The Dead King Problem: On India's Compulsive Return to Its Historical Dead

There is something revealing — and slightly unnerving — about the fact that the most animated exchanges in contemporary Indian parliamentary discourse tend to involve people who died anywhere between five hundred and two thousand years ago. In the winter session of 2025, the Lok Sabha erupted not over a policy but over the authorship of Vande Mataram and the comparative patriotism of Jawaharlal Nehru. A year earlier, Rahul Gandhi stood in the same chamber holding images of Lord Shiva, invoking the Abhaya Mudra of ancient iconography to make a constitutional argument in 2024.

Narendra Modi, for his part, has made the invocation of medieval and ancient rulers — from Chhatrapati Shivaji to Emperor Ashoka to the Gajapati kings of Kalinga — a near-liturgical feature of his public addresses, most recently framing Odisha’s future at the Odisha Parba 2024 in New Delhi through the civilisational grandeur of its past. At that gathering, Modi evoked the saints, scholars, and devotional lineage of Odisha, including Bhakta Dasia Bhauri, Bhakta Salabega, and the Odia poet Bhim Bhoi, positioning the state’s historical depth as a moral compass for its developmental future.

This is something more structurally significant than just nostalgia. What India is experiencing right now is a civilisational-scale identity crisis expressing itself through the systematic resurrection of historical figures as proxy carriers of political legitimacy. The pattern cuts across party lines, geographies, and ideological registers. It operates at the level of Lok Sabha oratory and at the level of a cultural diaspora event in Dubai. It animates both the Hindutva right’s claim to continuous civilisational sovereignty and the constitutional left’s claim to a more pluralist historical inheritance.

To understand why this is happening, one must step back from the noise of any single election cycle and ask what deeper structural conditions produce a polity that reaches for the dead when it cannot agree on the living.

The Grammar of Invocation

Before we can diagnose the phenomenon, we need to describe its syntax. The invocation of historical figures in Indian public discourse currently takes at least three distinct forms, each with a different purpose.

The first is what we might call legitimising invocation — the summoning of a historical figure to authorise a present-day political position. This is the mode that dominates BJP rhetoric. Modi, speaking at the 350th year of Shivaji Maharaj’s coronation, declared that the Maratha king was “completely different from other heroes of history because of his vision,” and that his “bravery, ideology and justice have inspired many generations,” with his “strategic skills and peaceful political system” remaining an inspiration today. The move here is transparent: Shivaji is not remembered as a historical subject situated in a specific 17th-century context of Deccan geopolitics. He is invoked as a template, a moral absolute, a pre-existing validation of whatever political project carries his name.

This pattern received its most elaborate institutional form in the G20 booklet on Bharat: Mother of Democracy, which traced democratic principles through Ashoka, Chandragupta Maurya, and Shivaji, arguing that Shivaji’s governance represented a “legacy of loktantra” and that he had appointed eight ministers who decentralised power equitably. The historical apparatus here is pressed into the service of a present-day claim: that democracy in India is not a Western import but an indigenous inheritance, which the current government naturally carries forward.

The second form is contestation invocation — the use of a historical figure to dispute the opposite party’s claim over history itself. Rahul Gandhi’s multiple deployments of Shivaji at election rallies in Maharashtra illustrate this clearly. In Kolhapur in 2024, he said the Constitution was “a translation of what Shivaji and Shahuji thought,” insisting that the Congress was fighting for what Shivaji himself had fought for, while attacking the BJP government over the collapse of a Shivaji statue that Modi had inaugurated. The symmetry with Modi’s use of the same figure is almost perfect — and precisely that symmetry is what makes it politically significant.

Both parties understand that control over historical memory is control over moral authority, which is itself a form of power. The same figure is deployed from opposite ends of the political spectrum because the figure has become a symbol without fixed ideological content — a canvas onto which any present-day value system can be projected.

