Deborah Sutton. <i>Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the Imperial Imagination, 1800–1946</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".