RELIGION, RITUAL AND ROYALTY

Construction of Rajasthan necessitates both understanding of textual-historical as well as oral-contextual sources. The historical sources generally focus on royalty, feudalistic order and linkages of administration from centre to peripheries. However, there are records, bahis, documents and oral traditions that provide sources for representation of life-cycle rituals, customs, festivals, modes of dispension of justice, indigenous faiths, local deities and worldview of common man. There have been two major traditions which sustained, ordered and regulated life of people placed in hierarchical relationships—one that of feudalistic-royalty and the other of folk-ethnoistic. In both these traditions the legitimacy of institutional and cultural practices has been derived from transcendence.
The oral history, recorded history and subaltern studies have significant bearing on contemporary life. These can be used effectively in the realms of planned change and development strategies. Conceptual articulation and issues related to gender and community empowerment, micro-level planning, common property resources, social capital, civil society, defeudalization, decolonization, cultural pluralism, honour and status, caste and micro-politics, dialect and discourse, need to be understood in relation to micro-history and vibrant diversity of Rajasthan. Religion, ritual and royalty were interconnected in a variety of ways and helped in normative ordering and dynamics of both civil society and the state.
Religion, Ritual and Royalty offers variety of academic perspectives and a broad range of observations on the subject, Well-known scholars in the field of Rajasthan Studies have contributed in this volume to give it an interdisciplinary appeal.