri-
cably in concert with orality and collective memory, those other categories
of scholarly analysis which, like myth, have until recently been confned to
the margins of the conventional discipline of history.
We know that the felds of folkloristics, anthropology, and religious stud-
ies have all long invested in the study of myth as a key to understanding
cultures from the inside. However, given its ambiguous, often symbolic and
subjective rather than literal relationship with ‘facts’ and empirical real-
ity, myth has sufered a somewhat uncertain status in the feld of history,
especially in the manner in which the latter has been ‘professionally’ prac-
tised since at least the 19th century, if not earlier. Indeed myth has perhaps
always been regarded as something of an antithesis and anathema, hence
the loaded binary of ‘historical versus mythical’. As Joseph Mali (2003)
explains for the world stage:

In the long history of historiography, the basic categories of both

myth and history have always been defned antithetically, as if
myth was all fabrication and pure fction and therefore a spurious
description of what merely appears to have happened, whereas his-
tory was a serious and reliable explanation of what actually hap-
pened insofar as its empirical sources and discourses were veritable.
Assuming thus . . . critical historians from Thucydides to Ranke as
well as all their modern followers, have commonly failed to account
for these archaic modes of historical comprehension and composi-
tion [myths] . . . what higher metaphysical truths they served, and,
ultimately, why they still persist in the collective imagination and
cultural traditions of all religions, nations and civilizations.
(2003: xii)

4
 R E C L A I M I N G M Y T H , E M P L A C I N G H I S T O RY

No doubt this has a good deal to do with the fact that Rankean history, or
‘scientifc historiography’, came to be a colonial project, even an agent of
Empire, in so far as it helped construct epistemologies of Otherness (Kaul
2021). Thus we were told that there were societies that possessed history
and those that had (only) mythology! Through the works of Imperialist-
Orientalist scholars like James Mill, H. H. Wilson and others, India was,
in efect, developed as an excellent example of the latter. (See Kaul 2018b.)
What’s more, as I have explained elsewhere (2021), this project of history
has outlasted Empire itself by enshrining a deeply empiricist and exclusion-
ary self-defnition as hegemonic even today, one that privileges certitudes,
verifability, and linearity, underwritten, in some measure, by Semitic theol-
ogies and mensuration. This defnition, complete with what Ethan Kleinberg
et al. (2018) have called history’s “disciplinary essentialism” and “methodo-
logical fetishism”, delegitimizes and brackets out the alternative visions and
modes of representing the past that fourished in premodern India. Instead,
the modern ‘global’ discipline of history set up the tyranny of the ‘fact’, of
scientifc method, chronology, objectivity, and rational causality – prime
but fraught emblems of a ‘modern/Western’ intellect. In classic circularity,
non-European, premodern cultures and their texts ended up being heav-
ily misinterpreted in the process, furthering the production of the colonial
Other (Kaul 2021: 3).
To repeat, while the mythological occupied a discrete place in ancient and
medieval worlds and was understood to perform certain central social func-
tions, the post-Enlightenment obsession with rationalism and scientifsm1
as against more creative orders of imagination, and the concomitant, resil-
ient hold of Positivism over professional history-writing, brought about for
the modern historian the instant and overwhelming delegitimation of any
cultural form that did not pass the test of objectivism and facticity. (See Kaul
2018a, 2021.) Myth, especially in ‘traditional’ non-Western societies, did
not just fall from grace in the process; it also came to be exoticized as the
practice of primitive people who became objects of the colonial gaze.
**
In India, a case in point would be some of the older readings of myth found
in texts like the Vedas and Puranas, by Orientalists like W. J. Wilkins of
the London Missionary Society (1882, 1900) and A. B. Keith of the Asi-
atic Society (1916). While these tended to document in the abstract mostly
Hindu but also Buddhist and Jaina myths, they clearly struggled with what
was for them the alien character of the Indic mythological enterprise. The
result was stereotyping assessments and pejorative, comparative comments
such as the following:

Gods and demons were very present to the mind of the Indian then
as they are today . . . [there exists] the essential vagueness of many

5
 SHONALEEKA KAUL

of the fgures of Indian mythology: the mysticism of Indian concep-

tion tends ever to a pantheism alien to the clear-cut creations of the
Hellenic imagination.
(Keith 1916: 6)
And:

I feel that a mere statement of much that was written in books pro-
fessedly inspired by God, carried its own condemnation. And at the
same time . . . amid much evil, there was also much good. The sages
of India were not in complete darkness. . . . [But] As we examine
the earlier writings . . . instructive to note the marked deterioration
in the quality of the teaching [later].
(Wilkins 1900: vii)

Post-Independence, as scientifc temper and modernization became some-

thing of a patriotic duty in a nation whose ‘soul, long suppressed, had
now found utterance’, scholars like the Marxist mathematician-historian
D. D. Kosambi (1962) and the archaeologist H. D. Sankalia (1973) crea-
tively engaged with the question of whether myths were truly divorced from
reality or somehow connected with it. Kosambi’s work also explored cul-
tural continuities from the past to the present through the medium of living
myths. The enquiry into the relationship between myth and reality is in fact
essentially the question that has consumed, with difering results, scholars
of the two Indian epics, the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, as well as the
Purāṇas, in their search for historicity in and of a genre that, ironically, in its
self-understanding, had no doubts about its historical nature and function
(see Lal 1973; Chattopadhayaya 1975–76; Bhargav 1982; Pollock 1993;
Dikshit 2003).
Of course, it is another question – fundamental yet moot – whether these
master texts of Indic civilization, which call themselves itihāsa-purāṇa, or
ancient narratives on the past/history (literally: ‘thus it was’), should be
classed as mythology in the frst place. However, as materialist historiog-
raphy in India took over from more culturally embedded approaches to
indigenous narratives, it found itself embracing and reproducing colonial
perspectives in strange ways. Thus myth journeyed from being a victim
of colonial power to being regarded as an instrument of the propagation
of power within Indian society itself. Such a position also seemed to mir-
ror in the 1970s the post-structuralist explication of a knowledge/power
nexus. Myth came to be treated by this school of thought as an agent of
acculturation and hegemonization by postulated superior, expanding social
groups over other native groups deemed to be less advanced materially and
culturally.
A powerful example of this approach is Romila Thapar’s study of the
Rāmāyaṇa (1978) which appeared under the auspices of The Mythic Society.

