ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the overarching line of questioning by examining the centrality of royal ideology to "The Greatness of the Goddess (DM)". It reexamines Heesterman's rhetoric on the allegedly precarious nature of Indian kingship, rhetoric since internalized by decades of scholarship on Indian kingship. The chapter examines the sine qua non of the Indian king: the function of protection, itself an inalienable attribute of both pravrtti ideology and constructions of the divine. It examines the extent to which pravrtti ideology in general, and royal ideology in particular, pervades the DM. The priest's potential monopoly on the manipulation of spiritual power is compromised by the king's capacity to directly access that realm of power personified by Durga. It is she, and not the brahmana, who serves as the womb of royal power. The most overt expression of the kingship-asceticism tension revolves around the way in which each station relates to acts of violence.
