Towards an Intellectual History of Cakravartin Kingship

Abstract Cakravartin kingship has long been treated as an ahistorical constant in histories of premodern Southern Asia. This paper argues for an intellectual history of cakravartin ship, based not on its articulation in supposedly authoritative texts—particularly Buddhist sutta s—but instead on what I call a “genealogy of practice,” traced primarily through the inscriptional record. Such a genealogy suggests that the mid-eleventh century served as a watershed moment for cakravartin claims: across the Indian Ocean, across “religious” boundaries, and across vernacular languages.