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Front Cover
Back Cover
Sacred Sovereignty: Kingship, Heritage, and Political Imagination in India
Author:
Caleb Simmons
Series:
Sanctum Studies in Indian Intellectual, Cultural, and Historical Traditions
Binding:
Paperback
FORTHCOMING
About the Book
Sacred Sovereignty: Kingship, Heritage, and Political Imagination in India
examines the enduring relationship between sacred authority and political power in India, tracing the ways sovereignty is imagined, legitimized, remembered, and reworked across changing historical contexts. Moving from premodern political theology to contemporary Karnataka, the book shows how kingship survives not merely as a historical institution but as a powerful language of devotion, ritual, genealogy, heritage, and political belonging.Beginning with the devotional foundations of earthly sovereignty in premodern India, the book explores how religious narratives and practices contributed to conceptions of legitimate rule. It then turns to Mysore, examining the Vaiṣṇavization of the Wodeyar dynasty under Rāja Woḍeyar and the role of devotion and genealogy in the construction of royal authority. A study of Tipu Sultan and rituals of oath-taking further reveals how sovereignty in the Mysore Sultanate was articulated through ceremonial and political practice.The later chapters follow these structures of meaning into the present. Through the struggle to preserve Chamundi Hill, the book investigates the interaction of history, heritage, myth, and local historical imagination. It concludes by considering the continuing presence of dynastic ideas in contemporary electoral politics in Karnataka, where inherited forms of authority are adapted to the institutions and language of democracy.Bringing together political theology, ritual, history, heritage, and contemporary politics,
Sacred Sovereignty
reveals the remarkable continuity and transformation of ideas of kingship in India. It demonstrates how older conceptions of sacred and dynastic authority continue to shape the ways political communities understand the past, claim legitimacy in the present, and imagine the relationship between sovereignty and society.
About the Author
Caleb Simmons
Caleb Simmons is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona and Executive Director of the Center for Buddhist Studies. He received his PhD in Religion from the University of Florida. His research focuses on the religions of South Asia, particularly Hinduism, with special interests in kingship, political theology, goddess traditions, sacred geography, and the intersections of religion, history, and state formation. He is the author of
Devotional Sovereignty: Kingship and Religion in India
(2020) and
Singing the Goddess into Place: Locality, Myth, and Social Change in Chamundi of the Hill, a Kannada Folk Ballad
(2022); and co-editor of
Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia
.
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