The project was launched in October 2023. Here are the sub-projects: 

Gods and Great Men:  Civic Statuary and Body Politic 

Lead: Moumita Sen

Work Package: WP 2 - Gods and Great Men: Civic Statuary and Body Politic

Summary:
India presents a rich ground for the analysis of political deification since the presentation of leaders as deities is a commonplace phenomenon. The symbolic politics of monumental statuary has been a long-standing controversial issue in Indian politics. In the middle of a financial crisis and the poor performance of India in the global hunger index, the highest bronze statue in the world came up in India in Modi’s regime as a marker of the ‘good days’ he had promised the nation. While some scholarship addresses this phenomenon of monumentality, what remains unexplored is how smaller communities create countercultures, or images-as-resistance, by building their own statues in cheap materials in their neighbourhoods and homes. This case will look at the culture of cheaply produced public statues by artisans who are primarily trained in making images of Hindu deities. What happens to the crafting of the icon and their body politic in the hands of artisans who are mainly trained in the aesthetics of god-making? This study will theorise ‘mimicry’ as it applies to contested postcolonial statuary, foregrounding the Indian case material. 

The Making of a National Deity:  Mujib in Everyday lives of Bangladeshis: Understanding embodied martyrdom, covert political deification, and Islam in Bangladesh

Lead:  Saimum Parvez

Work Package: WP 3 - A National Deity on the Ummah: Islamic Theology and Martyrdom

Summary:
This project aims to explore the mechanism of covert political deification of Mujibur Rahman including embodied martyrdom, and investigate its impact and relationship with the everyday lives of Bangladeshis. Making a charismatic leader a deity, or claiming that someone has god-like attributes is blasphemous in the revivalist Islamic context. However, Islam came to Bangladesh by the spiritual Sufis, not the modern-day revivalists and purist Islamists. With the social acceptance of god-like, sacred, and charismatic persons, political deification in Bangladesh is not “impossible,” although the process of deification would not be as overt as we observe in India. The omnipresence of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the national liberation leader, in every corner of the country, and almost holy-like attributes attached to him, the reverence for his death, his body, and rituals, icons, and discourses attached to his body and construction of collective memory, makes him a “covert deity. 

Filling The Chair:  Authority, Cosmology and Governance in Nusa Tenggara Timor 

Lead: Florence Durey 

Work Package:  WP 6 - The Sacred Bloodline: Monarchy and Dynasticism 

Summary:  
Sacred kingship is a form of leadership across Asia, and one that was repeated across many Indonesian historical kingdoms. On Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, the concept of the Just King or Ratu Adil described in Javanese folklore, is often drawn upon as model for social and political leadership, and popular former President Joko Widodo was sometimes described as having attributes of the Ratu Adil. While Java is the most populous island, Indonesia is an archipelagic nation of 17,000 islands with over 1,300 officially recognized ethnic groups as well as six recognized state religions that mix with myriad local belief systems and cultural traditions. The nation’s motto is, quite literally, “Unity in Diversity”.  

This project will move outside of the national center to research how Indonesians from minority religious and ethnic communities draw upon cosmology to think about leadership. Mixed-method fieldwork will be conducted in the province of Nusa Tenggara Timor (NTT), which is predominantly Christian. Research will focus on a case study of Lamalera, NTT, a majority Catholic community on the island of Lembata. Lamalera has been selected because the area has a rich cultural tradition of tripartite leadership focusing on the environment and the community, making it an ideal place to think through how small-scale cultural practices intersect with mainstream metaphors, narratives, and debates about leadership. Data from the Lamalera case study will then be contextualized with media analysis from regional sources to build-up a broader understanding about how minorities within Indonesia think about and participate in such national discussions. 

From Mandate of Heaven to Historical Destiny:  The Imperial Imprint on Modern Chinese Political Ideology and State Integration 

Lead: Arden Chao

Work Package: WP 5 - Red Deities: Communist nationalism and Deified Heroes 

Summary: 

My research within the POLDEI project investigates "From Mandate of Heaven to Historical Destiny: The Imperial Imprint on Modern Chinese Political Ideology and State Integration." This study traces how traditional Chinese political concepts—tianming (Mandate of Heaven), zhengtong (political legitimacy), and daotong (moral orthodoxy)—evolved and transformed to shape 20th-21st century Chinese politics.

Building on my expertise in early Republican political history, I examine how these imperial concepts were reimagined during critical moments of state transformation, particularly when parliamentary democracy failed and alternative forms of political authority emerged. My work reveals how the conceptual vocabulary of political legitimacy—from traditional cosmological notions to modern revolutionary terminology—enabled new forms of political sacralization. By analyzing the transformation of political discourse, constitutional debates, and the emergence of concepts like "historical destiny," I demonstrate how traditional legitimation mechanisms adapted to modern contexts, ultimately enabling the quasi-deification of political leaders.

This research contributes to POLDEI's transdisciplinary theory of political deification by revealing the deep historical roots and cultural mechanisms through which political authority acquires sacred dimensions in China, showing how imperial political theology continues to structure contemporary Chinese statecraft and popular political imagination.

Chinggisid-Buddhist Deification in Mongolia: State and Reincarnation

Lead: Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva

Work Package: WP 4 - In the name of the Buddah: Reincarnation and Custodianship

Summary:

My (sub)project explores the symbiotic relationship between the State and the Buddhist establishment in Mongolia, through examination of how the concepts indigenous to its state tradition are being resurrected and narrated in the emic discourse, and how the ideas of religious custodianship, sacred bloodline, and charismatic legitimacy are being imbued into the modern nation-building project of a secular state. The project will use methods of discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, and the findings will advance scholarly discourse within security studies and memory studies, in conjunction with the overarching political deification theory building for the POLDEI project. As this research is ultimately about the stories that are retold, it fills geographic, disciplinary, and thematic gaps within the wider International Relations discipline, which will illuminate on an overlooked inter-Asian (geo)political dynamic.