In Casting Kings, Jeffrey Snodgrass provides an anthropological account of the Rajasthani community of Bhats in the cities of Udaipur and Jaipur. Traditionally, Bhats served as the elite bards and genealogical specialists for the Rajput princes. Though eponymous with this traditional community, Snodgrass's Bhats are poor puppeteers who cater to the tourist trade in upscale hotels but who are also clients of a Dalit caste of leatherworkers called Bambhis. Modern Bhats, through poetry and performance, hearken back to the days of the princes and attempt to inscribe the traditional power of the Bhats into their current, fallen condition. In this book, Snodgrass produces a complex and engaging discourse on the power of language and cunning that the Bhats use both to entertain and to reimagine and recapture the social status that was once theirs.
There are three deeply intertwined stories in this text. The central one is the story...
