Utkal Sammillani

The conditions of its inception as well as its largely elite membership, which included many of the historically loyal Odia native princes, made the Utkal Sammillani both fiercely loyal to British rule as well as the most significant site for the articulation of pan-Odia nationalism. These dual fulcra of the Sammillani created profound tensions in its self-image as a public organization. On the one hand, leaders of the organization safeguarded their loyalist stand by using language such as British raja and Odia praja and by limiting rajaniti or politics to British raja’s ethics of governance. On the other hand, the very act of arguing for the Odia community’s rights to state resources and representation as a discrete community with specific interests opened up the possibility of the very anticolonial nationalist politics that they were seeking to avoid.

The Sammillani’s agenda drew from earlier nineteenth-century cultural politics in urban Odisha. Beginning with Odia responses to the British management of the Odisha famine of 1866 as well as critiques of colonial salt and pilgrim tax policies, the demands made by the Odia intelligentsia posed linguistic rights as a means for the economic and social development of the individual and the community,Footnote ⁶ thus producing a community whose interests were at stake in the interests of language. Often in these discussions, language and development were linked as leaders argued that as the community’s language developed the community would be better able to participate in the emerging Indian modernity. Not necessarily framed as a demand for regional autonomy, nineteenth-century public debates centered on two important objectives – the need for a more dedicated state machinery to cater to Odia interests by amalgamating all Odia-speaking areas under a single administration and the need to ensure that the Odia language, literature, and textual production kept pace with the other advanced languages of India.

This linking of language and development produced a liberal rhetoric that hinged on an educational imperative. As a result of the public discussion about the need for Odia textbooks on which depended the possibility of retaining the use of Odia language in schools, a connection between the development of the Odia language and that of the individual Odia was forged. During the 1860s and 1870s newspaper articles and speeches often featured claims that linked the underdevelopment and economic backwardness of the community with the “impoverished condition” of the language.Footnote ⁷ It was often argued that better educational resources in Odia would enable more Odias to become educated and to participate in governance and administration. This, in turn, would allow for better economic and social circumstances in Odia-speaking areas as they would be administered by Odias themselves. This liberal aspiration for social and economic progress that would result in a more responsible class of British subjects pivoted on the development of Odia language.Footnote ⁸ The linking of language and individual development in nineteenth-century Odia cultural politics tied the first knot in the linking of language and citizenship in India.

Even as language and progress came to be linked in liberal Odia aspirations, the Odia praja in nineteenth-century rhetoric was often referred to as a political community still early in its development. For instance, in an 1868 article explaining the need for greater participation in public associations, the author argued that:

Like many of its contemporaries, this narrative of the praja’s development situates British rule in an oft-cited history of changing forms of rule in India – Hindu, Muslim, British.Footnote ¹⁰ While the characterization of Hindu kings as kind fathers and Muslim kings as oppressive teachers is familiar, the discussion about British rule is striking. The only feature that seems to characterize British rule is one of happenstance. The British have come to rule India when the Indian praja happens to have come of age. This carefully loyalist narrative that is just shy of arguing that the Indian praja can no longer depend on a paternal state implies a progressive alienation between raja and praja in India – from father to teacher to outsider. While the narrative of the praja’s development from children to engaged subjects sounds distinctly liberal, the article’s silence on whether there is something about British rule that necessitates this engagement underlines its loyalism. This concurrence of loyalism and liberal aspirations was one of the hallmarks of moderate politics of the nineteenth century. In his reading of moderate politics in the Indian National Congress, Sanjay Seth has argued that loyalism was not simply a tactical choice that limited criticism of colonial rule. Rather, it “provided the very ground from which criticism became possible.”Footnote ¹¹ That is, moderate criticism was possible because the moderates could argue that the British rule was failing to live up to its own promise. Clearly, such a claim was founded on a loyalist commitment to British rule. We need to see Odia demands for unification within the context of loyalist liberalism.

The moderate demands for the union of Odia-speaking areas became increasingly insistent towards the end of the nineteenth century as proposals to change the official language of the Odia-speaking Sambalpur district of the Central Provinces from Odia to Hindi were posed in government circles in 1895.Footnote ¹² In the face of vocal opposition to the change amongst the Odia intelligentsia in the Odisha division of the Bengal Presidency, Sambalpur district in Central Provinces as well as the Odia-speaking Ganjam district of the Madras Presidency, the government decided to retain Odia as the official language of Sambalpur. The Sambalpur language agitation set in motion a process that would eventually lead to the partition of Bengal. As a result of the initial Sambalpur language agitation, the question of territorial redistribution of the massive Bengal Presidency was raised in colonial circles. In 1903, the Risley Circular, detailing the plans for the breakup of the Bengal Presidency, was published. While the plans for partitioning Bengal included the controversial issue of East and West Bengal, they also suggested that all Odia-speaking areas be brought together under a single province.

The push towards territorial reorganization by the government also received some impetus from Odia local organizations such as the Utkal Sabha and the Ganjam Hiteisini Sabha. The Utkal Sabha, set up in 1882 under the auspices of Madhusudan Das, allied with colleagues in Calcutta to organize a Bengal Provincial Conference, which was to discuss issues of provincial importance as opposed to issues of national importance that were discussed in the Indian National Congress. However, the Bengal Provincial Conference was unable to include Odia representatives from other British provinces. Hence, it could not serve as a pan-Odia organization. In early 1903, an organization called the Ganjam Jatiya Samiti met for the first time in the Odia-speaking Ganjam district of the Madras Presidency and called for the need of a pan-Odia organization. As a result of this meeting, it was decided to establish a public organization representing Odias from various British provinces. While the preparations for the Utkal Sammillani were underway, the Indian National Congress met in Madras to discuss the proposed partition of Bengal. While the partition of Bengal was severely critiqued, the delegates of the Congress also resolved that the proposed transfer of the Odia-speaking Ganjam district from the Madras to the Bengal Presidency was unnecessary as the Odias were given special consideration as backward classes.Footnote ¹³ With scant support from the Indian National Congress, the establishment of a loyalist pan-Odia organization that would lobby for the amalgamation of Odia-speaking tracts seemed to be the only viable choice left for the Odia leaders such as M. S. Das.

In December 1903, the first session of the Utkal Sammillani met in Cuttack. Almost half of the founding members of the Utkal Sammillani were princes of the Odisha princely states. For instance, the thirty-two out of sixty-two members of the 1903 Standing Committee in charge of social reforms among the Odia-speaking people were native princes. A large number of the remaining thirty members were university-educated government employees. The demographic of the other standing committees was very similar.Footnote ¹⁴ Closely reflecting the demographic of the erstwhile leadership in the Odia public sphere, this membership was fundamentally loyal to the colonial state. In the case of educated-government employees, this loyalty was enforced. Days before the first meeting of the Sammillani, government employees were barred from participating in the proceedings and some of the members on the organizing committee had to resign. The order was rescinded when the Sammillani assured the Commissioner of the Orissa division that there would be no political agitation on the Sammillani platform. Only matters of social, educational, and industrial development were to be discussed.Footnote ¹⁵

Under these circumstances, at its very inception, the organization declared that “all discussions on Political and Religious subjects and criticisms of the actions of Government and Government Officials are strictly prohibited.”Footnote ¹⁶ In its published statement on the objectives of the Sammillani, the organization declared that the Odia people were not ready for political revolution, being less developed than other communities in India. The statement argued that:

In this vein, religious discussion was to be avoided as this would cause discord among the diverse groups of people who identify as Odia. The function of the Sammillani was to be able to achieve its social and economic ends without engaging in political or religious discussion. While subsequent politics of the Sammillani reveals that religious discussion did slip into the Sammillani’s activities, politics in its very disavowal continued to haunt the organization until the fateful split in its ranks in 1920 when politics was included in the organization’s praxis.

While religion and politics were barred from the Sammillani, it repeatedly addressed questions about popular education, female education, industry in Odisha, and social reform. Madhusudan Das, the founder of the organization established two firms that would help develop native crafts – a silverworks and Utkal Tanneries. Utkal Tanneries was a commercial as well as a social experiment. The company offered employment to lower-caste workers who were traditionally involved in leatherwork due to taboos against their involvement in “cleaner” professions. Das’ aspiration was to engage the lower-caste groups in the commercial mainstream and, consequently, assimilate them into the liberal economy of colonial India.

The Sammillani’s abstinence from politics (which, in this context, meant any critique of the colonial government), based as it was on a rhetoric of the unpreparedness of a young underdeveloped praja, allowed the organization to pose itself as a symptom of a preparatory phase in the development of Odia political subjecthood, thus also making a claim that it was contributing to the colonial civilizing mission. Its narrative of loyalism required both an insistence on loyalty to the crown and a commitment to the purported social aspirations of the colonial state – the commitment to the liberal progress of the individual and the community and the possibility of greater Odia access to modes of production and circulation of colonial capital. Odisha literally needed to be brought into the time of colonial capital before it could be politically engaged. The organization’s attention to female education, industrial and commercial growth, alleviation of poverty, popular education, and social reform all tended towards creating a better Odia liberal subject who would remain just shy of citizenship as the organization situated itself in a time of preparation rather than action.

