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.

‘Departing from a traditional understanding of sovereignty that link it to state action and power, this important volume explores meaning making across a number of entangled registers of the  ‘secular' and the ‘religious' that have defined Kerala's modernity. The volume re-imagines sovereign action as claim making by multiple actors – religious bodies and divinities, local fishers and migrating workers – that has something to tell us about historical agency beyond the state. Just as importantly,  this ground-breaking volume interrogates concepts such as ‘public sphere' and ‘agency' to excavate both the proclamations and silences that inform the making of the distinctive human geography that is Kerala. In this, ‘Entangled Sovereignties' also provides a template for understanding relationships between theories of the social and the messiness of empirical materials within which it is invariably embedded.'

Sanjay Srivastava - SOAS, University of London

‘This highly original collection of essays on Kerala provides a take on the idea of sovereignty from the history of contestations and negotiations within this coastal region.  The book argues that the concatenation of religious and secular identities, landed and maritime politics, and traditions and legal modernities creates a space of dispersed and capillary sovereignties. A paradigmatic recasting of the history and politics of Kerala with deep implications for the study of South Asia.'

Dilip Menon - University of Witwaterstand, South Africa

‘Complicating conventional understandings of sovereignty, sacrality and the secular, this rich volume opens up Kerala's socio-political and historical landscape through a collection of essays spellbinding in its scope. Tracking diverse theologies, devotional practices and ‘more-than-human authority' as sources for local sovereignties, the essays outline the contours of a specific Kerala modernity that both publicly accommodates religion and privatizes it. But what emerges is far from the idealised and hagiographical accounts of Kerala's syncretic cultures to which we have become accustomed. The Introduction offers a frame to understand the processes that compound the historical marginalisation of subaltern groups through the production of an acceptable and legitimate secular social body; while the essays provide theoretically complex and granular accounts of specific localities, shrines, beliefs and practices. This book is not only about Kerala, but about the space marked ‘secular' in India – unstable, shot through with contradictions, yet productive of a distinctive mode of engaging modernity.'

Nivedita Menon - Jawaharlal Nehru University, India