South Asian Sovereignty The Conundrum of Worldly Power

Introduction: South Asian sovereignty: the conundrum of worldly power

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

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

7 Messianism and the Constitution of Pakistan

8 Sovereign sensibilities: Gunday and the nation as the self

Afterword: we have other ideas

Index

Biography

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.).

‘The examples raised across the essays in this volume . . . present legitimacy as a function of sovereignty, unstable and contradictory as [it tends] to be . . . The essays demystify the enchantments of sovereign kings or voters and the kinds of violence they legislate. This is deconstruction at its best.’

Uday Chandra, Georgetown University, Qatar

‘This fascinating collection of essays interrogates sovereignty through its tensions with the legitimacy of political power and authority in South Asia. As they move from kingship and nationalism to legal and religious institutions, these interdisciplinary contributions provide a rich historical context that greatly illuminates how international imperialism　transformed indigenous structures in the South Asian subcontinent. The solid empirical work here will resonate with studies of modern colonialism in other parts of the globe.’

Douglas Howland, Buck Professor of Chinese History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

‘We live in an age of clamouring sovereignties. Every current social and political movement, from Kurdish nationalism to the LGBT, grounds its claims in calls for self-determination and rule. This carefully crafted volume reaches deep into the clamour of South Asian politics to reveal how it draws on and clashes against the transcendent. This is as much a book for scholars of South Asia as it is for anyone interested in the chaos of politics around the world.’　　　

Anastasia Piliavsky, India Institute at King’s College London, UK