Caste and Kingship

Abstract Indian kingship, over the last two thousand years, has been characterized by the way in which kingship is founded on specific relationships to the castes and communities that constitute the kingdom. In contrast to conventional wisdom about Western kingship, modernity never replaced this structure with a universalist relationship to individual citizens. In this chapter, I use several examples to trace an outline of the history of Indian kingship during the Common Era, specifying various types of royal authority, and sketching a tentative typology of Indian kingship, where each type is defined by the specific make-up of castes and communities that structured and supported the king’s authority. As a conclusion, I note that these communitarian structures still characterize regional politics in India.