Raja, Praja, and Rajaniti

Despite explicit loyalism and a categorical denial of politics, the Sammillani inadvertently served as a site for the emergence of the Odia political subject. Throughout its career as the premier Odia public association, the Sammillani was plagued by criticism of its apolitical loyalist stance. Barely five years after its establishment, it was publicly attacked by younger radical leaders for banning the use of Vande Mataram on its platform.Footnote ¹⁸ These debates, in and around the organization, raised some crucial questions about the nature of political activity, Indian subjecthood, the role of the colonial state, that of the Indian National Congress, and the relationship between the region and the nation in Odisha. In its denial of politics, the Sammillani used terms that eventually escaped the narrow conservative definitions ascribed to them and came to be redeployed by opponents of the organization to signify citizenship and politics. In this section, I will explore the discussions about the nature of the political within the organization by tracking the use of two key terms in the Sammillani’s rhetoric – rajaniti and praja. In doing so, I explore the roots of their elision of conservative meanings.

In 1903, at the first annual meeting of the association, the President of the session, Ramchandra Bhanja Deo, Raja of Mayurbhanj, justified the organization’s decision to avoid politics by pointing out the particular politics or rajaniti that was being debarred from discussion in the Sammillani. He argued:

Bhanja Deo proceeded to argue that, as rajaniti was about governance, it was the prerogative of the colonial state. By comparing colonial rule with what he claimed was misrule by earlier rulers such as the Maratha and the Muslim monarchs, he contended that the Utkal Sammillani need not engage with questions of governance as the new British rajas lived up to their responsibilities as rulers. In fact, he argued that the primary aim of the Utkal Sammillani should be to help the Odia community recuperate from the ill effects of centuries of Muslim and Maratha misrule through social, economic, and cultural reform. At stake in this formulation of colonial rule as good rule was Bhanja Deo’s effort to ensure that the Utkal Sammillani did not participate in any opposition to the colonial state, even as it ventured to carve out for itself a public domain where it could represent the social, cultural, and economic interests of the Odia-speaking people. Ostensibly, by asking what is “said to be rajaniti”, Bhanja Deo claimed to be invoking a commonsensical notion of politics. In such a commonsensical notion, the raja would be king and the praja would be subject. And yet, smuggled in here, perhaps entirely against his explicit desires and arguments, is also another notion of raja and praja.

This slippage was due to the fact that Bhanja Deo’s “commonsensical” understanding of rajaniti was not the only understanding of politics and its constituent concepts, such as raja and praja in Odisha during the early twentieth century. Bhanja Deo’s definition of rajaniti as the ethics of rule that precluded subject participation was an overly simplified rendering of deeply nuanced traditions of sovereignty and subjecthood. To begin with, praja was a rather slippery term.Footnote ²⁰ With no etymological connection with raja or ruler, praja literally means progeny.Footnote ²¹ While commonly used to denote subject, in Odisha this subjecthood did not constitute a lack of agency in matters of state.Footnote ²² Much of the scholarship on precolonial kingship in Odisha concurs that kingly sovereignty in early modern Odisha was shared.Footnote ²³ By the time the Marathas gained control over Odisha from the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century, the area was ruled by a two-tier political system consisting of the ritually central Gajapati state of Khurda, which controlled the Jaganath Temple at Puri and the, feudatory hill states or Garjat kingdoms of the Eastern Ghats. With the Marathas gaining control, the political power of the Gajapati king waned and the Garjat kingdoms became increasingly independent. These precursors of the British princely states managed to maintain a fragile sovereignty over their fiefdoms through a complex ritual economy of rule that involved the Jaganath Temple through the Puri Gajapati rulers of Khurda, the princes and the local adivasi populations of the feudatory states.Footnote ²⁴

Akio Tanabe has argued that the impact of growing market forces of the early modern period coupled with the rise of vaishnava Bhakti in Khurda produced a system of entitlements that resulted in the deepening of the state’s reach into the local economy and society through a sharing of sovereignty between the king and the locality.Footnote ²⁵ This deepening of state control was unlike that of the modern state as it did not involve the intervention of a centralized bureaucracy and military power in the locality. Rather, what made this balance of power possible was the popular commitment to elements of Vaishnav Bhakti, particularly Karma Bhakti, which linked day-to-day service in the locality with service to the king as service to the divine. The ritualization of kingship in early modern Odisha was essential to the day-to-day secular functioning of the state at the center as well as the periphery. This ritualization of kingship became even more complex in the feudatory states that have traditionally struggled to maintain control by balancing sovereignty between Puri, themselves, and the adivasi communities under their rule.Footnote ²⁶ The feudatory princes maintained their control over adivasi communities either by claiming lineage from important tribal deitiesFootnote ²⁷ or by appropriating the worship of tribal deities and situating such local worship in an economy of piety that involved Jaganath in Puri, other Hindu deities, and tribal deities.Footnote ²⁸ At stake in this inclusion was a politics of conciliation that allowed Hindu rulers who were outsiders in the Gadajat areas to legitimize their rule. In some cases, adivasi legitimization had been incorporated into rituals of consecration. For instance, even in the mid-nineteenth century, royal succession in the princely state of Keonjhar had to be ratified, at least ritually, by leaders of the Bhuiyan community. The adivasi rebellion in 1868 in the Keonjhar princely state took place because a new successor had been announced without the approval of the Buiyan leaders. All this suggests that, in the day-to-day operation of state, sovereignty and the distinction between the religious and the political was often blurred. Sovereignty did not simply reside in the singular body of the king. Rather, the raja maintained his kingship through delicate networks of shared power and subjecthood.

However, Bhanja’s oversimplification of systems of sovereignty was itself a product of colonial intervention into native kingship and religious structures. Bhanja’s narrow notion of rajaniti as kingly ethics of rule was as much a product of Odia traditions of kingship as it was a consequence of the invention of Indian tradition due to the introduction of indirect rule by the postmutiny colonial state. As the policy of indirect rule of Indian princely states was introduced after the mutiny of 1857, the colonial state decided to minimize its intervention in to what it saw as “native political and social order.”Footnote ²⁹ The politics of indirect rule was based on a protectionist approach to “traditional” Indian political systems where Indian custom and tradition determined colonial interaction with princely states and other native political structures. While this was accompanied by essentialized notions of Indian rural life, it also produced efforts to define Indian customs of rule.

In Odisha, this resulted in two crucial moves by the colonial state. First, the princely states were notionally turned into states of exception with partial sovereignty over their domain and little intervention from the administrators of British Odisha. Second, it also resulted in the separation of the Puri Temple as well as the Gajapati King of Khurda from political power.Footnote ³⁰ Divine kingship became iconic rather than actual and was consigned to the private–religious experience of Odia Hindus while the political realm came to be inhabited exclusively by the British administrators and the native princes. No longer subjects of a religiopolitical hierarchy based on secular service to the divine, the Odia praja of the princely states as well as of British Odisha became private individuals with no access to the realm of the State.

Bhanja’s statement that rajaniti consisted of governmental maintenance of law and order drew on this invention of tradition and was a direct product of the colonial state’s policy towards the princely states of Odisha. In 1814, shortly after their conquest of Odisha, the colonial concerns about the administration of Princely states were guided by a liberal discomfort with princely misrule. To ensure the imperial mandate for good rule, a British official was appointed to each state who “unfettered by any precise rules might serve as a useful check on their conduct, and by obtaining a more accurate knowledge of the state of the country lay the foundations of an improved system of administration in the places in question.”Footnote ³¹ This interventionist attitude was considerably qualified by the late nineteenth century, when the British government granted new sanads to the Princely states to clarify the relationship between them. In a 1875 memorandum laying out the relationship between the British government and the princely states, we see that the remit of the British official posted in a princely state remained fairly wide but the status of the prince as the ruler came to be more rigorously protected. For instance, on the question of whether subjects of the princely states could sue their rulers, the memorandum was explicit that this should not be allowed as it would put the princes and their subjects on equal footing legally. According to the memoranda such a move ran counter to “the theory on which the sanads were based, namely, that he is the ruler of the state.”Footnote ³² As the “chief is (within his powers) supreme,” his authority “from the point of view of the subjects” should be “maintained intact.”Footnote ³³ The only caveat to this authority was the maintenance of just rule. To this end, the memorandum noted: “In maintaining in this way the dignity of the chief the principle must be recognized that the chief’s dignity and privileges were dependent on this just, impartial and right administration of his state.”

