It was in the combined arenas of literature, culture, print, politics, petitions and associations in Calcutta in the late 1830s and early 1840s that a notion of “the people of India” as a cultural and political category was first generated in public discourse by Indians themselves in British India. The phrase “the people of India”, of course, always had a straightforwardly descriptive meaning in the English language and was used as a synonym for “native” or “inhabitant” when used by British writers on India such as Edmund Burke or Alexander Dow from the 18th century onward – countless instances of such use may be found in British writings.
In Europe, a distinct modern sense of “the people” enters the language after the American and French revolutions, modifying or displacing earlier meanings, so that the category no longer remains a descriptive synonym for inhabitants or the population but becomes an agentive category and the locus of sovereignty. Young Bengal was certainly familiar with accounts of both revolutions, and knew their Rousseau and Burke well, while counting Tom Paine as their favourite author, with books and news travelling thickly and surprisingly speedily between metropole and colony.
In Calcutta, the revolution in newsprint publications, inaugurated in 1780 with Hicky’s Gazette and then the India Gazette, meant that by 1835–45 a myriad different newspapers, journals, magazines and annuals in a variety of languages in the city showcased events from across the world for the Indian reader. This meant, for instance, that apart from news of the Americas, both North and South, accounts of the Greek war of independence that Byron fought and died for in 1824, the July Revolution of 1830 in France, and the Italian movements under Garibaldi and Mazzini were familiar to readers of Calcutta newspapers. Meanwhile, the Reform Bill of 1832, and the anti-Corn Law and Chartist agitations in England in the 1840s (with their accompanying rhetoric of public pressure for greater representation) too would have reached the second city of the Empire in successive waves through these years. A report titled “The French Revolution” [of 1830] in the Asiatic Journal of 1831 shows us the immediacy with which the subcontinent reacted to events in faraway Europe:
The revolution in France, when known at Calcutta, in December last, produced an extraordinary sensation amongst all classes. The various journals are filled with reflexions (sic) and exultations upon the event. Even those published in the native languages partake of the general excitement, though their sentiments upon the subject are peculiar. One of them, the Jami Jehan Numa, in the Persian language, a paper having a considerable circulation in the interior, calls the revolution in France “a dismay-exciting and alarming occurrence. The French people,” says the editor, “have declined from and opposed their king, who, with his ministers, have fled for their lives. The people refused to afford the supplies demanded by the ministers, and insisted on printing what they chose!” After a description of some of the occurrences at Paris and in the provinces, where, he says, “the breeze of opposition blew, and the scent of mischief was sniffed by each individual,” the writer proceeds to condemn the conduct, – “the folly and madness,” – of the French king, in disregarding “the rights and authority of the people,” and not “tempering his rule with clemency;” and concludes with an encomium upon the principles and conduct of the British monarch.
On the 10th December, a grand “national banquet”, in celebration of the event, was given by the French gentlemen and commanders of French vessels, in Calcutta, to which their friends of all nations were invited. It took place in the Town-hall, and was attended by about 200 persons.
The writer in the Jam-i-Jahan-Numa in 1830 berates the French king for disregarding “the rights and authority of the people”, and for not “tempering his rule with clemency”, while paradoxically, however, arriving at a conclusion that delivers “an encomium upon the principles and conduct of the British monarch”, no doubt because it was known to receive government support. The sense in which Young Bengal is interpreting ‘the rights and authority of the people’ in these years, however, is completely different. They are not asking for clemency from an absolute monarch, although they are well aware that they live under a despotism; rather, they are responding by using the category of “the people” in the same altered conceptual sense in which it was being used in Britain or Europe – as claimants to better governance.
This new modern sense of the rights of the people and the duties of good governance is abundantly available, for instance, five years later, in Kylas Chunder Dutt’s article titled “India Under Foreigners” published in the same year as his work of speculative fiction, 1835, in the Hindu Pioneer, in which he wrote:
The government of India is purely aristocratical; the people have no voice in the council of legislature; they have no hand in framing the laws which regulate their civil conduct.
We need not expatiate on the monopoly of the State Service, the law’s delay, the insolence of office, the heavy expenses of Government, the retirement from India of all those who acquire wealth, and the enormous taxation to which the country is subjected – evils too wellknown in India. The Muhammedans patronised merit wherever it was to be found; the English, like the primitive Hindus, have one caste of men to govern the general body.
Kylas Dutt’s comment here, that “the people have no voice in the council of legislature; they have no hand in framing the laws which regulate their civil conduct”, and his understanding of this as unconscionable, unjustifiable and unacceptable is remarkable in the context of its time. Reflective of radical philosophy in its emphasis on the desirability of ‘representative’ government, and in its understanding that present difficulties arise out of the fact that “the people have no voice” or share in government, the urgency and persuasiveness of the writing here in this Young Bengal publication is responsible – in however limited a way – for floating an idea of people’s rights.
Emphasizing the undemocratic and unjust state of affairs suffered by Indians, Dutt had ended by mentioning “the people of the soil”, thus constructing a category that expressed, in some sense, a concern for an ethically more just world for “the people”, even if the strength of this rhetoric expressed itself in terms that were, for the moment, limited:
In conclusion we have only to remark that notwithstanding the manifold advantages that we have derived from the formation of roads, canals, bridges; the introduction of foreign commodities, the extent of commerce, and the dissemination of knowledge, the still existing evils are by far too numerous.
The violent means by which Foreign Supremacy has been established and the entire alienation of the people of the soil from any share in Government, nay, even from all offices of trust and power, are circumstances which humanity must ever regret, and which the heart of every lover of his species will tell him no commercial, no political benefits can ever authorise or justify. (original emphases)
It was reported that the Hindu College “youths who got up the Hindu Pioneer have made some sort of pledge to the managers [of the Hindu College] not to make it a vehicle of political or religious controversy or of attacks upon the college” – a promise, as we can see, that was so flagrantly reneged upon here that the swift demise of the paper should have come as no surprise to contemporary observers.
Excerpted with permission from India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Penguin Random House India.
