Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the British Imperial Imagination

This book is a colonial history of the Hindu temple. Despite the bewildering diversity of places, materials, and structures described by the term “Hindu temple”, a particular understanding of these edifices emerged during the imperial encounter in India from 1800 onwards.
Deborah Sutton presents the defining preoccupations through which colonial understandings of the temple took shape: wealth, sensuality, depravity, and devotion. Her analysis draws on a wide range of literary, visual, and bureaucratic sources to encompass religious, cultural, archaeological, imperial, and art histories. The book charts the influence of several prominent scholars and writers: James Fergusson, Ram Raz, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, and Stella Kramrisch. It also charts less renowned voices that were sidelined by imperial history.
Ruling Devotion   highlights the Hindu temple as a place at which the imperial gaze was held and challenged. Through a series of case studies, it demonstrates that the colonial state rarely, and even then only temporarily, got its own way at the Hindu temple.