Publications

My forthcoming book, Sovereign Vernaculars, explores a central puzzle: how did religious communities in Mughal Panjab build power and articulate political visions in the complete absence of state patronage? I argue that they used language itself as a political tool, revealing three distinct strategies for constituting authority. I contrast the Sikh project of building a parallel constitutional order aimed at eventual territorial rule with the Hindu strategy of masterfully using the empire’s own Persian legal archives to secure institutional autonomy. Alongside these, I analyze the Sufi model, which rejected territorial claims to circulate authority through deterritorialized charismatic networks. In this work, I treat sacred texts as constitutional documents and vernacular literature as a “technology of political imagination,” demonstrating how these communities functioned as rival polities whose struggle to define the vernacular was itself a struggle for power. This work challenges traditional court-centric histories by revealing how, in a space lacking state patronage, these communities pioneered radically different forms of power.