• Entangled Sovereignties in Kerala: An Introduction F. Osella, R. Santhosh, J. Devika and V. J. Varghese; Part I. Kerala's Multiple Sovereignties: 1. 1. Sin of the King: Early Modern Kingship and the Deification of Victimhood in Malabar Abhilash Malayil; 2. Syrian Christians and the Sacred Secular: South Indian Con-texts Bivitha Easo; 3. Layers of Gendered Sovereignty: An Ottoman Letter to an Arakkal Queen, 1780 CE Mahmood Kooria; 4. Embodied Charisma in Mālappāṭṭ: Saintly Piety and Sacred Sovereignty in the Mappila Mindscape of Colonial Malabar Muhammed Niyas Ashraf; ; Part II. Colonial and Post-colonial Reconstitution of the Social: 1. The Möbius Strip of Spirit and Matter: Abolition, Slave Agency, and Missionary Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Travancore, South India Vivek Narayan; 2. From Social to Secular: Transformation of Political Practices in Keralam Sunandan K. N.; 3. Power, Gender, and the Birth of the Modern Malayali Family J. Devika and Anamika Ajay Part III. The Making of a Secular Social Body: 1. Secular Politics and Popular Religiosity: Interrogating the Communist Narrative on Theyyam in North Malabar, Kerala V. U. Nirmala; 2. To Labour for the World: Indo-German Documentaries and the Historical Migration of Kerala Nurses Darshana Sreedhar Mini; 3. Intersecting Religious and Secular Sovereignties: Land Reclamation, Agrarian Expansion and New Subjectivities in South India V. J. Varghese; 4. Affective Memory and Melancholia: Reading the Visual Rhetoric of Christianity in Kerala Ambili Anna Markose; 5. Between the Relic and the Republic: The Case of the Markaz Knowledge City Visakh M. S.; 6. Contested Sovereignties on the Kerala Coast: Popular Protests Against the Construction of the Vizhinjam International Deepwater Multipurpose Seaport Johnson Jament and Filippo Osella; Part IV. Affirming and Contesting More-than-Human Sovereignties: 1. Socio-Religious Reforms, 'Hindu' Identity Consolidation and Transformation of the Temple Space in Kodungallur Dayal Paleri and R. Santhosh; 2. Sovereign Deities and Their Rule: Hindu Temples in Contemporary Kerala O. B. Roopesh; 3. Transformative Temple Entry Jurisprudence? Deepa Das Acevedo.

'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