Kings and Commerce on an Agrarian Frontier:

Kalketu’s Story in Mukunda’s Candimangal*

Introduction

This essay examines a sixteenth century Bengali text in which novel ideas about a

more pacific style of kingship are related to expansion of peasant agriculture north and

west of the Bengal delta, and to a degree of commercialization of agrarian relations on that

internal agrarian frontier. 1 It contributes to studies of commercialization, and to debates

about changes in state formation and in ideologies of kingship 2 in early modern Bengal.

*An early version of this paper was presented to SACPAN (South Asia Colloquium

of the Pacific Northwest), University of Washington, March 2, 1996; I wish to thank Prof.

Frank Conlon for this opportunity. I also wish to thank the American Institute of Indian

Studies for a fellowship in 1982-83 which allowed me leisure to begin the translation upon

which this essay is based.

 Since the publication of C.A. Bayly’s study showing how a buoyant commercial

economy in eighteenth century north India facilitated British imperial expansion, a number

of historians have re-examined processes of commercialization of the agrarian economy,

changing relations between rulers and merchants, and the political culture of non-European

merchants in eighteenth-century Bengal. 3 The choice to analyze the eighteenth century,

however, continues to be based primarily on the availability of European records, and

especially records of the English East India Company, and implicitly to assume that

European trading companies were the primary agents for change. 4 This essay confirms

the need to study precolonial commercialization in Bengal over a period lasting at least

three centuries, rather than in the eighteenth century alone, and to study endogenous

processes of commercialization throughout that period. 5 Second, this essay suggests that

some processes of commercialization may have been experienced more intensively on the

agrarian frontier than in the long-settled regions of the western delta, where European

trade often was concentrated. 6

 3

This essay suggests that care should be taken in describing markets and market

transactions. In Sudipta Sen’s important work, the common assumption that buying and

selling was or should have been an autonomous activity occurring in a politically protected

and economically neutral space is replaced by an image of fluctuating, overlapping and

contingent ‘passages of authority’ in eighteenth century Bengal, through which rulers taxed

and redirected both marketed commodities and the transient people of marketplaces. 7 This

essay also provides evidence that the authority exerted by rulers over marketplaces,

commodities, and vendors changed the meaning of buying and selling, by sometimes

making them subject to force and fraud, as well as to normative uses of authority. But it

also notes ways that forcible expropriation in markets was resisted, and it suggests change

in the contrary direction, for commercialization of agrarian relations also seems to have

changed state formation and ideologies of kingship, especially on the agrarian frontier.

Therefore this essay also contributes to debates about state formation and

ideologies of kingship in early modern India. 8 It argues that labor markets with a degree

at least of commercialization and competition characterized state formation on the agrarian

 4

frontier. It further argues that royal virtues could be seen as multiple and multivalent, and

that it was precisely the multivalence of royal virtues which made possible their re-

evaluation and repositioning in a new hierarchy where more pacific royal virtues became

more important than the codes of honor of warrior-rulers. Finally, it argues that more

pacific virtues came to be seen as more important because of a role for markets,

commercialization, competition and choice in state formation.

The Text and its Tropes

This essay is based upon Mukunda Cakrabarti’s Candimangal, 9 a text written in the

second half of the sixteenth century, 10 before the Mughal conquest of Bengal was

completed, but apparently towards the beginning of a period of long-term economic

buoyancy. 11 To be sure, middle Bengali devotional literature has long been read by

Bengali social historians for ‘facts’ about Bengali society. 12 Instead of attempting first to

isolate social ‘facts’ in literary garb, I read Mukunda’s Candimangal as a dramatic

representation of a complex argument. Therefore, initially, I approach this text with two

reading strategies. The first is to examine its explicit rhetoric. Mukunda’s text analyzed
 5

economic and political problems of his own society, and presented solutions which would

have required both human and divine agency, and institutional as well as individual

change. In particular, he argued for a more pacific alternative in place of kingship based

primarily upon the virtues of ksatriya status, of an individual’s martial capacity, and of his

adherence to a code of masculine honor. We can examine the rhetoric by which he

supports this position. The second reading strategy is to analyze assumptions implicit in

this rhetoric. In particular, Mukunda’s depiction of more pacific royal virtues both describes

and makes assumptions about buying and selling, about markets, and about agrarian

relations between local kings and their subjects, relations which displayed at least a degree

of commercialization. Although it is not possible to distinguish them with finality, I will try

to note what seem to be assumptions and descriptions in Mukunda’s narrative.

The author was a Brahman who had left his home village near the southeastern

boundary of Burdwan (Barddhaman) District, West Bengal, in the heartland of Brahman

settlements along the Bhagirathi, Hugli, and Sarasvati rivers. According to a widely

accepted text found in some manuscripts, he had departed because the Muslim governor
 6

in his locality began to exact taxes more rigorously from local landholders. 13 He moved

south, and found a patron in the prince of ‘Brahman'bhum’, a little Hindu kingdom probably

located in undivided Midnapur (Medinipur) District, West Bengal, and in what then was in

a frontier zone between Bengal and Orissa. 14 His narrative of agrarian expansion which

this essay discusses apparently drew its inspiration from the contemporary clearing of

forests to the northwest of this kingdom of Brahman'bhum, in the rolling peneplain which

rises out of the Bengal delta and which lies between it and the Chota Nagpur plateau. 15

Although this narrative is placed in the distant past, at the beginning of the Kali age, its

hero belongs to a base-born (antaja) group from this peneplain, and the subjects of this

hero’s kingdom belong to the familiar Hindu and Muslim castes and elite Muslim lineages

of deltaic Bengal. Therefore we may locate his text in relation to two frontiers, for it was

composed in a little kingdom which lay between the Muslim Sultanate of Bengal and the

usually Hindu kingdom of Orissa, and it is situated between in the Rarh, between the

western Bengal delta, long-settled and a center of Brahmanic culture, and the wild forests

and ‘tribal’ peoples of the Chota Nagpur plateau.

 7

Richard Eaton has shown that in the seventeenth century, in the active delta east of

the Rarh, populations began a long-term process of conversion to Islam as the land

simultaneously was put to the plough and brought under Mughal control. 16 But neither

Islamization nor a ‘Hindu’ reaction to it was a problem for Mukunda’s text, and it is not

clear whether the more pacific style of kingship which his text advocates should be read as

implicitly supporting peaceful accommodation to Muslim rulers of Bengal. 17

Mukunda’s explicit problem was how to create a more peaceful political order in the

context of a local, untouchable raja, a ‘little king’ on the agrarian frontier; his solution,

ultimately, was to integrate this raja into a more encompassing (but still local) polity

subject to a high-jati Hindu king. Nevertheless, his text betrays no interest in or familiarity

with the special beliefs and practices of indigenous, untouchable groups in the peneplain

as they came under the influence of peasants, traders, and Brahmans from deltaic

Bengal. 18 For example, the wedding of this man, accomplished well before he became a

raja, is described with rites typical for the higher jati of deltaic Bengal. 19 Mukunda was

concerned, instead, with the abstract terms of his problem. In the course of exploring
 8

them, Mukunda represented ‘hunting’ as the fundamental cause of conflict and war. At its

simplest, the trope of hunting depicts two classes in human society: predatory warriors,

and the people who are their prey. Hunting is the result of a martial capacity of warrior

elites which others do not have. Warriors, however, can be made kings, and can thus

enter into pacific relations with their subjects.

As it represented more pacific kings and polities, Mukunda’s text was concerned

with the requirements for being a king and with the nature of royal virtues. It described

how royal virtues appear in three ranked, logically distinct, and collectively comprehensive

transactions in human societies. The least ordered and most disruptive of these

transactions he called ‘hunting’; and the royal virtues associated with hunting were the

ones of yasa, a warrior’s strength, martial skill, valor and renown. 20 For Mukunda the crux

of the problem with kingship was the unavoidable, double-edged sword of military power,

which always could be used by military elites against their own subjects. A king, however,

could not be a king without the martial virtues of a hunter.

 9

The second kind of transaction found in human society, more well-ordered than

hunting, was ‘buying and selling’. This essay argues that the royal virtues Mukunda

associated with ‘buying and selling’, considered expansively, were related to a king’s

maintaining possession of sri (a word with a very wide range of meanings, including

auspiciousness, wealth, beauty, fertility and purity), possession of which always was

temporally unstable. While some virtues related to sri enable interpreting omens and

judging the compatibility of proposed actions with their temporal settings, others supported

rational, calculative self-discipline in expending wealth. 21

The third and most well-ordered transaction is a particular kind of gift exchange:

‘giving benefaction’ by a superior, after receiving a less valuable gift from an inferior, and

after hearing and judging his or her supplication. I argue that generosity on the part of the

superior is one of the most important royal virtues in Mukunda’s text. But I also argue that

for him gift exchange has a potential for entropy, because relations based upon it remain

vulnerable to the ‘calculative dimension’ 22 usually found in buying and selling. Ultimately
 10

for Mukunda, pacific kingdoms are possible only by means of the ordinary, unheroic, and

sympathetic virtue of ‘mercy’.

By elevating buying and selling and pacific royal virtues, Mukunda opposed many of

the ideals of contemporary martial sub-cultures in Bengal. 23 In an important passage

Georg Simmel suggests why pejorative views of buying and selling often are found in

aristocratic, martial cultures, which instead value violent expropriation:

This [preference for robbery over honest payment] also is understandable;

for in exchanging and paying one is subordinated to an objective norm, and

the strong and autonomous personality has to efface himself, which is

disagreeable. This also accounts for the disdain of trade by self-willed

aristocratic individuals. On the other hand, exchange favors peaceful

relations between men because they then accept a supra-personal and

normative regulation. 24
 11

In Mukunda’s text, force and fraud were not assumed to be absent from Bengali markets.

