Where Did the Phrase 'the People of India' Come From?

Excerpted with permission from India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire by Rosinka Chaudhuri, published by Penguin India.

The classification of the inhabitants of the country as the ‘people of India’ was not, in 1843, predicated on the claim that the people constitute the only legitimate ground of sovereignty. Arguably, that notion was absent in India throughout the nineteenth century, manifesting as an idea with galvanizing qualities only following the arrival of Gandhi from South Africa in 1915. I make no claim that this period witnessed the actual emergence of the people themselves as the bearers of sovereignty in Indian history, any more than I attempt to outline the originary moments when a people stirred into political and historical being. It should be self-evident, although it is rarely acknowledged, that politics is not the only arena within which the notion of ‘the people’ originated or had significance—clearly, both the concept and political thought itself relied largely on cultural constructs to generate such a category. As E.P. Thompson remarked, in passing, of radicalism at the start of the nineteenth century in The Making of the English Working Class: ‘If we are to understand the extremism of Burdett and Cochrane in 1810, we need read only Byron.’12 Of the radicalism of Young Bengal in Calcutta at the time we are looking at, much the same could be said.

The ‘people’ had obviously existed as a concept in the regional Indian languages well before this era, as well as in classical Sanskrit or Persian texts, and was in use concurrently with the English word. Leaving aside its ancient usage, every such word in the regional languages in the nineteenth century had a strict specificity and denoted a collective group that was grounded in community/class/caste/region or religion. In a general sense, the welfare of the Indian people may have been given primacy in the ancient code of Rām rājyā and may have been understood to be the dharma of every benevolent emperor, altruistic raja and generous nawab in the country preceding this moment, but it was only now, for the first time since the beginning of East India Company rule in Bengal, that the category of ‘the people’ was being used by Indians as an agent of change. The people (or the masses) themselves may not have been given or taken agency yet, but as a theoretical category, an idea of ‘the people’ was the stimulus being used—without precedent in Indian history—as a denominator for activism and action on their behalf.

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What I shall trace here is the new significance this word began to acquire in Calcutta’s public arena in the 1830s and 1840s, where the newspapers, whether in Bengali or in English, repeatedly invoke a body of subjects under British rule in the context of their rights and the government’s duties towards them. I will be paying attention to language in particular, i.e., to the words themselves and the conceptual shift made possible by the use of those words. Preceding the twentieth-century notion of popular sovereignty, or of our understanding of ‘the people of India’ as the locus, politically, of sovereignty, there was an earlier moment when the category of ‘the people’ can be shown to be coming into existence in the minds of middle-class Indians. The first geography texts, for instance, written by Indians for Indians in their own language at this time in 1841 and 1848 (discussed below), described the country and its people stretched across the subcontinent called Hindustan. The people of Hindustan are enumerated, listed and categorized in tables in relation to the regions they inhabited, generating a sense of who the people of India were in relation to other peoples of the world. Importantly for this argument, the vast swathes of people in the rural areas now also began to be evoked in newspapers and other print media in terms of their rights and expectations. We should note here also that ‘the people’ as a concept in India at this time was generally predicated on the figure of the peasant as a rights-bearing subject rather than the proletariat as a new body politic. The fundamental figure in colonial modern politics in India was the peasant, and it is the peasant that Young Bengal was thinking of when speaking repeatedly of ‘the people of India’ and how to better their condition.

In investigating the process of a people being imagined into existence by a particular group of people at a particular time, I intend to try not to make the mistake of looking back at this period from the space we inhabit today, but rather, examine the construction of an idiom following the history that was inhabited until then. For the reading and writing public of 1843, the idea that ‘the people’ had rights and could demand ‘amelioration’ (a much-used word at the time) from the government for their current suffering; that ‘the people’ were subjects ‘of the soil’ whose condition needed to be bettered; that a small part of this greater sum of ‘the people’ now needed to demand those rights not as supplicants before a monarch but as activists attempting to move public opinion; that ‘the people’ on whose behalf such action should be taken stretched as a body across the subcontinent; that these ‘people’ shared a common circumstance and were equal to each other as men—such ideas were surely unthought of until then in the subcontinent.

Rosinka Chaudhuri is director and professor of cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.