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  3. Metamorphoses of the Political: Multidisciplinary Approaches

The Series is a publishing collaboration of Cambridge University Press with The M. S. Merian–R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies 'Metamorphoses of the Political' (ICAS:MP). It seeks to publish new books that both expand and de-centre current perspectives on politics and the 'political' in the contemporary world. It examines, from a wide array of disciplinary and methodological approaches, how the 'political' has been conceptualized, articulated and transformed in specific arenas of contestation during the 'long twentieth century'. Though primarily located in India and the Global South, the Series seeks to interrogate and contribute to wider debates about global processes and politics. It is in this sense that the Series is imagined as one that is regionally focused but globally engaged, providing a context for interrogations of universalized theories of self, society and politics.

  • General Editors: Prathama Banerjee, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Antje Linkenbach, Universität Erfurt, Germany, Samita Sen, University of Cambridge, Indra Sengupta, German Historical Institute, Sanjay Srivastava, University of London, Debjani Mazumder, M. S. Merian - R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies, Delhi
  • Advisory Boards: Jörg Gengnagel, Universität Würzburg, Germany, Martin Fuchs, Universität Erfurt, Germany, Christina von Hodenberg, German Historical Institute, Awadhendra Sharan, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Shail Mayaram, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Ravi Vasudevan, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

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12 results in Metamorphoses of the Political: Multidisciplinary Approaches

Elusive Democracy
  • Dalit Politics, Elections, and the Contradictions of Representation
  • Michael Collins
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • Today, India is widely celebrated as the world's largest democracy. However, not all groups experience India's political institutions the same way. This book draws on extensive interviews with longtime Dalit (ex-Untouchable) activists and original archives of party documents to explore the democratic transformation of one of India's most prominent Dalit-led parties, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK; Liberation Panthers Party). Through a historical and ethnographic account of the VCK's transition from boycotts to ballots, this book provides a novel perspective on India's democratic trajectory, as well as its limits. Whereas VCK leaders initially viewed elections as an instrument to spur development and contest power asymmetries, they would come to recognize that democratic institutions can equally function as a means of containment, and control. The research shows how democratic politics opened new space for Dalit political advancement while simultaneously imposing unique constraints on these leaders that would reconfigure very nature of their politics.

Women and Colonial Law
  • A Feminist Social History
  • 2nd edition
  • Janaki Nair
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2025
  • This book introduces students of law and history to key colonial moments that have shaped women's legal status up to the present day. It introduces students and general readers to the critical events and legal decisions that determined the place of women under law. It also introduces readers to terms that are critical to understanding women's legal status in India today. In addition to bringing together the latest developments in Indian historical research with advances in feminist legal studies, it tracks the shifts and changes that have occurred, especially over the last 30 years, to feminist standpoints on women and law. Using examples and cases from different regions of India, it also weaves together a complex and nuanced account of colonial social history more generally. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Through the India-China Border
  • Kalimpong in the Himalayas
  • Prem Poddar, Lisa Lindkvist Zhang
  • Published online:
    28 November 2024
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • Through the India-China Border mobilizes rarely used documentary material from British, Chinese and Indian archives to shed new light on our understanding of the 'Tibet Question' in China-India relations. Focused on the Himalayan border town of Kalimpong from the 1920s to 1962, it unearths a history of espionage and political intrigue that challenges the way that remote peripheries are seen from the 'centres' of nations. The innovative use of postcolonial and transcultural theory demonstrates how a multidisciplinary framework augments our reading of imperial histories, postwar politics, decolonisation and frontier cultures. Kalimpong emerges from this analysis as a key node in Himalayan history and in the mid-century fashioning of India-China relations.

Claiming the People's Past
  • Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century
  • Edited by Berber Bevernage, Eline Mestdagh, Walderez Ramalho, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt
  • Published online:
    15 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025
  • This book offers a global and systematic overview of populist politics of history in the twenty-first century. An international group of scholars interrogates how and why populists engage with the past. Twelve case studies focus on uses of history and memory by populist movements across the globe – ranging from Brazil to Bangladesh, from Poland to Tanzania. Five thematic chapters zoom in on key features of populism: its relation to time, nationalism, emotions, academic expertise, and the language of 'moral remembrance'. The focus is both on left- and right-wing populism, as well as on oppositional populism and populists in power. This way, the volume presents an empirically rigorous and conceptually innovative analysis of populist historical reason.

Evacuee Cinema
  • Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940–1960
  • Salma Siddique
  • Published online:
    11 October 2022
    Print publication:
    16 February 2023
  • This new history of partition and South Asian cinema is narrated through the careers of émigré film personnel, as well as through the distinctive genres and ancillary ventures that accompanied the aftershocks of partition. Moving beyond arguments about social contingency and political intent, the book suggests that the creative energies, production and subsequent circulation of popular cinema can offer fresh insights into partition. Pointing to regional connections across national boundaries, this book asserts that the cinemas of India and Pakistan must be explored in tandem to uncover the legacy of partition for the culture industries of the region, one that is not hewn out of national erasures. The leitmotifs of émigré personnel, gossip and satire in film print culture, the partisan repertoire of a theatre company, the film genres of the Muslim social, romantic comedies and charba (remakes), and the unruly film archives of postcolonial nation–states, when accessed through the lens of a divisive decolonization, reveal the parallaxes and confabulations of the 'national' on both sides.

Women, Gender and Religious Nationalism
  • Edited by Amrita Basu, Tanika Sarkar
  • Published online:
    12 August 2022
    Print publication:
    10 November 2022
  • This book reflects the changing modalities of Hindu nationalist organizing among women and youth. It provides unique insights into how this immensely powerful political formation has been able to preside over a massive network of grassroots organisations among most segments of Indian society and capture national power. Chapters explore the techniques the RSS, VHP and BJP employ and the messages they convey about masculinity, femininity, and LGBTQ communities, and analyze contrasting forms of women's activism in defending and opposing Hindu nationalism. This book contributes to the global literature on the gender dimensions of rightwing politics. By exploring why women advance the agenda of the Hindu Right despite its conservative views on gender and sexuality, the book makes an important intervention in feminist and women's studies scholarship.