6
 R E C L A I M I N G M Y T H , E M P L A C I N G H I S T O RY

Though making a case for taking seriously this deemed mythological text,
Thapar argued that the men of Ayodhya and the demons of Lanka together
with the monkeys of Kishkindha represented real, contrasting social groups
in confict, namely, agrarian ‘Aryans’ aggressing against forest-dwelling
non-Aryan ‘tribals’, respectively. Similarly, Vijay Nath (2001) argued that
Sanskrit Purāṇas were an acculturative instrument for the imposition of
“mainstream civilization” and “brahmanization” on “tribal societies” to
facilitate the spread of agriculture. As Christopher Minkowski (2001: 94)
put it, this is “as if brahmins were a species of benefcial, exotic plant or
insect”! It could also be wondered how an essentialist and instrumentalist
position such as this could be sustained on the back of a genre (the Purāṇas)
that, it is well known, was an amorphous and heterogenous compilation
of free-foating oral narratives and encyclopaedic materials over centuries,
if not millennia. Yet this is how these texts are seen even today, in other
infuential studies of religious process in early India, as some kind of orches-
trated project of power and domination, be it based on caste, ethnicity,
state, or gender (Sahu 2001; Chakrabarti 2001; Sharma 2008, Shin 2018;
for a pithy critique of hierarchical and instrumentalist interpretations of the
Purāṇas, see Shulman 2003).
However, some scholars like the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1986)
have signifcantly called out this obsession with hierarchy in studying India
and cautioned that concepts like legitimation, acculturation, and indeed
Sanskritization as the prime vehicle of such acculturation in the Indian sub-
continent have become “theoretical metonyms” and surrogates for Indian
civilization as a whole, “gate-keeping concepts” thought to apply to every
socio-cultural process. This approach then perhaps limits the full potential
for apprehending what was in fact a complicated compound of local reali-
ties (Appadurai 1986: 356–360).
And this is why, tempting though the materialist approaches to reading
Indic mythology may be, they remain speculative, running the risk of force-
ftting a sociological narrative on the textual intent, rather than tapping the
semantic potential of a less literal and riven reading, aligned with the text’s
didactic purpose and strategies of representation instead. For example, the
Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock (1986, 1991) pointed out a needed corrective
to interpretations of the Rāmāyaṇa by reminding us of what the text itself
may have been aiming at, namely, the pedagogical depiction of righteous-
ness via Ayodhya and Lanka – alternative ideals and models of emotion
and behaviour (disciplined and afective versus licentious and unbridled) as
symbolized ethical choices before one and the same society/audience rather
than a portrayal of two real and antagonistic social groups.
In fact it can be argued that ethics and didacticism lay at the heart of not
just Indic mythology but Indic historical visions as well, as seen in itihāsa
purāṇa but also other historical texts like the Rājataraṅgiṇī. This has been
discussed at length elsewhere (Kaul 2018a, 2018b, 2022). These ethics

7
 SHONALEEKA KAUL

inscribed cultural truth-claims. And the stories bearing and projecting these
truth-claims must be understood as “not dogmatic but dramatic stories of
tradition” whose social utility lay precisely in their dramatic reactivation of
the community’s original motivations (Victor Turner paraphrased by Mali
2003: 6).
Similarly, R. P. Goldman (1986) and Alf Hiltebeitel (1989) argued for crea-
tive ways of reading myth in connection with symbolic constructions put on
the city of Mathura in the Epics and the Purāṇas. For Goldman, Mathura and
its environs served a “symbolic, even metaphysical function” in myth and

provided us with an enchanted landscape . . . a profound and pow-

erful inner realm. . . . It is in this sense that the very real and ancient
urban settlement of Mathura is at the same time more powerfully
a city of the heart.
(1986: 482–483)

Goldman signifcantly spoke of the “cultural and emotional signifcance of

a place important in literature” and of the “realities of fantasy” that were
“often far more keenly felt” than those of history and geography (1986:
471). Myths were thus “efective in so far as they were afective”, to borrow
Ernest Renan’s insightful comment about myths surrounding the French
Revolution (1939: 190–203).
However, these interventions, all by scholars who, tellingly, belong to
disciplines other than history, have remained largely unrecognized in the
historical mainstream in India, where myth has come to be considerably
decontextualized in the name of being historicized, wreaking what T. S.
Eliot may have called a “dissociation of sensibility”. Joseph Mali argues
that true to worldwide Marxist positions aimed at “exposing and thereby
opposing” historical myths, the still-thoroughly Positivist anxiety has been
perhaps to purge the historical discipline of mythological fallacies (2003: 7).
There has been little place in this binary view for the meanings that the
myths concerned, which typically originated and travelled orally and in
nebulous fragments, may have held for the communities themselves in their
worldviews rather than for interpreting historians deeply imbricated in
those of the 21st century. Appealing for reconciling myth and history once
again, Mali coins the phrase “mythistory”.
Of course taking such a critical position today amidst the deeply polar-
ized politics of history in contemporary India, that too on an emotive issue
such as myth relating to real and often contested places, runs the risk of get-
ting sucked into ideological battles, which are often themselves about power
in and through academia. But this is a risk that must perhaps be braved and
defed or we run the greater risk of not only acquiescing in the subjugation
of history to politics but losing out on emic perspectives to recover a peo-
ple’s history – in this case, also geography – of the land.

