In Elementary Aspects of the Political Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal.

Prathama Banerjee is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India, and author of Politics of Time: "Primitives" and History-Writing in a Colonial Society.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
Part I. The Self
1. Renunciation and Antisocial Being  23
2. Philosophy, Theater, Realpolitik  44
Part II. Action
3. Karma, Freedom, and Everyday Life  67
4. Labor, Hunger, and Struggle  87
Part III. Idea
5. Equality and Spirituality  119
6. Equality and Economic Reason  142
Part IV. People
7. People as Party  165
8. People as Fiction  189
Epilogue  214
Notes  221
Bibliography  247
Index  265