I suggest, therefore, that any ‘objective norm’ governing market exchanges may have been

experienced as intermittent or weak. Nevertheless, according to Mukunda’s poem,

conditions of labor scarcity on the agrarian frontier made it necessary, or at least at times

advantageous, for rulers to protect ‘tax-free’ markets and to compete for subjects in

market-like transactions. I argue that there is an important correspondence between

Mukunda’s elevation of the pacific virtues of ‘buying and selling’ and of gift exchanges, and

his criticisms of ‘hunting’, and of martial cultures and their excessive concern with

masculine honor.

Hunters, Kings and War

The metaphor of ‘hunting’ within human society is introduced and secured by a

reciprocal metaphor, the peaceable ‘kingdom of the animals’ which Candi established

immediately after she had built her first temple and introduced her worship in the city and

kingdom of Kalinga on the banks of the Kamsa river at the end of the Third Age.

Hundreds of animals of Biju [desolate] Forest begged for her intervention because they
 12

were afraid of the tiger and other predatory animals. Candi granted them the boon of

freedom from fear, instituted her worship among them, and along with her worship,

established their ‘kingdom’, and promised them freedom from predation. 25

Candi made the lion king of this kingdom. Similarly, she appointed all the predatory

and powerful animals officers of the realm: the hyena (taraksu) was told to hold the royal

umbrella; the tiger, bear, wolf, wild boar and rhinoceros were to be the king’s five chief

ministers (mahapatra); and both the elephant and pairs of horses his royal mounts. There

were roles for other animals as well: the sarabha (a mythical creature with eight feet and

a single horn) was appointed royal purohit; the mongoose became the royal doctor whose

medicines would preserve the animals from snakebite. Troops of monkeys would fan the

king with chowries; the jackal (bheur: ‘one who follows’ and eats the carrion of the tiger)

would be the royal panegyrist and genealogist. The kingdom’s wild buffalos were made

chiefs of thousands in the royal army and the palace doorkeepers; and jackals again

(srgal, also a pejorative term for someone clever like a fox) the city’s guards and their

prefect of the police (kotal, P. kotwal). 26

 13

Candi could establish the kingdom of the animals only because she also abolished

hunting by the predatory animals; in fact, these two statements are almost synonymous, for

the predatory animals became members of the kingdom’s ruling elite. The kingdom of the

animals can be read as associating kings with divine power when it makes the goddess’s

lion-mount the king. 27 But it also can be read as a satire of the rapacity of thoroughly

human royal officers when it calls the lion’s royal ministers wolves, tigers, and bears, and

both his panegyrist and his commander of the guard jackals. 28 Thereby it provides an all

too convenient excuse for kings when their administrations fail to rule justly.

Candi then arranged for a prince in Indra’s court to be cursed to suffer human

existence. By his own self-description Kalketu, the human male thus born, was a Cohar

by jati whom no one would touch. 29 At the beginning of the Fourth Age he hunted the

animals of Biju Forest, and his wife Phullara sold their flesh, horns and fur in periodic

markets, where she also purchased rice and other foods which the family consumed. To

protect their subjects the lion king and his ministers in turn went to war against Kalketu.
 14

When Kalketu defeated them, they appealed to the goddess, and she determined to put an

end to Kalketu’s hunting by making him a king.

Again, therefore, the problem posed by the narrative is ‘hunting’, and again the

solution is establishment of a kingdom to be ruled by a former predator. Candi gave

Kalketu great wealth and commanded him to use it to establish a kingdom. He bought

regalia, arms, and provisions, cleared the forest where previously he had hunted, secured

divine assistance to build a temple and city, and attracted subjects to Gujarat, his new

kingdom, by offering them favorable terms. But martial prowess remained necessary for

Kalketu’s kingship. Despite Candi’s command to abandon (teja, imperative) his bow and

arrows, in order to fell the forest of Gujarat, Kalketu had to hunt and slay its man-eating

tiger. 30 Later, when he had to defend his kingdom against the army of Kalinga, Kalketu

displayed an indomitable will and a heroic martial prowess, both of which virtues the poem

celebrates while it also makes them subordinate to the goddess’s own power and

purposes. 31 At the end of the narrative we are told that the inferior ‘lords of the soil’
 15

(bhua raja) worshipped him; that no raja was able to make war with him; and that after

they had been defeated, other rajas ‘gave him taxes’ (kar). 32

The dilemma of human polities is that rulers and their agents are usually powerful

men, ‘hunters’ by nature; paradoxically their duty is to protect subjects from the ‘hunting’

that in other circumstances they themselves do. Weaker humans, like the weaker animals

who are preyed upon, cannot aspire to rule because they cannot perform the warrior’s duty

of protection. Vulnerability to ‘hunting’ therefore is built into kingdoms, even though

kingdoms are constituted in order to negate ‘hunting’. Initially, this dilemma seems to have

been avoided through Candi’s divine gift of wealth to Kalketu, which both defined a

transaction opposite to the violent expropriations of hunting, and was itself so generous

that Kalketu could have had no need to hunt thereafter. But of course Candi’s gift of

wealth to Kalketu did not suffice to end ‘hunting’. Rather, his use of this wealth had to be

guided by royal virtues which would support a new, royal dharma, different from that of a

hunter. We now may turn to this complex of themes, as we examine Candi’s gift of

wealth.
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Sri, Sovereignty, and Wealth

In this section I argue that in Mukunda’s text sri is associated with the second of

his three transactions, ‘buying and selling’, and that the virtues which concern a ruler’s

relation to markets have been elevated above those of ‘hunting’. A theme of ambiguous

omens, auspicious and inauspicious, and of Kalketu’s inability to read them correctly, is

broached when the goddess first appeared to Kalketu in the form of an iguana (godhika),

whose common name, cow-snake (go-sap) indicates a conjunction of opposites. 33 But

this theme immediately is replaced by an ambiguous promise of wealth, another dimension

of sri, in the following episode. After a fruitless search for animals more common in a

Bengali hunter’s diet, finally a beautiful deer appeared, golden like the iguana. Not

ignorant of the Ramayana, Kalketu understood that this magic doe (mayamrgi) was like

Marica, that evil ‘treasury of magic’, who once had taken the form of a bejewelled deer to

deceive Rama; and therefore Kalketu feared that its purpose was to ‘deceive’ him also.

In the Valmiki Ramayana, Rama had argued that the bejewelled deer was ‘all the

wealth a man could ask for...riches enough to swell his coffers... ’. And he had enclosed
 17

this thought with the following two general truths: ‘In the deep forests [kings do] gather

riches with determination, precious metals of all sorts, veined with gems and gold’, and

second, the science of artha teaches that ‘a man in want of something should go and get

it without hesitation’. 34 Kalketu also decided that the magic doe, with its hooves of silver,

antlers of gold and bejewelled body, would put an end to his ‘net of sorrow’ if he were to

get its gold and jewels, or to sell it for provisions for his household. 35 Elsewhere the poem

quotes (but does not quite approve of) the following proverb: ‘Fish in a dry pond, a

wandering woman, gold and silver in the deep forest—seeing these even a sage’s heart is

enticed, for no one leaves aside what can be got without effort’. 36 Nevertheless, as

Kalketu feared, the deer herself appeared and disappeared at will, and so could not be

hunted. More interestingly, recognizing the divinity of her magic, Kalketu could not even

aim his arrow when he saw her face. 37 Kalketu saw that the doe was divine and that the

apparent potential to seize a fortune in the forest was deceptive. In this way his prowess

as a hunter is marginalized by the story, just before he returned to the border of the forest,

tied up the iguana, and took her home.

 18

We now return from the forest to Kalketu’s hut, where, as the iguana, Candi broke

free from her bonds and changed her appearance again, to become a beautiful, sixteen-

year-old Brahman woman wandering alone. This appearance introduces still a third

opposition, that of a beautiful but apparently unchaste woman, and this opposition also is

linked to wealth and to the temptations of greed, because this beautiful sixteen-year-old

promised Kalketu’s wife Phullara that she would deliver the couple from poverty and

suffering by giving them an unimaginable fortune, if she could live with them. Phullara was

not tempted by the offer of her wealth, and went to complain to Kalketu. To his wife

Kalketu denied that he had brought the woman home; to the woman he argued that she

should return to her husband before she was dishonored by the people of her own family,

or punished by the king of Kalinga for defiling her jati by staying with a family of

untouchables. 38

One may see an analogy between the magic doe bearing great wealth in the forest

and a ‘wandering woman’ to be had ‘without effort’. Perhaps in her erotic beauty and

teasing puns we also may see a divinity playing with the figure of the king’s devadasi,
 19

never widowed and therefore always auspicious, the ‘moving Laksmi’ whose rituals of

erotic dance assure a kingdom rains, fertility and prosperity. 39 Nevertheless, the story

comically emphasizes Kalketu’s conjugal fidelity, rather than any royal capacity to enjoy

many wives. 40 But perhaps simplicity and fidelity are virtues not irrelevant to kingship; for,

if kingdoms are to be conceived as autarkies, kings have a primary obligation to the well-

being of their ‘own’ people, as a husband does to his wife.

This story does not repeat the misogynist language frequently found in Indian

martial cultures, for example in stories which tell how beautiful women seduced Gorakh

Nath renunciates or celibate wrestlers and warriors, and so made them lose their semen

and therewith mental and bodily powers. 41 Nor did Kalketu either reject the woman’s

proposal because she seemed already to be impure, or see through the disguise of the

goddess, and reject her advances because he knew she was testing him. 42 Despite the

seductive beauty of the goddess, neither the dangers of beauty nor the value of sexual

purity receives further emphasis as an aspect of sri. Instead, Mukunda has shaped this

episode to suggest alternative royal virtues to those of a warrior’s valor (yasa), by relating
 20

improper sexual desire to desire for wealth and luxury, rather than to loss of semen and

resulting injuries to male health and bodily strength. Apparently, to deserve the great

wealth the goddess was about to give them, Kalketu and Phullara should not desire wealth

and luxury at the expense of their own marital bond. The ambiguous potential of wealth

for good or for ill is the one dimension of sri which is consistently emphasized in this

episode.