8
 R E C L A I M I N G M Y T H , E M P L A C I N G H I S T O RY

Indeed, it is a travesty of the obviously subaltern and complex nature

of so many of the mythologies that abound in Indic history that for many
historians, myth became a top-down imposition on a people rather than an
element of their own daily lived lives and beliefs which were intrinsically tied
to their land and their being, and to which diferent sections of a composite
society could well have subscribed and contributed. A. K. Ramanujan’s
sagacious warning (1990) that when it came to cultural production, the
classical and the folk, the elite and the popular, were but points on a
shifting continuum rather than mutually exclusive oppositions – was ignored.
Instead, an Imperialist prism of power and virtue signalling – rational versus
irrational, modern versus traditional, progressive versus backward people –
was ironically reproduced within the Indian past by the academy in the
form of advanced versus inferior, ‘Great’ versus ‘Little’ Traditions, elite ver-
sus folk, Aryan versus non-Aryan, Sanskritic versus non-Sanskritic, Centre
versus periphery, and so on.
Of course there have been other, more productive approaches to myth in
India, some of which will fnd mention later. But it may be fair to say that
due to the stature of Positivist and materialist historiography in the discipli-
nary mainstream in India, myth has been on the back foot and more or less
discredited, either as relaying an unhistorical obscure past or as mediating
relationships of inequity between and within communities. It has tended to
be seen not as the self-expression of a people but typically a veiled, ulterior
project – a result perhaps of the modern historian’s “perturbation at their
link to their own inheritance” (Terdiman 1993: 3–4). This volume proposes
departing from these approaches and rehabilitating myth, not as history’s
primeval Other, nor as an instrument of socio-religious propagation, i.e. an
instrument of power and acculturation, but as communitarian mechanisms
by which societies made sense of themselves and their world.
As noted before, myths were ways of knowing and being – epistemologi-
cal and ontological devices that remind us that “historical communities . . .
consist in the beliefs that their members have about them[selves] . . . in the
stories they tell about them[selves]” (Mali 2003: 4) and indeed about the
spaces they come to make their own. “A myth is a story that is sacred to
and shared by a group of people who fnd their most important meanings
in it” (Doniger 1988: 27). And its importance stemmed perhaps from the
fact that myth usually contained or referred to certain crucial issues in the
history of the community, such as common ancestry or territory or fertility
or morality or fraternity or heroism – those “practical verities in which the
members of the community all believe and live” (Mali 2003: 4) which found
their way into what Ernst Cassirer (1953) called “an unconscious grammar
of experience”.
Thus myths helped communities fashion their identities and their habitat/
habitus alike and were fashioned by these in turn. Studying myths within the
arena of history but in culturally sensitive ways that do not alienate myth

9
 SHONALEEKA KAUL

or reduce it to something other than itself can provide an important route

for scholars and social groups alike to reclaim regional/local pasts and their
self-understanding. For this, Myths and Places proposes reading myth as
animating ontologies, to borrow Josephson-Storm’s phrase (2017: 5). What
does that mean? It means restoring people and places to their myths and
then working through those myths to understand the people and their
cherished locales. And to do so, for the most part, while staying within the
disciplinary ambit of history and historical texts and testimonies.
**
In the process, not just myth, this volume also hopes to reposition how
historians understand place. The sub-discipline of ‘historical geography’ has
been around in India for several decades now, albeit in a muted fashion,
and evolved through multiple stages (see Chattopadhyaya 1984). Initially, it
began with the yen to identify mountains, rivers, cities, regions, and routes
named in ancient texts with real archaeological locations on the ground. This
has been described as the ‘great age of rediscovery’ and is best associated
with the likes of Alexander Cunningham (1871), J. E. Abbott (1899), and F.
E. Pargiter (1904). This continued in works focused on geographical explo-
rations of ancient Indian texts by N. L. Dey (1927), H. C. Raychaudhuri
(1943), B. C. Law (1954), and D. C. Sircar (1967), among several others.
The methodological concern here was predominantly the compilation, clas-
sifcation, and search for place names found profusely in the earliest Indic
texts like the Vedas and, of course, the Purāṇas. The preoccupation with
establishing the historicity of ancient geographical phenomena is seen well
into our times, in a sense, in the search for the Saraswati River (Suraj Bhan
1972; Mann 1980; Danino 2010) or the submerged city of Dwarka (Rao
1999; Alok Tripathi 2007), both of which sported a good deal of ancient
mythic-narrative signifcance.
A second trend in the 1970s and 1980s consisted of what may loosely be
called regional history-writing, which saw a number of states of the mod-
ern union of India coming in for investigations based on ancient texts and
inscriptions, not all of which entailed mythology. These states included
Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Assam, and so
on (Chattopadhyaya 1984: 14–32), though notably other states/union
territories (UTs) such as Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh,
Mizoram, Manipur, Sikkim. etc., and their sub-divisions have yet to attract
serious and sustained attention from historical geographers. The point to
note is that these studies more or less aligned with modern administrative
units, or at best, with undiferentiated premodern political realms (king-
doms), neglecting in the process ancient culture regions and their defn-
ing attributes, which may have had their own spatial extent and identity
(Chattopadhyaya 1984: 32, 42). The other issue is that most of these stud-
ies (barring some notable exceptions) in the last 150 years failed to relate

