Rituals of Legitimacy

This chapter looks at the way in which colonial and the feudal ruling classes ritualized diverse aspects related to their interactions with the common people in order to tap their resources, while also simultaneously exercising control over them. Keeping the question of ‘Hinduization’ and Sanskritization at the centre, it highlights the manner in which the pre-existing system of caste was ritualized using a diverse range of strategies. At the same time, the chapter illustrates the ways in which common people challenged the exploiting classes using fascinating strategies, which reflect an entire range of counter-hegemonic rituals of protest and subversion. These included inventing a discourse of equality that was a fall-out of the interactions with modernity, which has somehow been assumed by historians to be a phenomenon limited to the urban middle classes/upper castes.