Gifts of Wealth and Dharma

To end Kalketu’s hunting, Candi then gave the couple great wealth, in the form of a

jewelled ring as well as pots of siver rupees, and with this wealth she also gave them a

new dharma. As part of his new dharma, Candi commanded that Kalketu should ‘break’

the ring (that is to say, take it to a money changer and exchange it for money), cut down

the forest of Gujarat, give hundreds of people homes together with a capital of cowries,

husked rice and paddy seed, and nurture all his subjects as he would his sons. 43

Immediately, Kalketu responded with a cogent objection to Candi’s command:

 21

My birth is in an extremely debased lineage; by jati I am a Cohar. No one

can touch me. People call me a ‘savage’. What Brahman will ever be my

priest? Does getting any kind of wealth ever make the base-born high?

But Candi replied, ‘Your priest will get sight of me. The highest Brahman will accept gifts

from you’. 44 At least on this frontier of Bengali agrarian settlement, Candi intended that

her temple worship should dissolve the expected links between jati and kingship. She

reconstituted a political order in which kingship would be based on wealth and devotion to

her, rather than on any kind of qualification by birth, conquest or heroic self-sacrifice.

Of course, in Mukunda’s time leaders from low-born, ‘tribal’ peoples had become

kings on the agrarian frontier below the Chota Nagpur plateau. We may take as an

example the Malla kings of Vishnupur, who begin to be visible to historians during the

reign of Akbar, but who claimed a much more ancient royal lineage. Stories which

legitimize the Malla lineage, despite its apparent relation to the ‘base-born’ (antaja) jati of

Bagdis, narrate that Adi Malla, founder of the lineage, was born to a Rajput king and
 22

queen from north India; that he was abandoned at birth, and raised as a foundling by a

poor Bagdi family; that a Brahman nevertheless recognized signs of royalty in the young

boy, and took him to his house to educate; and finally, that after the death of a

neighboring king that king’s royal elephant seized the boy in his trunk and set him upon

the throne. 45 Kalketu’s story in Candimangal in contrast is inevitably comic, because he is

without a royal lineage, signs or qualifications. Indeed, exactly while relating how he came

to be a king, Mukunda satirizes Kalketu’s simplicity and ignorance as a base-born hunter. 46

It also is a comic story because Candi initiates Kalketu’s transformation by the gift of a

ring worth an immense sum of money, and she directs him to ‘break’ the ring for money.

Are we not meant to understand a reduction of the ring (a symbol of wholeness, of sri,

and thus of Candi’s selection of Kalketu to be king, and of her divine gift of sovereignty) to

the function of money as a store of value for the instrumental purpose of buying things? If

so, we do not have a story about a divine fetish which must be carefully guarded as

‘sacred’ to attest to the allegedly ‘eternal’ sacredness of a temporal political order.

Candi’s divine gift nevertheless would both authorize and make possible lesser royal gifts
 23

to constitute and display Kalketu’s kingship through his personal relations with his subjects.

But Kalketu’s gifts also were not precious objects to be safeguarded as fetishes, but

utilitarian tools, animals, paddy seeds, and cowries, a local money. 47 We have a story

which thoroughly and comically integrates a money economy into the constitution of

kingship.

Kalketu’s first item of purchase was a covered palanquin, at once throne and

conveyance, ornamented with golden crests set with diamonds, with jewels and strands of

pearls, with a seat of sandalwood, and with a cover of splendid silk. Elephants, Arabian

horses, and mountain ponies were other insignia of kingship bought in the marketplace;

they also were necessities for a royal army. His personal weapons simultaneously served

as regalia: a suit of armor, a helmet ornamented with jewels, and a curved, broad-blade

sword (taripatra taroyal) with a golden handle. Otherwise, Kalketu purchased only the

minimum of ornaments for himself and his wife, together with a golden chest for their

safekeeping. 48 It is worth noting that Kalketu did not purchase saffron or sandalwood to

anoint his body, nor a chariot and sandalwood throne, nor a white umbrella, the royal
 24

‘honors’ that properly would come only later as royal gifts and by ritual investiture

(abhisek) by an overlord. 49 He concentrated instead on weapons of war. Among

weapons we can note matchlocks (tabak; A. tupak), battleaxes, several kinds of swords,

also spears, pikes, slings, elephant goads, maces, bows, arrows, daggers and shields.

Kalketu finally completed his purchases in the market by buying large stocks of food,

apparently for both his army and his subjects. Reduced to purchasing power, sri allowed

Kalketu to purchase men and weapons for a military force, so that his individual virtues as

a warrior and a hero could be extended to leadership of an army. A story that suggests

that one could become a king by means of wealth also implies a degree of

commercialization of the instruments of kingship: in Mukunda’s account, men willing to

engage for a price in military service, 50 accountants to manage expenditures, the basic

regalia of a conveyance, of personal armor and weapons, and of royal ornaments; the

stock of common weapons needed by an army, and a store of food all could be purchased

in a market.
 25

Moreover, as we watch Kalketu exchange the ring for money and then purchase

some of the insignia and instruments of kingship, we are shown vices and virtues which

attend market transactions: among vices, the greed and dishonesty of the pawnbroker and

money-changer Murari Sil, and the simple-mindedness of Kalketu in bargaining with this

man, and later, in bargaining with the Kayastha headman Bharu Datta; and among virtues,

the numeracy of Kayastha accountants who recorded and paid for Kalketu’s purchases,

and Kalketu’s self-restraint in not purchasing many luxurious accoutrements for himself and

his wife. A story which at the same time says that Kalketu’s wealth was the gift of

Candi draws a veil over more ordinary sources of the wealth by which ‘hunting’ men might

have become kings. (But one of the accusations which the king of Kalinga later would

bring against Kalketu is that he had obtained his wealth by killing and robbing some

merchant. 51) In making new wealth the gift of Candi, Mukunda both mystified the

acquisition of wealth and failed to provide any human escape from the zero-sum logic of

‘hunting’. A zero-sum logic similarly is visible in the way Kalketu’s kingdom was settled:

indigenous people of the forest did not become new peasants; rather, Kalketu had to
 26

attract existing peasants to his kingdom from the kingdom of Kalinga, and therefore the

king of Kalinga had to lose all those whom Kalketu gained as his subjects. Finally, this

zero-sum logic is visible in Kalketu’s royal gifts to his subjects, for they are given out of

the vast treasure that Candi had given him. Should it not also apply to transactions of

buying and selling? If so, to Mukunda whatever profit a merchant gained must be

equivalent to a loss sustained by someone else. Although Mukunda realistically portrayed

expansion of settled agriculture on the agrarian frontier, and a degree of commercialization

of the instruments of kingship there, he did not observe, let alone attempt to find a human

explanation for, a general and secular growth of the economy.

Gifts of Pan and a Redistributive Economy

Although one could buy many of the instruments of kingship, apparently one could

not simply buy a kingdom. Kalketu cleared the forest with hired laborers, but to build a

city and a temple for Candi and to find settlers he had to ask for divine assistance.

Having received these further divine gifts, Kalketu in turn made gifts to people who had

come to settle his new land, and thus by receiving and giving he moved beyond
 27

transactions of ‘buying and selling’. Nevertheless, Mukunda’s narrative implies that his

gifts and the relations which they constituted had a ‘calculative dimension’ as Kalketu

bargained for settlers on the agrarian frontier.

Compared to other authors of Candimangal, Mukunda complicated the story of

settling Kalketu’s kingdom. Candi, in his account, did not simply advise the headman

Bulan Mandal in a dream to relocate with his subjects for the sake of tax-free lands, or

threaten him with floods if he should choose to remain in Kalinga. 52 Rather, in his account

Bulan Mandal and his peasants actually lost their stores of wealth in the flood Candi sent,

had no savings with which to pay the king’s revenue demand, and would have had no

income until weeks after it was due. 53 In this situation Bulan went to see Kalketu to

negotiate more favorable terms.

Mukunda thereby outlined problems of village headmen and of kings on the agrarian

frontier. In a situation of labor scarcity, village headmen used their authority over other

peasants and their mobility to negotiate for better terms from alternative rulers. Crucial to

their interests were: an initial period of tax free possession to allow clearing and
 28

cultivating forests or bushy fallows, security of title to the land they would cultivate,

permanency of settlement of the land revenue demand, absence of labor taxes or

additional cesses or taxes in kind, and their own control of agency for tax collection from

their dependants and subleasers (rather than tax collection by the king’s officials). 54

Village headmen also considered the procedure for assessing the land revenue demand

(more strictly, by measurement of the land, or more loosely, per plough), its remission for

harvest failures, the schedule of its installments relative to the times of harvest, and the

security held for and the rate of interest assessed on unpaid installments of the land

revenue. 55 According to Mukunda’s narrative, a ruler should satisfy generously the

demands of village headmen coming to his city with their dependants, and at the same

time he should establish direct and permanent relationships with those same dependants.

Kalketu constituted his relation to his new subjects by a royal ceremony giving pan

to all of them. (Pan are ‘betel leaves’, Piper betel, but the text suggests gifts of prepared

‘rolls’ of pan, containing ground areca nuts, catechu, a lime paste made from sea-shells,

and perhaps spices as well.) Royal gifts of pan commonly were used to honor subjects.
 29

In addition, at least in this poem, royal gifts of pan were ‘taken’ in a courtly ceremony in

order to indicate that a subject voluntarily had accepted a royal command. 56 Kalketu did

not accompany these gifts of pan with any commands. Were Kalketu’s gifts of pan

represented only as royal honors to all his subjects, or did their ‘taking’ the gifts of pan

also mean that they voluntarily had entered into a new relationship with Kalketu as their

ruler? If the latter is the case, then a ceremony of ‘taking’ pan simultaneously

acknowledged his subjects’ capacity to choose their ruler.