10
 R E C L A I M I N G M Y T H , E M P L A C I N G H I S T O RY

geographical information gleaned from early Indic sources to any theoretical

framework (Chattopadhyaya 1984: 38). They also tended to retain a tunnel
vision in disciplinary terms.
**
Addressing all these limitations is the ‘cultural geography’ approach that we
adopt in this volume, which seeks to extend and deepen history’s engage-
ment with the land. The emergence of this subtype of the geographical disci-
pline tallied with the cultural turn in the historical discipline as well over the
last three or four decades. Philosophically and methodologically, this signi-
fes, in the main, replacing quasi-scientifsm with hermeneutics – the search
for meaning and not just ‘facts’, for truth-claims and not just ‘truths’, for
subjectivities as much as verities – and greater recognition of the narrative
engagement with reality, both historical and geographical.
Specifcally, Myths and Places embraces the relatively recent paradigm
of ‘cultural landscape’ – largely used so far in archaeology rather than in
the study of literature or mythology – to now read myth for exploring
the fundamental relationship between stories, peoples, and places. This
involves identifying, through a variety of media, the range of cultural con-
structions that societies cast onto the physical features of a site or region
through myth and memory. To do this is to view the land as landscape,
that is, to understand geography (natural and man-made) as overlaid by
narrative.
To elaborate, myths invoking natural or built features – mountains, for-
ests, rivers, pastures, cities, and villages – generated a sense of place and a
rootedness in the land (Eck 2012: 1). These myths could be local lore or
they could be derived subcontinentally from Epic and Puranic archetypes,
weaving together gods, demigods, kings, peoples, and places, as well as the
past and the present. They flled out and lent tradition to the land, anchor-
ing and orienting its people not only to their own physical world but willy-
nilly to the moral that inhered in these constructed and preserved memories.
Here was myth in its classic role as a teaching tool. Indeed in the Platonic
exposition of myth (‘mythos’), it is considered ethics by other means, which
is needed to charm one into agreement when logic fails to do so (Partenie
2018). And, as Christopher Tilley put it, “Both land and language are
equally symbolic resources drawn on to foster correct social behavior and
values. In narrative, geographical features of the landscape act as mnemonic
pegs on which moral teachings hang” (1994: 33).
The practice of landscape, then, encoded the realm with meanings and
embedded it with cultural knowledge. In a remarkably pan-Indian pattern,
mythology and geography appear as “a joint imaginative and descriptive
undertaking”. Geographical knowledge was “grounded in the mythical
apprehension of the world’s meaning and order” (Eck 2012: 53) even as
myth-making itself was resonant with geographical markers of the land.

11
 SHONALEEKA KAUL

And since geographical awareness comprises a sense of spatial identity and

ownership, myths enacted places in these very historical ways.
Adopting this understanding, Myths and Places traces, through a lim-
ited number of case studies from north, south, east, north-east, and west
India, the ways in which myth transforms abstract space into intimate place.
Averting the pitfalls of geographic determinism as well as of an unadulter-
ated linguistic determinism, this volume insists on a dialectical, mutually
constitutive relationship between geography and culture, mediated by myth.
Further, as mentioned before, since some of these myths could be pan-Indic
in character and others deeply local, this volume also locates the study of
cultural geography in the interplay of the universal and the particular.
**
Recent works in religious studies and anthropology (for example, Eck 1981,
2012; Sax 1991; Shulman 1992; Haberman 1994, 2013; Feldhaus 2003;
Cecil 2020), coming somewhat closer to our approach, have focused admi-
rably on site- or region-specifc myths and the sacred networks these have
spun. Taking this forward, Myths and Places centrally locates its focus on
the concrete relationship between myths and the locales these inhabited
without, however, confning itself to the arena of religion alone.
Of course perhaps “it is the privilege of antiquity to mingle divine things
with human, and so to add dignity to the beginnings . . .”, as Livy famously
pronounced (1919, I, pref, 6–9). Though this volume certainly looks at
sacred centres and the inaugurative myths that inscribe and vivify them (at,
for example, Kāśī), toning down the sacred character of myth, not to say
desacralizing it, may go some way towards collapsing the ‘spiritual versus
materialist’, ‘mythical versus historical’ dichotomous stereotypes with which
the ‘Orient’ has long had to contend. Thus the essays in this volume ofer
an array of myth-related themes where, apart from religion (Chapters 2, 4,
and 8), it is ecology (Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 7), ethnicity (Chapters 3, 5, and
10), urbanism (Chapter 9), mercantilism (Chapter 10), politics (Chapters 5
and 9), tourism (Chapter 3), art (Chapter 4), philosophy (Chapters 6 and
12), and performance (Chapter 11) that intersect with ideology, identity,
representation, migration/mobility, borderlands, orality, language, and the
everyday.
Accordingly it will be evident that Myths and Places attempts to redress
the somewhat chauvinistic binary of history and myth by re-approaching
history through the entry point of myth, exploring the latter as a uniquely
expressive historical mode in its own right, as well as integrating both with
geography in a fulsome way. Indeed it can be argued that a sense of territo-
rial becoming and belonging has perhaps always had less to do with objec-
tive history than with subjective traditions and associations, such as not
only myths but also legends and imageries about the land and its people that
gain currency often precisely through narrativization, textual or otherwise.

12
 R E C L A I M I N G M Y T H , E M P L A C I N G H I S T O RY

This volume sets out to reclaim such modes of territorial becoming and
belonging.
In this context, the phenomenology of several of the mythicized rendi-
tions of places elaborated as landscapes in this volume needs also to be
noted: As readers will see, the immediacy and specifcity of the natural
and constructed elements with which myths put together the spatial imagi-
nary constitute a vivid materiality. So a constant interweaving of the two
discourses, the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, the topographic and the mythic-
narrative, is on display at many, if not all, junctures.
Further, this advanced perspective is applied to a number of new places
from the nooks and corners of India that, studied through their myths, are
presented here for the frst time (Kodungallur, Manyul, Valabhī, Belgar) as
well as a number of older myths around iconic places studied anew, advanc-
ing fresh interpretations of them (Kāśī, Mathurā, banks of Ganga-Yamuna,
Dhārā, Rajasthan, and indeed India). Moreover, a host of creative, mul-
tidisciplinary methods are brought to bear in this volume, including the
philological, epigraphic, art historical, text historical, ethnographic, and
performance studies. And these are enacted in equally variegated geo-
cultural contexts, which the volume packs into fve sections, namely, “Hills
and Mountains”, “Plains and Deserts”, “Rivers and Forests”, “Cities and
Coasts”, and “Supra-region”. While covering northern, southern, western,
central, eastern, and north-eastern regions of India, the studies also relate to
diferent time periods across history, from antiquity to the contemporary,
with a slight slant towards the former; the larger purpose achieved is per-
haps to explore the remarkable continuity and relevance across time of such
fecund communitarian devices as myth.

Note
1 For a succinct discussion of how science itself may not be counterposed to myth
but a form of it, see Mali 2003: 18.

