6 august 2018 http://www.openthemagazine.com 53
sain, sarojini naidu and sister nivedita
(who compared a nation to a ship in
need of a strong commander or sover-
eign) have been recorded.
subaltern voices feature through the
book but come into greater focus in the
fourth chapter which locates subaltern
forms of sovereign consciousness in the
Kshatriyaisation of peasant communi-
ties. The Tripur Kshatriya samaj aspired
to reconstitute sovereignty by aspiring
to moral and social reform (samskara),
progress in education (shikshonnati), so-
cial discipline and development (samajik
shrinkhala and unnati). The low-caste
rajavamshis of north Bengal declared
themselves to be Kshatriya descendants,
fulfilling the functions of palana
or of protecting, guarding,
watching, defending, ‘combin-
ing the functions of a ruler,
nourisher, herdsman’. Taking
a cue from Foucault, Banerjee
suggests that these constitute
the invocation of an ancient
euro-asian grammar of pastoral
governance.
B
anerjee’s worK seeks
to acknowledge the agency
and subjectivity of the various
sovereigns and to recover their
‘mortal god’ from nationalist
projects and positivist histori-
ography. reading local histories
and historiographical represen-
tations with an uncanny eye,
Banerjee offers a fascinating
account of how both peasant
consciousness (of rajavamshis,
for instance) combined with
mythic invocations of god-kings
and with bonds of community.
The ‘sovereign’ that emerges is
not, as Banerjee puts it, a ‘real
sovereign’ (in the typified sense
used in contemporary Bodinian
parlance) in sync with nation
and class. This sovereign is more
local, more culturalised, defy-
ing models of sovereignty and
monarchy that conventional
historiography or politics uses.
what it means to decolonise succes-
fully has long been a matter of debate
and discussion. Post-colonial studies and
subaltern school historiography seek to
undo the eurocentrism produced by co-
lonialist, nationalist or Marxist projects.
not self-admittedly, but Banerjee too
makes a similar case. By rigorously his-
toricising definitions of the sovereign-
sovereignty pair, by making available
‘plausible plural possibilities, scales
and spaces of being sovereign’,
Banerjee attempts to destabilise any
monopolising and totalising semantic
frames like the ‘imperial’, the ‘national-
ist’ or the ‘western’.
Banerjee deserves accolades for hiswork in fashioning a new imagery of
sovereigns in colonial india. The strat-
egy, to use a phrase from Gyan Prakash,
is to find in the functioning of history as
a discipline (in the Foucauldian sense),
the source of another history. How-
ever, if the project is to ‘decolonise and
subalternise sovereignty’ so that ‘radical
politics can be bolstered’, then the aim
cannot only be to explore the faultlines
of dominant narratives and provide a
different history.
a critique must go further and
unmask dominant discourses. if forms
of latent monarchism survive today,
what kinds of tensions are reproduced
when they cohabit in an institutional
ecosystem of liberal democracy?
Can an assertion of plurality,
locality and histories be a radical
political project if it does not
interrogate the place, role and
politics of contemporary ‘mortal
gods’? what modes of elite, ma-
joritarian consciousness prevail
upon smaller or minority or
marginalised forms of sovereign
consciousness? why is it that
key components of the modern
nation-state—political parties,
electoral process, parliamentary
bodies, bureaucracy, law, ideol-
ogy of development—embody
statist elements of sovereignty,
despite the divergent genealo-
gies that precede them? why
has the political efficacy of
varied legacies been rendered
inconsequential? Perhaps these
are not questions the author
seeks to ask; perhaps this
is not the quest of the book.
Fair enough. But the claim of
‘radical politics’ and the agenda
of building ‘political solidarities’
need to account for the lived
trajectories of dominant
sovereigns and the mortality of
smaller Mortal Gods. nRajshree Chandra is an associate
professor of Political Science
at Janki Devi Memorial
College, University of Delhia gitators of the greater cooch behar
movement in 2016 used images and
flags of King nripendra narayan
(reign: 1863-1911) to rally for greater
political agency and statehoodalamy