When Kayastha headmen came to settle Kalketu’s kingdom, they brought gifts

(bhet) of food—curds, fish, and ghee in clay pots—to initiate a relationship. They

promised to settle their dependants (prajagan), and requested that Kalketu give them and

their dependants pan, along with good lands well delimited, houses, paddy seed, and

money to buy bullocks; and that he delay requiring them to repay loans. 57 Kalketu’s

acceptance of the gifts of food are matched by their acceptance of gifts of pan, and both

signify acceptance of a relationship.

 30

The narrative suggests in several passages that Kalketu gave pan to all his

subjects, both Muslim and Hindu, and both high-born and low-born. 58 Gifts of pan thus

became socially and religiously neutral symbols of inclusion in a kingdom which contained

very different kinds of subjects. They initiated other, more valuable royal gifts of land

which would be tax free for an initial period (or in the case of Brahmans, in perpetuity), of

interest-free loans, of paddy seed, of houses, and of ‘beautiful clothes’. 59 In turn these

royal gifts were to be reciprocated by his subjects’ gifts of taxes after the revenue-free

period had expired, and in the case of Brahmans, by their ‘judgment’ of sastras, and by

the intangible gifts of their blessings. 60 Finally, in Kalketu’s city pan growers (barui, ‘who

continually gave the hero pan’) also could count on a special relationship with him. He

promised them that no one would take goods from them by force without their being able

to call upon the king to intervene, and that he would impose no unjust regulation upon

them. 61 In this narrative gifts of pan from the king mark out the autarkic boundaries of

royal redistribution, and by synecdoche gifts of pan from pan-growers to the king also
 31

suggest the other side of a redistributive economy, gifts of taxes from non-Brahman

subjects to the king.

Mukunda’s text proposes a direct relationship between king and subjects, even

though it also specifies a mediating role for labor-controlling Kayastha headmen over their

dependants. Gifts of pan both sealed and veiled bargaining about the specific terms

offered to settlers, a process which Mukunda’s text represents as intensely competitive,

suggesting conditions of labor scarcity on the agrarian frontier. Therefore, behind the gifts

of pan we may imagine a price, or a series of prices, more or less freely and mutually

agreed upon, as a frontier king divided his lands among subjects who were valuable to him

in different ways and in different degrees; and as they in turn came to terms with him

about the taxes most of them eventually would have to give, and computed both the

economic value of his terms of settlement, and the degree of honor he would show them.

In this text the ‘poison in the gift’ was not the capacity of some ritual gifts to transfer

inauspiciousness. 62 Rather, precisely because they were voluntary, gift exchanges and

relationships constituted by them had a ‘calculative dimension’ through which they became
 32

vulnerable to the entropy of competitive self-interest. Through calculations of self-interest

‘hunting’ would be reintroduced to the moral economy of Kalketu’s gift-centered and

autarkic realm, which, because of Kalketu’s great wealth and exemplary generosity,

otherwise might have been a peaceable kingdom, invulnerable to predation.

Markets and ‘Hunting’ within a Redistributive Economy

Before Bulan Mandal and Kalketu could seal their agreement, a rival headman

appeared who complicated the bargain. This man’s name was Bharu [cheater] Datta.

Also a Kayastha, he nominated himself as Kalketu’s ‘minister’ (patra) by giving the king an

exaggerated account of his own lineage and family honor. 63 Mukunda satirizes Bharu

Datta’s transparent attempts to claim more honor than was his due, the greed which

motivated him, and Kalketu’s simplicity in failing to discern either his character or his

intention. Proposing himself as minister, Bharu advised Kalketu:

There is no fear in speaking what is right. To win the love of your

dependants (jinite prajar maya, a pun also meaning, ‘to defeat the deception
 33

of your dependants’) take a ledger (chiya, A. siyaha) of their deeds [of

land], so that they keep to their own plots. When the winter harvest ripens,

you should set upon them a deep stratagem (bisam phanda). Distrain the

grain of the poor. Thus no one will flee while indebted to you, and in the

end you will not suffer from fraud. 64

In this way Kalketu would have insured that peasants could not sell the standing grain,

pocket the profits, and flee without paying taxes due to the king. Bharu further advised

Kalketu to make that ‘peasant’ (casa) Bulan Mandal his ‘headman of peasants’ (desmukh)

while making Bharu ‘chief’ (mukhya) of all the Kayasthas. And to justify both of these

steps he quoted the following proverb, which clearly applies to himself: ‘In the hands of a

servant a sword, and in the possession of wives a treasure—they [both] cause great

sorrow in the end’. 65

A process of negotiation brought settlers to Kalketu’s new kingdom, partly because

Kalketu had to offer better terms than his rival, the King of Kalinga. Negotiations
 34

proceeded, and became more complex, because the redistributive economy which he

thereby instituted could have had either of two conflicting goals. The king and his agents

could employ the redistributive economy to ‘nurture his subjects like sons’, or alternatively,

they could keep subjects firmly in their place, like servants or wives, without weapons and

without wealth, so that they would not ‘cheat’ the king of his taxes, or bring him ‘great

sorrow in the end’. Through the tigerish minister Bharu Datta and his ‘deep stratagem’ of

distraint of the main winter rice crop before harvest, and through the alleged ‘deception of

dependants’ which it would have counteracted, Mukunda’s poem can be read to suggest

how force and fraud, endemic to competition in Bengali marketplaces, also entered into

strategies of tax collection and tax resistance, and therewith into the redistributive economy

of local kingdoms.

Moreover, a market economy intersected the redistributive economy instituted by

Kalketu. The poem’s list of jatis of people who settled his kingdom no doubt was meant

to indicate all the services and products which a kingdom must have, in order to be able

to produce and reproduce itself, to be an autarkic whole. 66 Although the poem clearly
 35

states that Kayastha families brought with them their own dependants, families of artisan

and serving jatis, we are told nothing of non-market, customary ‘jajmani’ exchanges

between households of these patrons and their clients. 67 Instead, to allow for the

exchange of goods and services among his subjects, as well as for trade with other lands,

we are told by Mukunda that Kalketu founded a ‘tax-free market’ (bebaj hat, bebaj

bajar). 68 In founding a market for his kingdom which, by the absence of taxes, would

attract ‘merchants from various lands’, 69 and which would allow subjects to buy and sell

without being taxed, Kalketu apparently fulfilled one of the duties of kings and safeguarded

his subjects’ wealth. 70

Bharu, however, treated Kalketu’s market vendors as a hunter treats his prey, by

‘looting their wares and loading his baskets and giving not a cowrie for all the things he

took’. 71 He involved the vendors in mutual quarrels, for the resolution of which his dhuti

swallowed bribes of silver rupees. His knavish son and his widowed sister took a ‘tax in

kind’ (tola) of greens, brinjals, radishes, clay pots, rice, and even of areca nuts and pan.

The vendors complained to Kalketu in a body, and threatened to leave his kingdom. When
 36

Kalketu summoned Bharu for trial and judgment of their complaints, another kind of fraud

also was alleged. Kalketu himself claimed that Bharu took ‘interest’ (kalantar) on loans to

others, despite his paying none for the loans of paddy seed given him by Kalketu, and

despite his living upon gift lands and in a house built for him at the king’s expense.

Bharu, in his defense, explained all his demands as his ‘headman’s tax in kind’ (mandaliya

tola), and claimed that Kalketu was trying to cheat him, after having got the benefit of his

work, for ‘all the dependants who were my servants came here at my word’. 72 Without

being told, auditors of Mukunda’s poem know that this last claim is false; Kalketu’s city

already had been settled before Bharu arrived.

Mukunda’s poem suggests that royal agents, ‘ministers’ and ‘headmen’ like Bharu

Datta, were well placed to exploit subjects by force and fraud, and we can understand the

calculations of short-term self-interest behind such exploitation. Force and fraud in

collection of taxes inserted the most entropic and predatory relations of ‘hunting’ and

‘buying and selling’ into relations that had appeared to be based upon exchanges of gifts.
 37

Dismissed from Kalketu’s service, Bharu immediately presented himself with

offerings (bhet) to the king of Kalinga, and gave him the news of Kalketu’s upstart

kingdom within his territory, and the king of Kalinga determined upon a policy of war. The

plot of the poem therefore inscribes a circle, from Kalketu’s hunting upwards to his sale of

Candi’s ring and his purchases of men, regalia, and instruments of kingship, upwards

again to the gifts of pan, homes, land and capital by which he attracted subjects, and the

gifts which they promised in return, but then downwards to the appearance of force and

fraud in Bharu’s tax collection in his marketplace, and downwards again to war. But it

also inscribes a complication in the argument, for through the plot we see more clearly the

potential for conflicts of interest within ruling elites as well as between them and their

subjects.

Battle and a Warrior’s Honor

David Schulman has alerted us to the ‘symbolic activity’ of battle in literature of the

Chola kingdom, ‘in which [symbolic activity] the unwieldy and disharmonious fragments of

the kingdom combine in a moment of institutionalized breakdown and release’. In Tamil

 38

poetry war was imagined as surreal, ludic, vividly sensual, and at the same time frenzied

and grotesque; descriptions of death in battle made war into a carnival feast for Kali’s

minions, a ghastly ‘demon sabbath’. 73 Mukunda, no warrior himself, often relied on

stereotypes to convey the battle between Kalketu and the army of the King of Kalinga, and

in these passages his poem seems to have attracted the interpolations of lesser talents as

well. It is clear, nevertheless, that he meant to convey some of the same links between

war and a ‘wilderness of comic chaos’, a wilderness dominated, however, by Kalketu’s

heroic will.

