New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualising Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India

In addressing the perennial political conundrum of how to move between understanding and overcoming subordination, this important book aims to restore a ‘dialectical sensibility to our understanding of subaltern politics’ (Nilsen, p. 46). This is rooted, on the one hand, in the sub- altern’s historical embeddedness ‘within formations of state and capital’ (Subramaniam 2011 cited on p.20), and on the other in the subalterns’ capacity to transform their conditions. More specifically the book deepens understandings of hegemony in contemporary India by showing how subaltern political agency is both enabled and constrained through the state (Nilsen and Roy, p.21), and by illustrating the dynamic interplay of coercion and consent that marks class relations over time and place.