How to (Un)make a Chakravarti King: Kingship in U Hpo Hlaing’s Rajadhammasangaha and Bagis Sarma’s Nitilatankur

Abstract

This paper offers a comparative analysis of two 19 th century texts of political advice, ethics and kingship composed at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia, respectively in the Buddhist court of Konbaung Burma and the Hinduized milieu of the Tai-Ahom kingdom of Assam.The first text, Rajadhammasangaha, a treatise on kingship and polity in Burmese, was penned in 1878 by U Hpo Hlaing, a prominent courtier, minister and intellectual in King Mindon's entourage, purportedly as a guide for the potential reforms and "righteous" kingly conduct in the go-vernment of the Kingdom of Burma as a young Thibaw-min, the last Burmese monarch, was just installed on the throne as Mindon's successor. The second text, Nitilatankur was composed sometime in the first decade of the 19 th century by a court poet named Bagis Sarma under the patronage of an Ahom military general. The two texts were embedded and encoded in two interrelated but divergent frameworks of kingship: one, the Buddhist dharmaraja, righteous kingship, and the other, the Brahmanical devaraja, divinised kingship. This study argues that while the Burmese text outlined a revolutionary proposal for devolution of chakravarti kingship into a form of constitutional monarchy and abolition of kingly absolutism drawing on the contractual nature of Bud-dhist kingship and global constitutionalist ideas, the Assamese text was a classic advice manual for ensuring the sustenance of chakravarti kingship in a Brahmanical polity.