Kalketu’s will is emphasized by the contrast between his simple bow and arrows

and the weapons of the army of the King of Kalinga, with its cannons carried on ‘hundred

of thousands of wagons’, and with its war elephants that seemed like vermilion clouds,

they were so huge. 74 Indeed, the plot of Mukunda’s account of their battle progressively

strips Kalketu of all weapons, until he had to fight only with his fists, but so strong was his

will to conquer, and so great his prowess in battle, that even then he could not be

defeated, until Candi caused him to lose his ‘intelligence and power’ (balabuddhi). 75 But
 39

battle is not seen as without any value; it too has a divine dimension. As is the case with

the other battle described in this poem, Candi’s ghouls joined the fray, and happily drank

the blood of the slain in a carnival feast. 76

At a crucial moment in the battle, however, the heroic contest is called into

question, and temporarily is made comic and inconsequential. After the army of Kalinga,

led by the commander of the guard, had suffered a convincing defeat, Bharu goaded the

commander of the guard into resuming his attack. Kalketu’s wife Phullara then recalled an

episode from the Ramayana. Before their second and crucial battle, Valin was challenged

by his brother Sugriva, despite already having defeated Sugriva in combat. Sugriva,

however, challenged his brother this second time only after securing an alliance with Lord

Rama, and only because he counted on Rama’s secret and unchivalrous promise to come

to his assistance in what should have been single combat between heroes. Phullara also

recalled that Valin’s wife, Tara, suspecting some such plot, had advised her husband to

submit to Sugriva this second time, and that she had witnessed Rama kill her husband by
 40

treachery when he failed to accept her advice. Phullara concluded that she also should

advise her husband Kalketu not to resume the battle.

Valin, we must recall, had replied to Tara as follows: ‘For invincible heroes who

never turn back in battle, to endure insolence is worse than death, timid woman’. Thus he

made the masculine honor of a warrior his ultimate value. Indeed, in proposing the

challenge, Rama had counted on the fact that heroes like Valin do not tolerate insults,

‘particularly when their women are present’. 77 Kalketu, on the contrary, listened to his

wife’s good advice and at once hid in the granary. 78 Nor was his opponent, Kalinga’s

commander of the guard, any more heroic in Kalketu’s sudden absence. Convinced that

somewhere Kalketu was lying in ambush, he halted; his body became covered in goose-

flesh, and his mouth could give voice to no sound, while he strained to hear some slight

noise indicating Kalketu’s location. 79 In the heart of the account of the battle, one finds

this comic image of two warriors each hiding from the other.

We are never told that, like Valin’s, Kalketu’s honor depended on fighting whenever

challenged, even to the death, and ‘particularly in the presence of women’. Later, when
 41

freed from his shackles and released by Candi from the Kalinga prison, Kalketu would be

quite indifferent to her promises that on the morrow the king would honor and reward him.

Instead, he wanted only to escape while he could with his bow and three arrows. 80 The

whole episode suggests a pragmatic orientation to issues of war and peace. Indeed, we

will see that a solution to war must involve, among other reforms, replacing the codes of

honor which require victory or death from both men and women in warrior lineages.

Tej, Stuti, and Mercy

Kalketu announced a theory of his kingship when brought before the King of Kalinga

to be tried and punished for his upstart kingdom. Prompted by the king, who evidently

expected that Kalketu either would admit his usurpation or would identify a rival overlord as

his protector, Kalketu in fact claimed that Mahes Thakur (Siva) was the king (raja) of his

kingdom, that Candi was the ‘administrator’ (adhikari), and that he himself was her ‘chief

minister (mahapatra) holding her ‘tej’ (energy), and the ‘executor of her commands’

(ajnakari). 81 In Mukunda’s time and place an ideology declaring that the king was only the

delegate of a divine ruler would have been associated with the region of Orissa or
 42

‘Kalinga’. It first had been announced in Cuttack by the Ganga king Anangabhima III in

the years 1230-38, who declared himself the ‘deputy’ (ravuta) and ‘son’ of [Link]. 82

More recently the theory had been revived and elaborated by Kapilendra (r. 1435-1467),

who usurped the Gajapati throne and founded the powerful Suryavamsa dynasty in

Orissa. 83

Despite the familiarity of Kalketu’s theory, however, Mukunda did not represent it as

persuasive to the king of Kalinga. Denying any divine and spiritual authority to Kalketu,

the king was interested only in how a vile hunter had acquired so much wealth, and in the

various kinds of dishonor he, the king, had suffered in consequence of the upstart little

kingdom within his realm. Kalketu asserted that Candi had given him her own wealth.

This claim seems to have enraged the king, precisely because of its violation of the

hierarchical principles of jati. Kalketu’s claim that he ruled as a delegate by ‘holding

Candi’s tej’ therefore is an assertion that complements his claim to rule by her gift of

wealth. Does it refute the claim that jati order had been violated by his possession of a

kingdom, or by the prior acquisition of wealth which made that kingdom possible?
 43

In Bengali tej has a range of meanings which tend to emphasize the expression of

‘radiance’, ‘heat’, or ‘energy’ in mental or spiritual ‘power’, ‘physical strenght’, ‘valor’,

‘courage’, or ‘heroism’. 84 Taken in any of these senses, Kalketu’s tej already had been

demonstrated in battle. Are we to understand that a commitment to truth and dharma, or

a moral teleology in general is inherent in this term? 85 Of course, in other mangal-kabya

there are stories of kings or warriors who became invincible through divine gifts. We may

mention the character of Ichai Ghos in Dharmamangal, a rebel against proper authority and

a protégé of the goddess, who received from her a deceptive assurance of invincibility.

Lau Sen, the hero of this story, succeeded in battle against Ichai Ghos by the intervention

of Lord Dharma, and with the help of other male divinities. In Vipradas’s Manasa-vijaya,

for another example, Cad for a time was invincible as a king because of Siva’s gift of

gnosis (mahajnan), concretely embodied in gifts of an ascetic’s uncut hair, a ‘pouch of

siddhi’ (hashish), and most important, a ‘victory scarf’ which allowed him to raise the dead

to life. 86 But again divine gifts of invincibility did not prevent Cad from committing grave

mental errors (kubuddhi) in his dealings with Manasa. In Kalketu’s case, what particularly
 44

refutes the king’s claim that jati order had been violated is Kalketu’s counter-claim that he

was only the executor of Candi’s commands. The king’s ministers, whose minds were not

clouded by rage, noted that Kalketu showed no fear of the king, because his mental and

emotional attention (bhab) was fixed upon Candi. Because he was marked by

participation in the divine, they refused to consent to his execution, and without their

consent the king relented and had Kalketu imprisoned. 87 Apparently Kalketu’s devotional

absorption in and dependence on the goddess had given them some evidence that he

‘held Candi’s tej’.

No purification rituals could have cleansed Kalketu of the impurity which was his by

birth. Although Candi intervened to release Kalketu from prison, and made sure he

received investiture from the king of Kalinga, she did not arrange for elaborate royal rituals

to infuse in him more of her own tej, except as that virtue might have been present in gifts

of regalia and unguents from the king of Kalinga. 88 Kalketu’s theory of his kingship, which

identifies the divine basis for his authority as holding Candi’s tej, is not emphasized in
 45

subsequent events of the narrative; in fact the phrase appears nowhere else in Mukunda’s

text.

Instead of extraordinary royal rituals, the text emphasizes a common devotional

practice as the means by which Kalketu could reverse an entropic flow towards hunting

and war. This practice was stuti, a prayer for divine intervention. It could be performed

by all regardless of jati, and by men and women alike. The virtue by which Candi herself

responded to stuti to save Kalinga and Gujarat, and which she awakened in both of her

kings to save them from an endless cycle of hunting and war, was the anti-heroic and

non-hierarchical virtue of mercy (karuna, krpa).

Stuti, at least as Kalketu modeled it at the crux of the narrative, was an emotionally

multivalent, devotional hymn which praised the goddess, mentioning all her names,

attributes, and salvational actions in the world, and which questioned her indifference to,

and abandonment of him. 89 At the same time, it gradually became an act of moral

reflection, a reckoning and judgment with respect to his own life. Kalketu punctuated his

verses of praise (given us in an improbably Sanskritized Bengali, and using verses also
 46

used by all her other worshippers) with entirely personal interjections in colloquial Bengali.

In the latter he insisted on his innocence before some charges (he never was a ‘thug’ [t.

hag]; he never had misbehaved with another’s wife) and admitted to others (he had been

a hunter; he had been guilty of greed in taking Candi’s wealth, and such greed in general

leads to lascivious conduct). For ‘grievous faults’ (darun dos) thus gradually identified,

Kalketu’s stuti finally asked for Candi’s forgiveness, while at the same time he begged

Candi to ‘fly quickly to deliver her servant’. 90

Candi’s emotional involvement in Kalketu’s stuti is most interesting. She came at

once, ‘without tying up her hair’, felt herself ashamed to see Kalketu bound in prison, and

sorrowed to see his weeping face. She freed him from bondage, and insisted that he

should remain in Kalinga to be invested and to receive from the king a royal umbrella,

along with other ‘honors’ and ‘rewards’. 91 An unmotivated act of mercy immediately

follows: she freed, not Kalketu alone, but also all the prisoners in the king’s prison, and

had her ghouls seize the weapons of all the prison guards, who fell unconscious and in

disarray. 92
 47

But it is following Kalketu’s investiture that we see the most extraordinary acts of

mercy. The first occurred as Kalketu was returning to his kingdom. On the road he saw

the wives of the soldiers he had slain. They were preparing to immolate themselves upon

their husbands’ funeral pyres. Kalketu’s ears were filled with their weeping, and he

acknowledged his responsibility for their fate in a way contrary to the code of masculine

honor for a warrior: ‘In shame and fear he kept his head downcast’. Candi understood

his silent wish, and promised to restore the soldiers to life. Hearing this promise, Kalketu

forbade the women the rite of anumarana, and Candi revived the slaughtered soldiers, who

danced in a carnival of joy that reversed their experience of the carnival of battle. 93 We

must note at once that here Kalketu reciprocated an earlier act of mercy, by which his own

wife had been spared suicide or immolation, when he had been captured by the

commander of the guard of Kalinga. That man, inspired by the goddess, had promised

Phullara that he would speak to the king and save Kalketu’s life. 94 Finally, this episode

corrects the model for heroic action enacted by Lord Rama, who had raised to life only his

allies, the dead monkey soldiers of Sugriva.