The resonances between these colonial stipulations of the rights and duties of the king and Bhanja’s definition of rajaniti, the function of the raja and rights of the praja are clear. When Bhanja defined the limits of the Sammillani’s activities he was drawing from his own experience of kingship and its remit.Footnote ³⁴ However, not only is his definition a very simplified version of Odia traditions of kingship, it did not account for contemporary discussions on sovereignty taking place outside colonial circles. For instance, we see that just a few years before Bhanja’s speech, in 1897–98, articles on the meaning of rajaniti appeared in the Utkal Sahitya journal. In an essay titled “Rajaniti,” Sadhucharan Rai unthreaded the relationship between raja and praja and, in this unthreading, endowed upon the praja a more modern characteristic of individual sovereignty.Footnote ³⁵ Rai’s formulation oscillated between a monarchical model and a model of politics resting on the balance between the sovereignty of the raja and that of the praja.

Building upon the notion of praja as progeny rather than subject, he suggested that rajaniti was based on a homology between the sovereign/subject relationship and familial relationships.Footnote ³⁶ This formulation of rajaniti as management of family fits well into the Sammillani’s understanding of rajaniti as governance. Rai wrote: “Raja is father, raja is mother, raja is brother, raja is teacher, and he is your closest friend.”Footnote ³⁷ He postulated that while the raja, like a father, could exercise his powers to discipline the praja, he should never abuse his powers. Furthermore, just as the mother comforted the child when he was punished, the raja, too, should protect the praja from excessive punishment.Footnote ³⁸ By enacting various familial and social relationships, the raja had to ensure that peace, brotherhood, and freedom among the praja was maintained. The raja here was more than just a figure of order, he was also a figure of conscience.

In this context, while the praja/subject depended on the raja for familial and social support, raja also required the support of the praja. In another essay entitled “Rajashakti O Prajashakti,” Rai expanded on this interdependence between the raja and praja based on an economy of rajashakti (power of the raja) and prajashakti (power of the praja).Footnote ³⁹ Prajashakti, according to Rai, was the sum of all power that resides in all human beings. Rajashakti was the amalgam of all prajashakti. In an ideal situation, rajashakti and prajashakti would balance one another. A decrease in rajashakti could result in a people’s revolution. An increase in prajashakti could lead to the establishment of democracy or prajatantra.

It could be inferred from Rai’s discussion that neither revolution nor democracy was the ideal condition. In the ideal condition, the praja would be content with the regime of the raja. However, Rai’s formulation of an ideal situation did account for the individual agency of the praja. He held that “every praja was a miniature raja.” Thus, Rai argued, as long as the raja recognized this individual sovereignty, his sovereignty would remain unmolested. Clearly, for Rai the raja/praja relationship was based on a balance between individual sovereignty and the sovereignty of the ruler.

Two things should be noted about the “praja” in Rai’s discussion. First, the praja here was understood as a subject under the protection of the raja. By implicating the praja in a filial relationship with the raja, Rai invoked a traditional monarchical understanding of subjecthood where the praja’s relationship with the state placed definite limits on his/her individual sovereignty; just as a child is free and self-determining only to the extent that the parent deems it fit. Paradoxically, and this is the second thing to be noted about Rai’s praja: the praja also has individual sovereignty that is of fundamental importance to the stability of the raja/praja relationship and even rajaniti itself. When Rai argued that the each praja was a “small raja,” the praja appeared in a completely different light. The argument that the raja/praja relationship depends on the balance between the sovereignty of the praja and that of the raja undermined the unquestionable control of the raja over the praja’s destiny implied in the earlier idea of subjecthood. Even though this allusion to individual sovereignty does not invoke democracy, or at least the praja’s participation in political activities, it opens the door to such possibilities. That is, the logic of individual sovereignty of the praja would ultimately lead to democracy or prajatantra. It is this ultimate possibility that Rai recoiled from when he wrote that in the ideal condition there should be neither rebellion nor democracy.

In both Bhanja’s and Rai’s framework, the praja’s participation in governance remained suspect even as it repeatedly emerged as a possibility. It is in the limited case of their argument—the idea of rebellion—that this reluctance to envisage a politics of the praja emerges most clearly. Bhanja justifies the avoidance of politics within the Sammillani by arguing that good governance by the new English rajas makes the intervention of the praja into the affairs of state unnecessary. With this elaboration of the merits of the English raja, Bhanja Deo slips back into the language of the monarchical state in which the praja could only be a subject. For instance, he defined bad governance as rule where “the Rajas are selfish, and exploit their praja or are unable to protect their life and property.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Bhanja Deo used instances from the Odia past, such as the period of Muslim and Maratha rule, to illustrate bad governance. By juxtaposing the establishment of rule of law and social stability during the British rule of Odisha, against his view of the political, social, and economic chaos of the Muslim and Maratha rule over Odisha, Bhanja Deo situated colonial rule within the matrix of existing political networks.Footnote ⁴¹ The British colonial government could be seen as just another player in an already existing hierarchical political field and not necessarily an alien or colonial force. As rajaniti was defined as the ethics of governance, the changing identity of the ruler did not affect the concept of the political. Thus, this ambivalence about the identity of the ruler in Bhanja Deo’s definition of rajaniti allowed the leadership of the Utkal Sammillani to accommodate colonial rule in an existing political matrix.

Bhanja Deo’s attempt to avoid politics by arguing that the British are good rajas, involves a double move that subverts the very purpose that it attempts to accomplish. On the one hand, there is an attempt to see the British as just another raja. On the other hand, in insisting that the praja stay out of politics, he uses a novel argument: that the praja can stay out of the political sphere because the government is being run properly. It is the converse of this statement that threatens to subvert his effort to foreclose on popular politics. The converse of his argument is that the praja need not stay out if the government is not running properly. By arguing that as long as the raja was fulfilling his responsibilities, the praja can abstain from politics, Bhanja Deo was providing for a possibility that a situation may arise when the praja could be a political actor. Thus, even as he asserted the older notion of raja and rajaniti, he smuggled in new notions of rule despite himself.

After establishing the efficacy of British rule over Odisha, Bhanja Deo argued that since peace and stability had been instituted by the British, it was time to “repair the losses suffered by the country due to many centuries of misrule.” This was the function of an organization like the Utkal Sammillani. He proclaimed that the primary aims of the Utkal Sammillani would be to provide a common platform for the Odia-speaking people living in different British provinces, to increase national wealth through supporting industrial growth, to promote the spread of education among the people, to support development of Odia language and literature, and to bring about social reform. Thus, the Utkal Sammillani was imagined as a social, economic, and cultural organization that represented all the Odia-speaking people.

In Bhanja Deo’s explicit formulations, the constituency of the Utkal Sammillani was the Odia praja of the English rajas. The creation of the category of the Odia-speaking people as a distinct community was a necessary precondition for the institution of the Utkal Sammillani. As the last two chapters have illustrated, such an Odia public had already been imagined in the emergent but limited urban Odia public sphere and this imagined category carried within it the rudiments of a political community. The Odia praja that the Sammillani represented was already marked by a shared culture and language. This community based on language and culture was very different from Bhanja’s formulation of a raja–praja relationship where all that defined the praja was that it was the subject. Here, ironically, the praja was more than a subject. The praja, while being bound together as a community by its subjection to colonial rule, was also interconnected by a preexisting cultural movement.

By juxtaposing the Odia community and praja as subject, the Utkal Sammillani leadership redefined the “praja” as more than subject to a royal king. Praja now was marked by linguistic and cultural interests that were not within the governing responsibilities of the English raja. This community of interests bound the praja in connections that were not entirely mediated by the colonial state. Consequently, the very presence of Utkal Sammillani as a sociocultural organization outside the influence of the colonial state provided a possibility for the praja to explore his/her individual potential without limits posed by the colonial state. Furthermore, once the existence of such as praja was conceived, the possibility arose that this praja could practice a politics through a disagreement with the raja over questions of rule. This, in turn, could lead to a scenario where the praja could claim as praja some authority in the system of governance. It is this possibility that made Bhanja Deo anxious because by invoking the praja, the Sammillani was already laying claim to politics. Even though Bhanja Deo used the term praja to ensure that the constituency of the Utkal Sammillani remained apolitical and loyal to the colonial state, his very justification for the distancing of the praja from politics smuggled in the possibility of political activity by the praja.

A New Politics: Prajaniti for the Praja (1903–1918)

Even as the denial of politics in early Sammillani rhetoric raised the specter of a politics for the colonized in spite of its explicit efforts, the question of politics remained a highly contentious issue in the Odia public sphere. At every annual meeting of the organization, political activism was consistently disavowed.Footnote ⁴² However, as the Swadeshi agitation against the partition of Bengal gained ground in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Sammillani’s apolitical stand became increasingly untenable. As the Swadeshi movement linked political opposition to colonial rule with economic self-sufficiency and boycott of British goods in the interest of fostering Indian industry, the Sammillani’s neat separation of the political and the socioeconomic threatened to break down. In this section, I will explore the public discussions surrounding the Sammillani’s disavowal of politics, the attempts by the leaders of the organization to resolve the ensuing crisis by proposing an alternative politics of the colonized called prajaniti and the eventual critique of the separation of the political and social that led to the fall of the organization.

