Unity of being against state and capital

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Political theology and democracy : perspectives from South Asia, West Asia, and North Africa

Funding: With thanks to the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 853051 for a project on ’India’s politics in its vernaculars’.PostprintPeer reviewe

The partition of India, Bengali “new Jews,” and refugee democracy : transnational horizons of Indian refugee political discourse

This essay advocates “refugee political thought” as an autonomous category which needs to be centre-staged in global intellectual history. I concretise this by studying Bengali Hindu refugees who migrated from Muslim-majority eastern Bengal (after the Partition of British India in 1947 part of Pakistan, and after 1971, the sovereign state of Bangladesh) to the Hindu-majority Indian state of West Bengal, and occasionally their descendants as well. By studying the transnational horizons of Bengali refugees from the late 1940s to today, I posit them as part of modern global intellectual history. Bengali refugees and their descendants connected their experiences with those of refugees elsewhere in the world, seeing themselves, for example, as “new Jews.” Later, some of them aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause. Refugee politics became enmeshed with Cold War revolutionary currents. European, Soviet, and Chinese Marxist theory—and latent Lockean assumptions—propelled the everyday politics of refugee land occupation. Marxism, sometimes with Hegelian inflection, nourished the East Bengali-–origin founders of Subaltern Studies theory and Dalit (lower-caste) thought. Ultimately, this essay shows how Bengali refugees instrumentalised transnational thinking to produce new models of democratic political thought and practice in postcolonial India. I describe this as “refugee democracy.”Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The modern invention of ‘dynasty’ : an introduction

Historians tend to take ‘dynasty’ for granted. It is assumed that ‘we’ know what ‘dynasty’ is; and that the concept unproblematically corresponds to the empirical reality of a historical institution present in all ‘pre-modern’ rulerships. Taking as its point of departure the peculiar history of the word itself, which acquired its current meaning only in the second half of the eighteenth century, this article sets out a research agenda for historicizing ‘dynasty’. It argues that ‘dynasty’ is not simply a neutral historical term, but a political concept that became globally hegemonic in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the expansion of European colonialism. The article maps out three main trajectories for rethinking history beyond the totalizing concept of ‘dynasty’. First, it points toward a more complex and less hierarchical vision of pre-capitalist, especially extra-European, societies. Second, it considers how capitalism produced new modes and ideologies of hereditary transmission of sovereignty and property and theorizes a link between ‘primitive accumulation’ and the political form of the royal/princely ‘House’. Third, it centres the role of colonialism–European imperial expansion as well as anti-colonial non-European nationalisms–in globalizing ‘dynasty’ as a category of power.PostprintPeer reviewe

Forced migration and refugee resettlement in the long 1940s : an introduction to its connected and global history

When considering the wave of forced migrations during the Second World War in Europe and Asia, and the international and institutional responses thereof, we can speak about the 1940s as witnessing the birth of a global refugee resettlement regime. Organisations including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and eventually the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed refugee resettlement at the heart of constructing the postwar world order. This volume adopts a global optic to investigate the formation of this international resettlement regime in Europe and Asia, while also studying refugee camps and movements, agency of refugees and migrants, decision factors for resettlement, and the intellectual production of people on the move. A historicisation of the global resettlement regime of the long 1940s may well carry important political and ethical lessons for us today, if only to remind us of the connected fates of our common humanity, and the responsibilities we therefore bear towards our fellow human beings.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Sovereignty as a motor of global conceptual travel

How may one imagine the global travel of legal concepts, thinking through models of diffusion and translation, as well as through obstruction, negation, and dialectical transfiguration? This article offers some reflections by interrogating discourses (intertextually woven with Sanskritic invocations) produced by three celebrated Bengalis: the nationalist littérateur Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), the Rajavamshi “lower-caste” peasant leader Panchanan Barma (1866–1935), and the international jurist Radhabinod Pal (1886–1967). These actors evidently took part in projects of vernacularizing (and thereby globalizing through linguistic–conceptual translation) legal–political frameworks of state sovereignty. They produced ideas of nexus between sovereignty, law, and “divine” lawgiving activity, which resemble as well as diverge from notions of political theology associated with the German jurist Carl Schmitt. Simultaneously, these actors critiqued coercive impositions of state-backed positive law and sovereign violence, often in the name of globally oriented concepts of “ethical”/natural law, theology, and capacious forms of solidarity, including categories like “all beings,” “self/soul,” “humanity,” and “world.” I argue that “sovereignty,” as a metonym for concrete practices of power as well as a polyvalent conceptual signifier, thus dialectically provoked the globalization of modern legal intellection, including in the extra-European world

How 'dynasty' became a modern global concept : intellectual histories of sovereignty and property

The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. Hegel’s references to ‘dynasty’, read with Marx’s critique, further show how ‘dynasty’ encoded the intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism. Imaginaries about ‘dynasty’ also connected national sovereignty with patriarchal authority. European colonialism helped globalize the concept in the non-European world; British India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates. The globalization of the abstraction of ‘dynasty’ was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/‘tribal’ populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’. These concepts nourished new forms of democracy in modern India. Global intellectual histories can thus expand political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern models of collective and polyarchic power.PostprintPeer reviewe

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