 48

Kalketu’s treatment of Bharu Datta was even more extraordinary. The latter, by

one final set of falsehoods, attempted to regain his old position as minister, but Kalketu

judged him and found him guilty, and the whole town joined in giving him disgraceful

punishments. A barber wet him with a horse’s piss, scraped his hair and beard with a dull

razor, made streams of blood soak his garments, and left only five long strands of hair on

his head. People of the town marked one of Bharu’s cheeks with white lime and one with

lampblack as a sign of his disgrace. The commander of the guard poured whey upon his

head. They gave him a garland of ‘China roses’ (oramala), and drove him from the town,

beating him on all sides, while boys taunted him along the way, and even the shyest

brides pelted him with blackened cooking pots. Nevertheless, despite the undoubted

justice of these punishments, ‘seeing Bharu’s dishonor (laghabe) the hero felt great

sorrow, and taking mercy (krpa kari), gave him back his house and home’. 95 We are

meant, I think to contrast unfavorably Rama’s rejection and banishment of Sita, not for any

real misconduct, but merely because some of his subjects had been gossiping about her.

In the midst of victory, the ordinary, unheroic, and sympathetic human emotions of shame
 49

for his own deeds, fear for their consequences, and sorrow for others allowed Kalketu to

‘take mercy’ and to make peace out of victory.

Conclusion

This essay has analyzed the rhetoric and assumptions of a sixteenth century

Bengali text, which argued for a novel and more pacific style of kingship on the agrarian

frontier, where peasant agriculture was expanding north and west of the Bengal delta. It

has argued that Mukunda’s Candimangal is a rich historical source for our understanding of

two, related topics. The first topic is commercialization on the agrarian frontier: an

increasing role for markets and market-like transactions, especially in state formation. The

second topic is a change in the ideology of kingship, involving a re-evaluation of royal

virtues, to give more importance to those which would make possible a more pacific polity,

and less importance to martial prowess and masculine honor.

In his rhetoric portraying the proper characteristics of a frontier kingdom ruled by a

local, base-born, untouchable raja, Mukunda’s vivid details suggest direct observation of

the role of markets and trade on the agrarian frontier in sixteenth century Bengal.
 50

Mukunda gave unusual importance to wealth, to buying and selling, and to marketplaces.

As a gift Kalketu received from Candi a vast treasure, not sovereignty itself, nor any

precious symbol of sovereignty or of his relation with her. He received that wealth only

after demonstrating that he was not ‘lascivious’ (but to some extent he was ‘greedy’), and

he used her gift of wealth to purchase soldiers, numerate and literate servants, laborers, a

minimum of regalia, weapons for himself and an army, and a stock of food. In bargaining

for settlers on the agrarian frontier he entered into market-like transactions by offering

them more attractive terms than the neighboring, high-jati king had done. He founded a

central, tax-free marketplace in his kingdom to serve his own subjects and to attract

foreign merchants. Finally, through his scheming minister Bharu Datta, competitive self-

interest and force and fraud entered tax collection in that market and threatened the

redistributive ‘moral economy’ of Kalketu’s little kingdom.

Mukunda’s sixteenth century text suggests that commercialization in early modern

Bengal should be studied in the longue durée, over the course of at least three centuries,

not just in the eighteenth century. It also suggests that processes of commercialization
 51

may have been experienced most acutely on internal agrarian frontiers, rather than along

the axis of the Bhagirathi, Hugli, and Sarasvati rivers. 96

In this narrative Candi promised to end both hunting of animals, and ‘hunting’ in the

sense of exploitative predation in human society. Mukunda’s text developed ideas about a

more pacific kingship and the royal virtues such a kingship would have required.

Nevertheless, this essay has argued that, according to Mukunda, in order to protect their

subjects kings must have the very martial virtues that make predation possible. By

representing martial virtues through the trope of ‘hunting’ Mukunda’s text de-emphasized

them, but did not altogether deny them a role.

At the same time it elevated to a middle position those virtues which relate broadly

to the possession of sri, always temporally unstable, and which relate narrowly to buying

and selling. For buying and selling it valued shrewdness in bargaining, instrumental

rationality in choosing what to purchase, and an absence of greed for luxury, sensual

enjoyment, and many wives. Mukunda’s text differs with those views of kingship which

emphasized the king’s divine capacity for sensual enjoyment (bhog), lavish generosity, and
 52

elaborate and expensive royal rituals, views in which the fluid capitals of cash crops and

market economies are reflected in royal rituals of feeding Brahmans and other displays of

conspicuous consumption. 97 Probably Brahmans like Mukunda would not have regarded

any ostentatious expenditure as virtuous in a base-born raja on the agrarian frontier, but

nothing in his text suggests a different standard for judging expenditures of higher ranking

kings.

Ultimately, as this text imagined them, more pacific kings and polities had to be

based upon royal gifts, gifts which originated from and were modeled upon a divine gift of

wealth to the king. As did authors of most other versions of Candimangal, Mukunda

made Candi require a fatherly generosity in the royal dharma of giving to the king’s

subjects. Mukunda’s emphasis, however, was less upon transforming ‘wealth into alms’ in

order to give ‘moral value’ to what otherwise would be a ‘raw material, itself neutral’, 98 and

more upon constituting a redistributive economy in order to attract subjects to Kalketu’s

new kingdom. By narrating a story in which Candi’s divine gift both authorized and made

possible further gifts from Kalketu, Mukunda veiled human sources of new wealth on the
 53

agrarian frontier, and mystified the economic growth that must have been experienced as

settled agriculture expanded into the forested peneplain north and west of the Bengal delta.

Mukunda both preserved a logical distinction between ‘buying and selling’ and

‘hunting’, and developed an entropic pattern of causation by which ‘buying and selling’

easily can be reduced to ‘hunting’. Perhaps the ‘super-personal and normative regulation’

which makes markets free of force and fraud was known to him, but was experienced as

intermittent or weak. Of course, with a zero-sum logic, any profit may have appeared as

the result of ‘hunting’. Further research is needed to clarify whether and how a distinct

domain of ‘buying and selling’ sometimes appeared in marketplaces, despite fraud, and

despite multiple and overlapping ‘passages of authority’ which intervened to redirect both

marketable commodities and vendors.

Mukunda’s account devalues the royal virtues proper to hunting and war. In its

emphasis on individual character rather than jati, its de-emphasis, if not disapproval, of

lavish royal gifts and expenditures, and its openness to seeing some royal virtue in

calculative, rational transactions of ‘buying and selling’ and gift exchange, Mukunda’s
 54

narrative of Kalketu can be compared to one medieval Jain text on kingship from Gujarat. 99

Both suggest multiple and multivalent royal virtues. The Jain text does give unusually

important roles to merchants, and narrates alliances between them and the king. At the

same time it denigrates luxurious and sensual royal entertainments, and upholds a

calculative rationality. The Jain text, however, does not devalue ‘hunting’ and war; its

paradigmatical Jain king begins his career as a thief, and secures the treasure needed for

kingship by robbing the tax collections of a neighboring king.

To model a more pacific kingship Mukunda had to re-evaluate both models of

heroic masculinity and the expectations of martial culture for wives of warriors and kings.

Mukunda’s text was opposed to the masculine codes of honor of young men training to be

soldiers, of wrestling akharas, and of Gorakh Nath renunciates. In all three arenas one

could find in sixteenth century Bengal attempts to perfect and make invulnerable the

celibate male body; and in Bengal as elsewhere a widely shared misogynist discourse was

associated with all such disciplines. Mukunda’s text, on the contrary, is relatively free of

both misogynist and misogamist discourse. Here also this study suggests an avenue for
 55

comparative research, to develop more detailed contrasts with contemporary martial

subcultures in Bengal.

Twice Mukunda’s narrative represented ‘mercy’ as a preferable alternative to the

code of honor which required ritual immolation of the wives of defeated warriors. The

royal virtue of mercy provided alternatives to a warrior’s code of masculine honor, and

made peace possible. Mercy is supported by stuti, the devotional practice which the poem

most frequently upholds. At least as Kalketu modeled it at the crux of his story, stuti was

punctuated by individual, moral self-reflection, and by the ordinary, unheroic human

emotions of sorrow, shame and fear, and it concluded with a prayer for Candi’s

forgiveness of ‘grievous faults’. Having experienced forgiveness of his goddess, Kalketu

could act with mercy for others.

No doubt the self-effacement required for this virtue is related to Kalketu’s lowly

status by jati and to that simplicity of character which Mukunda satirized in earlier episodes

of the narrative. But I argue that it also is related to the king’s submission to norms of

exchange, in both buying and selling and in gift exchanges, to his calculative rationality in
 56

expenditures, and to the large role which Mukunda’s text gave to markets and to

commercialized agrarian relations in his kingdom. In all these cases we can see normative

limits placed upon the ‘strong and autonomous’ personality of a warrior king.
 57

I have taken the idea of an ‘internal frontier’ in the history of settlement patterns of
1

Bengal from Ralph W. Nicholas, ‘Villages of the Bengal Delta: A Study of Ecology and

Peasant Society’ (University of Chicago, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1962).