In its initial years as a pan-Odia organization, the Sammillani’s decision to focus on the social and economic development of the community without participating in political activity was celebrated by the Odia as well as Bengali press. In May 1904, an Odia newspaper carried an editorial in which the author congratulated the Odia leadership for pursuing “such a noble cause instead of clamouring in impotence for political privileges.”Footnote ⁴³ This positive view of the Sammillani was strengthened by the efforts of the organization to deepen its reach into Odia-speaking areas in British Odisha as well as the princely states. By January 1905, little over a year after its establishment, the organization had 381 branches in Odia-speaking areas.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the time the antipartition movement began in Bengal in 1905, the Sammillani was seen as the primary representative association of all Odia people. The 1908, the Swadeshi movement’s critique of colonial government threw the Sammillani’s apolitical stance into question. Newspaper reports reveal that, initially, Odia community organizations everywhere supported the Swadeshi movement. Even the Jaganath Temple chose to boycott foreign cloth and other goods in its ritual practices. The Puri branch of the Sammillani convinced the local marwari traders to carry locally produced goods.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, in a few months, we see an increasing disaffection towards the antipartition movement in the Odia media. Loyalist newspapers, including the Star of Utkal, exhorted readers to distinguish between the antipartition movement and the Swadeshi movement. While the Swadeshi movement was “against the laws of political economy and would not survive for long,” the antipartition politics was a legitimate grievance of the “civilized Bengalis” who should be given the same consideration as the “kols,” the “Santhals” and the “negroes” by the British government.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the more liberal newspapers, this attitude is reversed. For instance, the Sambalpur Hiteisini argued that the Odias should support the Swadeshi movement but avoid the antipartition aspect of the movement because Odia activism “should be positive and not anti-British.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Meanwhile, the Sammillani leadership supported the boycott of foreign goods and campaigned for it in various places. However, by 1908, we see a stark change in the organization’s attitude towards the movement. As mentioned earlier, the most ubiquitous feature of the movement, the nationalist song – Vande Mataram – was banned from the Sammillani platform. This move opened the leadership of the organization to criticism as they were called a “handful of sycophants” who had shown no solidarity with the Indian National Congress.Footnote ⁴⁸ The liberal leadership of the organization, headed by Madhusudan Das, responded by arguing that political reform should be gained by “moral not physical force.”Footnote ⁴⁹

While the banning of Vande Mataram caused controversy, the Odisha famine of 1908 coupled with the government’s plans to conduct survey exercises for revenue settlement at a time of scarcity forced the organization into an untenable position. Newspapers of both loyalist and liberal bend such as Nilachal Samachar, Sambada Vahika, Gadajat Basini, and Utkal Dipika exhorted the Sammillani to “show their practical usefulness as a representative organization by doing something substantial to relieve the distress in Odisha.”Footnote ⁵⁰ These arguments were often linked with an economic critique of colonial rule.Footnote ⁵¹Within the context of the antipartition Swadeshi movement that conflated economic concerns with radical anticolonial politics, it became impossible for the Sammillani to pose demands for economic support while still sustaining its apolitical stance.

This conundrum led the founding member of the Sammillani, Madhusudan Das, to propose an alternative politics that would enable the Odia people to ask for economic rights without demanding political rights. Madhusudan Das (1848–1934) was one of the most influential figures in the Odia public sphere of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Educated as a lawyer in Calcutta, he served as the Odia translator to the government of India, a member of the legislative council, as member of the Odisha Association (established 1882) and a founding member of the Utkal Sammillani. Das rose to fame early in his career when he successfully represented the Queen of Puri in her lawsuit opposing the implementation of the Puri Temple Act of 1880. He dominated the Utkal Sammillani platform for most of the organization’s active life.

In his essay, “Utkal Sammillani”, published in the Utkal Sahitya journal in 1908, Das argued that politics was not necessary for the development of the community because:

Implicit here is an echo of Bhanja Deo’s argument that the praja have no say in the realm of governance. However, while Bhanja Deo had suggested that the British were just another ruler in a long list of rulers, Das’ use of the term “conquered” gestures at a departure from the Sammillani’s notion of rajaniti as an economy of rule between the raja and the praja. This recognition that British rule was not simply any rule but a colonial rule also changed the nature of praja – not simply praja but a colonized praja. However, despite this nod to contemporary critiques of colonial rule in Odisha and elsewhere, Das’ subsequent discussion shies away from any radical anticolonial propositions.

He conceded to the critics of the Sammillani that the exclusion of politics limited the organization’s effectiveness. By breaking down the community’s development or unnati into the unnati of dharma (ethical goodness), mokhsha (spiritual transcendence), kama (pleasure) and artha (wealth and power), Das argued that the exclusion of religious and political discussion resulted in an inability to develop fully on any of these registers. This reference to the four purushrathas is revealing. In classical Indian political tradition, the objective of the science of politics or Danda niti was to “create the cultural conditions necessary for the pursuit of the four great ends of life: the purushrathas.”Footnote ⁵³ By invoking this, Das effectively marked the parameters of his intervention as squarely within the science of politics. This again is a departure from the early Sammillani discussion. While Bhanja Deo’s definition of rajaniti as ethics of rule effectively precluded any discussion of politics, thinking about the science of politics and the attainment of purushrathas opened the door to alternative definitions of rajaniti. In his pursuit of the four purusharthas, Das suggested that the Sammillani should allow for a partial inclusion of politics. He defined this partial politics as follows:

This prajaniti belonged to an entirely different sphere of activity than that of rajaniti. Das argued that it was crucial for the interest of the raja as well as the praja to make this distinction clear and avoid any encroachment of one on the other. Not simply limited to praising the government, the rest of Das’ essay laid out a manifesto for a praxis of prajaniti. This praxis was centered on community education. According to Das, the Sammillani had to identify and educate the Odia people about:

Thus the function of the Sammillani, according to Das, was to educate the Odia people in the ethics of communal life. The Sammillani had to identify and balance the interests of the individual, Odia community, and the Indian nation. In balancing these interests, Das posed a regional politics that was informed by both local and national concerns.

In this economy of interests, Das ascribed to the Sammillani a conceptual task. The actual task of development of the Odia condition, such as the establishment of schools, local hospitals, or cooperative banks was to be carried out by the rural organizations or Gramya Samitis set up by the Utkal Sammillani. The Sammillani itself was to clarify conceptual issues about community building and ensure that the Gramya Samitis acted in accordance with the interests of the Odia region and the Indian nation. Since Das argued that the activity of the Utkal Sammillani as well as that of the Gramya Samitis was prajaniti, two types of praja emerge here. The Utkal Sammillani as praja ascribed to itself the position of the vanguard while the Gramya Samitis as praja were to be instructed by this vanguard in the rites of citizenship.

In Das’ rejection and refiguration of Rajaniti, the stakes of rajaniti emerged clearly. In accommodating critiques of the Utkal Sammillani’s political standing while maintaining the Sammillani’s distance from politics, Das’ formulation of a politics of the colonized praja proposed a number of radical shifts in the understanding of subjecthood. While arguing the separation of the praja from rajaniti be maintained, his invocation of purusharthas as development towards the four crucial ends of life and insistence on education as the centre of community activism suggests a fundamentally liberal understanding of subjecthood – liberal but Indian. This avowal of partial citizenship and politics despite profound discomfort with the idea of popular politics was due to Das’ realization that acting in the interests of a community essentially involved political activity. What Das failed to address is how the Odia community could be emancipated without opposition to the colonial state whose interests did not coincide with that of the Odia community.

This question of the opposition between the interests of the colonial state and that of the colonized animated the activism of younger members of the Sammillani. For instance, in an essay entitled “Samaja Sanskara o Rajaniti”, an anonymous author argued that “a community’s politics influences and constitutes its social life in as much as it is influenced and constituted by the community’s social life.”Footnote ⁵⁶ From 1908 onwards, the primary critics of the Sammillani were members of student organizations like Bharati Mandir and the younger members of the Sammillani itself. Young students and lawyers such as Gopabandhu Das, Harekrushna Mahtab, Nabakrushna Chaoudhury, Nilakantha Das, Godavarish Mishra, Lakhshminarayan Sahu, and Jagabandhu Singh disagreed with the Sammillani’s positive attitude towards the colonial state. Over the next two decades, many of these men came to play a significant role in anticolonial politics in Odisha. Prominent among the opponents of the Utkal Sammillani were Gopabandhu Das, Nilakantha Das, Godavaris Mishra, Krupasindhu Mishra, and Harihara Mishra. Together they came to be called the Satyabadi group named after the Satyabadi School set up by Gopabandhu Das in 1909. This school came to symbolize anticolonial nationalism in Odisha. Through their educational activities, the Satyabadi group was engaged in social reform projects that exposed them to the day-to-day realities of the common Odia people. The politics of the Satyabadi group emerged from an understanding of the people as oppressed and disenfranchised under colonial rule. The Utkal Sammillani’s formulation of “praja” as passive receptors of good governance did not speak to the ground realities as witnessed by the Satyabadi group.Footnote ⁵⁷