The third form is identity-protective invocation — the use of historical figures by regional communities, diaspora groups, and cultural organisations to assert the coherence and dignity of a particular civilisational inheritance under conditions of perceived threat. This is where figures like Kapilendra Deva and Fakir Mohan Senapati enter the picture — not primarily as political tools of the state, but as anchors of a threatened collective selfhood.

Kapilendra Deva and the Problem of Regional Civilisational Anxiety

Kapilendra Deva, the founder of the Suryavamsa Gajapati dynasty, came to power in Odisha in 1435 by overthrowing the last Eastern Ganga ruler, Bhanu Deva IV. During the mid-15th century, when the entire Gangetic belt from Delhi to Bengal had come under Muslim Sultanate rule, his was one of the few Hindu kingdoms that not only resisted but expanded, creating an empire that at its height stretched from Bengal’s Ganga to Tamil Nadu’s Kaveri along the entire eastern coast. He patronised arts, culture and scholars throughout his military campaigns, and under his reign the Puri Jagannath Temple became a cultural hub while the classical dance tradition of Odissi flourished. The Odia-language poet Sarala Das was patronised in Kapilendra Deva’s court, and under his dynasty’s rule Odia literature began to form its distinct literary identity.

The recent resurgence of interest in this figure — in cultural events, publications, academic discoveries, and community ceremonies — is not accidental. A long-neglected inscription attributed to Kapilendra Deva was discovered in Jakampudi village in Andhra Pradesh as recently as 2025, prompting organisations like Utkal Sammilani to petition for its preservation and transfer to Odisha, arguing that it “rightfully belongs due to its Odia historical roots.” Simultaneously, new inscriptions of Kapilendra Deva in Odia script were found at the Srikurmam Temple, with epigraphists noting that these “open a new chapter in understanding his cultural and administrative influence in Andhra.”

These archaeological recoveries are not politically neutral events. They are being mobilised as evidence that Odia civilisational reach was once vast, extending well beyond current state boundaries — a claim with obvious relevance to persistent debates about Odia language rights, boundary disputes, and the status of Odia-speaking communities in Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh.

The rise of Odia pride, as that term is understood today, happened during the reign of the Suryavamsi Gajapati dynasty. Kapilendra Deva was the first king of an ethnically defined Odia-language polity, and the familiar story of Purushottama Deva’s conquest of Kanchi — in which Lord Jagannath is said to have fought alongside the Odisha army — strongly associated Lord Jagannath with Odia identity as a whole. The Suryavamshi Gajapatis continued the patronisation of the Jagannath cult with great devotion, and during the Ganga and Suryavamsi periods, kingship became closely linked with that cult, with rulers using the deity’s name to seek religious authority over the state by creating a sense of solidarity and shared purpose among subjects.

In other words, the Kapilendra Deva invocation is not merely historical enthusiasm — it is a retrieval of a specific political theology of sovereignty, one in which cultural coherence, divine protection, and political legitimacy are fused into a single narrative.

The same logic operates with Fakir Mohan Senapati. If Senapati had not been born in 1843 and had not fought tooth and nail against the proclamation by influential Bengalis that “Odia is not an independent language,” it is plausible that Odia would have been replaced by Bengali as the medium of teaching in Odisha. Senapati, known as the father of Odia nationalism and modern Odia literature, played a leading role in establishing the distinct identity of Odia as a language and literary tradition, and his invocation of the question “When there is the bustle of progress everywhere, will Utkal be still in slumber?” continues to resonate as a call to civilisational awakening.

In 2024 and 2025, both the BJP and its predecessor, Naveen Patnaik’s BJD, have consistently cited Senapati on his birth anniversary — not as literary homage but as political positioning, signalling continuity with a tradition of Odia cultural resistance that each party claims to inherit.