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14
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 [133] Two patriarchial rulers of China (b.c. circa 2300) whose
wise principles of government were immortalised by Confucius.
[134] With the Empress Dowager of China (Eveleigh Nash,
1906).
[135] Since the days of the Emperor Ch’ien-Lung, these
expenses have averaged some forty millions of taels per annum.
Vide “The Times,” special article, 7th Dec., 1909.
[136] The nucleus of this hoard was the money confiscated
from the usurping Regent Su Shun in 1861.
[137] An account of his life was given in a memoir published by
The Times on the 6th October, 1909.
[138] Vide supra, Chapter I., page 12.
[139] It has remained thus in many districts until now, vast
solitudes of ruins being the chief characteristic of a region that,
before the rebellion, supported some thirty million inhabitants.
[140] Subsequently Governor of Formosa.
 INDEX

Actors, Palace, 86, 87, 492

Admiralty, vide Navy
Adviser to the Government, vide Prince Kung; also Prince Ch’un
Adviser to the Regency, vide Prince Ch’un
Aisin Gioros, 4, 6, 167
A-Lu-Te, Empress, 118-132-162
suicide of, 129, 350
Ancestor worship, 134, 328, 473-4
Ancestral shrines, 167
Ancestral tablet, 470, 473-4
Annals of dynasty, vide Dynastic
Annam, 505
Anti-foreign movement, 230, 305, 334, 336;
also vide Boxer movement
An Wei-chun, 171
Astrologers, 387, 471, 485-6
Audiences, procedure at, 58, 75, 77, 103, 111, 113, 188, 408,
412, 452

Banishment, vide Post-roads

Baron von Ketteler, 271, 273, 278, 288, 305, 316, 330, 332, 384
“Benign Countenance,” 53
Berlin, mission to, 383-386
Big Sword Society, 255
Birthday celebrations, 168, 450-1
Black List, 1900, 104
Blood brotherhood, 206, 361
Board of Punishments, 227
Board of Rites, 190, 192, 197, 207
Bombardment of Peking, 297, 344
Book of Odes, quoted, 265
Boxer chiefs, 281, 323, 331, 363, 369-374
Boxer movement, 82, 100, 180, 195, 228, 243, 246-250, 260 to
303, 311-12, 364, 440, 512
British Minister, 215, 228, 241, 503
British Policy, 214-5, 339
Brooks, Revd., 255
Bruce, Sir F., 24
Burial Ceremonies, 17, 19, 61-2, 136, 149, 465, 470, 475
Burning of Legations, 263, 364
Burying Alive, 147, 472

Caligraphy, Edict re, 195

Cantonese, lampooners, 84, 225, 491
reformers, 100, 185, 219, 220, 225, 418
Capture of Peking, 1860, 17 et seq.
Carl, Miss, 290, 492
Censorate, 86, 88, 122, 147, 163, 172, 195, 305, 488, 492, 494,
501, 512
and eunuchs, 82, 109
Chang Chih-tung, 140, 220, 278, 353, 398, 429, 483, 501-6
Chang Yin-huan, 173, 185, 202, 220-1, 228
Chao, Duke, 6
Chao Erh-hsün, 159
Chao Kuang-yin, Emperor, 133
Chao Shu-ch’iao, 256, 258, 269, 298, 324, 357, 364, 366-9, 370
Cheng, Prince, vide Tuan Hua
Ch’en Lien-fang, Dr., 216-19
Ch’en Pao-chen, 186, 196
Ch’en Tu-en, 53
Chia Ch’ing, Emperor, 247
Chia Hsun, Empress, vide A-Lu-Te
Chief Eunuch, vide Eunuchs
Ch’ien Lung, Emperor, 45, 83, 149, 164, 350, 442, 445
Ch’i Hsiu, 260-1, 264-5, 295, 314, 324, 367, 374
Chi Lu, Chamberlain, 361, 402, 415
China’s Foreign Policy, 338
Chinese Resident in Corea, 171, 201
Ching Hsin, 252
Ch’ing, Prince, 99, 104, 256, 259, 271, 278, 334, 342, 372, 374,
384, 438, 447, 450, 456, 473
Ching Shan, 224, 251-303, 327, 413, 478
death of, 251
Ching Yüan-shan, 219
Chi Shou-ch’eng, 255-6, 260, 272, 286, 291
Ch’i Ying, Envoy, 12, 502
Chou Dynasty, 315
Chou Tsu-p’ei, 41
Christianity, 105, 248, 260, 268, 313, 336, 392, 461, 505
Christians massacred, 282, 286, 292, 331, 415
Chuang, Prince, 270, 273, 282, 286, 357, 365, 370
Chu Hung-teng, 311
Ch’ung Ch’i, 118, 350, 351
Ch’ung Hou, 419, 501-2
Chung Li, 257
Ch’un, House of, 5, 158, 164, 446
Ch’un, Prince (brother of Kuang Hsü), 5, 302, 383, 444, 446,
451, 458, 462
Ch’un, Prince (the first), 5, 99, 121-2, 125, 130, 143, 158-65,
167, 446
adviser to Grand Council, 160
death of, 166
Clan Imperial, vide Imperial
Classical essays, vide Examinations
Coast Defences, 100, 328
“Cobbler’s Wax” Li, vide Li Lien-ying
“Cold Palace,” 32, 149
Colleges, 194, 196, 205, 222, 429, 461, 493
Concubines, Palace, 9, 107, 162, 209, 225, 231, 300, 408, 429
(also vide under “Pearl” and “Lustrous”)
Conferences, Palace, 125-6, 297, 457
Confucian system, 64, 136, 213, 226-7, 236, 245, 307, 328,
363, 488, 512
Confucius, 83, 469, 484-5
quoted, 113, 260, 288, 302, 319, 420
Conger, Mrs., 290, 488
Conservative Party, 194, 197, 201-10, 221, 229, 235
Conspiracy of Regents, vide Tsai Yuan
Constitutional Government, 106, 221, 425, 431, 438, 441, 450,
461, 468, 498
Consular Service, British, 339
Corea, 168, 170, 201, 390
Council, Grand, vide Grand
Coup d’état, 169 et seq., 201-210, 213, 438, 451, 505, 511
Court Ceremonies, 58, 75, 130, 153, 168, 178, 206, 208, 212,
218, 355, 412, 450, 462, 492
Court in exile, 97, 344
Court of Astronomers, 34, 117, 493
Court physicians, 217-8, 448, 457
Court’s return to Peking, 353, 357, 394, 399, 404-11, 486
Criminal Code, 431
Czar’s Coronation, 182

