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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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Pallavas to Mughals—a history of hero worship in medieval India

The preference for the performing ruler over the governing one is not just a pathology of today’s democracy. It has been ingrained into our politics for nearly one and a half millennia.

Tamil film star C Joseph Vijay led his newly formed Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam to victory in Tamil Nadu last week, routing the much more established Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. But the appeal of the star-politician is by no means limited to South India.

Indian politics today is focused on carefully-cultivated personas. Narendra Modi’s brand is that of an ascetic strongman. Rahul Gandhi is a mohabbat marathoner; Mamata Banerjee is a cotton sari-clad ‘Didi’; and Pinarayi Vijayan is a communist boss in a crisp white shirt. The received wisdom holds this to be evidence of democratic immaturity, a failure to vote for policy over personality.

However, the preference for the performing ruler over the governing one is not just a pathology of today’s democracy. It is an unacknowledged inheritance: ingrained into our politics, by politicians great and small, for nearly one and a half millennia.

The king and the aristocrat

In the late sixth century CE, a dynasty formerly based on the Andhra coast—the Pallavas—arrived with their armies in present-day Tamil Nadu. In the region, especially the Kaveri delta, powerful peasants of the Vellala caste controlled most agricultural land, and were not interested in these new kings handing property out to their loyalists. And so, the early seventh-century king Mahendra-varman I, a playwright, aesthete, and patron of rock-cut temples, invested in a new mode of semidivine political branding. In his temple to Shiva at the Trichy Rock Fort, for example, he claimed that when he “made a stone figure in the wonderful stone abode on top of the King of Mountains, this ruler, ‘Vidhi’ [the creator], made Sthanu [Shiva] true to His name and became himself sthanu [fixed, immortal] together with Him, on earth.” Sanskrit puns of this sort could not be read by the average subject or devotee. Mahendra’s audience was other landed aristocrats, over whom he claimed preeminence through his proximity to Shiva.

What followed, as historian Manu Devadevan demonstrates in his paper, ‘From the Cult of Chivalry to the Cult of Personality’ (2017), was a wholesale reinvention of royal identity. Temples were named after the king’s personal titles—for example, Mahendra-Vishnu-Griha, Mahendra’s Home for Vishnu. Cities were renamed: Mahallapuram, after king Mahamalla (“Great Wrestler”).

Pallava court poet Dandin, whose Kavyadarsha or “Mirror of Poetry” shaped literary practice from Sri Lanka to Tibet, made explicitly urban and elite recommendations for good Sanskrit, maintaining a careful theoretical distance from the rural and the rustic. The infrastructure of Pallava kingship was calibrated to dazzle an audience of urban, literate elites. The eighth-century Pallava king, Narasimhavarman II, left a catalogue of 233 personal titles inscribed at Kanchipuram, celebrating his courage in battle, his........

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