This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the Vijayanagara empire during the 16th to 18th centuries: Ikkeri Tanjavur Madurai and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records this research offers a captivating new analysis of political culture power relations and dynastic developments. This monograph provides in great detail both new facts and fresh insights that contest existing scholarship. By highlighting their competitive fluid and dynamic nature it undermines the historiography viewing these courts as harmonic hierarchic and static. Far from being remote ritualised figures we find kings and Brahmins contesting with other courtiers for power. At the same time by stressing continuities with the past this study questions the recent scholarship that perceives a fundamentally new form of Nayaka kingship. Thus this research has important repercussions for the way we perceive both these kingdoms and their ‘medieval’ precursors. About the Author Lennart Bes is an Indologist and historian studying political culture in pre-modern India. He has published on south India’s late medieval/early modern kingdoms and Dutch sources on (South) Asia; and has been teaching Asian history Dutch overseas history and archival studies at Leiden University the University of Tokyo and Universitas Gadjah Mada Yogyakarta. He is presently researching the courts of 17th- and 18th-century Kerala.