2
In discussing Kalketu as a raja the words ‘king’ and ‘kingship’ may be problematic,

because he came to acknowledge the superior authority of a maharaja, an overlord. I use

them nevertheless because in this text because it has no different account of what would

constitute right rule by a maharaja. Cf. Rahul Peter Das, ‘Little Kingdoms and Big

Theories of History,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 117 (1997): 127-34.

3
C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1989); Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal

(New Delhi: Manohar, 1995); Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics and Society in Early

Modern India, Bihar: 1733-1820 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996); Rajat Datta, Society, Economy

and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760-1800 (New Delhi: Manohar,
 58

2000).

4
Cf. Frank Perlin, Unbroken Landscape: Commodity, Category, Sign and Identity:

Their Production as Myth and Knowledge from 1500 (Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, 1994),

pp. 29-30.

5
Dutch records make it clear that production for export of raw silk, of silk and

cotton textiles, and of rice and other foodstuffs already was well established in Bengal by

the middle of the seventeenth century. See Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company

and the Economy of Bengal 1630-1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);

Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century (Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1994), pp. 149-72. Richard Eaton’s brief but very important discussion

of the economy of pre-Mughal Bengal suggests an even earlier commercialization of at

least some manufacturing sectors of Bengal’s economy, when European agency could not

have been predominate. See Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal
 59

Frontier, 1204-1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 95-103.

Eaton’s description of the expansion of settled agriculture in the eastern Bengal

6

delta in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also emphasizes endogenous processes

of commercialization on a different agrarian frontier which seems to have opened later than

the one this essay will suggest; the processes, however, were similar, and Eaton makes

use of the text I will discuss in this essay. See Eaton, Rise of Islam, pp. 194-227.

Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

7

1998), pp. 19-59.

Literature on medieval and early modern state formation can be approached

8

through The State in India, 1000-1700, ed. Hermann Kulke (Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1995). This literature has focused on three models: ‘feudalism’, and the

‘segmentary state’ for the medieval period, and a ‘patrimonial-bureaucratic empire’ for the

Mughal period. In none of these models do markets, commercialization or rational choice

 60

in market-like relations play an important role. For this and a more general criticism of

the static character of ‘models’ see the important review by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The

Mughal State—Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography’,

Indian Economic and Social History Review (hereafter IESHR), 29, 3 (1992), pp. 291-

321. For a noteworthy exception to the tendency to make commercial relations irrelevant

to ideologies of kingship see Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay

Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu

(Delhi: Oxford University Press,1992).

9
I have cited throughout as CM the following edition: Kabikankan Mukunda-biracita,

Candimangal, Sukumar Sen sampadita (Nay Dilli: Sahitya Akademi, 1975). For variant

readings I have consulted the Calcutta University edition: Kabikankan-Candi, pratham

bhag, Srikumar Bandyopadhyay o Bisvapati Caudhuri sampadita (Kalikata: Kalikata

Bisvabidyalay, 1975), hereafter cited as CMUC 1. This is a much shorter text, and its

readings, when they differ, are frequently simpler and later than those of Sen’s edition. I
 61

also have consulted Mukundaram Cakrabarti biracita, Candimangal, bhumika o sampadana

Pancanan Mandal (Kalakata: Bharabi, 1992), hereafter cited as CMPM.

10
Sukhamay Mukhopadhyay summarizes the controversies about Mukunda’s dates;

see Madhyayuger Bamla Sahityer Tathya o Kalakram (Kalikata: Bharati Buk [Link], 1993),

pp. 121-35. Sen (‘Bhumika’, in CM, pp. 28-9) argues for a date of 1555/56 when

Mukunda’s poem first was sung; most other scholars favor a date towards the end of the

century.

11
Eaton, Rise of Islam, pp. 194-207.

11
The best example is still Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir,

2nd impression (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1969). For a brief history of the use of

mangal-kabya by Bengali historians, see Aniruddha Ray, ‘Middle Bengali Literature: A

Source for the Study of Bengal in the Age of Akbar’, in Irfan Habib, ed., Akbar and his

India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 225-26.

 62

Sen, ‘Bhumika’, in CM, pp. 19-24, discusses the more certain information about
13

the poet’s life which is distributed among signature lines in his poem, and the much less

certain information to be found in an account of his life, included in some MSS as an

explanation of how he came to compose the poem. This account is at CM, pad 6, pp. 3-

4; variants are provided in the appendix, ‘Pathantar o mantabya’, pp. 310-13.

Sen, ‘Bhumika’, in CM, p. 20.

14

Hitesranjan Sanyal, ‘Mallabhum’, in Tribal Polities and State Systems in Pre-

15

Colonial Eastern and North Eastern India, ed. Surajit Sinha (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi &

Company, for Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 1987), pp. 73-142; see also

map facing p. 73.

Eaton, Rise of Islam, pp. 194-227.

16

The only possible textual reference to the Sultans of Bengal is an episode

17

involving the ‘raja‘ of Gaur, for Gaur had been their capital city, but use of the word ‘raja'
 63

suggests instead a Hindu king of Bengal in the distant past. See CM, pad 219, pp. 126-7

ff.

17
Cf. Sanyal, ‘Mallabhum’, pp. 84, 107-12.

18
CM, pad 70-73, pp. 42-44.

20
My discussion of this virtue and of royal virtues in general has been guided by Alf

Hiltebeitel’s analysis of ‘all the virtues’ of a king in The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the

Mahabharata (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 193-228, and for yasa in particular,

pp. 215-16, 220. But I find somewhat different royal virtues in Mukunda’s text, and

different relations among them, compared to Hiltebeitel’s analysis of royal virtues in the

Mahabharata; I am not suggesting that there is an enduring ‘essential’ identity of content

or structure of ideas between the two texts.

21
My discussion of sri similarly has benefited from Hiltebeitel, Ritual of Battle, pp.

220-22; Frédérique A. Marglin, ‘Types of Oppositions in Hindu Culture’, in Purity and

 64

Auspiciousness in Indian Society, ed. John B. Carman and Frédérique A. Marglin (Leiden:

E.J. Brill, 1985), pp. 65-83; and T.N. Madan, ‘Concerning the Categories Subha and

Sudha in Hindu Culture, An Exploratory Essay’, in Purity and Auspiciousness, ed. Carman

and Marglin, pp. 11-29.

For this term and its application to social relations constituted by gift exchanges,
22

see Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social

Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp.

12-13.

Cf. Ghanaram Cakrabartti-biracita, SriDharmmamangal, Piyus Kanti Mahapatra

23

sampadita (Kalikata: Kalikata Bisvabidyalay, 1962). In this early eighteenth century text,

Ichai Ghos, a similarly upstart local king whose power also had been obtained by worship

of Candi, had to be killed to re-establish peace and good order. Of particular interest in

this text is the theme of ‘virility’ (paurusya), a word never used in Mukunda’s text, and the
 65

theme of celibacy, one of the bodily disciplines necessary for a young man to prove

himself as a warrior.

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tome Bottomore and David
24

Frisby (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 97.

’As the result of worshipping me, the tiger never again will eat you’. CM, pad 40,
25

pp. 30-31.

CM, pad 50, p. 31.

26

France Bhattacharya, ‘La déesse et le royaume selon le Kalaketu Upakhyana du

27

Candi Mangala’, in Madeleine Biardeau, Autour de la Déesse Hindoue: Études/ Réunies

par Madeleine Biardeau (Paris: Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, 1981;

Series Purusartha no. 5), pp. 23-4.

Prasenajit Bandyopadhyay, ‘Ek cokse nidra jay ek cokse jage’, in Asisakumar De

28

o Bisvanath Ray sampadita, Kabikankan Mukunder Candimangal, alocana o paryalocana,

 66

(Kal'kata: Pustak Bipani, 1996), p. 216.

29
CM, pad 107, p. 64. For notice of Cohars as ‘tribals living in the Jungle Mahals

of Midnapore’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when they were

employed as soldiers by local zamindars and briefly by the English East India Company,

see Aditee Nag Chowdhury-Zilly, The Vagrant Peasant: Agrarian Distress and Desertion in

Bengal 1770-1830 (Weisbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982), pp. 130-6.

30
CM, pad 113-14, pp. 76-78. Candi’s command to abandon his bow and arrows

is at pad 105, p. 62.

31
CM, pad 146-59, pp. 87-93.

32
CM, pad 176, p. 104.

33
Bhattacharya, ‘La déesse et le royaume’, pp. 29-30.

34
The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India, Vol. III, Aranyakanda, trans.
 67

Sheldon I. Pollock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), sarga 41. 30-32, p. 173.

35
CM, pad 88, p. 52.

36
CM, pad 316, p. 180: sukhanar matsya ar narir bhraman, tepantare pay yadi

rajat kancan, ayatne paile iha chare kona jan, dekhile bhulaye ithe munijanar man.

37
CM, pad 88, p. 52.

38
CM, pad 102-103, pp. 61-2.

39
Frédérique A. Marglin, Wives of the God-King (Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1985), pp. 89-113, 171-84.

40
Contrast Ronald Inden, ‘Hierarchies of Kings in Early Medieval India’,

Contributions to Indian Sociology, New Series, Vol. 15, 1 & 2 (1981), pp. 99-103; and

Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance, pp. 58-68.

41
Shashibhusan Das Gupta, Obscure Religious Cults, 3d edn. (Calcutta: Firma K.L.
 68

Mukhopadhyay, 1969), pp. 244-50; Joseph Alter, ‘Celibacy, Sexuality and the

Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.

53,1 (February 1994): 45-66.

Contrast the very different story of Candi’s test of Lau Sen’s celibacy as a warrior
42

in the Ghanaram Cakrabarti-biracita, SriDharmmamangal, pp. 148-66.

