Nullius is an award-winning anthropological account of the troubled status of ownership in India and its consequences for our understanding of sovereignty and social relations. Though property rights and ownership are said to be a cornerstone of modern law, in the Indian case they are often a spectral presence. Kapila offers a detailed study of paradigms where proprietary relations have been erased, denied, misappropriated. 
 
The book examines three forms of negation, where the Indian state de facto adopted doctrines of terra nullius (in the erasure of indigenous title), res nullius (in acquiring museum objects), and, controversially, corpus nullius (in denying citizens ownership of their bodies under biometrics). The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of questions of property, exchange, dispossession, law, and sovereignty.

Nullius is the winner of the 2024 Bernard S. Cohn Prize,  Association of Asian Studies.

"In this context, Nullius’ originality is to set the concept of dispossession (not necessarily the extant body of work addressing it, and for good reason) as the counterfactual to that of the gift; its success is to take the ethnographic imagination the whole nine yards to flesh out the theoretical possibilities of this counterfactual that could have easily remained a superficial witticism."  - Anthropology Book Forum

"Kapila’s work reveals the many depths of state-led dispossession beyond a grid of monopolized violence and political economic calculations... Its key contributions are in showing how an anthropology of the state can be revived outside of Agambenian-Foucauldian frameworks that animate much of the recent work on sovereignty and state-subject relations. Kapila’s commitment to an anthropological grounding produces a welcomed and refreshing piece of scholarship at a moment when many of us are wading into the waters of transdisciplinary work." - PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review