Aditya Pratap Deo, "Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India: Enchanting the State" (Routledge, 2021)

New Books in Indian Religions · May 3, 2022 · 47m

Part anthropological history and part memoir, this book is a study of the polity of the colonial-princely state of Kanker in central India. The author, a scion of the erstwhile ruling family of Kanker, delves into the oral accounts given in the ancestral deity practices of the mixed tribe-caste communities of the region to highlight popular narratives of its historical polity. As he struggles with his own dilemmas as ethnographer-king, what comes into view is a polity where the princely state is drawn out amidst a terrain of gods and spirits as much as that of law courts and magistrates, and…