Dalai Lama, 448, 452, 454-5

Decrees:—
1860: 24, 26, 27, 28, 29
1861: 34, 42, 44, 45, 46, 54, 60
1864: 67, 86
1865: 60, 62
1866: 89
1869: 92, 93
1872: (T’ung Chih’s majority), 117
1873: (Foreign Ministers’ audiences), 115
1874: (T’ung Chih’s illness), 120
1884: (Dismissal of Prince Kung), 154
 1889: (Position of Emperor’s father), 164
1894: (Tzŭ Hsi’s 60th birthday), 168
(Re Censor An Wei-chun), 175
1898: (Death of Prince Kung), 183
(Chinese versus Manchus), 231
(Coup d’état), 207, 221
(K’ang Yu-wei), 204, 226
(Reform Edicts), 186-7, 196-7, 199
(Re lawsuits), 240
(The Boxers charter), 241, 243
(Tzŭ Hsi’s policy), 237
(Weng T’ung-ho), 188
(Yüan Shih-k’ai), 203
1900: (Heir Apparent), 303
(Boxers Punished), 364, 367
(Disowning Boxers), 331
(Expiatory), 349
(Flight to Hsi-an), 354
(Return to Peking), 357
(Yangtsze Viceroys), 330
1901: (Conversion to Reform), 419-424, 426
(Cancels Boxer Edicts), 375
(Penitential), 376
1902: (Re Jung Lu), 414
(Reforms), 416
1903: (Death of Jung Lu), 437
1905: (Constitutional Government), 431-2
1908: (Death of Kuang Hsü), 460
(Imperial Succession), 462
(Regency), 465
(Tzŭ Hsi’s Valedictory), 467-9
(Valedictory), 461
Déthève, Dr., 217
Diplomatic Body, 241, 265, 335, 401, 412-3, 452, 495
ladies of, 214, 241, 290, 412, 434, 495
District magistrates, 199, 205, 235, 240, 243, 441
“Divine Mother,” 240
Du Chaylard, 268
Dynastic annals, 338, 437, 477

Edicts, vide Decrees

Educational Reform, 430, 505
Elephant, Tzŭ Hsi’s, 454
Elgin, Lord, 12, 24-5
Emperor of Japan, telegram to, 333, 335, 337
Emperor of Russia, telegram to, 333, 335
Emperor’s education, 87, 107, 127, 233
Empress Consort (Tzŭ An), vide Tzŭ An
Empress Dowager, vide Tzŭ Hsi, and Yehonala
Empress Dowager, widow of Kuang Hsü (Lung Yü), 4, 301, 447,
464-5
Empress Grand Dowager (Tzŭ Hsi), 464
Empress Mother, 35, 150, 177
Empress of Kuang Hsü, 163, 177, 209, 301, 346, 447
Empress of the East, vide Tzŭ An
Empress of the West, vide Tzŭ Hsi
En Hai, 271, 288, 305
En Ming, En Ch’u, En Ch’un, En Lin, sons of Ching Shan, 251-
303
Etiquette, vide Audiences, Ceremonies, Court, &c.
Eunuchs, place of origin, 85
all Manchus, 429
Chief Eunuch An Te-hai, 38, 63, 85, 88, 90 et seq., 122,
154, 259
 Li Lien-ying, 82, 84-5, 94-5, 97-8, 208, 267, 300, 453,
472
and Dalai Lama, 448
and Pearl Concubine, 300
and the Navy funds, 169, 196
at Hsi-an, 355, 360
collecting tribute, 402
corrupt practices of, 353, 495
denounced by Censor, 174
during flight of Court, 341
hostility to Emperor of, 100, 179, 199
in disgrace, 102
power of, 103, 151, 162, 360, 435
supports Boxers, 258, 263, 279
Wei Chung, 83
Decree against, 89
duties at audiences, 85
Eunuch Sun, 184, 356
evil influences of, 81 et seq., 119, 494
Memorial denouncing, 107
under K’ang Hsi, 83
under Ming dynasty, 81, 152, 466
European morals, &c., 111, 268
Ever-victorious army, 66
Examinations, system of, 180, 187, 190, 192, 235-6, 429, 484
Extra-territoriality, 430

Flight of Court (1860), 18, 27

(1900), 300, 302, 340-62
Foot-binding, Edict re, 428
Foreign Office, vide Waiwupu and Tsungli Yamên
French Cathedral, Peking, destroyed, 276, 293
Funeral of Hsien-Feng, 38, 61
 Jung Lu, 437
Tzŭ Hsi, 465, 470-5, 515
T’ung Chih, 501

Gendarmerie, Peking, 150, 276

German Emperor, 384
German Minister, vide Baron von Ketteler
Giers, de, Mr., 336
Ginseng, 441
Goddess of Mercy, Tzŭ Hsi as, 455
Gordon, General, 11, 66, 67, 73
Government Gazette, vide Official
Grand Council, 44, 159, 266, 275, 297, 464
Gros, Baron, 25

Han dynasty, 52, 391

Hanlin academy, 282, 293, 483
Hanlin diarist (1860), 14 et seq.
Hart, Sir R., 510
“Heavenly King,” vide Hung Hsiu-ch’uan
Heir Apparent, 253, 255, 257, 274-8, 281, 289, 303-4, 349, 358-
9, 360, 381, 451, 457, 511
deposed, 382
Hereditary rank, 56
Hillier, Sir W., 171
Hills, Eastern, 471
Honan fu, Court at, 399
Honorific titles, Tzŭ Hsi’s, 55, 469, 490
Household, Imperial, vide Imperial
House laws, dynastic, 90, 119, 122, 128, 133, 143, 159, 174,
381, 444, 462
Hsi-an, Court at, 101, 108, 354-5, 358, 492, 496
Hsien-Feng, Emperor, 2, 8, 11, 467
at Jehol, 23, 24, 30
burial, 61, 472
death of, 35, 85
eunuchs under, 85
heir born to, 12
tomb of, 149
Hsüan-hua fu, Court at, 342, 346
Prefect of, 247
Hsüan-T’ung, Emperor, 444, 459, 462
Hsü Ching-ch’eng, 269, 281, 291-2, 294, 307-26, 377
Hsü Shih-ch’ang, 6-7
Hsü Shih-ch’ing, 221
Hsü T’ung, 180-1, 253, 257, 263, 270, 302, 324, 366, 511
Hsü Ying-ku’ei, 190, 197, 202, 207, 232, 246
Hsü Yung-yi, 296
Huai-lai, Court at, 340-3
Huai Ta Pu, 194, 197, 202, 207
Hui Chang, 230
Hui Cheng (Tzŭ Hsi’s father), 2
Hundred Days, the, 213
Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, 67, 69, 71-3

