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Muhammed Shah Shajahan

Muhammed Shah Shajahan is a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech. His area of research is the intersection of religion and early political economy in colonial South Asia. He is particularly interested in exploring the question of sovereignty in relation to economic and spiritual transactions.

Symposia

<strong>Religion, Rebellion, and Sovereignty: Malabar Rebellion and the Problem Space of Political Theology</strong>

The symposium initiates a conversation on the forms and practices of sovereignty in South Asia in the context of a peasant Muslim insurgency against British colonialism in 20th-century Malabar in South India.

Essays

<strong>“War” in The Time of The Rebellion: Between Colonial and Decolonial Narratives About Malabar of 1921</strong>

This blog post investigates and problematizes a certain narrative strategy in the historiography of Malabar rebellion, in which “war” (“yudham”) and “riot” (“lahala” or “mutiny”) were configured on the model of “politics” and “religion”. The post asks what kind of sovereign formation was imagined in such a narrative strategy and why it needs to be addressed.