CSA Open Workshop | Shades of Sovereignty: Lineages of Authority and Social Order in South Asia

The workshop will provide an opportunity to reflect on relationships between historical shifts, enduring structures, and recent dynamics in deeply uneven landscapes of practical legal and political sovereignty. In addition to generating a dialogue on the relationship between past centuries and the present, we will consider South Asian sovereignty from a range of disciplinary perspectives such as anthropology, history, political science and legal studies, relying on both fieldwork-based and textual-archival approaches.

Recent historical and social scientific scholarship has described prevailing configurations and key shifts in South Asian political sovereignty from Mughal imperial fragmentation and expanding East India Company authority; through the advent of Crown Raj and attendant reforms; over decades of nationalist self-assertion and decolonization; and then in postcolonial reconfigurations of relationships between the national center, provinces and localities, and urban spaces. Much of this work has underscored the unevenness and contingency of political sovereignty across space throughout the subcontinent's recent history. Anthropologists and political scientists have demonstrated that long-standing repertoires of authority and sovereign power in various regions and areas across the subcontinent have profoundly shaped their contemporary political imaginations and their social orders.