Theology and statecraft

Abstract

In Indian regional kingdoms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the process of state building was accompanied by ambitious projects of religious legitimation. Statecraft was pronounced to rest on the pillars of dharma and bhakti. In the eighteenth century, the kingdom of the Kachvāhās of Āmer and Jaipur under Savāī Jaisingh excelled in a project of this kind. The brāhmaṇ intellectuals, who executed the project, were both Vaiṣṇava Smārtas and theologians representing the orthodox factions of Vaiṣṇava sects who recently migrated from Braj to the Rajput kingdoms, thereby themselves striving for legitimation. Pursuing a project bearing on the ideology of governance and their common interests to vindicate orthodoxy against its detractors accounts for shifts in style of a sectarian discourse conducted in a new arena. Although their basically similar discourses had, prior to this, been conducted overtly more or less within the boundaries of each of their own sect, sectarian scholars now entered into a dialogue, also to project their group identity. The focus is here on the way this dialogue, the addressee of which was ultimately the king, was conducted between scholars of the Puṣṭimārg and the Gauḍīya sampradāya, who represented the two most influential Vaiṣṇava sects at Jaisingh's court.