In this intellectually and historically rich book, Prathama Banerjee examines developments in what she calls “elementary aspects of the political” from the Global South, drawing on Indian and Bengali sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Banerjee provides a sophisticated contribution to long-standing debates regarding “the political” that is grounded in histories from the Global South, tracking developments in four constitutive elements as “internally heterogeneous, expressive events” (p. 12): self, action, idea, and people. Her argument for a theory of the political rejects Western philosophical universals and attends carefully to historical specificity and context, while retaining space for theoretical creativity and political salience at the global level. This argument emerges from a deeply original analysis of sources frequently overlooked by political theorists. As Banerjee explains, “This is a study of the years when what we know as modern politics took shape in India and the world,” focusing on “histories of the political…[and] what and how is the political” (p. 1). In contrast to most approaches, she takes history and real politics first, before any pure “political” or “philosophical” thinking. One might suppose that this approach would restrict theoretical application in analyzing the political across time and geographic space, but Banerjee explains how it facilitates the use of transcontextual and transtemporal creativity “to break out of the debilitating theory/practice, philosophy/life binary, which constrains political imagination in modern times” (p. 220).

To start, Banerjee rejects the idea that philosophy has a privileged access to unearthing “the political,” especially as conceived in universalized (philosophical) Anglo-European archetypes. She thus departs from a number of foundational thinkers on the political, such as Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort, among others (pp. 5–7). This move allows Banerjee to distance herself from predominant approaches to examining the political in contemporary political theory. This is a welcome and fruitful contribution in itself, because it posits “ordinary politics” as a deeply important, open, and contingent (re)source for (re)thinking the question: “What and how is the political?” The “how” in this formulation is especially significant, because Banerjee argues the “political” is mobile and ever changing, so philosophy cannot pin it down to any one type of phenomenon nor anchor it in any particular or universal essence. Hence, “the political is not just a self-standing noun but an orientation, a qualifier, that is sometimes assumed or worn by subjects, forces, acts, and images, irrespective of their origin. What is political becomes so and does not remain so forever” (p. 8). Banerjee’s reading of the political thus highlights its evanescent character through time and space as it eludes essentialist pegs.

Schematically, the book focuses on the four aforementioned elementary aspects of the political. She explains that these are not pure concepts but rather heterogeneous and unstable in nature, interacting in co-constitutive, dialectical tandem with concepts such as the social, the religious, the economic, and the aesthetic. In this regard, the political and its elementary aspects always seek grounding by posing themselves against the “non-” and “extra-political.” Although these multifarious concepts and categories undoubtedly sharpen her analytic framework, the complex historical processes of “dialectical differentiation” can sometimes obscure exactly what distinguishes the political from its constitutive other at any given point in time. The political can thus become so fluid that its coherence as a distinct category appears to vanish almost entirely.

Each of the four parts of the book contains a chapter pair that highlights “the internal tension, indeed the split, within the element itself” (p. 15). Part I explores the emergence of “the self” that becomes political in modern times, focusing on two precolonial Indic traditions—renunciation (sannyas) and realpolitik (artha/niti)—that are critically refashioned in figures such as Swami Vivekananda and the Brahmin Chanakya/Kautilya. In part II, she turns to politics as “act,” examining how the concepts of karma and labor become refigured and contested by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Gandhi, Tagore, and members of the Communist Party. The next part of the book explores the emergence of “the idea” of the political, explaining how equality becomes the central political idea in modern times, rearticulated and disputed through spiritual, economic, and literary registers. Finally, part IV astutely examines how modern politics entailed the repeated (un)making and staging of “the people” who might make a legitimate claim to sovereignty in form and presence, in the form of both political party and fiction.

Outside the introduction and its critical engagement with preexisting approaches to the political, argumentative opposition is primarily internal to the historical figures and positions that Banerjee examines; e.g., modalities of renunciation versus realpolitik. Therefore, Banerjee does not necessarily side with any particular thinker or position on the political, but rather explains how various thinkers and groups exhibit some important element of the political as it emerges in historical context. Since the book’s central argument and analyses are not developed in direct contention with any particular scholars or single scholarly literature, from the perspective of a political theorist, the book’s major contributions lie more at a broader theoretical level; thus, I focus here on these aspects of the book.

Banerjee’s detailed analysis shows how fluid, plural, and dynamic the political remains in modernity, convincingly challenging essentialist conceptions. For example, her examination of renunciation and antisocial being in chapter 1 brilliantly explains how ascetism and renunciation—often viewed as antithetical to political life—index political being in profound ways (p. 27). Drawing on her extensive knowledge and command of modern Indian and Bengali histories, this diagnosis has the value of showing how we can creatively theorize and draw conceptual insights in a global fashion within a “non-place,” or an intellectual space that is not limited to “West” versus “non-West,” or “modern” versus “premodern” categories. This approach dissolves important temporal and territorial boundaries, thus defying a problematic “West/non-West” binary that has haunted global political theory for decades (p. 215). Banerjee reminds us how “thinking across traditions…not only allows us to recover lost and forgotten intellectual cartographies but also helps us carve out thought regions anew” (p. 216). Accordingly, one of the book’s most important contributions lies in how Banerjee practices what she theorizes, and in so doing, she shows the powerful aesthetic possibilities in political theorizing and acting across any number of borders that have traditionally delimited and reified particular conceptions of the political. For example, she shows how renunciates, realpolitikers, laborers, and party activists alike all become involved in shaping the modern landscape of the political in distinctive, unique ways.

Banerjee does not necessarily seek to provide new interpretations of major figures like Gandhi, Ambedkar, or Vivekananda as such, but rather reads them within the framework of the elementary aspects that she astutely identifies. This is not a criticism of Banerjee’s project, just a clarification that she views her thinkers and activists through the analytic lens of these aspects and, in doing so, provides new ways for us to think about a variety of Indian figures and primary texts. Stylistically, although the chapters are dense in historical detail, each part of the book supplies a tremendously diverse array of evidence drawn from philosophy, politics, art, sociology, history, and literature. In sum, these chapters burst with historical and theoretical insights that will be of interest to scholars in global-comparative and Indic political theory, as well as modern intellectual history and Indian politics more generally.