The Mortal God is a study in intellectual history which uncovers how actors in colonial India imagined various figures of human, divine, and messianic rulers to battle over the nature and locus of sovereignty. It studies British and Indian political-intellectual elites as well as South Asian peasant activists, giving particular attention to Bengal, including the associated princely states of Cooch Behar and Tripura. Global intellectual history approaches are deployed to place India within wider trajectories of royal nationhood that unfolded across contemporaneous Europe and Asia. The book intervenes within theoretical debates about sovereignty and political theology, and offers novel arguments about decolonizing and subalternizing sovereignty.

1. Caesar of India: Debating the British Monarchy and Colonial Ruler ship
2. State is the Household Vastly Enlarged: Imagining Sovereignty
Through the Princely States
3. One Law, One Nation, One Throne: Debating National Unity
4. One Has to Rule Oneself: Collectivism Sovereignty in Peasant Politics
5. God Kingdom Has Come: Messianic Sovereignty in Late Colonial India