Branfoot, Crispin

English

SOAS Research Online

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Irelandhttp://journals.cambridge.org/JRAAdditional services for Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereHindu Arms and Ritual: Arms and Armour from India 1400–1865. By Robert Elgood. pp. 312, 277 col. Illus. Delft, Eburon Academic Publishers, 2004.Crispin BranfootJournal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland / Volume 16 / Issue 01 / April 2006, pp 95 ­ 96DOI: 10.1017/S1356186305255918, Published online: 15 March 2006Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1356186305255918How to cite this article:Crispin Branfoot (2006). Review of Robert Elgood 'Hindu Arms and Ritual: Arms and Armour from India 1400–1865' Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland, 16, pp 95­96 doi:10.1017/S1356186305255918Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/JRA, IP address: 212.219.238.14 on 21 Jun 2013Reviews of Books 95a number of essays which lack some of the methodological finesse of recent discussions of these issuesin the humanities at large. Some kind of broader reflective (or indeed reflexive) essay may have helpedsituate the volume better within these wider debates, perhaps even addressing the meaning and politicsof memory in the tradition of Islamic Studies and close textual scrutiny represented here. Perhaps thisweakness should be seen as reflecting a collision of scholarly genres, for only in the rarest circumstancescan the Festschrift’s common point of reference in the esteemed colleague or teacher compete with thesense of collaborative intellectual effort and collective objectives found in the best thematic anthologies.But then Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam is ultimately a commemoration volume rather than athematic work, and to demand such unity of purpose is inevitably to detract from both the merits andcharms of the scholarly miscellany.Nile GreenLady Margaret Hall, University of OxfordHindu Arms and Ritual: Arms and Armour from India 1400–1865. By Robert Elgood. pp. 312,277 col. Illus. Delft, Eburon Academic Publishers, 2004.doi:10.1017/S1356186305255918This richly illustrated book, by an established authority on Middle Eastern and South Asian arms andarmour, is a notable contribution to the study of late medieval and pre-modern Indian decorative artsand material culture, especially in southern India. The study of South Asian arms and armour has beendominated by Mughal northern India and little attention has been paid to material from southern India.Elgood successfully draws attention to the wealth of evidence from southern India for the creation ofsuperb examples of metalwork, with exquisitely detailed ornament and figural decoration.One of Elgood’s key contributions in this study is to bring together, assess and thoroughly illustratea large number of south Indian arms from museum collections in Madras, the Metropolitan Museumin New York and smaller numbers in other museums and private collections. The primary provenancefor these metal objects – swords, daggers, ankushas (elephant goads), arrows, maces, axes, spears andarmour – is the Tanjore armoury, dispersed by the British following the fall of the Maratha polity thatruled from the centre of the Tamil heartlands from 1675. An appendix reproduces the 1860 inventory ofthe Tanjore armoury, listing the huge numbers of accumulated armour for men, horses and elephants,shields, various types of sword, daggers, knives, spears, pistols and rifles. Rather than simply assertingthat the weapons discussed were all made in eighteenth and nineteenth century Tanjavur, as previousauthors have suggested, Elgood convincingly dates many of these to the earlier Vijayanagara andNayaka periods of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This highlights the circulation of prestigearms and armour amongst the many courts of pre-modern southern India: Vijayanagara, the Nayakasof Tanjavur and Madurai, the Wodeyars of Mysore and Maratha Tanjavur.The book is divided into twenty chapters of varying length and content: some address a particulartype of arm, others develop a contextual theme such as ritual kingship, the weapons’ iconography orthe metal-working tradition in south India. Colour illustrations of the weapons, details of wall andmanuscript paintings, and sixteenth and seventeenth century Tamil temple sculptures are distributedthroughout this attractively produced book. Some of the chapters are photographic essays where longcaptions accompany each image rather than the text developing a sustained narrative. Many of theseobjects are stunning: the exquisite detail of the ankusha from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts on thefront cover, for example, emphasises the wealth of ornament and rich iconography found on these farfrom purely functional objects.Without direct evidence for provenance and date of manufacture from the objects themselves,Elgood surveys the depiction of weapons in architectural sculpture and painting to support the96 Reviews of Booksattribution of his examples to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tamil temples of this periodoften include innovative, huge monolithic columns with 2–3 metre high images of deities, mountedcavalry, or royal portraits. These are used as supporting evidence for different arm-types and their dates.Elgood wisely notes that accurate dates for these architectural sculptures are far from certain in manycases, but the dating of the south Indian weapons he examined is reliably narrowed to the later sixteenthand early seventeenth centuries rather than the previously thought eighteenth and nineteenth century.These sculptures have previously been examined as evidence for contemporary dress and jewellery (byJean-François Hurpré), but Elgood’s research marks a further advance in their study.An issue that might have been better addressed is signalled by the book’s title, Hindu Arms andRitual. Despite Elgood’s great efforts to provide contextual evidence for their production and use,there is little to suggest a ‘Hindu’ nature for their conception and reception, despite the appearanceof imagery better known from religious art. A more accurate title, or at least a clearer subtitle, mighthave emphasised that these objects are from south India and that their iconography and use was part ofcourtly not religious ritual. Elgood rather uncritically adopts the outdated notion of Vijayanagara as aHindu empire preserving south India from the ravages of the Islamic north. Together with the broaderscholarly move to see pre-colonial India through indigenous categories other than the communalHindu vs. Muslim, this characterisation of Vijaynagara and Nayaka south India has been challengedby a number of recent scholars. There was a greater degree of sharing of cultural forms, titles, dressand material culture amongst the diverse communities of the region than such a communally-basedbinary classification would suggest – material culture is clear evidence for this, as demonstrated byPhillip Wagoner in a study of Vijayanagara dress and by George Michell’s work on the period’s palacearchitecture. Some of the contextual material is thus not always as directly relevant as it might be,however interesting in its own right – modern teyyam ritual in Kerala, for example, the meaning ofthe goddess in India or the extensive quotations from the Vedas. In many ways this demonstrates thedifficulties in studying south Indian decorative arts when they are divorced from their context, withoutdates and little direct literary evidence to help assess their production, conception and reception –ivory carving from the region poses a similar problems. The linguistic skills needed to study all theavailable literature of southern India are great; few of the scholars who have the requisite abilities haveshown much serious interest in visual culture. Scholarly collaboration is clearly necessary.The book might have been organised better – there are three chapters on sixteenth and seventeenthswords, for example – and could have been shorter to emphasise the beauty and fascination of thematerial gathered, rather than getting too distracted by contextual studies. Tighter editing might alsohave ensured the accurate and consistent use of diacritical marks, and the inclusion of all references inthe bibliography.In summary, this is a fascinating book on a poorly studied subject; it would be wonderful if morebooks on Asian visual culture could be so thoroughly and generously illustrated. Elgood’s book makesa significant contribution to the study of arms history, and draws attention to the material wealth insouthern India contemporary to the better-known Mughal empire and its successors. I will certainlybe returning to this book for insights into the visual and material culture of pre-modern south India.Crispin BranfootDe Montfort University, LeicesterWahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to global jihad. By Natana J. Delong-Bas. pp. ix,370. London, I.B. Tauris, 2004.doi:10.1017/S1356186305265914This study is the first examination, so we are told, of the entire corpus of the thought of MuhammadIbn Abd al-Wahhab (1702–91), the founder of the Wahhabi tradition. It destroys the stereotype of this

Hindu Arms and Ritual: Arms and Armour from India 1400–1865. By Robert Elgood.

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