The Last Hindu Emperor

Cynthia Talbot is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is author of Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra (2001), co-author (with Catherine B. Asher) of India before Europe (with Catherine B. Asher, Cambridge, 2006), and editor of Knowing India: Colonial and Modern Constructions of the Past (2011). Her scholarship has been supported by numerous organizations including the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.

• 1. Introduction: layers of memory; 2. Literary trajectories of the historic king; 3. Delhi in the making of the last Hindu emperor; 4. The heroic vision of a regional elite; 5. Imagining the Rajput past in Mughal-era Mewar; 6. Validating Prithviraj Rāso in colonial India, 1820s–70s; 7. Contested meanings in a nationalist age, 1880s–1940s; 8. Epilogue: the postcolonial Prithviraj; Bibliography; Index.

'While Talbot's archive is almost entirely restricted to the written word, she executes a sensitive reading that allows her to furnish a nuanced picture of the communities that wrote and read such works. Especially rich is Talbot's description of the Rajput elites for whom the Raso was a central text beginning in the late sixteenth century.' Audrey Truschke, H-Asia