Craftsmen of Legitimation: Creating Sanskrit Genealogies in the Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries

Abstract

Inscriptional Sanskrit genealogies played an important role in the research on power and ideology in recent decades. In this context, they were often seen as just a legitimatory strategy, as if this were a phenomenon which does not require further analysis. I try to show here that their creation was a complex process, that they were products of ongoing debates between producers and patrons, patrons and competitors and as will be shown further on, between the producers and the conventions created by their own predecessors. Moreover, they were strongly influenced by their specific function within donation rituals. Form, content and shifts from text to text once were answers to a variety of very contemporary problems. So they can only be assessed according to a careful investigation into their individual histories. I trace their development in a certain area, Mewar (southern Rajasthan) and time (between the tenth and fifteenth century). This enables us to follow their construction and reconstruction through several political, social and cultural changes and crises. The example of Mewar shows us that the process of legitimization by genealogy was not identical everywhere in South Asia, but depended on the development of clusters of neighbouring political entities that had entered into a competitive situation with one another.