The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty.

This talk will discuss salient features of authoritarian rule in Pakistan. First, the permanent state of emergency that shapes political life in the country fuels arbitrary and whimsical forms of governance. The perpetual violation of the constitution by the ruling classes tells us that rather than viewing the Pakistani state as theocratic, it might be better to suggest that the country's crisis results from the fact that it lacks any political theology or sacred document.

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Within British imperial thought, the transfer of sovereign power to India and subsequently other former colonies was not perceived as the final end of British imperialism, but simply its latest, evolved iteration in the form of the Commonwealth of Nations, which absorbed the sources of and arguments for British imperial power, both real and imagined, in the postwar decades. This talk explores the relationships between British imperial thought and British nationality after 1947.

‘I have some Garos as my tenants. Though otherwise very obedient and docile, they refused to tell me their dreams.’ Tarun Chandra Sinha, ‘Dreams of the Garos’

‘When you have cut down all the trees and mined all the mountains, when you have analysed all your dreams, there will be nothing left for you to break. The Earth then will be a rubbish dump, a vast trans body dismembered and devoured. The bodies of the colonists and your bodies, esteemed psychoanalysts, will be buried with the trans organs you have taken from us.’ Paul Preciado, ‘Can the Monster Speak’

Rohit De is an Associate Professor of History at Yale University and an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. A lawyer and a historian of South Asia and the common law world, he is the author of A People’s Constitution: Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018). He is currently working on two book projects.

This lecture returns to themes in the history of British imperial finance via approaches from the new interdisciplinary history of capitalism. Informed by attention to historical processes of economization as well as to theorizing contemporary modes of financial profit and their social imaginaries, recent approaches have begun to examine infrastructures—legal, governmental, digital, material—of securitization and speculation, arguably the dominant mode of financial capitalism today.

The churning that was happening in Indian historiography in the 1980s-90s came from multiple directions, including a new and reinvigorated feminist historiography. The latter’s ambition was never just to draw attention to women and gender, but what this attention did to the field as a whole: raising new questions and reframing existing ones. Looking back at several decades of feminist historiographical interventions, I believe their results have been mixed. My talk will attempt to take stock of this trajectory with special attention to histories of politics and the political.

The rise of Hindu nationalism – or Hindutva – is often regarded as the apotheosis of religious ethno-nationalism in India. Adherents of Hindutva insist that theirs is a secular ideology but this seemingly paradoxical claim is poorly understood beyond a crude majoritarian calculus. In focussing on the architect of Hindutva, V. D. Savarkar, this paper reconstructs his political thought to show that secular ideas of glory and humiliation were foundational to his understanding of how and why Hindu-ness ought to be actualised as a sovereign political category.

Accomplished populists are researched from distant quarters, long after they turned populists. Yet, populism—the attempt to represent the people through being the people—is not an overnight decision; it results from a gradual self-fashioning welded to the political trajectory of their bearer. This contribution proposes to explore populism diachronically as a political career. It builds on a 7-year ethnography of Indian student activism gravitating around the figure of Govind, a secular left student leader turned politician in North India during the 2019 parliamentary elections.