The Parliament as Archaeological Site

The extraordinary intensity with which contemporary Indian politicians invoke historical figures in parliamentary discourse points to a structural crisis of legitimacy that has no easy resolution. Rahul Gandhi’s July 2024 inaugural speech as Leader of the Opposition saw him hold up images of Lord Shiva, Guru Nanak, and Jesus Christ, citing the Abhaya Mudra and teachings of Buddha, Mahavir, and Jesus to argue that “all religions and great people of the country have said ‘do not be scared, do not scare others.’” In the winter session of 2024, invoking the 75-year constitutional journey, he argued that “the ideas of people like Lord Shiva, Guru Nanak, Basavanna, Lord Buddha and Mahavira” were the intellectual preconditions for the Constitution, and that “when we open the Constitution, we can hear the voice and ideas of Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.”

This layering — the ancient spiritual, the medieval reformist, the modern constitutional — is a carefully assembled genealogy designed to position the Congress as the rightful heir to a long and pluralist tradition of Indian ethical thought.

President Droupadi Murmu, inaugurating Odisha Parba 2024, invoked the Kalinga War chapter of Odisha’s history as a guide toward peace in a world facing contemporary conflicts, arguing that the transformation of Ashoka from “Chandashoka” to “Dharmashoka” carried a lesson about the cost and consequence of violence. Here, even the constitutional head of state reaches for a 2,300-year-old event to comment on the wars of the present moment — whether in Ukraine or Gaza or the contested borderlands of South Asia.

What this consistent pattern reveals is that contemporary Indian politics has lost confidence in the present tense. When parliamentary debates are most heated — over the Constitution, over electoral integrity, over cultural identity — the move is invariably backwards, to a time before the current disagreements, to a figure whose authority cannot be disputed because they cannot be cross-examined. The historical invocation functions as a rhetorical escape from the intractability of the present.

Civilisational Populism and the Architecture of Nostalgia

The academic literature on what has been termed “civilisationist populism” offers one of the most useful frameworks for understanding this pattern at the structural level. Researchers examining the Hindutva movement have shown the central role of “sacralized nostalgia, history, and culture” in mobilising political constituencies, arguing that this form of nationalism creates an “emotionally charged division of society” by positioning one group as the authentic inheritors of a civilisational legacy. But it would be too easy — and intellectually dishonest — to confine this observation to the BJP alone. The opposition’s deployment of historical figures follows the same underlying logic: legitimacy through genealogy, authority through ancestry.

The BJP under Modi built a decade-long high-decibel cultural narrative that tapped “deep-seated cultural codes, harnessed collective sub-consciousness, and stroked a sense of historical injury in the majority Hindu community,” with Modi symbolising what analysts described as “a new age religiosity, hyper-nationalism, and supremacism that came across in popular politics as resurgent Hindu identity and renewed Indic civilizational belonging.”

But by the 2024 general elections, that narrative had begun to stall. The cultural machinery of historical invocation, having been so relentlessly operated, was showing signs of diminishing returns.

The 2024 elections were, according to political analysts, “without a national narrative, excitement, hyperbole” — a “deafening silence” after a decade of civilisational maximalism. The opposition read this correctly and responded not by abandoning the historical register but by contesting it — offering an alternative genealogy.

What this strategic symmetry reveals is that historical invocation in Indian politics is not simply a feature of one party’s ideology. It is a structural property of the political field itself — a field in which claims about the present are considered insufficiently authoritative unless they can be grounded in claims about the past. The deeper question, then, is why this structural dependency has intensified so dramatically in the 2020s.

Why Now? Three Structural Pressures

The intensification of historical invocation in contemporary India can be attributed to at least three intersecting structural pressures, none of which is reducible to the others.

The first is economic anxiety and the crisis of developmental legitimacy. Analysis of the Modi decade shows that India’s economy has not performed measurably better than in the pre-2014 period, that inequalities have continued to grow, and that welfare expenditures have remained relatively flat — with systematic political communication creating a gap between the narrative of achievement and the lived experience of a significant portion of the population. When a government cannot fully deliver on its promises of material prosperity, cultural pride becomes the compensatory currency.

