Speaker: Milinda Banerjee (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich)

Respondent: Jon Wilson (King's College London)

Dr Banerjee will speak about his new book, The Mortal God, which 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. In it, he deploys global intellectual history approaches to place India within wider trajectories of royal nationhood that unfolded across contemporaneous Europe and Asia. The book intervenes in theoretical debates about sovereignty and political theology and offers novel arguments about decolonising and subalternising sovereignty.