"Out from under the Shadow of Devgiri" - Jason Schwartz

Out from under the Shadow of Devgiri: Recovering Hidden Histories of Legal Alterity, Caste, Religion, and Political Economy in the Western Deccan

In the middle of the thirteenth century, the western Deccan witnessed a sudden sea-change in values, with profound and lasting repercussions for South Asia's political, religious, and juridical imaginaries. Abrogating long-standing precedents affirmed by his own father, Kandharāya, the King at Devgiri, abruptly ceased to recognize the legitimacy and autonomy of the vast, wealthy, and powerful independent monastic estates of the Deccan. For five hundred years, regardless of personal or theological commitments, secular power had entered such spaces as a guest, whether seeking the favor of their religious authorities, employing their skilled artisan labor forces, or publicly reaffirming the sovereign rights of these so-called undying land grants. Kandharāyainstead sent in his soldiers and armies of bureaucrats. His forces seized monastic wealth and annulled local institutional norms, redefining lands and resources as subject to direct taxation and state oversight. Liquidating local and often subaltern governing bodies, he substituted in their placebrāhmaṇajurists, to manage the premises according to a singular state-sanctioned set of standards and values. Inśāstraand in stone, Kandharāyaand his successors proclaimed the coming of a new kind of political order and a new vision of disciplinary power.

Combining micro-historical accounts of the monastic estates the SeuṇaYādavasea-change obliterated with an examination of the juridico-religious frameworks that had formed their conditions of possibility, this presentation offers a fresh encounter with the often-surprising life-worlds of the early medieval Deccan. I argue that the pluralized religious institutional cultures of the early medieval world, in which a range of non-brāhmaṇa—even Dalit—agents acted as juridical and religious authorities, were disrupted by the SeuṇaYādavastate in the service of inculcating a radically new singular vision of universal, brāhmaṇicaldharma. This undiscovered moment of rupture bears significant implications for longue durée histories of political sovereignty, community rights, and caste in South Asia.

Jason Schwartz is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University.