Milinda Banerjee in his monograph titled The Mortal God examines the history of kingship as a concept in colonial India with a focus on Bengal, and adequately addresses all the methodological challenges which one encounters while tracing the global genealogies of an idea. The introduction to this monograph lays out the frontiers of Banerjee's gigantic intellectual project. Tracing the roots of royalism in India from the modern-day Greater Cooch Behar Movement, Banerjee establishes the importance of monarchic thought in determining the political futures of the modern Indian state. Based on this premise, he begins by problematizing the inherent elitism in the histories of monarchic thought and brings his subaltern actors into play. From peasant communities such as the Rajvamsis to queens like Sunity Devi, from “political sadhus” (392) to elite upper-caste poets, from Indian nationalists to British administrators: in his “socially contextualised intellectual history” (7), Banerjee cuts across the spectrum to illustrate the ways in which Indian political thought in the late nineteenth and twentieth century sought to democratise sovereignty and kingship as political concepts.
The first chapter of this book focusses on diverse discourses on monarchy from the early eighteenth century to late twentieth century amongst colonial administrators and Indian nationalists. Banerjee unpacks the notion of a homogenous understanding of the British monarchy amongst both these groups. He engages with a multiplicity of arguments made by British administrators, ranging from monarchy as the harbinger of modernity in the East to skepticism of the state's authoritarianism under the rule of a single sovereign. He also focusses on Indian nationalists’ diverse responses to the British monarchy. While for elites it presented a model of governance which they could indigenise for India, it caused dissatisfaction amongst marginalised groups who had no access to the royalty.
The second chapter of Banerjee's work focusses on princely states in colonial India and argues that these territories in British India offered nationalists and reformers new languages for articulating models of paternalistic governance, civilization, and progress. By studying Tripura, and Cooch Behar, the two princely states most closely associated with West Bengal, he argues that these territories and their models of rulership played a significant role in shaping the intellectual trajectories of centralised sovereignty and kingship in colonial India. To win the allegiances of the marginalised population who were dissatisfied with the British monarchy, Banerjee shows how Indian nationalists began to valorise the personalised and intimate models of “household sovereignty” (143), in practice in the princely states. Adding to his introductory argument, he illustrates how these discourses in post-colonial times played a significant role in spawning and sustaining anti-state movements like the Greater Cooch Behar movement in West Bengal.
The third chapter of this book is where its argument reaches a climax and shows us glimpses of the imagined sovereign in India's nationalist discourses during the colonial era. This sovereign resembled what Banerjee describes in his title as the “Mortal God”: a benevolent paternalistic force whose authority and power depended simultaneously on divine legitimacy and validation of the people he (rarely she) intended to rule. This ambivalence, the author argues, can be traced back to the ambiguity of Indian nationalists towards singular rulership. A significant elite section of this group felt favourably towards a robust centralised state imitating the oppressive structures of colonial rule depending on an authoritative sovereign. This sovereignty was conceptualised in a broader global context, where inspiration came from British, German, Italian, and Japanese models of rulership. However, the violence of imperialism perpetrated by these European and Asian models made many Indians extremely critical towards the idea of centralised state sovereignty, and “the monistic political theology that allegedly underwrote it” (263). Moreover, as the colonisers perceived India to be the land of oriental despotism, Indian nationalists could not publicly non-ambiguously proclaim an absolute sovereign. By contextualising this critique, Banerjee unravels the central paradox of his argument and illustrates why India remained a fertile ground for monarchic thought, which never developed into a national monarchy.
The fourth chapter focusses on peasant communities, specifically those claiming royal genealogies in colonial Bengal, such as the Rajvamsis. In this section of the book, the author deals exclusively with subaltern reimaginations of the sovereign and illustrates how these communities sought to devise models of shared sovereignty, and in turn, democratise the Indian political. The final chapter of this books ties up the diverse groups of actors and ideologies it has engaged with and argues that “messianic politics” (350) formed meaningful connections between elite and popular politics in late colonial India. These visions of the sovereign saviour too were imagined transnationally and emerged through intersections between not just Hindu, Islamic, and Christian religious idioms, but with socialist and communist ideologies.
This book addresses crucial questions of power, statehood, and models of governance which plague modern South Asia, and traces their conceptual genealogies trans-spatially and trans-temporally (often from pre-colonial times). Histories of ideas tend to overlook questions of language as an institution for producing knowledge, but Banerjee often employs vernacular designators of concepts (in Bengali, and Hindi), traces their etymological roots, and theorises on their untranslatability. Last, but not the least, the author adequately addresses questions of gender, both by pointing out the patriarchal nature of the discourses on kingship and by considering powerful women as active participants in these discourses. Interestingly, by repeatedly pointing to the maleness of sovereignty as a concept, Banerjee does not isolate the gender question to a specific section of the monograph, but touches upon it time and again, throughout the entire text. The book also considers subaltern actors as agents of historical transformation and capable of original intellection in equal capacity with the elite actors. Therefore, not only does Banerjee's work very elegantly present a new argument, it successfully carries out a methodological intervention in the upcoming fields of political thought and global intellectual history.
