King, Kinglessness and an Oral Poem

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2010

A 'narrative' is a construct created in a suitable medËum (speech, writing. images) that describes a sequence of fictional or non fictional events. All narratives make use of language to convey ideas and here, the issue of the politics of language surfaces. Language can never be å neutral medium of communication. The locale of both Indulekha [IL] (1889) by O. Chandu Menon and Parangodi Parinayan (PP] (1892) by Kizhakkeppattu Ramankutty Menon is Malabar in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Both these novels have effectively captured the political milieu of the period, along with the occasional glances it cast on the past. Issues of power and dominance remain as a common thread that passes through both these novels. A rcading of these two novels would provide us fresh insights into the discourses of nineteenth century Malabar and the politics that has moulded them.

Economic and Political Weekly, 1999

Studies of Kerala tend to be land centred and concentrate on agrarian relations, landed households, and temples. Sitting beside the Indian Ocean, Kerala has been part of the rhythms of the ocean for millennia. What would it mean to think the histories of the land and maritime together? This paper looks at the history of oceanic involvement, the fragility of monarchies, and the changing relations of Mappila Muslims to structures of power in the 18th century

Economic and Political Weekly, 2013

The South Asianist, 2013

History and Sociology of India, 2015

Exploring the caste practices of Namboothiris (Kerala Brahmins) in the first half of the twentieth century, this paper analyses the transformation of Brahminical claims of superiority over other castes, in interaction with colonial knowledge practices. The paper maps the historical process by which claims of Brahminical superiority transformed from ritual to knowledge-from claims based on acharam (the daily practices of rituals) into a claim of possession of traditional knowledge. By analysing the upper caste world of Namboothiris, the paper explores the tension between emerging order of colonial knowledge and the existing order of acharam. The paper shows that until the reform movement in the 1920s, Namboothiris as a community were not part of either traditional or colonial knowledge practices. Even in the reform movement the attempt was not to wholeheartedly enter into the domains of knowledge but to incorporate the elements of acharam into the order of colonial knowledge.

BIHAR JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION (A Bi-Annual Refereed Research Journal of IIPA Bihar Regional Branch, Patna) (S. No. 41 In UGC-CARE Reference List of Quality Journals, Soc. Sc.), 2021

The legacy of colonial rule creating colonized mindsets, acceptance of modern democratic system as the best governing model, increasing challenges before the agenda of national integration, the socio-political compulsions of multi-religious and multi-cultural secular constitutional set up, rapidly growing allurement of westernized models of life, sustained neglect and resultant decline of vernacular Indian languages, and the epidemic rise of English- based academia, etc. are the main causes of a complete apathy towards the Indian literary and political treatises. Through this paper an attempt has been made to throw some light on the Vedic legacy of Rajadharma as well as other political apparatus in practice during those times. This analysis is a modest endeavour and undertakes to peep into further details of structural and functional aspects of ancient Indian politics. Some of the traits of the kings described and enumerated in these treatises may very well pave the way for more Indianized political socialization of our newly recruited political leadership.

2022

This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Madurai, Ramnad, and Tanjavur (the latter under both the Nayaka and Maratha Bhonsle dynasties). Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival (VOC) records, this research offers a captivating new analysis of political culture, power relations, and dynastic developments -- with chapters devoted to foundations myths, successions to the throne, the power of courtiers, court protocol and diplomatic insults, influences from Sultanate courts, and mutual relations. In great detail, this monograph provides both new facts and fresh insights that contest existing scholarship. By highlighting their competitive, fluid, and dynamic nature, it undermines the historiography viewing these courts as harmonic, hierarchic, and static. Far from being remote, ritualised figures, we find kings and Brahmins contesting with other courtiers for power. At the same time, by stressing continuities with the past, this study questions recent scholarship that perceives a fundamentally new form of Nayaka kingship. Thus, this research has important repercussions for the way we perceive both these kingdoms and their ‘medieval’ precursors.

2011

The literature on South Asian kingship has typically explored the idioms in which kingship—a king’s assertion of his right to rule—was articulated, while assuming ready consent to such assertions of royal authority among a king’s subjects, vassals, peers, and overlords. This paper re-examines the nature and limits of South Asian kingship by investigating the modes in which Man Singh Kachhwaha, a prominent regional chief in the Mughal Empire, claimed royal status. I examine how target audiences—consisting of literati, peers, rivals, and the Mughal overlord—may have received an ambitious chief’s claims to kingly status in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This essay reinterprets the abundant evidence from Man Singh’s reign to reveal the character of kingship in South Asia as much more circumscribed and contingent than has often been assumed, and as continually open to challenge and contestation.