Streets in Motion
  • The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta
  • Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay
  • Published online:
    30 June 2022
    Print publication:
    10 November 2022
  • The book studies the social production of motion in a capitalist urban context. In the city of capital, motion refers to a fetish. The bourgeois order posits motion as a metaphor for energy, positivity, and progress – a norm – and obstruction (motion's dialectical opposite) as delinquency. The book uncovers the social tectonics of spatial mobilization and thus demystifies motion. Who and what set spaces on the move? How did various classes of city dwellers activate, experience, and negotiate it? Streets in Motion develops an approach to urban history by theorizing and historicizing the 'street' as an apparatus of city-making and subject formation. It works at two registers – a local history of Calcutta in colonial and post-colonial periods, and a theorizing of the logistical and political-cultural centrality of the street within this rubric. It is argued that the street is politics in as much as politics is the production of space.

Rule of the Commoner
  • DMK and Formations of the Political in Tamil Nadu, 1949–1967
  • Rajan Kurai Krishnan, Ravindran Sriramachandran, V. M. S. Subagunarajan
  • Published online:
    15 June 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022
  • The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has been singular in heralding and establishing a firm regional polity among the Indian states after the Indian Union was inaugurated as a republic. Academic scholarship has often treated the DMK as a Tamil nationalist or ethno-nationalist formation without conceptual clarity or critical insight. Rule of the Commoner demonstrates with persuasive evidence that the DMK appealed to a federalist and not nationalist imagination. The DMK's combining of the non-Brahmin Dravidian identity and allegiance to Tamil language led to a counter hegemonic formation of the plebes and left populism. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau, the book argues that the DMK achieved the construction of a people as Dravidian-Tamil, with Tamil being the empty signifier of the social whole, Brahmin vs. non-Brahmin divide functioning as the internal frontier leading to the formations of the political. It elaborates the conceptual scheme under the three rubrics of Ideation, Imagination and Mobilization.

Saffron Republic
  • Hindu Nationalism and State Power in India
  • Edited by Thomas Blom Hansen, Srirupa Roy
  • Published online:
    31 May 2022
    Print publication:
    10 November 2022
  • This volume examines the phenomenon of contemporary Hindu nationalism or 'new Hindutva' that is presently the dominant ideological and political-electoral formation in India. There is a rich body of work on Hindu nationalism, but its main focus is on an earlier moment of insurgent movement politics in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, new Hindutva is a governmental formation that converges with wider global currents and enjoys mainstream acceptance. To understand these new political forms and their implications for democratic futures, a fresh set of reflections is in order. This book approaches contemporary Hindutva as an example of a democratic authoritarianism or an authoritarian populism, a politics that simultaneously advances and violates ideas and practices of popular and constitutional democracy.

Properties of Rent
  • Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi
  • Sushmita Pati
  • Published online:
    31 March 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022
  • We live in cities whose borders have always been subject to expansion. What does such transformation of rural spaces mean for cities and vice-versa? This book looks at the spatial transformation of villages brought into the Delhi's urban fray in the 1950s. As these villages transform physically; their residents, an agrarian-pastoralist community - the Jats - also transform into dabblers in real estate. A study of two villages - Munirka and Shahpur Jat - both in the heart of bustling urban economies of Delhi, reveal that it is 'rent' that could define this suburbanisation. 'Bhaichara', once a form of land ownership in colonial times, transforms into an affective claim of belonging, and managing urban property in the face of a steady onslaught from the 'city'. Properties of Rent is a study of how vernacular form of capitalism and its various affects shape up in opposition to both state, finance capital and the city in contemporary urban Delhi.

The Secret Life of Another Indian Nationalism
  • Transitions from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana
  • Shail Mayaram
  • Published online:
    11 February 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022
  • Nationalism is among the most influential ideas that has shaped the 'Metamorphoses of the Political' in the long twentieth century. This book focuses on exclusivist Indian nationalism and identifies its distinction from inclusivist nationalism. It highlights shifts in 'another Indian nationalism' over the last two centuries as the geopolitical context has transitioned from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana and its war on terror. The books braids the following three strands together: first, a majoritarian nationalist ideology called Hindutva; second, the making of popular history as a precolonial epic is highlighted, depicting the defeat of the last Hindu Emperor by a conquering Muslim Sultan purportedly leading to eight centuries of Hindu enslavement and third, the 'reconversion' of a community by the Visva Hindu Parishad with consequences for Lived Hinduism and Indic civilisation with its complex identities.

Debt, Trust, and Reputation
  • Extra-legal Finance in Northern India
  • Sebastian Schwecke
  • Published online:
    30 November 2021
    Print publication:
    16 June 2022
  • Starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial rule in India took an active interest in regulating financial markets beyond the bridgeheads of European capital in intercontinental trade. Regulatory efforts were part of a modernizing project seeking to produce alignments between British and Indian business procedures, and to create the financial basis for incipient industrialization in India. For vast sections of Indian society, however, they pushed credit/debt relations into the realm of extra-legality, while the new, regulated agents of finance remained incapable (and unwilling) of serving their needs. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book questions underlying assumptions of modernization in finance that continue to prevail in postcolonial India, and delineates the socioeconomic responses they produced, and studies the reputational economies of debt that have emerged instead – extra-legal markets embedded into communication flows on trust and reputation that have turned out to be significantly more exploitative than their colonial predecessors.