'With infinite care and unfaltering speculative ambition, Rule of the Commoner rises from the sea like Proteus: cultural critique but also political theory, political sociology but also electoral analysis, the book inaugurates a new and powerful idiom, a new sapience in political philosophy. Plotted against the double horizon of immanence and transcendence, this is an allegory of how the infusion of the social into the political relentlessly individualizes and singularizes the mass, but always from within a warm ethical fold through which glints the sunny humanity of the DMK in its world-historical moment of mass mobilization.' Milind Wakankar, author of Subalternity and Religion: The Prehistory of Dalit Empowerment in South Asia
List of Tables; List of Maps; Acknowledgments; Note on Transliteration; Illustrations; Dedication; Introduction: Two Scenes of Departure; Part I. Ideation: 1. Construction of 'Dravidian –Tamil' People; 2. The Uses of Language; 3. Human Immanence; 4. Left Populism; Part II. Imagination: 5. The Play is the Thing; 6. Critical Hermeneutics; 7. Counter Narratives; 8. Power of Fiction; Part III. Mobilization: 9. The Grassroots; 10. The Waves; 11. The Eruption; 12. The Climb; Conclusion: Formations of the Political; Bibliography; Index.