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, two perspectives on political participation by the colonized circulated in Odisha. In arguments for the Sammillani’s apolitical stance we see that any participation in politics is seen as “impotent” and sometimes as a self-indulgent, elite pastime.Footnote ⁵⁸ In arguments against the Sammillani’s stance, politics is seen as essential to the amelioration of economic problems that plagued common Odias. As such antipolitical arguments saw the practice of politics as a betrayal of popular interests that could only be served by an elite alliance with the colonial state. In contrast, propolitical arguments during the Swadeshi movement held that without political rights for the colonized, popular economic interests could never be met.Footnote ⁵⁹ Despite this opposition, both sides shared a common understanding that proper politics was possible only if the colonized shared equal political rights as the colonizers. Therefore, political agitation was impotent because the Odias were not on a par with the British. And yet, it was necessary precisely because equal political rights had to be gained by the colonized. In this framework, the leaders of the Sammillani as well as the emerging radical leadership had to engage with the conflict between regional and national interests. Much like other minority politics, regional agendas worked on a principle of colonial appeasement and a need to seek state protection against more dominant national interests. Both these concerns, about the lack of political sovereignty and the anxiety about balancing the interests of the region and the nation, became much more significant with the introduction of a wider franchise in 1918 through the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms.

A Magna Carta for India: Constitutional Reforms of 1918–19 and the Emergence of Liberal Citizenship in India

The introduction of a wider franchise in 1918 precipitated a rethinking of the relationship between the ruler and ruled in India. It also resulted in what I would call the “regionalization” of Indian national politics. The system of diarchy instituted by the Government of India Act of 1919 involved the introduction of wider elections, which established a system of dual governmental responsibility between a popularly elected provincial government and the central government under the Governor General of India. The need to demarcate constituencies and assign representation to various elements of Indian society required the colonial government to take regional public opinion into account. Consequently, the reforms involved a systematic accounting of linguistic communities in India and language became one of the most important factors in determining representation in future elections. As regional identity movements had come to be based on language by the early twentieth century, the idea of Indian franchise and representation came to be informed by a system of classification that was based on linguistic regions.

With the emergence of a more popular franchise and increased awareness of the need for a broader popular base in both regional and national organizations, the colonial government, Indian National Congress, and the Utkal Sammillani had to conceptualize subaltern political participation. The argument here is about neither elite politics nor subaltern politics. Rather, it is an attempt to elaborate on the way in which the elite thought about the absorption of the non-elite into the realm of the political. Appealing to regional linguistic interests and using regional languages in all-India nationalist political praxis was the most effective means of enabling a broader base for both the regional and national political organizations. Hence, I argue that this need to create a political community that would reach beyond the elite produced the paradoxical concept of the Indian citizen who was marked by particular regional linguistic identities.

The emergence of colonial citizenship required a reformulation of the notion of rule or rajya in colonial India, which would make way for the participation of Indian subjects in British reign in matters of government. Thus, this section traces changes in the understanding of “rule” or rajya through a reading of political discussions both within and outside Odisha that argued for a broadening of politics and the inclusion of the “masses” in political agitation in India. It is in this shift in the meaning of rule in 1918–1919 that the roots of the change in the attitude of the Utkal Sammillani’s politics lay.

In the years preceding the 1918 reforms, Indian leadership as well as the colonial government in India became increasingly entangled in the ongoing global move towards self-determination. The growing emphasis on the “consent of the governed” in the Wilsonian moment in world politics coupled with the commitments made by the colonial government to the Indian leadership in return for native support in the Great War compelled the British government to “endow India … with the largest measure of self-government compatible with the maintenance of the supremacy of British rule.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In their response to Wilson’s arguments for self-determination of races, the Indian political leadership came to deploy Wilson and his speeches as a propaganda tool against the colonial government. For instance, shortly before her arrest for sedition in 1917, Annie Besant distributed copies of Wilson’s war message in aid of the Indian Home Rule movement.Footnote ⁶¹ The impact of World War I on Indian politics also produced profound changes in the attitude of the Indian leadership. Their excitement about Indian participation in the war effort as a means to achieve parity of citizenship with European British subjects as well as the rapid growth of Indian manufacturing to make up for British goods that had disappeared from local markets encouraged a reappraisal of the relationship between the British and their Indian subjects. In 1916, the Indian Home Rule league led by Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak elaborated a detailed argument for self-governance that fell just shy of a demand for complete independence.

Tilak’s home rule speeches from 1916 to 1918 reveal how the demand for home rule was founded on a careful reinterpretation of rajya or rule as it shifted away from the domain of the raja and was transformed into a category tenuously linked to popular will. By translating home rule as swarajya, Tilak argued that, rather than demanding the removal of British sovereignty, the demand for swaraj was seeking to achieve the right of Indians to govern their home.Footnote ⁶² Taking care not to argue against the continuance of colonial rule, Tilak suggested that swarajya entailed a qualified idea of self-rule. Hence, even though the utterance of swarajya invokes the existence of “some kind of rule opposed to swa, i.e. our,” this opposition is not necessarily about the alienness of the ruler’s race.Footnote ⁶³ That is, he argued elsewhere, the contemporary government of India was not alien because it was British but because the British colonial government did not do its duty as King:

By avoiding the question of the alienness of British rule, Tilak posed an idea of self-rule that was divorced from any implication of nativist Indian sovereignty. To underline this separation, he punctuated the rest of his speech with the refrain “the question of swarajya is not about the emperor.” Swarajya was not about the emperor because the emperor represented an “invisible sentiment” that was different from the “visible administrative arm of the state.”Footnote ⁶⁵ As such, demanding swarajya by questioning the right of the visible administration to “manage” India was not sedition or rajyadroha. In the era of swarajya, he argued:

While it can argued that Tilak’s care to illustrate that the demand for swarajya was not sedition was a strategic move to avoid prosecution by the colonial government and to assure his listeners that their support of the movement could not be seditious. By arguing that the demand for swarajya was proper to human nature, Tilak envisioned an Indian subject who was not only entitled to express dissent but this expression was essential to proper rule. This was clearly a radical departure from existing loyalist perspectives on popular dissent like those prevailing in elite organizations in Odisha where any opposition to the colonial state was seen as an illicit encroachment into the realm of the political.

This changing relationship between the subject and the sovereign in British India was also a major concern for the planners of the constitutional reforms of 1918–1919. The Montague Declaration of August 1917 proclaimed the intention of the government to work towards “the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British empire.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The reforms of 1919 were the enactment of this governmental policy to institute responsible government based on popular elections. In keeping with the spirit of the declaration, the reforms introduced two major changes to the existing form of government in India. First, the reforms introduced the idea of direct election that was based on limited popular franchise. Hitherto, a system of indirect elections was used to enable Indian representatives to be members of the Indian Legislative Council and the Provincial Legislative councils based on a very narrow franchise.Footnote ⁶⁸ Second, a system of diarchy where the responsibility for the governance of British India was shared between a partially elected central government and the provincial government was introduced. The Southborough committee set up to investigate the eligibility criteria for franchise and categorization of the Indian electorate into constituencies suggested that franchise be based on territorial constituencies within each province. This provincial and territorial classification of the new Indian electorate created a new citizen who was not simply a potential voter but who was also a subject marked by regional or provincial identity.

The report on the Indian constitutional reforms suggests that the drafters of the reforms were chiefly concerned with the need to educate the rural Indian masses in a “sense of citizenship” as the proposed changes threatened to cause “the most radical revolution in the people’s traditional ideas in India.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The report noted that unlike in the past, when the Indian peasant placed his “faith” in the government official to represent his interests, he now had to be much more actively involved in governance as he had the “power to compel” the attention of the person he chose as his representative.Footnote ⁷⁰ Coupled with this language of radical change was a language of protection in relation to the Indian rural population. As the report discussed the political preparedness of the Indian population, concerns about the possible exploitation of the “Indian ryots” by “people who are stronger and cleverer that he is” served as ground for the colonial state to “retain power to protect him.”Footnote ⁷¹ While these concerns about political unfitness and its associated dangers can rightly be read as a means to halt Indian progression towards complete self-governance, the report reveals (along with Tilak’s notion of swarajya) a moment of profound rupture in the way both the colonial officials and the Indian political elite read the relationship between the sovereign British government and its colonized Indian subjects.

This moment of rupture is particularly important because it was the beginning of one of the most enduring preoccupations of Indian nationalist as well as postcolonial politics – the politicization of the Indian masses. It is in this context that the use of the vernacular also became important in politics for both the colonial government that was trying to introduce representative government and the Indian political elite of the Indian National Congress that was trying to rouse the masses to join the struggle for self-determination. Later in the chapter, I will be illustrating how there was an increasing realization within the ranks of the Indian National Congress that a common national political agenda could not be propagated throughout India without recourse to vernacular languages. While English served as a lingua franca for the urban English educated elite of the Indian provinces, the majority of the Indian population used the local vernacular for public communication. As was illustrated in Chapter 2, the vernacular public sphere was fairly well developed by the 1920s and could effectively serve the interests of pan-Indian nationalism.

