Deborah Sutton. <i>Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the Imperial Imagination, 1800–1946</i>

Deborah Sutton’s Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the Imperial Imagination contributes to the growing literature on Hindu temples in historical, art historical, and political contexts. Sutton is not concerned, however, with Hindu temples and their complex archeology, intricate carvings, and plentiful devotees; nor does she address the range of rituals that take place therein (though, of course, she acknowledges their importance). Rather, it is how the temple—which was variously understood in colonial history as “a site of enviable wealth, compelling depravity, architectural wonder, political sensitivity, and aesthetic appeal” (2)—and how the idea of the temple was mobilized variously throughout colonial history that Sutton expertly explores through deep archival research. In other words, Sutton explores the idea of the Hindu temple as it appears in historic, literary, and academic discourses in order to demonstrate how this discourse was utilized to justify continued colonial rule in South Asia. Sutton’s history of the Hindu temple in colonial discourse begins in the years following the eighteenth-century Carnatic wars in south India. Focusing on three temples in particular—the Srirangam, Jambukeswarar, and Thayumanar temples, all located in present-day Tiruchirapalli district—Sutton demonstrates the way that the British East India Company’s failure to understand elements of the temple (such as the organizational structure, financial management, and rituals) affected their (mis)management of the temples. The ambivalence of British authorities toward Hindu temples, which both fascinated and disgusted them, resulted in an overall discomfort that comes across in the archives as racially coded malice toward local temple managers. Despite this discomfort, the Company still benefited from these very same temples until Evangelist missionary campaigns eventually succeeded in ending the Company’s support of “idolatry” (and thus, Company involvement in temple administration altogether) in 1841.

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