In this presentation, I look back, as a historian of modern south Asia, into the far past and ask: what does a deep history of sovereignty look like in this part of the world? I argue that the concept of sovereignty – as it evolved in medieval and early modern Europe and subsequently globalized via the work of colonialism and nationalism – does not quite capture the diverse and dispersed regimes of rule that south Asia experienced through the centuries. I propose that in south Asia, regimes of rule were constituted by an irresoluble dialectic between political power and social power, king and Brahmin, sultan and sharia, state law and caste/community law – in a way that unsettles the classical definition of sovereignty as the exclusive right of the ruler to institute and suspend law. To understand political power here, therefore, we must attend to the social constitution as much as to the state. We must also acknowledge the centrality of what I call the ‘anti-social critique’, embodied in the figures of the king, the outcaste, the ascetic, the forest dweller and counter-intuitively the ‘ideal Brahmin’ himself, who by virtue of being outside society claimed a personalized form of sovereignty and immunity.
Ambedkar famously said that Indian society is not a society at all, even if India might be a nation politically and culturally. India is an agglomeration of castes and communities which operate in effect like polities unto themselves, with established borders in-between and no sociability whatsoever. Hence sovereign power in India rests neither in the state nor in its symmetrical other, the autonomous rational individual of liberal thought. It is dispersed across what I am calling for the moment ‘the social constitution’ (which is not exactly what we mean by the modern term ‘society’), and hence thwarts the standard social/political and state/society binaries of modern thought?
I end by briefly reflecting on the contemporary implications of this long history and the difficulties of breaching the periodization protocols of the historical discipline.
Recording Link (requires NYU Zoom login)
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Prathama Banerjee is a historian at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. She is the author of Politics of Time: ‘primitives’ and history-writing in a colonial society (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Elementary Aspects of the Political: histories from the global south (Duke University Press, 2020, forthcoming). Her interests lie in the history of ideas, cultural history, literary studies and increasingly contemporary democracy.
October 16, 2020
Presenter: Prathama Banerjee
Location: Virtual