Entangled Sovereignties: Rethinking the Secular in Kerala

Entangled Sovereignties is a rich volume that attempts to rethink the meanings and modalities of sovereignty in South Asia through the lens of Kerala's historical and contemporary political formations. Focusing on the entwined religious and secular logics, it draws attention to how diverse actors – from deities and communities to state agents and market forces – assert sovereign claims in social, ritual, and political life. Through a multidisciplinary engagement spanning ethnography, textual analysis, and historical inquiry, the book challenges dominant state-centric understandings of sovereignty. It foregrounds everyday, contested, layered expressions of authority that exceed the monopoly of violence, offering a new vocabulary to engage with questions of power, legitimacy, and moral reasoning in postcolonial democracies. From Christian reformers and Sunni traditionalists to fisher communities and communist appropriations of ritual, the book examines how sovereignty is asserted and negotiated across time and domains.

• Publication date: 31 January 2027
• Page count: 300
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781009774482