Charting Historiographies

The book under review is the published product of a series of Conference panels and workshops that were organized between 2011 and 2013 in Honolulu, Nottingham, and Bergen. The introduction ‘Reconceptualizing Subaltern Politics in Contemporary India’ begins with a section called ‘What is Subaltern Politics?’ Nilsen and Roy’s definition of ‘subaltern politics’ as ‘the political activity of social groups who are adversely incorporated into determinate power relations’ broadens the term ‘subaltern’. The book successfully conceptualizes the varied forms of resistances and protests like everyday forms of resistances, like rights based campaigns within the civil society and participation in electoral democracy to armed struggles for a revolutionary transformation in unison opposed to astute power relations that structure and enforce the marginalization of the subalterns as well as maps the unfolding of these protests in India.