WAITING FOR THE PEOPLE - The Idea of Democracy in Indian Hardcover

"WAITING FOR THE PEOPLE: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought" by Nazmul Sultan offers a groundbreaking re-evaluation of how democracy was conceived and debated within Indian anticolonial thought. Challenging the colonial assertion that Indians were unfit for self-rule due to a lack of "peoplehood," the book meticulously traces how Indian thinkers—from Surendranath Banerjea and Radhakamal Mukerjee to Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru—critically engaged with and reinvented the modern ideal of peoplehood. This original reconstruction demonstrates how their efforts to forge a unified peoplehood and grapple with the fraught relationship between sovereignty and government led to novel insights into the global trajectory of democracy, ultimately shaping India's twentieth-century political transformation and making significant, yet largely unheralded, contributions to democratic theory at large.