Royal accommodations: pilgrim rest houses in early colonial South India

Abstract

PurposeThis article provides background on the historical development of royal hospitality in India before the advent of commercial hospitality in the twentieth century. The aim of the paper is to insert into the historiography of commercial hospitality the ancient Indian practice of endowing pilgrim rest houses, or chattrams (choultry) for the temporary housing and feeding of travelers, religious mendicants, and other groups in Indian society. As a case study, the article focuses on the chattrams of the Maratha Kings of Tanjavur (Tanjore) in South India, especially during the reign of Raja Serfoji II (r. 1798‐1832). Serfoji, working from the palette of past practices of his forebears, expanded these practices of traditional Hindu religious hospitality to include more progressive and inclusive charity, education and hospitality during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Serfoji's munificent activities in his chattrams pose a challenge to any characterization that royal elites adapted historically dormant or static institutions to practical usage in the twentieth century.Design/methodology/approachThis article is based on archival research into the role of institution building in strategies of indigenous kingship in early colonial India. The primary methodology used is content and descriptive analyses of archival documents in the Tamil language related to chattrams constructed by the Maratha court of Tanjavur between 1739 and 1855 CE.FindingsThe archival data show that the Maratha court of Tanjavur, particularly under Raja Serfoji II (r. 1798‐1832), incorporated through the chattram institution a greater variety of social groups in its charitable mandate by expanding the traditional forms of pious and ceremonial hospitality of the court to include not only religious mendicants and pilgrims, but also students, staff and European guests as well. The article reveals the manner in which such practices could sustain aspects of the traditional relationship between ruler and subject while creating newly responsive forms of social outreach to wider constituencies by an indigenous court that had been reduced to titular status under the rise of the British East India Company after 1798.Originality/valueAs yet, there has been no systematic survey of the evolution of commercial hospitality in India, nor particularly one that includes the practice of charitable rest houses in pre‐modern India. This article focuses attention on the diversified social functions of these institutions in the early colonial period in south India, and introduces these institutions as a potential precedent of later forms of commercial hospitality.