Karunadu

The NewsMinute, 2023

The shift in discourse around the Karnatak province from a neglected but self-sufficient entity to a poor and underdeveloped one was primarily the result of Mysorean insistence on its own developed status and the 'burden' it was to raise it to the 'Mysorean standard'.

2008

Economic and Political Weekly , 2011

Has the idea of the linguistic state been rendered increasingly irrelevant or less pertinent in the current stage of capitalist development? The unfolding political scenario in Karnataka calls for a return to its founding moments as a linguistic state. In the early 1950s, Kengal Hanumanthaiah developed the idea of a “composite state” partly in order to channelise the discontent within Mysore about the possible loss of (caste) power but equally to provide an alternative matrix (that of development) within the expanded state. What were the roots of that alternative to the (linguistic) state that was being imagined, and have the recent political developments been a realisation of that imagined “composite state” or its demise? This article attempts to frame these questions through a return to the legislative assembly debates of the early 1950s

2008

Economic and Political Weekly, 1996

South Asian Sovereignty: The Conundrum of Worldly Power, 2020

In this chapter, I explore the tension present in these two very different understandings of politics and the selection of leaders in contemporary India, namely competing notions of democratic and divine election. While some might draw the distinction between the two forms as struggle of a modern, rational political system versus a traditional religious worldview, I argue that the overlap between the two ways of viewing election is based on the development of political theologies in the early modern period in which sovereignty itself was reconceptualized in the transition from kingdoms to princely states under British control.