Voting from the Rooftops: Reflections on Religion and Politics from Mughal India

Given the apparent lack of engagement with Greco-Roman thought on democracy and republicanism in India before modernity, in what way might we relate a history of voting the divine in the region? In this lecture I will suggest that despite the absence of practices such as voting, we may observe the entanglement of the practices of collective decision-making with sacral engagements across South Asia in the early modern period. To see such entanglements, however, will require us to question the standard distinctions which have divided the realm of politics from that of religion in the study of the region.
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