Local elites and everyday sovereignty: A comparative study of the Nayakas of Tanjore and the Chero chieftaincies of Bihar–Jharkhand (1500–1700)

Abstract

The study of early modern India mostly talked and discussed imperial narrative. The common narratives of those periods were of the Mughal sovereignty in the North and Vijayanagara or Maratha ascendancy in the South. These were said to be centralised formations that formed the backbone of political history. Here, I point to the gap that the lived experiences of ruling were shaped not only by the apex of power but also by the practices of regional elites, chieftains, and local communities operating at the margins of empire or at that place where the centre is unable to exert its maximum power. This thesis focuses on two such formations: the Nayakas of South India (Tanjore) and the Chero chieftaincies of the Bihar-Jharkhand borderlands (Palamou). Both groups operated as autonomous or semi-autonomous sovereigns in their own regions. Mansabdars or later zamindars were intermediaries of Mughal but Nayakas and Chero chieftains resisted an imperial structure and exercised several attributes of sovereignty on their own terms. The period 1500–1700 allows a parallel comparison, as both Nayaka polities and Chero rule flourished and consolidated during this time. The thesis argues that sovereignty at the local level was not simply a reflection of imperial authority but a set of everyday practices enacted through land control, military organisation, ritual legitimation, and negotiation with local communities. The Nayakas and Cheros offer two contrasting yet similar and comparable models of this “everyday sovereignty,” emerging not from bureaucratic delegation but from regional militarisation, aesthetic kingship, kinship networks, and control over territory.