“I-cheng-wang,” 56, 60
I-Ho Yüan, vide Summer Palace
Ili, Russians at, 112, 181, 501-3
Imperial Clan Court, 32, 44, 48, 213
Imperial Clans, 122, 187, 267, 325, 326, 418, 425, 447, 481
Imperial Clansmen, 40, 47, 54, 60, 91, 123, 158, 212, 326, 429
Imperial Commissioner, 370
Imperial Decrees, vide Decrees
Imperial Guards, 38
Imperial Household, tribute to, 86, 97, 99, 104, 359, 361
accounts of, 87, 103, 495
Comptrollers of, 87-8, 121, 151, 251, 259, 457
eunuchs in, 81 et seq.
Imperial Succession, vide Succession
Imperial Tombs, vide Tombs
Incantations of Boxers, 279, 315
Inspector General of Customs, 170, 510
Intermarriage, Chinese and Manchus, 428, 491
International jealousies, 333, 392
Iron-capped princes, 2, 6, 182
Ito, Prince, 391, 438

Jade, Emperor, 258, 270

Jadot, Monsieur, 407, 410-11
James, Professor, 272
Japan, war with, vide Wars
Jehol, Court at, 14 et seq., 27, 439, 484
Imperial Treasures at, 301
Su Shun’s Palace at, 45
 Tsai Yüan conspiracy at, 30-40
Judicial reform, 430, 461
Jung Lu, 121, 124
and Eunuch An Te-hai, 85, 104
and Legations, 224, 266, 285
and Reformers, 221, 223, 231, 440
and Tsai Yüan Conspiracy, 32, 37, 40
and Weng T’ung-ho, 181
at T’ai-Yüan fu, 350, 352
audience with Kuang Hsü, 185
commander-in-chief, 222, 302, 352
death of, 415
his corrupt practices, 352
his daughter, 302, 447, 458
his wives, 274, 352, 458, 493
illness of, 404
in disgrace, 150-1
intimacy with Yehonala, 8, 225
opposes Boxers, 195, 224, 246, 260, 266, 440
relations with Emperor, 295, 352
with foreigners, 334, 413
restored, 168
Tartar General, Hsi-an, 103, 168, 440
telegram to Yangtsze Viceroys, 277
Tzŭ Hsi’s adviser, 224, 246, 297, 354, 387, 413
valedictory memorial, 438-442
Viceroy of Chihli, 188, 440
withholds artillery from Boxers, 284, 291

Kai-Feng, Court at, 104

K’ang-Hsi, Emperor, 37, 48, 74, 146, 190, 268, 346
Kang Yi, 178, 195, 241, 256-300, 354, 365
K’ang Yu-wei, 2, 8, 84, 184
character of, 192
 flight from Peking, 204
plot against Tzŭ Hsi, 198, 225, 244, 293, 421, 440, 445, 511
Kansuh soldiery, 251, 262, 271, 276, 316, 360, 509
Kashgar, fall of, 509
Kauffmann, General, 508
Ketteler, vide Baron von
Kiaochao Bay, seizure of, 193, 390
Ko Pao-hua, 365, 370
Kotow, 111
“Kow-hsing,” s.s., 171
Kuang Hsü, Emperor, minority of, 51, 128, 149
and eunuchs, 82, 85, 110
a prisoner, 207, 211
assumes government, 161, 439
at Hsi-an fu, 358
character of, 105, 143
death of, 128, 443, 460
education of, 127, 152
elected by Tzŭ Hsi, 126, 129, 439
foreign sympathy for, 241
funeral of, 471, 473
his brothers, 386, 515
his concubines, 163
his consort, 163, 177, 209, 301, 346
his disposition, 179, 358, 415
his mother, 166
majority of, 164
marriage of, 161
opposed to Boxers, 269
personal appearance of, 218, 359
physical defects, 128
plots against Tzŭ Hsi, 198, 202
relations with Chang Chih-tung, 278
 Heir Apparent, 281
Jung Lu, 352
Pearl Concubine, 300
Reformers, 181, 424
proposed deposition of, 252, 257, 274
relations with Tzŭ Hsi, 176, 438, 449
sickness of, 216, 383, 443-4, 448, 459
succession to, 462
Kuanshih, Court at, 340
Kuan Wen, 68
Kuei Ching, 119, 121
Kuei Hsiang, Duke, 6, 161, 209, 415
Kuei Liang, 24-5, 41
Kuei Pao, 120
Kung, Duke, 357
Kung, Prince (candidate for Throne, 1908), 5, 458
Kung, Prince (son of Tao-Kuang), 20, 126, 178
Adviser to the Government, 56, 154
assists Yehonala against Tsai Yuan, 33 et seq.
at Jehol, 32
death of, 183
degraded, 59, 155
his daughter, Princess Imperial, 56, 95
in retirement, 157
plenipotentiary, 27-29
quarrels with Tzŭ Hsi, 95, 149, 488
re-instated, 61, 63
K’un Ming Lake, 178, 204

