Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
in the Ganga
Valley by Romila Thapar
Review by: Richard W. Lariviere
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1987), pp. 517-518
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/603487 .
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517
Reviews of Books
presented with a breathtaking discourse on contradiction
and complementarity, liminality, transformation, and permutation.
The King and the Clown is an analysis of the political
iconography of medieval South India, from the 7th to the
17th centuries, centering on Chola times and the Chola
heartland in the Kaveri delta. The work is not an attempt at
a "factual" account of medieval South India from epigraphic
records, chronicles and accounts of foreign visitors, but an
analysis of literary sources (epics, war poems, ballads and
South Indian folk drama). Shulman demonstrates that these
sources contain a wealth of information on social and cultural
life, especially the world views, of the traditional South.
Shulman has chosen the Chola king as the centerpiece for his
analysis because he views the Chola period as an efflorescence
of Southern culture, and the Chola king as the focus of that
culture. Shulman's closely reasoned, elegantly written excursion through the representations of the king and his court
is impossible to summarize. One can only point to the route
taken. Shulman begins with the dharmic view of kingship,
but quickly reveals this as a mask behind which lurk other
more problematic and elusive norms. The king's mask of
perfection entails self-contradiction: the inevitability of failure
and consequent self-destruction. Shulman then explores the
foundation of the state, the relationship of king and Brahmin.
The Brahmin is portrayed as a boundary figure embodying
another contradiction. A keeper of the otherworldly ideal of
renunciation, the Brahmin is mired in the mundane world as
a powerful maintainer of the social order. Supposedly
complementary and mutually dependent, in the texts the
king and the Brahmin overlap and collide. Another figure
whose character reveals the king is the bandit. His unchecked
power is examined as a contrasting, sometimes overlapping:
the thief is sometimes a hero; sometimes even a god. Shulman
delves further into the nature of the state by exploring the
disorderly side of South Indian kingship: exile and war. The
women of the court, queens and courtesans, in their complementary relationships further illuminate the problematic
of kingship. The queen upholds the illusion of stability; the
courtesans undermine it. By exciting passion and withholding
love, they reinforce the king's separation.
But the characters that Shulman finds the most illuminating
and the most enjoyable to study are the comic ones. Clowns,
according to Shulman, have the "freedom both to see and to
state simple, sometimes shocking truths" (p. 101). The Indian
clown's simplest most profound truth is that whatever is
perceived as real is wholly ludicrous and false. The clown
dissolves, unravels and undermines perceived reality. It is
this comic transformation, developed by Shulman from folk
genres as much as from classical ones that truly sets in
perpetual motion his portrayal of South Indian polity. One
has a sense of interpretations only fleetingly glimpsed before
the elusive subject is again transformed. This sense of
S.
BEAN
518
W. LARIVIERE