Political Theory and South Asian Counter-Narratives (Routledge Studies in South Asian Politics)

This book evaluates the promise of human progress and secularism in grand political narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comparing counter-narratives of South Asia within the context of a fast-changing twenty-first century.

The book embraces a broad range of sources and theoretical approaches that include political philosophy, film, and ideological discourse analysis. In the twenty-first century, global inequality and significant growth of religious and majoritarian nationalisms have been appended with a protracted economic slowdown and recession in many countries. Examining what went wrong in terms of secularism and distributive justice in India, this book critiques the Euro-American visions of democracy, global capitalism, and their so-called universality. As an alternative, it proposes a progressive politics of radical democracy for the Indian people.

Reconsidering alternatives to capitalism, western secularism and the radical possibilities of Islamism, Political Theory and South Asian Counter-Narratives will appeal to students and scholars of political theory, international relations, global history, and South Asian politics.

Maidul Islam is a political scientist at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His primary research interests are in political theory and contemporary South Asian politics. He is the author of Limits of Islamism (2015) and Indian Muslim(s) after Liberalization (2019).