Milinda Banerjee - Böcker

The ancient Indian epic, Mahabharata, was first composed in Sanskrit and then rendered into Indian vernaculars and other Asian and European languages. This book demonstrates how the epic has shaped the birth of modern politics and thought across India, Europe, Japan, China, Thailand, Iran, and the Arab world. It draws on methodologies of global intellectual and religious history. The contributing authors are specialists on various world-regions. They reveal how kings and peasants, statesmen and revolutionaries, intellectuals, and activists, have invoked the epic to forge their political visions over the past centuries. The epic has thus contributed to state formation, nationalism, as well as the decolonization and democratization of the modern world. This book helps us understand the non-Eurocentric roots of modern political and social ideas, in India and across Asia and Europe. We thereby understand the global origins of contemporary politics, society, and democracy.

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.

On a second wave of anti-colonial revolutions.State and Capital reign over the Age of Sorrow. We face inequality, pandemics, ethnocide, climate crisis, and mass extinction. Our desire for security and power governs us as State. Our desire for possessions governs us as Capital. Our desires imprison and rule us beings as Unbeing. Yet, from Nagaland to New Zealand, Bhutan to Bolivia, a second wave of anti-colonial revolutions has begun. Arising from assemblies of humans and other-than-humans, these revolutions replace possessive individualism with non-exploitative interdependence. Naga elders, Bhutanese herders and other indigenous communities, feminists, poets, seers, yaks, cranes, vultures, and fungi haunt this pamphlet. The original Subaltern Studies narrated how Indian peasant communities destroyed the British empire. Subaltern Studies 2.0 prophesies the multi-being demos and liberates Being from Unbeing. Re-kin, Re-nomad, Re-animate, Re-wild! The Animist Revolution has come.

While monarchies are often portrayed as old-fashioned – as things of the past – we argue that modern monarchies have been at the centre of nation-construction in many parts of the world. Today, roughly a quarter of states define themselves as monarchies as well as nation-states – they are Royal Nations.