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“My friends and I saw politics as the default condition of being,” writes Prathama Banerjee describing her coming of age in India during the later decades of the twentieth century. Banerjee’s quest in The Elementary Aspects of the Political is to query why and how this came to be. Why was every domain of life – “art, philosophy, love, spirituality” – and every space one inhabited – “classroom, household, workplace, theatre” – subsumed under the master sign of the political?
Generations of historians, most prominently those of the Subaltern Studies school, have analysed the particular stakes of political modernity in India, especially its divergence and overlaps with the European modern. Despite its ubiquity, the concept of the political, to recall Carl Schmitt’s important book that made the adjective into a widely accepted noun, is rarely interrogated in historical works, not only South Asian histories but postcolonial studies of the global South more generally. Banerjee’s second monograph urges that we take a step back and ask the fundamental question about how the political comes to be.
Politics and history
Elementary Aspects is a history of the political that recognises the difficulty of defining the “political”, recalling Nietzsche’s maxim that only that “which has no history can be defined.”…