South Asian Sovereignty

This book brings ethnographies of everyday power and ritual into dialogue with intellectual studies of theology and political theory. It underscores the importance of academic collaboration between scholars of religion, anthropology and history in uncovering the structures of thinking and action that make politics work.

David Gilmartin is Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina State University, USA. His current research focuses on the legal history of India's electoral institutions as they have evolved from a colonial past and changed in relation to evolving visions of the people's sovereignty. His earlier books include Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (2015), Civilization and Modernity: Narrating the Creation of Pakistan (2014), and Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (1988). Pamela Price is Professor Emerita of South Asian History at the University of Oslo, Norway. She began her research on political culture working on colonial South India and has published, among others, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India (1996). Moving onto post-colonial topics, she edited Power and Influence in India: Bosses, Lords and Captains (2010, with Arild Engelsen Ruud). A collection of her articles appears in State, Politics, and Cultures in Modern South India: Honour, Authority, and Morality (2013). Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He writes on issues of democracy and politics in South Asia, specifically West Bengal and Bangladesh. He is the author of Poetics of Village Politics: The Making of West Bengal's Rural Communism (2003), co-editor of Power and Influence in India (2010, with Pamela Price), and co-author of Mafia Raj (2018, with Lucia Michelutti et al.).

Introduction: South Asian Sovereignty: The Conundrum of Worldly Power Part I. Law, Religion and Sovereignty in India 1. Sovereign Struggles: Governance and Mathas under British Imperial Rule in South India 2. The Guru as Legislator: Religious Leadership and Informal Legal Space in Rural South India 3. Time and the Sovereignty of the People Part II. Kingship Reconfigured 4. Deities, Alliances and the Power over Life and Death: Exploring Royal Sovereignty and its Tenacity in a Former Princely State in Odisha 5. Dynastic Continuity and Election in Contemporary Karnataka Politics 6. Circuits of Protection and Extortion: Sovereignty in a Provincial North Indian Town Part III. The Nation and the Sovereign Imagination 7. Messianism and the Constitution of Pakistan 8. Sovereign Sensibilities: Gunday and the Nation as the Self. Afterword: We Have Other Ideas