CM, pad 105, pp. 62-3.

43

CM, pad 107, p. 64.

44

West Bengal (India), West Bengal District Gazetteers: Vol. 2, Bankura, ed. Amiya
45

Kumar Banerji (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1968), pp. 88-100.

For example, Kalketu’s simplicity is satirized at CM, pad 107, pp. 63-4, when he
46

and his wife receive, not just the ring, but also seven jars of treasure, in response to

Phullara’s thought: ‘Lest some desire arise from the one ring—lord you will not ever be

able to remove the ill-name of wealth’. Immediately, however, Kalketu began to worry that
 69

Candi would take one of the jars for herself.

47
Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 108-25.

48
CM, pad 111, pp. 66-7.

49
Kalketu’s investiture is described at CM, pad 170, pp. 100-01.

50
Cf. Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput & Sepoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990), pp. 32-70, discussing the relations of Sher Khan Šur and a military labor

market.

51
CM, pad 162, p. 95.

52
Contrast Dvija Madhab racita, Mangalacandir Git, Sudhibhusan Bhattacaryya

sampadita (Kalikata: Kalikata Bisvabidyalay, 1952) p. 64; Dvija Ramadeb-biracita,

Abhayamangal, Asutos Das sampadita (Kalikata: Kalikata Bisvabidyalay, 1957), pp. 75-6.
 70

CM, pad 126, p. 75.

53

CM, pad 127, p. 75: the terms Kalketu proposes to the headman Bulan Mandal.
54

CM, pad 126, p. 75: the complaints of Bulan Mandal against the King of Kalinga.
55

See also pad 129, p. 76: the harsher treatment of subjects proposed by Bharu Datta, a

rival headman.

For one of many examples, CM, pad 331, p. 188: ‘Feeling oppressed at heart, the
55

merchant does not take the roll [of pan], and the king’s eyes become red with anger. So,

understanding what was expected (karyyer gati), the merchant Dhanapati takes the pan

and, with the anjali gesture, touches his head’. See also ‘“Voluntary” Relationships and

Royal Gifts of Pan in Mughal Bengal’, in this volume.

CM, pad 134, pp. 79-80.

57

‘All the Musalmans’ included ‘ten or twenty lineages’ (biradhari) of men who
58

‘continually read the Qur’an’, and various jati of Muslim artisans who ‘know neither the fast
 71

nor daily prayer’ (CM, pad 130, p. 77). ‘All the Brahmans’ who received pan similarly

included both kulin lineages and lowly genealogists, astrologers, and various renunciate

beggars (pad 132, p. 77). ‘All the dependants’ of Kayasthas, to whom Kalketu was

requested to give pan (pad 134, p. 80), apparently included several untouchable jati and

his town’s prostitutes (pad 136, p. 81).

59
For the gift of revenue free land to Brahmans, see CM, pad 127, p. 75, and for

other gifts to them, see pad 132, p. 78. For mention of Kalketu's gifts of houses and

‘beautiful clothes’ to all see CM, pad 136, p. 81.

60
CM, pad 132, pp. 77-8.

CM, pad 135, p. 80: barui nibase pure, baroj nirman kare, mahabire nitya dei
61

pan/ bale yadi keha nei, birer dohai dei, anucit na dei bidhan.

62
Cf. Gloria Goodwin Raheja, The Poison in the Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1988), pp. 68-92.

 72

CM, pad 128, p. 76. Although himself only a Datta, he claimed to have
63

overcome the norm of hypergamy; his two wives were daughters of the superior, kulin

[noble by descent] ‘Ghos. and Baus.’ [sic., Basu] lineages. I am indebted to Aditi Nath

Sarkar for the relevant comment that the progenitor of the Dattas himself had been judged

not a kulin because of his overweening pride.

CM, pad 129, p 76.

64

CM, pad 129, p. 76: napharer hathe khara, [Link] bhara, pariname dei
65

mahadukha.

Bhattacharya, ‘La déesse et le royaume’, pp. 41-2.

66

Raychaudhari, Bengal under Akbar, p. 84, notes that in the absence of dominant
67

peasant jati in Bengal, ‘jajmans’ were landlords, who ‘mediated the distribution of rural

income’ only by land grants. He concludes: ‘Subsistence agriculture, based on customary

arrangements, does not in fact appear to have been the chief characteristic of Bengal’s
 73

economy in our period’. For the classic account of the ‘jajmani system’ in a north Indian

village, see William H. Wiser, The Hindu Jajmani System (New York, AMS Press, 1979; 1st

pub. 1936). For more recent scholarship critical of the erasure of conflict in Wiser’s

model, see Anne Mayhew and Walter C. Neale, ‘Jajmaniland: In India, in Economic

Anthropology and Elsewhere’, Contributions to Asian Studies (Leiden), Vol. 13 (1979):

138-54; Simon Commander, ‘The Jajmani System in North India: An Examination of its

Logic and Status across Two Centuries’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 17, 2 (April 1983),

pp. 283-311.

CM, pad 137, p. 82, pad 139, p. 83. Most other authors of Candimangal do not
68

include founding the market in their narratives, but Bharu Datta does enter the market to

demand his taxes or gifts. Compare Dvija Madhab racita, Mangalcandir Git, pp. 65-74;

Dvija Ramadeb-biracita, Abhayamangal, pp. 74-84. Ramananda Yati, however, does not

even include this episode of unjust taxation in the market; see Ramananda Yati-biracita,

Candimangal, Anilabaran Gangopadhyay sampadita (Kalikata: Kalikata Bisvabidyalay,

 74

1969), pp. 185-6.

69
CM, pad 138, p. 82.

70
This duty perhaps forms the basis of the following proverbial expression of an

untimely destruction: hat. nir'minu, besaite na painu, harila bidhi sampad [We founded the

market but did not get to do business; Fate destroyed our wealth]. CM, pad 76, p. 46.

CM, pad 137, p 82.

71

72
CM, pad 139, p. 83.

73
David Schulman, The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry

(Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 276-92.

74
CM, pad 146, p. 87.

75
CM, pad 159, p. 93; other MSS read ‘caused the hero to lose knowledge and

right there to become speechless’ [harila birer jnan abol seikhane], CMPM, p. 104; or,
 75

simply, stripped him of his ‘power’, CMUC 1: 408, text and variant in fn. 2.

76
CM, pad 149, p. 88; compare pad 475, pp. 267-8.

77
The Ramayana of Valmiki, Vol. IV: Kiskindhakanda, introduction, translation and

annotation Rosalind Lefeber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), sarga 14.17,

16.3; pp. 83, 85.

78
CM, pad 154, p. 91.

79
CM, pad 155, p. 92.

80
CM, pad 166, 167, p. 99.

CM, pad 162, p. 95.

81

82
Hermann Kulke, ‘Early Royal Patronage of the Jagannatha Cult’, in The Cult of

Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, ed. Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann

Kulke and Gaya Charan Tripathi (Delhi: Manohar, 1978), pp. 150-55.
 76

Kapilendra claimed that Jagannatha had elected him to be king. He called himself
83

a servant (sevaka) of Jagannatha, and claimed to consult the god for important decisions,

whose help in battle he also claimed to have received. See Hermann Kulke, ‘Jagannatha

as the State Deity under the Gajapatis of Orissa’, in Cult of Jagannatha, ed. Eschmann,

Kulke and Tripathi, pp. 204-08.

Haricaran Bandyopadhyay, Bangiya Sabdakos, 2 khanda (Niu Dilli: Sahitya

82

Akademi, 1978), 1:1055, v. tej1.

Cf. Hiltebeitel, Ritual of Battle, p. 218; Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India

83

(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 235-6, analyzing tejas in the royal consecration

rituals of the Visnudharmottara Purana.

Vipradas, Manasa-vijaya, edited with summarized translation, notes, glossary and

84

introduction by Sukumar Sen (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1953), pp. 56-57.

CM, pad 163, p. 95.

87
 77

88
Kalketu’s abhisek, performed by the king of Kalinga, was the minimal ritual

allowed by Muslim overlords, marking the forehead with a tilak, not an elaborate bath in

‘luminous waters’. He also received from the king presents of regalia: a white umbrella, a

sandalwood throne, a chariot, and unguents of saffron and sandalwood to ornament his

body. See CM, pad 170, pp. 100-01; and compare Inden, Imagining India, pp. 233-9.

89
CM, pad 165, pp. 96-8.

90
CM, pad 165, p. 98. Not all examples of sthutti in this text contain acts of moral

self-reflection, but all confess failures to worship. Compare pad 455, pp. 253-5, sthutti of

Srimanta; pad 477, pp. 268-9, sthutti of the king of Simhala; and pad 524, pp. 295-6,

sthutti of the merchant Dhanapati.

CM, pad 166, pp. 98-99.

91

92
CM, pad 167, p. 99.

93
CM, pad 170-172, pp. 101-02. Anumarana is the rite by which a woman is
 78

burned as a sati when she cannot be burned upon her husband’s funeral pyre, and so

must ‘follow his death’.

94
CM, pad 160, 161, p. 94. For a fuller treatment of sati in this text see, ‘Marriage,

Honor, Agency, and Trials by Ordeal: Women’s Gender Roles in Candimangal’, in this

volume.

95
CM, pad 175, p. 104.

96
Cf. ‘“Tribute Exchange” and the Liminality of Foreign Merchants in Mukunda’s

Candimangal’, in this volume.

97
Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance, pp. 58-68.

98
Georges Dumezil, The Destiny of a King, trans. Alf Hiltebeitel (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 34, 37, discussing the myth of Yayati.

99
Cf. Toshikazu Arai, ‘Jaina Kingship in the Prabandhacintamani’, in Kingship and

Authority in South Asia, ed. John F. Richards (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, 1st
 79

pub. 1978), pp. 92-132.