The invocation of great kings and reformers offers a sense of belonging to greatness even when material conditions do not. The same logic has been documented in other contexts of frustrated economic aspiration — the resurrection of imperial nostalgia in post-Brexit Britain, the invocation of a great national past in the MAGA movement in the United States, and the civilisational discourse of Xi Jinping’s China.

The second pressure is the crisis of democratic legitimacy — a crisis that affects both the ruling party and the opposition, but in different ways. Parliament under Modi has become “even less salient in the governance of India” than it was historically, with power concentrated in the Prime Minister and a small circle of acolytes, and checks on executive authority rendered increasingly weak. Opposition parties, unable to contest policy effectively within the formal structures of legislative deliberation, have shifted the site of contestation to the symbolic domain — fighting over who owns Ambedkar, who owns Shivaji, who owns Nehru, who owns the Constitution’s genealogy.

Historical invocation becomes a substitute for institutional accountability.

The third pressure is the acceleration of cultural anxiety driven by the speed of social transformation. India is simultaneously experiencing rapid urbanisation, the erosion of traditional community structures, the displacement of regional languages in digital and economic life, and the disruption of caste and gender hierarchies that, whatever their moral valence, provided stable orientations for millions of people. When the present becomes unstable and the future uncertain, the past acquires the quality of bedrock.

Erik Erikson’s concept of identity formation, though developed in the context of individual psychology, has direct applicability here: Erikson showed, through his psychohistorical studies, how identity formation always occurs within specific historical and cultural contexts, and how personal and collective psychological development can both shape and be shaped by historical circumstances. 

At the civilisational scale, a community undergoing rapid transformation will seek anchors in its historical narrative — figures who embodied coherence, who held things together, who knew who they were and made others know it too.

Historical Parallels: This Has Happened Before

This pattern — of a society under pressure turning to its historical dead for legitimacy and orientation — is not new. The most instructive parallel in Indian history itself is the Gajapati period, specifically the transition in political theology that began with Anangabhima Deva III. The Ganga king declared himself the deputy (Rauta) of Lord Jagannath, seeking religious authority over the state by creating a sense of solidarity and shared purpose among subjects, proclaiming that his reign had divine protection in the face of Turko-Afghan invasion.

This was precisely a political response to civilisational anxiety — the threatened fragmentation of regional identity under external military and cultural pressure produced an invocatory strategy that fused historical kingship, religious authority, and collective identity into a single symbolic system. Kapilendra Deva then intensified this strategy, and the result was one of the most expansive empires in the medieval subcontinent.

The European parallel is equally instructive. The French Revolution’s invocation of Roman republicanism — the imagery of senators, consuls, Brutus, Cincinnatus — was not mere classicism. It was a structural need: the revolutionaries could not ground their authority in existing institutions (the monarchy, the Church) because they had destroyed them. They reached backwards into classical Rome to find a legitimising grammar for a present that had no precedent. Napoleon’s later appropriation of Charlemagne served the same purpose from the opposite political direction. Hegel observed this dynamic with characteristic sharpness, noting in 1807 that “world history is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom” — but in practice, freedom’s advocates kept dressing their innovations in the costume of the past.

The German nationalist movement of the 19th century produced the most dangerous iteration of this pattern. The invocation of Germanic tribal identity, medieval holy emperors, and Teutonic mythology was precisely a response to political fragmentation and economic humiliation — a search for a historical self that was coherent, powerful, and undefeated. The catastrophe that followed belongs to a different order of magnitude from anything occurring in contemporary India, but the structural logic — civilisational anxiety producing mythologised historical invocation producing political mobilisation — is uncomfortably familiar.

