How students of Calcutta’s Hindu College created an idea of ‘the people of India’ under British rule

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…

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