Rosinka Chaudhuri

A New Category: The People of India

Thursday, 4/25, 3:00pm | Rosenwald 105

This paper will try to show that it was in the combined arenas of literature, culture, politics, petitions and associations in Calcutta in the late 1830s and early 1840s that a notion of ‘the people of India’ was first generated in public discourse within British India. Specifically, I will be paying attention to the history of the concept, and therefore to language – i.e. to the words themselves and the conceptual shift the use of those words generates – rather than analysing the actual emergence of populism in Indian history. The people themselves are not the concern here, nor is this an attempt to trace the original moments when a people stirred into political and historical being. In a sense, then, what I intend to describe is the inauguration of a category – the conceptual genesis of ‘the people of India’ – which, in this time, can be found articulated in the consciousness of a new class of Indian men in the first half of the nineteenth century.