In Raja Yudhi??hira, Kevin McGrath brings his literary, ethnographic, and analytical knowledge of the Mahabharata to bear on the representation of kingship in the epic. He shows how the Mahabharata depicts both archaic and classical models of kingly and premonetary polity and how the king becomes a ruler who is seen as ritually divine. McGrath then addresses the idea of heroic religion in antiquity and the present, for bronze-age heroes still receive great devotional worship in modern India and communities continue to clash at the sites that have been