| Abstract |
"Looking at the political process in early modern South Asia as shaped by state formation from below, the work argues that, outside the imperial and trans-regional contexts, the state subsisted on the mutually empowering relations with the elites and common people. In pitching for the model of 'mutually empowering interactions' as the basis of state-society relations, the study highlights not simply the dependence of the state on local circuits of power and resource dispensation, but also its socially embedded character. These relations-formal and intimate, and familial and impersonal-embroiled the state into ever-deepening local arenas, and served to create spaces for state participation in social and cultural spaces, and equally for social participation in state spaces. In this work, the author takes an in-depth, if diachronic look at the social constituents of the state, and sees how the state's relations with the local power relations impinged on, and reproduced, the legal order, local corporate bodies, forms of social communication and property transactions. Focusing on the socially embedded attributes of the state, the present study offers fresh perspectives concerning the socio-cultural developments of the period, in particular, over issues concerning legal pluralism, literacy and oral traditions, identity politics, publicness and public sphere, and property relations"-- Provided by publisher. |
