Author Meets Critics: Nazmul Sultan's "Waiting for the People"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This Author-Meets-Critics panel will be devoted to a discussion of Nazmul Sultan’s recently published book, Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (Harvard University Press, 2023). Waiting for the People provides a deep study of Indian answers to the problem of peoplehood in political theory. The claim that Indians were unfit for self-rule was a shibboleth of British colonial rule. Behind this assertion lay a deeper conviction, shared by many British and Indian intellectuals alike, that peoplehood was simply absent in India. They were underdeveloped. This conviction both enabled a democratic legitimation of British rule and helped reconcile the logic of empire and democracy. In response, Sultan shows how Indian anticolonial thinkers launched a searching critique of the modern ideal of popular sovereignty. From Surendranath Banerjea and Radhakamal Mukerjee to Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian political thinkers explored the fraught theoretical space between sovereignty and government. They grappled in different ways with the developmental assumptions built into the modern category of peoplehood. And above all, they scrutinized the assumption, common to European theories of popular sovereignty, that a unified peoplehood was a prerequisite for self-government. Nazmul Sultan demonstrates how the anticolonial reckoning with popular sovereignty fostered novel insights into the globalization of democracy and shaped India’s twentieth-century political transformations.

Waiting for the People will be of interest to political theorists concerned with modern democratic thought, popular sovereignty, global intellectual history, as well as specialists of Indian history and politics. To discuss Sultan's book, this panel brings together four discussants: Jason Frank (Cornell University), Karuna Mantena (Columbia University), Kevin Duong (University of Virginia), and Shuk Ying Chan (University College London). Lucia Rubinelli (Yale) will chair. Each of them will be able to bring out Sultan's contributions to fields from democratic theory to the history of political thought.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Chairs

• Karuna Mantena Columbia University

• Lucia Rubinelli Yale University

Presenters

• Kevin Duong University of Virginia

• Nazmul S. Sultan University of British Columbia

• Jason Frank Cornell University

• Shuk Ying Chan University College London