New Books In South Asian Studies

Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India (Cambridge UP, 2023) delves into the period between the decline of empire and the rise of the Indian nation-state in the context of seismic global transformations of the early twentieth century-namely the two World Wars and the crisis of the imperial order. Rama Sundari Mantena argues this period is defined by not only the dominance of the nation state and debates over a new global order, but also mass participation in defining and negotiating the form and substance of democratic political futures. Mantena recovers this debate by reconstructing the emerging vocabularies of liberalism, political rights, and self-government in colonial South India, especially in the princely domain of Hyderabad and among Andhra speakers in British India’s Madras province. Provincial Democracy shifts the focus from the dominant narrative of linguistic nationalism as defining regionalism to debates over questions of representation, r