In Odisha, these shifts occasioned a break from the earlier avoidance of political discussion within the Utkal Sammillani. A special session of the Sammillani met in August 1918 with the express objective of critiquing the proposed constitutional reforms. As president of the session, Madhusudan Das made a speech on Odia objections to the proposed reforms. Even as he set out to critique the government, Das placed his discussion squarely within the earlier economy of rule between the British raja and the Odia praja, by posing the August 1917 Montagu declaration as an Indian Magna Carta. What distinguished the 1917 declaration from its medieval English predecessor was that while the latter was introduced by a king “who had no sympathy with the aspirations of the people,” the former was the “free gift of a constitutional monarch” to protect the “just and legitimate rights of the people.”Footnote ⁷² By framing the reforms as an Indian Magna Carta, Das was able to sustain an idea of sovereignty rooted in the British emperor and account for the emergence of a new kind of politics in India where the Indian people were laying stake on governance.

Das’ speech also reveals the impact of the reforms on the manner in which the political geography of India came to be envisioned in the subsequent years. Much of his speech was devoted to the implications of the suggestions for the reorganization of the provinces on linguistic grounds in the report on the constitutional reforms.Footnote ⁷³ In discussing these suggestions, M. S. Das addressed the report’s concerns about the need to gradually politicize the rural Indian population by underlining the importance of linguistically homogenous provinces for the effective politicization of the people. He explicitly linked the question of redistribution of British Indian territories on linguistic lines with the reform objectives by connecting language with access to citizenship. While Das applauded the report’s allusion to the need for reorganization of provincial boundaries, he took issue with the implicit deferral of any actual state action to that end. In the rest of his speech he made a forceful argument for the reorganization of Indian provinces on linguistic lines based on the claim that the government’s efforts to institute political reforms would come to naught if provinces were not linguistically homogenous.

By introducing the idea of “intermediary ruling classes,” Das attempted to prove that in linguistically heterogeneous provinces such as Bihar and Odisha and the Bengal Presidency, the speakers of minority language were at a great disadvantage in the new atmosphere of representative government. Instead of introducing limited self-governance through the institution of provincial autonomy, the reforms would put in place an intermediary ruling class of Biharis and Bengali who were in a majority in the aforementioned provinces. As Odias were a minority in both provinces, they would be assigned a fewer number of representatives to both the Bihar and Odisha and Bengal provincial legislatures. This, in turn, would mean that the Odia would not have an equal say in matters of government and hence would not enjoy a true measure of self-rule. Das emphasized that this lack of self-rule for the Odias and the institution of “intermediary ruling classes” would both mar the “sisterhood of Indian states in the future” and jeopardize Odia loyalty to the British Empire.

By entangling national consciousness, responsibility and the notion of intermediary ruling races, Das made a case for the recognition of Odias as a separate political constituency that could only have representation through the formation of a linguistically organized Odia province. This recognition, Das argued was crucial for the life of the Empire as well as that of the emerging Indian nation as a sisterhood of states. By stressing the link between language and access to self-rule, Das was arguing for the recognition of the regional nature of the emergent citizen in India. Hence, for both the framers of the constitutional reforms of 1918 and the Utkal Sammillani, the reforms were about the introduction of a new kind of relationship between the colonial state and the Indian people. Furthermore, this relationship was marked by an idea of a regional citizen based on a regional electoral constituency. This is particularly reflected in M. S. Das’ formulation of “intermediary ruling races,” which emphasized self-rule through a demarcation of distinct “racially” differentiated regions.

Speaking to the Heart of the People: Indian National Congress Policy on Regional Languages and Linguistic Politics

The introduction of constitutional reforms coincided with a shift in the policy of the Indian National Congress towards linguistic politics in India. At the national level, this acknowledgement of regional linguistic politics occasioned a reimagining of the Indian nation as a conglomeration of linguistically diverse regions. It was in this period (1918–1920) that the metonymic relationship between linguistically diverse regions and the unified Indian nation was established. This section will trace the prehistory of this moment and also illustrate how this new idea of the Indian nation enabled an elision of other more pressing registers of difference – particularly the Hindu/Muslim question. Two important themes will be dealt with in this section – the curious relationship between the Congress attitude towards language and the organization’s engagement with the problem of Hindu/Muslim communalism and the realization within Congress that its objective of the politicization of the Indian masses was impossible without the use of vernacular languages.

Language became an important issue on the Congress platform in 1903 when the British government published plans to partition the massive Bengal Presidency into two halves. Bengali Muslims were a majority in the proposed East Bengal province and Bengali Hindus were a majority in the new western half. The proposals for the partition of Bengal led to the first mass-based public demonstrations against the policies of the colonial government – the Swadeshi movement of 1908. While the Swadeshi movement figures as a major landmark in the history of anticolonial nationalism in India, the partition of Bengal played a pivotal role in two other histories in early Indian nationalism – in the history of communalism in India and that of the Congress attitude towards language in national politics. In 1903, after the plans for the partition of Bengal were made public, the Congress met for its major annual meeting in Madras and severely criticized what its leaders saw as the government’s efforts to create dissention among the “Bengali speaking brethren” on religious grounds.Footnote ⁷⁵ Here, the linguistic community of the Bengali-speaking people was privileged over the actual religious communities that the Bengali-speaking people belonged to. Paradoxically, this acknowledgement of the linguistic identity of the Bengali people involved an argument for the retention of existing political boundaries of British Indian provinces in general. This argument entailed an opposition to other plans for rearranging regional boundaries that would unite other linguistic communities in India. In particular, the Congress resolutions in Madras criticized not only the partition of Bengal but also the proposals of the Risley circular, which called for the amalgamation of the Odia-speaking tracts including the Ganjam district of the Madras Presidency under a single administration.Footnote ⁷⁶Criticizing all government efforts to rearrange provincial boundaries the Congress in Madras stated:

This contradictory resolution that questioned both the government’s efforts to divide the Bengali linguistic community and unite the Odia linguistic community alienated the Odia political elite. It appeared that the Congress would not support Odia efforts for the amalgamation of all Odia-speaking areas under a single administration.

The 1903 Congress recourse to claims about the interests of regional linguistic community in its opposition to the partition of Bengal compounded a curious conflation of the question of religious difference and the idea of a linguistic community. The argument that linguistic community produced a shared everyday life that trumped the demands of religious separatism recurred in the early twentieth-century Congress rhetoric about the Hindu–Muslim relationships. For instance, the 1906 annual presidential address by Dadabhai Naoroji spoke about the need to inculcate a “thorough political union among the Indian people of all creeds and classes” by emphasizing the linguistic commonality between people of various religious groups:

While this passage raises many interesting questions about race, religion, and historical memory, let us focus on how language is used to trump religious difference in Naoroji’s call for the thorough unification of all classes and creeds in India. In his formulation, the difference between Hindus and Muslims is an artificial and historically contingent difference. Religious identity by definition is also a historically contingent form of identification that cannot enable Hindus and Muslims of various regions of India to “divest themselves from the natural affinity of common blood.” By moving immediately to the assertion that the Hindus and Muslims of Maharastra and Gujarat share a common language and racial origin, Naoroji afforded linguistic community a primordial status in the organization of the people of India. It was a marker of difference far older and influential than religious difference that was threatening to disrupt his dream of a united India.

It is evident from the language of first Indian constitution to be prepared by Indians in 1928 that this use of linguistic affinity to trump religious difference had come to dominate the way in which constituents of the Indian nation were being categorized and enumerated. The Nehru Report written under the presidentship of Motilal Nehru was published as the first native constitution for India . After expending a lot of ink on the question of communalism and communal representation in the future Indian electorate, the Report turned to the question of linguistic reorganization of states. The Nehru Report deemed the question of linguistic reorganization of the states as an issue that was “more germane to the Constitution of India.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Focused mainly on the question of the creation of a new Sindh province, the Report’s discussion of the details of the proposed reforms in the boundaries of the Indian provinces called for a deliberation on the issue which considered “the general question on the merits apart from its communal bearings.” Implicit in the Nehru Report’s efforts to set aside the question of religious difference and focus on the question of linguistic regions was the imagining of the Indian nation on linguistic terms. It is evident that, by 1928, the dominant way of thinking about difference in India was through language rather than through religion. Congress rhetoric often presented political debates based on religious issue as illegitimate and harmful to the interests of the Indian nation. However, by 1928, the idea of a differentiated India seemed to be acceptable to the Congress leadership. This was because in place of religion language had become the dominant and most acceptable register of difference for the Congress platform.