China under Xi Jinping offers the most direct contemporary comparison. Xi has used notions of “historical injury and civilizational greatness” to position China’s cultural narrative, increasingly pronouncing the country’s global significance in terms of a 5,000-year civilisational continuity that temporarily suffered the “century of humiliation” before now reasserting its rightful place. The invocation of historical emperors, philosophers, and dynasties in Xi’s speeches is structurally identical to Modi’s deployment of ancient Indian kings — both are using the past to authorise present political arrangements and future territorial or civilisational ambitions.

Democracy’s Uneasy Relationship with Its Ancestors

There is a genuine philosophical paradox at the heart of this phenomenon, and it deserves to be named clearly. The current generation’s invocation of kings, emperors, and warrior rulers coexists with a sustained rhetorical commitment to democracy, constitutionalism, and the rights of citizens. This is not necessarily hypocrisy — it may be something more structurally interesting: an unresolved tension between two different theories of legitimacy.

One theory holds that authority derives from consent — from the present will of living citizens, expressed through democratic institutions. This is the theory that underlies the Constitution, the Lok Sabha, and the formal architecture of the Indian republic. The other theory holds that authority derives from continuity — from belonging to a historical stream whose depth and coherence confer dignity, purpose, and identity upon those who stand within it. This is the theory that underlies the invocation of kings.

When Rahul Gandhi says that the Constitution carries the voice of Lord Shiva and Guru Nanak, or when Modi says that Shivaji’s governance model inspires him today, they are not simply making political arguments — they are gesturing toward the second theory, borrowing its authority to reinforce the first.

The danger in this is not imaginary. When historical kings are repeatedly invoked as models of governance, the associative logic gradually rehabilitates the idea of concentrated, divinely authorised, non-accountable power — even when the invocators explicitly endorse democratic forms. The figure of the great king does not carry within itself the values of judicial independence, separation of powers, or the rights of minorities. He carries within himself the values of decisive action, territorial expansion, cultural glory, and the suppression of enemies. These are precisely the values that are most politically useful in a moment of civilisational anxiety — and most corrosive to the institutions of liberal democracy over time.

The Odia Case as Microcosm

Odisha’s particular investment in its historical figures — Kharavela, Kapilendra Deva, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Gopabandhu Das, the entire Gajapati lineage — operates at a scale and with a specificity that illuminates the national phenomenon from a revealing angle. Odia civilisational anxiety has its own distinct texture: a region whose language was nearly erased by colonial administrative convenience, whose statehood was achieved only in 1936 through sustained cultural struggle, whose classical arts and historical sites have been persistently underrepresented in national narratives, and whose diaspora communities in the Gulf, the United States, and across India use cultural events as instruments of identity maintenance.

The Odisha Samaj UAE’s Rath Yatra in Dubai — drawing over 1,000 devotees from all seven emirates, with the event’s president articulating it as a matter of “preserving identity, building community, and passing on traditions to the next generation” — is a perfect encapsulation of this dynamic. The same logic that drives the retrieval of Kapilendra Deva’s inscriptions from Andhra Pradesh drives the ceremonial recreation of Puri’s temple traditions in a Dubai school auditorium. Both are responses to the same underlying anxiety: that something essential about Odia identity will not survive unless it is actively, consciously, and publicly maintained against the pressures of assimilation, erasure, and cultural dilution.

What makes Kapilendra Deva specifically compelling as an invocation for Odias in the present moment is the particular historical configuration he represents. He came to power during a period of maximum external threat — Sultanate pressure from the north, the Bahmani Sultanate from the west, the Vijayanagara Empire from the south — and responded not by submission or accommodation but by expansion. He became the undisputed master of an empire stretching from Bengal to Trichy, covering the entire east coast, and assumed the imperial title Gajapati Gauḍeśvara Navakoṭi Karṇāṭa Kalavargeśvara — a title that duly justified his status. For an Odia community that has spent much of its modern history negotiating with larger, more powerful neighbours — Bengal, Andhra, the central government — the figure of a king who turned adversity into civilisational expansion carries obvious and powerful appeal.

