Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India

In her first book, "Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India," Purnima Bose musters strong archival skills, rhetorical elegance and theoretical sophistication to reveal (powerfully) the ways that colonial and anti-colonial forms of political discourse and historiography created domesticated models of "rogue individualism" and "heroic individualism" to explain away, disavow and sublimate into accomplishment the epistemic, legalized, and routine domination of the British Empire in India and Ireland. Modes of "feminist nationalist" and "heroic nationalist" forms are also exposed in relentless critical detail to show the makings of elite-subaltern forms of agency, narration, and resistance. Everywhere, the mode of analysis here is informed, engaged, fully situated and complex in its vision of agency, discourse, hegemony, and the state; no easy or comforting model of "postcolonial hybridity" is offered by her here to assuage the analysis of culture and discourse, as subjected individualism, under the enlightenment regimes and discourses of British empire.

Bose's beautiful prose style is exceeded only by the sharpness and originality of her insights. A must have for anyone interested in post-colonial theory, historical analysis of the region, or just curious thinkers interested in a great read.