How did this come about? The roots of this resolution of difference lie in the late 1910s when the Congress leadership attempted to broaden its popular base through local propaganda. In conjunction with the increased governmental attention to the politicization of the Indian masses as the result of the constitutional reforms of 1918–19, the new impetus within the Indian National Congress to “broaden its base” made the question of language of popular political discussion very important. In 1920, Annie Besant, the President of the Indian National Congress Session at Lahore noted:

Besant saw the use of the vernacular languages as a way to include in the “great National Movement,” the hitherto excluded sections of the Indian population – the raiyat or peasants. In Congress, the raiyat had frequently come to stand in for the lower classes of rural India. Hence, like the framers of the report on the constitutional reforms of 1918, Besant and her colleagues at the Congress had come to realize that popular participation in “practical discussions on local affairs” was impossible without the use of the vernacular languages in political and public forums. What should be noted here is the emergence of more general concern with the local and the implications of greater attention to “local affairs” on the growing constituency of the “National Movement.” The realization that the awareness of a membership in the Congress-led “National Movement” had to come via a greater involvement in discussions about local affairs points to the ways in which the emergence of the need to increase popular participation in political affairs led to the rethinking of the relationship between the national and the local. Hence, apart from the efficacy of using the vernacular in public political discussions, the Congress leadership at the center was also coming to realize that the incorporation of local affairs within the concerns of the day-to-day activities of the Congress was essential to broadening the reach of its politics.

Of course, local issues had been espoused by the Congress leadership in the past. For instance, Gandhi’s support of the peasants in Champaran in 1916 was definitely based on an attempt to draw on local politics to make the case for a wider political demand for reforms in colonial governance. However, these early efforts at involvement in local affairs were meant to serve as exemplars. They were meant to be spectacles that would reveal the problems with colonial governance. Besant’s invocation of local affairs was motivated by an entirely different need – to involve a greater number of people in Congress practices through a greater attention to particularities of their daily lives: to bring the nation home to the local. Hence, the local came to be constitutive of the national in this period.

This concern with language and the local was echoed in Gandhi’s discussions about language in the early 1920s when he centered language as matter of great importance to the fight for Swaraj. It is through his rhetorical intervention that the question of language became of the most prominent issue with the ranks of the Congress in the 1920s. By the time both Annie Besant and Gandhi were talking about the question of language, Congress had called for the establishment of new provincial branches called the Provincial Congress Committees (PCCs). The constituency of these PCCs was based on linguistic lines rather than the existing provincial boundaries. Once Congress had recognized linguistic politics through the establishment of PCCs along these linguistic lines, it adopted the demand for the redistribution of British Indian territories on linguistic lines as one of its foremost demands in the early 1920s. Even though the politics of Congress and its attitude towards the constitutional reforms of this period underwent significant changes in this period, its attitude towards vernacular languages and linguistic politics remained constant.

In his advocacy of vernacular languages in the 1920s, Gandhi made the use of Indian languages central to anticolonial praxis. He did this in two ways: first, his critique of the use of English as the lingua franca of India was based on the need to use the language of the people in popular propaganda and, second, he made the demand for linguistic reorganization of Indian provinces central to demand for self-rule in the Congress politics of the 1920s.

In his 1920 article entitled “An Appeal to Madras,” Gandhi argued that the use of English in popular propaganda undermined the ability of political speakers to reach their audience. He noted that in all the years since the establishment of the Congress party, English had been useful only as a “spectacle but never for its real educative value.”Footnote ⁸¹ That is, political speeches in English may have drawn the crowds to experience Congress politics only as passive spectators. Such a popular experience of Congress where the common people did not participate as thinking citizens, rather as devotees following the example of the spectacular English-speaking political leader was no longer desirable by 1920. Given the increasing attention to the political education of the common people due to the constitutional reforms, Congress was beginning to adopt a policy of increasing popular awareness of the people’s role in a democratic political set up. Gandhi’s discussion of popular politics and the relationship between the leaders and the people is symptomatic of this shift. In an article titled “About leaders and Public,” he noted:

Regional vernaculars became central to the project of building a new mass-based political movement where every individual understood his role in the movement and “was ready for self-sacrifice.”

As the Congress leadership came to realize the importance of vernacular languages to their political project, they espoused the demand for the linguistic reorganization of the Indian provinces as a central political aim. In 1920, immediately after the declaration of the constitutional reforms while the Congress was still prepared to participate in the provincial elections, Gandhi wrote an article titled “What Should the Voter Do?”Footnote ⁸³ He suggested the voters ask their prospective representative the following questions:

These questions reveal the growing importance given to linguistic reorganization of the provinces during this period. By posing the lack of linguistically organized provinces as an impediment to national growth, Gandhi shifted the emphasis of regional linguistic movements from regional interests to Indian national interests. That is, the demand for linguistically organized states was no longer required merely to safeguard the interests of particular linguistic groups. Rather, linguistic reorganization of Indian provinces was central to the interests of the Indian nation as such reorganization would lead to national growth. Hence, Gandhi made regional linguistic politics cosmopolitan and nationally relevant.

Thinking the Region Within the Nation: Changing Attitude of the Utkal Sammillani Towards Anticolonial Politics

This speech by Gopabandhu Das, who later served as the president of the Utkal Provincial Congress Committee, marks the final radical change in the praxis of the Utkal Sammillani. In its annual session in January 1920, the Sammillani decided to espouse Congress politics and participate in the emerging Non-Cooperation Movement. As the prevailing understanding of rule based on the relationship between the British sovereign and the Indian colonized subject was changing due to the introduction of electoral franchise in 1919–20 and the Indian nation came to be understood as a conglomeration of linguistically distinct regions, Odia attitudes towards anticolonial, nationalist political agitation also radically changed. This nationalization of regional politics could not have been brought about without the intervention of a younger generation of Odia political activists led by Gopabandhu Das. These activists attempted to rethink crucial relationships that were the basis of the Sammillani’s attitude towards political activism – the relationship between the British raja and the Odia praja, the relationship between the interests of the region Odisha and the Indian nation and, finally, the relationship between the elite of public organizations and the people they seek to represent. It is this rethinking that produced a new notion of citizenship in Odisha articulated through terms such as praja-sadharana (ordinary-subject) often used by Gopabandhu Das in his writing. Central to this rethinking was the privileging of those who constituted the “silent masses of India” in definitions of community and politics. This section treats Gopabandhu’s speech and traces his ideas about politics, citizenship, region, and nation to illustrate how the emerging ideas of representative government, on the one hand, and a nation constituted of linguistic difference, on the other, enabled a regional understanding of citizenship and the region’s role in the future of the Indian nation.

Gopabandhu’s speech was not only the harbinger of the changes in Odisha politics but also the most sustained and representative statement of the changing attitude towards political activism, the colonial government, and the Indian National Congress in Odisha. In his speeches and writings, Gopabandhu, like Gandhi, called for mass participation in political activism and made the individual Odia central to both regional and national politics. His definition of the relationship between the region and the nation was founded on the primacy of the needs, interests, and potential of every Odia individual.

In order to make his point, Das used both rhetorical strategies and conceptual intervention into the way community was thought about in Odisha. Through rhetorical strategies such as discursive structures of past presidential speeches to introduce new concerns into the Sammillani platform, Das attempted to reformulate the very meaning and symbolism of the Sammillani as a community organization. While he called for a reformulation of the prevailing understanding of the Utkal Sammillani to include more populist ideas and imperatives, Das also introduced a new way of thinking about community itself by arguing that the ultimate objective of the Utkal Sammillani should be the establishment of udaar manabikata or “expansive humanism.” This informed the way he reconceptualized the constituents of the Odia community and located the Odia region within the Indian nation. More significantly, the notion of expansive humanism informed his eventual construction of the identity of the Odia/Indian citizen.

Mimicking presidential speeches of earlier years, which began with obituaries to notable members of the Odia community, Gopabandhu commenced his speech with a reference to the dead of Odisha. However, he departed from this earlier rhetoric by also calling attention to even greater losses to Odia population due to the ongoing famine and floods in Odisha. The significance of this departure was not simply because of the mention of the Odia masses in the same register as the members of the Odia elite but also due the tone of this invocation of the Odia people:

This mention of the dying millions of Odisha was doing something more than bringing public attention to their plight. Das was attempting to engage with the earlier tendency of the Utkal Sammillani to see itself as a vanguard class that spoke for the interests of the “silent long suffering Odia people.” While refraining from demonizing something that was essentially a product of the movement’s early efforts to build a public notion of a political community that did not preexist the organization, Das was arguing that it was time to see both the organization and the Odia people differently.

Signaled here is the emerging notion of the Odia praja as something more than subjects of the colonial state. By thinking of them as potential contributors to the Odia community rather than the consumers of the boons begotten by the Utkal Sammillani from the colonial state (as the earlier use of the term praja seemed to suggest), Das centered the role and interests of the Odia people in the development of a community project like Utkal Sammillani. This shift reveals the earliest move within the Utkal Sammillani from the elitist civic activities based on the management of the Odia people to a more populist political agenda wherein the people themselves had a direct stake.

