Rajputs and their Goddesses in Early Modern Rajasthan

Cults worshipping various forms of the mother goddess in Rajasthan have been the subject of enquiry among cultural anthropologists and religious studies scholars for some decades now. However, historians have paid far less attention to these cults, their patrons and their uses in particular historical contexts. This paper seeks to contextualize the emergence and consolidation of particular kinds of goddess cults in the Rajput chiefdoms of Rajasthan during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Royal Rajput patrons commissioned new bardic narratives in this period that typically ascribed the waxing and waning of their political fortunes to a particular goddess alternately showering or withdrawing her blessings. Such supernatural intervention was often seen in concrete terms – the goddess revealed where treasure was hidden, or how a caravan of horses should be looted. The same Rajput rulers also built temples to the particular patron goddesses of their clans (kuladevis). While narratives of divine intervention underpinning political consolidation by new rulers are by no means peculiar to Rajasthan or even to South Asia, this paper focuses on the distinctive attributes of these Rajput kuladevis that were resonant with a particular historical context of territorial consolidation at the expense of other, non-Rajput groups in the early modern period.