This book investigates the shifting articulations of kingship in a wide variety of literary (Sanskrit and Kannada), visual, and material courtly productions in the South Indian kingdom of Mysore during the reigns of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–1799) and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (r. 1799–1868). Tipu Sultan was a Muslim king famous for resisting British dominance until his death, and Krishnaraja III was a Hindu king who succumbed to British political and administrative control. Both of their courts dealt with the changing political landscape of the period by turning to the religious and mythical past to ... More

This book investigates the shifting articulations of kingship in a wide variety of literary (Sanskrit and Kannada), visual, and material courtly productions in the South Indian kingdom of Mysore during the reigns of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–1799) and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (r. 1799–1868). Tipu Sultan was a Muslim king famous for resisting British dominance until his death, and Krishnaraja III was a Hindu king who succumbed to British political and administrative control. Both of their courts dealt with the changing political landscape of the period by turning to the religious and mythical past to construct a royal identity for their kings. With their use of religious narrative to articulate their kingship, the changing conceptions of sovereignty that accompanied burgeoning British colonial hegemony did not result in languishing. The religious past, instead, provided an idiom through which the Mysore courts could articulate their kings’ unique claims to kingship in the region, as they attributed their rule to divine election and increasingly employed religious vocabularies in a variety of courtly genres and media. What emerges within this material is an increasing reliance on devotion to frame Mysore kingship in relation to the kings’ changing role in regional politics. The emphasis on devotion for the constitution of Indian sovereignty in this period had lasting effects on Indian national politics as it provided an ideological basis for united Indian sovereignty that could simultaneously integrate and transcend premodern forms of regional kingship and its association with local deities.