Cynthia Talbot. The Last Hindu Emperor

In The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200–2000, Cynthia Talbot seeks to excavate the layers of memory sedimented around the celebrated Indian king Prithviraj Chauhan (1166–1192). Defeated by the armies of Shihab al-Din (Muhammad Ghuri) at the end of the twelfth century, Prithviraj came to be the subject of numerous story cycles beginning shortly after his own life and continuing down to the twentieth century. In this important book, Talbot presents us with a sophisticated and compelling account of the complex changes in these narratives through the centuries by examining their particular historical contexts, agendas, and audiences. Talbot begins by reconstructing Prithviraj’s life from broadly contemporary sources, including inscriptions, Indo-Persian histories, and Sanskrit literary accounts. Talbot’s aim here is not to present the “true” or “historical” Prithviraj but to provide a kind of biographical “baseline” from which to trace changes in later narratives. These early accounts, often partial or highly conventionalized, give a picture of Prithviraj as a rather unremarkable ruler from a lineage of former Pratīhāra vassals, based in the city of Ajayameru (Ajmer), in modern-day Rajasthan. Talbot next turns to several brief accounts of the king’s life from Western Indian Jain texts, composed in Sanskrit, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These texts portray him as a neglectful and impetuous sovereign, whose defeat by the Ghurids was attributed to his moral flaws. Such early representations are important for Talbot because while they do not represent Prithviraj as the heroic figure of later textual traditions, they do introduce narrative elements that would be built upon in later representations, suggesting that stories about the king were circulating in Western India during sultanate times.

Ancient history · Art · Emperor · Fifteenth · Hinduism · Literature · Narrative · Ruler · Sanskrit · Subject (documents) · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies