Sharing Sovereignty: The Little Kingdom in South Asia*(Second Edition)

This volume focuses on little kingdoms, a concept developed by anthropologists and historians to characterize a specific type of local rulership in South Asia. It emphasizes the role of Hermann Kulke, whose work on the little kingdoms of Odisha took forward the explorations of Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks. It also integrates the most comprehensive of these models, i.e. the little kingdom model, with post-modern historiography, which is an important and hitherto neglected issue in current historiographical debates. The essays herein seek to formulate models in analogy to the textual andanthropological studies that have elaborated the idea of the little kingdom as a multifaceted reality—a reality expressed in ritual and performative processes, as well as in textual and oral representations.