52 6 august 2018I
n Milinda Banerjee’s The
Mortal God, the title is a leitmotif that
runs through the book. it is meant
to draw attention to the connections
between ideas of divinity, rulership, sov-
ereignty and sacralisation of the political
form. Hobbes’ phrase, the ‘moral God’,
serves as a ‘provocative metonym’ to
convey the ‘divinisation of the political’.
However, Banerjee, in laying out di-
vergent forms of political deployment of
the divine, goes beyond the Hobbesian
invocation of the State as a mortal god to
suggest that ‘sovereignty or even divin-
ity belongs potentially to everyone, and
is not the monopoly of the state and of
ruling hierarchs.’ The book suggests that
expressions and markers of sovereignty
do not exhaust themselves in Bodin’s or
Hobbes’ theories of state sovereignty. a
focus solely on these ‘state discourses’
leaves us with a risk of ‘leaving out a
very large spectrum of non-elite political
intellection centering on divine, human
and messianic rulers.’
The book launches a detailed survey
of how people—cutting across caste,
class, ethnicity, gender and political dis-
pensation—in colonial india imagined
divergent sovereign figures. it narrates
the plural and divergent narratives of
the ruler as a ‘mortal god’ and varied ge-
nealogies of political theologies. The aim
is to historicise the plural definitions of
‘sovereign presence’ that were sculpted
by various political actors in the context
of colonial india. Through an explora-
tion of particular genealogies—in
the landscapes of late 19th–mid 20th
century Bengal, including the associ-
ated princely states of Cooch Behar and
Tripura—the book aims to bring into
visibility the many ‘secret and forgotten
sovereignty idioms which continue to
shape modern india’.
a case in point is the Bangshi Badan
Barman-led Greater Cooch Behar move-
ment in north Bengal in February 2016,
where the agitators (mainly low-caste ra-
javamshis) used colonial monarchic sym-
bols—images and flags of King nripen-
dra narayan (reign: 1863-1911)—to rally
for greater political agency and statehood.
The narrative of the rajavamshi struggle
is meant to make a broader suggestion—
that is, forms of latent monarchism reso-
nate even today in our visualisation of
the sovereign. There is a need therefore to
understand plural social and intellectual
histories, and through them, the ‘broader
imbrications of kingship, sovereignty
and democracy’ that have contemporary
relevance and find space in the modern
democratic vocabulary.
The book explores sovereign figures
of colonial india at five levels. First, the
British imperial monistic order of state
and sovereignty that invoked the British
imperial monarch and Christian mono-
theistic theology. second, the regional
structures of monarchic sovereignty, in
part adapted from the British, which in
princely india produced ‘new concepts
of reformist and patriotic rulership’.Third, the discourses and liturgies of
nationalist leaders who invoked diverse
historical and mythical rulers—the ‘God
king’—as embodiments of national
sovereignty. The monistic ruler was
invoked as a symbol that unified and
justified the nation. Fourth, the dis-
courses among lower castes and ‘tribal’
communities, wherein martial peasant
groups asserted regal and divine identity.
For example, rajavamshis and Tripur
Kshatriyas both claimed the status of
Kshatriya descendants, challenged
upper-caste hegemony and helped
‘democratise indian politics’. Fifth, the
construction of a messianic sovereignty
that combined the norms of indic ava-
tara and ascetic-ruler (the icon of Gandhi
Maharaj being a fine example) with
islamic ideals of Mahdi sovereignty.
at all these five levels, the book
contextualises developments in Bengal
and locates it in the wider south asian
tradition while making a case for the
global orientation of the subaltern and
other hybridised conceptualisations
of sovereignty. it draws upon diverse
sources. For instance, religious-social
reformers like swami Vivekananda
and other nationalist leaders like Tilak
who admired German monarchy for
its contribution to education, military
strength and economic progress; or
reformers like rammohan roy who
pioneered the monotheistisation of religi-
osity in india, fostering an idea of global
unity. native writers like Tagore invoked
(in what came to be adopted as the
national anthem) the divine monarch
(adhinayaka), who was in charge of the
destiny (Bharat bhagya vidhata) of india
and who ordained the very unity of the
indian people. Contributions of women
reformers such as Maharani sunity devi
of Cooch Behar, rokeya sakhawat Hos-The Quest for a Sovereign Identity
Divine authority and other idioms of power in the shaping of modern India
By Rajshree Chandra
The MorTal God
Milinda BanerjeeCambridge University Press
450 Pages | Rs 906books