Warrior Ascetics and Hindu Temples, 1756–1882

My paper will explore the military and political dimensions of temples and shrines in north India, particularly between 1756 and 1858.  The structures that I focus on are those connected to warrior ascetics, particularly Umraogiri and Anupgiri but also, insofar as material is available, the (not unrelated) sanyasi and fakir insurgents in Bengal during the latter half of the eighteenth century.  While temple/shrine typologies can offer clues to the evolution of ascetic military entrepreneurship during the period, my main questions concern the basic political and military uses to which temples and shrines were put and the meanings their histories contained and conveyed.  These
questions are complicated by the fact that an idealized notion of the warrior ascetic -- and his temple/shrine retreats -- came to dominate the nationalist imagination of the late nineteenth century, primarily a result of the explosive popularity of Bankim Chandra Chatterji's Bengali novel, "Anandamath" (1882).  In "Anandamath" Bankim celebrated -- and rewrote -- the late eighteenth-century sanyasi and fakir insurgency as a proto-nationalist Hindu uprising, and re-imagined the temple/shrine as a site of national and logistical significance. While there was some truth to Bankim's romantic assertions (temples and shrines did possess political meanings for ascetic warriors, and did, on occasion, serve the functions of garrison and supply), a close reading of the evidence reveals that warrior ascetics and their temples and shrines looked nothing like Bankim's images of them -- neither in their religious dimensions, nor in their social-economic location and gender dynamics, nor even in their politics.  What they do reflect, I argue, is the contradictory -- and in some ways central -- role of warrior ascetics in the religious, military, and political transition from Mughal to British imperialism.