The Mortal God
Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India

This work explores how colonial India imagined human and divine figures to battle the nature and locus of sovereignty.

Milinda Banerjee (Author)

9781107166561, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 April 2018

450 pages
23.7 x 15.6 x 3.3 cm, 0.69 kg

'The Mortal God is a thoughtful contribution to an emerging literature on the global and comparative histories of sovereignty. Banerjee proceeds from the vantage of Bengali political thought to examine the intimacy between claims about the singular figure of the king and the democratic figure of the people. His inclusion of agrarian and caste-based political movements within the scope of this intellectual history is one of the book's most refreshing features. This is a work that advances the agenda of both global intellectual history and comparative political theory.' Andrew Sartori, New York University

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.

Acknowledgements
Note on transliteration
Abbreviations
Note on documents used
Introduction
1. 'Caesar of India': debating the British monarchy and colonial rulership
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': collectivising sovereignty in peasant politics
5. 'God's kingdom has come': messianic sovereignty in late colonial India
Conclusions and further thoughts
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Regional & national history [HBJ], History [HB]