Faculty Seminar | Antaja Kings in Mleccha Land: The Political Imagination of Jāti in an Early Eighteenth-Century Royal Court

NLS faculty Dr. Samyak Ghosh will be presenting his paper titled “Antaja Kings in Mleccha Land: The Political Imagination of Jāti in an Early Eighteenth-Century Royal Court” on November 22, 2023 . Dr. Chandrabhan Yadav will be the discussant for this paper.

Abstract

In the early eighteenth century in Brahmaputra Valley, the concept of jāti (people) entered the realm of elite courtly literature. The region consisting of the fertile floodplains of the Brahmaputra River was then ruled by the kings belonging to the Tungkhungia lineage (henceforth Tungkhungia kings). Around this time, several waves of Brahman migration into the region (from Gangetic South Asia) and particularly the Brahman presence in the court of the Tungkhungia kings created possibilities for new intellectual explorations. One of the results of this early eighteenth-century cultural encounter was the ways in which kingship was reconfigured in Tungkhungia courtly literature through its negotiations with the political concept of jāti. In this chapter, I trace the consequence of this cultural encounter through a close reading of the Assamese Dharmapurāṇa, an early eighteenth-century Tungkhungia courtly text.Further, by incorporating philological and art historical methods of reading an early eighteenth-century punthi or illustrated “book”, I demonstrate the ways in which jāti emerged as the foundation of a new political based on the reconfigured knowledge of kingship, expressed both in words and in images.