Democracy from Below

Toward the End of Empire in South Asia, the anti-colonial movement spearheaded by the Indian National Congress had all but subsumed alternative nationalisms within its fold. The INC came to represent a centralized orientation of popular sovereignty. At the same time, myriad forms of nationalisms, orchestrated by different social and cultural forces at the regional and provincial levels, continued to shape the relationship between the regional and the national. Rama Sundari Mantena in her insightful new book seeks to explore the emerging political imaginaries of the provinces to argue that they offered parallel, if not antithetical accounts of ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-rule’, to the overarching nationalist discourse of freedom from British rule. For Mantena, anti-colonialism emerged from provincial archives. By focusing on the northern Telugu-speaking districts of the Madras Presidency along with the Princely State of Hyderabad in the early 20th century, Mantena argues that provincial autonomy in British India and autonomy for Indian native States are two strands which have received scant scholarly attention amidst the overwhelming academic focus on the binary of the colonizer and the colonized. Mantena’s primary aim is to underscore the significance of provincial politics, and more importantly, the rise of political consciousness regarding democracy and democratic institutions among everyday people. By readjusting the focus from the nation and the empire to the region and the nation,