The Mortal God Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India

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.

Milinda Banerjee teaches at the Department of History, Presidency University, Kolkata and is a Research Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany. He has co-edited Transnational Histories of the 'Royal Nation' (2017), and is the author of two monographs as well as several journal articles and book chapters on the intersections of South Asian and transregional intellectual history.