The little studied Sāmrājyalakṣmīpīṭhikā is known to a small number of Sanskritists and historians as an encyclopaedic work on kingship from the Vijayanagara period. The work is, however, catalogued as a Tantric text, probably owing to its title (which includes the name of a Tantric goddess), literary form, colophon and the majority of the contents of the first half of the book, which includes a large portion on the elaborate Tantric rituals that must be conducted by the king at both private and state festivals – the foremost being the Navarātri, the 10-day festival exclusively dedicated to the worship of the Mother Goddess. The second half of the Sāmrājyalakṣmīpīṭhikā, nevertheless, focuses exclusively on kingship and statecraft in well-balanced proportion with its first part on Tantra. Thus, I propose to call the text a hybrid compilation (nibandha) of kingship and Tantric practices.

The primary aim of this dissertation would, therefore, be to justify my argument on why I call the text “hybrid”. Firstly, it will attempt to explain why the text is characterised and catalogued as a Tantric work and examine its relationship with the corpus of Tantric literature. Secondly, it will look into how the king, for whom the text was obviously written, might have used its material, particularly the chapters on coronation rituals, state festivals and statecraft given in the text to strengthen his grip on power.

The dissertation, which contains a total of six chapters, is divided into two sections. The first section starts with the introduction to the work as a whole followed by a consideration of its dating and location, before it moves on to contextually explain the role of Goddess Sāmrājyalakṣmī in relation to different Sanskrit writings. The second section highlights the text’s “hybrid” nature. In particular, chapter 4 covers the Tantric elements in the text and its relationship to Tantric literature of different periods. In a similar manner, chapter 5 demonstrates how the text is also a compilation on polity, and how it is connected to other texts of the same genre of different periods. Finally, through the survey of the Vijayanagara history, literature, material culture and archaeology, chapter 6 shows how the text fits in and reflects the society of the Vijayanagara period and how the Vijayanagara emperors, or the kingdom’s vassal kings and feudatory chieftains, may have used the text to rule their subjects and to legitimise the overlordship of the vast south Indian empire by employing the concept of “Tantric Kingship”, which the text implies is its main theme. The result suggests that Tantra had been an integral part of Indian kingship right down to the late medieval period when Vijayanagara, the last of the great Hindu empires, was eventually conquered by a coordinated attack by Muslim armies. The Sāmrājyalakṣmīpīṭhikā strikingly reflects this integration of Tantra into royal ideology, as well as the 16th-century socio-political climate, much more pronouncedly than its predecessors of the same genre.