Partha Chatterjee's ‘Politics of the Governed’ and in particular, his concept of political society, is deservedly famous because it identifies the central conundrum in a post-Foucauldian theoretical world, where hope is not lost but politics loses its way in a mass of identities and governmental ascriptions, where universalist citizenship is an ideal, but the citizen herself or himself is a cipher in some computerized code; when welfare becomes the ideal of an equal citizenship in a Marshallian framework, but this notion of welfare itself creates a ‘proliferation of governmentality’ (Chatterjee 2004, 36). What do we do when our deepest aspirations (for example, for universal equality) turn into categorical chains that imprison us (as has happened to affirmative action in India); or, conversely, as the communitarians bemoaned of old, what do we do when the idea of universal citizenship that we struggle for obliterates our most personal identities? Unlike Foucault, for whom resistance or politics was only possible at the interstices, for Chatterjee, ‘popular politics in most of the world’ remains an abiding area of interest, an arena that he fleshes out with compassion and insight.