The Limits of the Historical Mirror

There is, however, a serious limitation to the politics of historical invocation that is rarely acknowledged by those who practice it, and it has to do with the fundamental incommensurability of historical conditions. Kapilendra Deva governed a medieval polity in which loyalty was personal, warfare was the primary instrument of territorial negotiation, and cultural patronage flowed from a single sovereign’s discretion. Fakir Mohan Senapati fought for a language’s survival against colonial administrative fiat. Shivaji built a kingdom against a decaying Mughal empire. Kharavela inscribed his conquests on the walls of Udayagiri against a political context utterly unlike our own.

The lessons these figures offer are genuine — regarding courage, cultural confidence, administrative creativity, the value of resistance — but they are not instructions. They cannot tell us what to do about air pollution, electoral roll manipulation, unemployment, or the governance of artificial intelligence.

The risk of historical invocation, when it becomes the primary mode of political thought, is that it substitutes the emotional resonance of a great past for the intellectual labour of a workable present.

A polity that can evoke Kapilendra Deva but cannot reform its land records, that can honour Fakir Mohan Senapati on his birth anniversary but cannot reverse the decline of Odia in higher education, that can invoke Ambedkar in every parliamentary speech but cannot dismantle the mechanisms of caste discrimination — that polity is using history as an anaesthetic rather than an inspiration.

This is not, to be clear, an argument against historical memory. Quite the contrary: the recovery of figures like Kapilendra Deva, the serious study of Kharavela’s Kalinga, the literary archaeology of Fakir Mohan Senapati’s novels as social documents — these are genuinely valuable intellectual and cultural projects. The problem arises when memory is weaponised rather than examined, when the historical figure is reduced from a complex human being embedded in specific circumstances to a floating symbol available for any ideological use that the present moment requires.

The Return of the Dead and the Work of the Living

What India is experiencing is a collective identity crisis of civilisational proportions, and the systematic return to historical figures — kings, reformers, revolutionaries, saints — is the most visible symptom of that crisis. The crisis has multiple causes: economic anxiety, democratic instability, the speed of cultural transformation, the erosion of regional identities in the homogenising pressures of national and digital life, and the unresolved question of what India actually is — a civilisational state, a constitutional republic, a Hindu nation, a plural society, a development project, or some unstable combination of all of these at once.

When the present cannot answer its own questions, it reaches for the past. And the past, obligingly, offers figures large enough to carry any weight the present places on them — Shivaji becomes a democrat, Ashoka becomes a secular humanist, Kapilendra Deva becomes a cultural nationalist, Nehru becomes either the father of modern India or the architect of its failures, depending on who is invoking him and why.

The pattern has precedents in every civilisation that has experienced structural disruption: post-revolutionary France, 19th-century German nationalism, contemporary China’s civilisational reassertion, and the post-colonial African turn to pre-colonial kingship. In each case, the invocation of the historical serves the same function — it provides a sense of continuity and coherence to communities that are experiencing discontinuity and fragmentation.

It says: we were once great, therefore we are legitimately important, therefore the present uncertainty is temporary and manageable.

The question India must ultimately confront — and which its most serious thinkers across the political spectrum are beginning to articulate — is whether the invocation of historical greatness can substitute for the construction of present institutions, or whether the two projects are actually complementary, requiring each other to be complete. The greatness that is worth invoking was always, at its core, the greatness of a creative response to present conditions.

The dead kings can inspire. They cannot govern. That remains, as it has always been, the irreducible responsibility of the living.

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All political speech citations draw from parliamentary records and documented public addresses. Archaeological and historical facts regarding Kapilendra Deva and Fakir Mohan Senapati are sourced from epigraphic discoveries reported in 2024–2025 and established historiographic record. Analysis of political trends draws from documented election research and scholarly commentary on Indian populism.