Lake Palace, 206

Lan-chou fu, 372, 396, 509
Lan, Duke, vide Tsai Lan
Lawsuits, edict re, 239
Legation Guards, 256, 313, 332
Legations at Peking, 110, 214, 263, 271 et seq., 298, 433
Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 196, 208, 327, 505
Liao Shou-heng, 178, 185
Li Ching-fang, 173
Lien Yuan, 296
Li Hsiu-ch’eng, 69, 71-73
Li Hung-chang, 76-7, 99, 100, 123, 170, 172, 176, 192, 201,
239, 336, 384, 387-9, 434, 501, 505
death of, 399
Li Hung-tsao, 156, 180, 193
Li Lien-ying, vide Eunuchs
Lin Hsü, Reformer, 202, 205
Li Ping-heng, 102, 246, 286, 292, 293-4, 297, 343, 348, 366,
505
Li, Prince, 157, 178, 262, 271, 275, 292
Li Shan, 269, 285, 296
Literati, 213, 235, 398, 418, 425, 492, 502
Li Tuan-fen, 202, 228-9
Liu Kuang-ti, 202
Liu K’un-yi, Viceroy, 220, 233, 274-5, 279, 327, 334, 395
Li Wan-ts’ai, 69
Lu Ch’uan-lin, 354, 358-9, 458
Lü, Empress, 52
Lü Hai-huan, 385
Lung Yü, Empress, 150, 177, 301, 464-5
“Lustrous” Concubine, 163, 408, 452

Magic arts of Boxers, 247, 261, 279

Mahomedan rebellion, 74, 117, 321, 503, 507-509
Ma Hsin-yi, 78
Manchu Field Force, 131, 167, 305
Clansmen, 4, 268
soldiery, 182, 228, 271
Manchurian provinces, 170, 176, 396, 490, 503, 507
Manchus versus Chinese, 166, 230, 270, 421, 427, 477
Masquerades, vide Palace Theatricals
Mausolea, vide Tombs
Ma Yu-k’un, General, 302, 343
Memorials:—
An Wei-chun, 172
Censorate, 271
Hsü Ying-ku’ei, 192
Hui Chang, 230
Jung Lu, 350, 436, 438-42
Li Hung-chang, 389
Li Tuan-fen, 229
Prince Ch’un, 165, 384
Re Eunuchs, 86, 88, 107
Southern Viceroys, 394-5
Tseng Quo-fan, 72, 74
Wu K’o-tu, 110 et seq., 142-7
Yüan Ch’ang and Hsü Ching-ch’eng, 292-3, 307-26
Yü Lu, Viceroy, 264
Mencius, quoted, 111, 163, 187, 273, 284, 287-8, 514
Military reorganisation, 194, 228, 386
Ming dynasty, 144, 186, 246, 253, 312, 428, 431, 466
Mining Bureau, Peking, 196
Ministers, foreign, vide Diplomatic Body
Missionaries, 78, 241, 255, 287, 292, 318, 329, 415, 505, 513
Mission to Berlin, 383-386
abroad (1905), 431
Morrison, Dr., vide “Times”
Muyanga, 2, 9

Nanking re-captured, 48, 66 et seq.

Na T’ung, 31, 264-5, 285, 296
Navy funds, 98
naval reorganisation, 163, 167, 196, 386, 503
Ning Shou Palace, 301, 403, 496
Niuhulu, 7, 10
North and South factions, 180 et seq.
Nurhachu, 1, 4, 5, 371, 429

“Ocean Terrace,” 207, 455, 460

Official Gazettes, 196, 204, 222
Old Buddha, vide Tzŭ Hsi, also Yehonala
Opium smoking (Tzŭ Hsi), 411, 496, 504
abolition of, 430, 497, 509

Palace eunuchs, vide Eunuchs

orgies, 90, 120
politics, 4, 184, 231, 353
Theatricals, 87, 88, 256, 356, 400, 454-5
Palace harem, 9, 162, 408, 429
P’an Tsu-yin, 180
Pao-Ting Fu, Court at, 405
Pao Yun, 147, 156
Parkes (Sir), Harry, 16, 21, 271
Peace negotiations, 342, 356, 381, 400
Peace protocol, 357, 364, 376, 383, 398, 401, 478
Pearl Concubine, 163, 209, 300, 403
Peking, capture of (1860), 14, 22
bombardment (1900), 297
Peking University, 187, 194
P’eng Yu-lin, 68
Penitential Decree, 376
Mission, 384-6
Phœnix flag, 92
“P’i Hsiao,” Li, vide Li Lien-ying (under eunuchs)
Plot against Tzŭ Hsi, 225
Po Ch’un, 31
Police, Peking, 6, 512
Port Arthur, 99
Portrait of Tzŭ Hsi, 290, 483
Portsmouth Treaty, 506
Post-roads, banishment to, 176, 209, 228
Press Bureau, Shanghai, 204, 511
Press, native, 109, 196, 229, 433, 477, 491
foreign, 433, 448
Princess Imperial, 178, 262, 493
Privy Purse, 40, 45, 98, 162, 353, 355, 495
P’u Chün, vide Heir Apparent
P’u Lun, Prince, 5, 122-3, 125, 300, 342, 446-7, 458-9
P’u T’ung, Prince, 361
P’u Yi (Emperor Hsuan T’ung), 444, 459, 462

Railway journey, Court’s, 401, 404-11, 414

Reactionaries, vide Conservatives
Rebellion, vide Taiping, Mahomedan, &c.
Red Girdles, vide Aisin Gioros
Reform Decrees, 185-200
Repeal of, 209, 222
Reform Movement, 108, 169, 190-215, 220, 230, 418, 424, 430,
441, 469
Regency, Joint of Empresses Dowager, 4, 44, 51 et seq., 65, 94,
117, 118, 121, 127, 468
Regency of Tsai Yuan, 30 et seq., 42, 439
Regency of Tzŭ Hsi, 148 et seq., 180
Regent, Prince Ch’un (1908), 5, 447, 458-9, 462, 473
Relief of Legations, 298, 334
Republic, Chinese, 245
Revolutionary Movement, 194, 227, 237, 245, 249, 457
Rewards for killing Europeans, 100, 271, 276, 281, 285, 331,
365
Russian Policy, 23, 82, 171, 176, 181, 336, 396, 434, 502-3
Russians at Ili, 112, 181, 501-3