Antaja kings in Mlecch Land: The political between caste and law in early eighteenth-century Hindustan

This chapter studies the many meanings of a reconfigured idea of kingship through a close reading of the Assamese Dharmapurana, an eighteenth-century Tungkhungia courtly text. By incorporating philological and art historical methods of reading, the chapter foregrounds the ways in which the concept of jati emerged as the foundation of a new political imagination of kingship, expressed in words and in paintings. Finally, the chapter suggests that we read early modern conceptions of caste expressed in Brahminical texts as a discourse on dharma in practice, situated within transregional networks of learning in eighteenth-century India.