Apart from this radical reconfiguration of the organization, Das proceeded to argue for a more expansive understanding of both the Sammillani and the Odia community. Calling for a more inclusive association that would make it more than a “mere Conference … a meeting of knowledgeable Odia people aimed at discussing the interests of Odisha or that of Odia people.”Footnote ⁸⁷

This speech featured an entirely new construction of the Odia community, which was no longer founded merely on the Odia language. Rather, Das’ new Odia community was based on the place known as Odisha.

This definition of the Odia community signaled a significant shift in the understanding of community in Odisha as the fundamental basis of the Odia community shifted from language to place. Definitions of community in Odisha, both before and after the formation of the Utkal Sammillani had always been based on language. As Chapter 1 illustrates, the efforts by the colonial state to replace Odia with Bengali first occasioned public articulations of the interests of the “Odia community.” Since then community came to be defined as a group of people speaking the same language. Occasional efforts to broaden this understanding to include non-Odia-speaking communities who resided in the Odisha division were made by the domiciled Bengalis of Odisha division. The domiciled Bengalis were an influential group within the Odia literati of Cuttack and played an important role in the Odia language movement of the nineteenth century. In 1905, the Star of Utkal, an English-language paper published by a member of the domiciled Bengali community, featured an article that introduced the term utkaliya to denote members of the Odia community. Utkaliyas were people who lived in the Odia-speaking area but did not use Odia in their day-to-day lives.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, it was with Gopabandhu’s speech that the dominant understanding of the Odia community went through its first divorce from language.

By founding his understanding of community on spatial categories like stana (place), sketra (area), and bhumi (land), Gopabandhu called for a shift in focus from a linguistically based community to one that was geographically organized. In his speech, Das managed this shift by calling into question the distinction between Utkal and Odia. The common understanding of Utkal – due to its links with the term utkaliya – invoked the idea of the inhabitants of Odisha. The appellation Odia denoted the speakers of the Odia language. Das posed the question: Is there a distinction between those who inhabit Odisha and those who speak Odia?

This move proposed to shift the locus of Odia regional politics from an exclusive community based on linguistic identity to a more inclusive constituency based on a shared everyday life in a common place. However, the argument for a community based on adjacency and commonality of interests did not necessarily involve a disavowal of the Odia community as a linguistic unit. Rather the very invocation of other such linguistic identities such as Bengali, Punjabi, Marwari etc. reveals Gopabandhu’s investment in the distinctiveness of these identities. In fact, he was calling for a cosmopolitan idea of community where shared interests, common historical experience and future aspirations transcended rather than effaced particular linguistic identities. Furthermore, by calling for transcendence of linguistic identities, he did not forsake the idea of a distinct region of Odisha. In fact, for Das, the transcendence of particular linguistic, religious, or caste identity was possible precisely because the geographical category Odisha was assumed as an irrevocable reality. Hence, his call for the inclusion of other linguistic groups in the Odia community did not threaten to demolish the long-cherished vision of a separate region of Odisha.

The geography of the proposed province of Odisha became central to the objectives of the Sammillani as a consequence of Das’ privileging of a spatial definition of the Odia community. Hence, in this session a new constitution of the Utkal Sammillani was drafted where the concept of “natural Odisha” as a geographical category was defined.Footnote ⁹¹ In the new constitution, natural Odisha was opposed to the existing “artificial” or political Odisha that did not include all Odia-speaking areas.

As the definition of regional community came to be founded on a commonality of interests and shared everyday life rather than exclusively on language, Gopabandhu was able to argue for a new set of objectives for the Utkal Sammillani that were aimed at fostering an inclusive politics based on expansive humanism. He listed three main objectives of the Utkal Sammillani: fostering kinship among the various communities within Odisha their home, participation in politics because as a well-rounded community organization all interests and concerns of the community fall within the purview of the Sammillani, and the establishment of liberal humanism.

At the root of his revisioning of community was his use of expansive humanism that enabled him to forge an intrinsic connection between the interests of the Odia community and that of the Indian nation. Approaching the question of the relationship between the region and the nation from the perspective of the interests of the Odia community, Das argued that expansive humanism could be possible only through espousing broader Indian objectives:

Unlike Madhusudan Das’ sisterhood of provinces organized by a common allegiance to the British Empire, Gopabandhu Das’ India remains unmarked by Indian subjecthood to the British. While M. S. Das’ organizing principle for the making of the Indian nation was a shared bond with the British Empire, for Gopabandhu Das, it was a social kinship of common interests. The Indian nation in Gopabandhu Das’ formulation was a society of linguistic provinces in which the freedom of each province was ensured by the establishment of the strong national civil society. Hence, Das posed Odisha as something akin to a citizen in the Indian social world populated by other such communities. Also the emphasis on India as a liberal civil society allowed him to reimagine the relationship between other communities residing in Odisha – Biharis and Bengalis.

The earlier Utkal Sammillani attitude towards these groups is best exemplified by Madhusudan Das’ description of the Bengalis and Biharis as “intermediary ruling races.” M. S. Das argued that being majority linguistic groups in their respective provinces, these groups of people occupied a more dominant position in the colonial hierarchy of influence. They acted as intermediaries between the colonial rulers and the Odia people. Such a reading of the relationship between these communities and the Odia community implied unequal and oppressive transactions between Bengalis and Biharis and the Odia community. Through his discussion of liberal humanism and a national civil society, Gopabandhu Das attempted to reimagine this relationship as equal.

Having established Odisha’s place within the Indian nation, Gopabandhu Das moved to establish the particular characteristic of the Odia community that made it most adept at imagining a liberal and inclusive community. Das argued that historically only the Odias have been able to recognize the importance of expansive humanism and lead an inclusive social and spiritual life. He based his argument on the Odia community’s allegiance to the Cult of Jaganath. He notes:

Through this discussion of the Jaganath cult, Das is able to both establish the exceptional and exemplary nature of Odia community and make an argument for equality within the Odia community by drawing on the notion of equality before God. Making such a case for expansive humanism allowed Das to describe an Odia community that transcended race, religion, and caste. As more and more concrete decisions about the new province were made in the next two decades, this description of Odia community that transcended difference and was held together by allegiance to common land and religion would be put in service of the movement for the formation of the new province.

Conclusion

Gopabandhu’s humanist definition of the Utkal Sammillani, the Odia community, and the relationship between the region Odisha and the Indian nation established the basic structures and ideas that were fundamental to the foundation of liberal democracy in India. His redefinition of both the Utkal Sammillani and the Odia community enabled him to posit a new idea of liberal community that was not based on any exclusive marker of identity. Rather, it was based on a shared everyday life that, in turn, enabled him to see members of both the Odia and the Indian community as mutually interchangeable and fundamentally equal.

This was clearly a departure from Madhusudan Das’ understanding of the non-Odia-speaking people such as Bengalis and Biharis as “intermediary ruling races” whose control over the fortunes of the Odia-speaking people, in the Bengal Presidency and the province of Bihar and Odisha, threatened to negate the colonial government’s efforts to introduce representative government based on franchise. Gopabandhu Das’s concern about the creation of a community based on the homogenizing potential of expansive humanism was informed by his desire to think the relationship between the Odias, Bengalis, and Biharis differently.

A stake in this rethinking was an argument for a national community that allowed for both Indian nationalism and Odia regional affiliation. The shift in the understanding of community represented by the difference between Madhusudan Das and Gopabandhu Das’ approach to Bengalis and Biharis illustrates the gradual expansion of the limits of regional and national allegiances. That is, the move from an idea of regional community based on exclusive interests to an idea of regional community predicated on expansive humanism enabled the imagination of an Indian citizen who could be simultaneously loyal to both India and Odisha.

At the root of this shift and the creation of this doubly marked Indian citizen is Gopandhu’s astute sublimation of language as the basis of regional community. Gopabandhu effected the resolution of the contradiction between an exclusively language-based regional identity and the increasingly urgent need to imagine an inclusive Indian national identity by founding his definition of Odia identity on the notion of the shared space of Odisha. As the rhetoric within the Indian National Congress illustrates, language as the basis of regional community sat uncomfortably within the Congress’s political agenda of unification. Even when it was acknowledged, linguistic identity of the Indian peoples was seen as an irrevocable fact of Indian life that needed to be harnessed to further the project of Indian nationalism. Within this context, the Odia drive to define regional community on exclusively linguistic lines could possibly disrupt the nationalist agenda. Therefore, the linguistic identity drive had to be sublimated into something a bit more acceptable within the nationalist framework. However, as I have illustrated in the discussion of my use of the term sublimation in the introduction, this sublimation of regional exclusivity is always inherently reversible. It is wrought by the pressure to fit into a broader Indian federation of linguistic communities and to account for uncomfortable minorities like Muslims, domiciled Bengalis, and, most importantly, adivasis within the territory being claimed as Odisha.

In his 1920 speech, Gopabandhu was able to achieve this by shifting the basis of Odia regional community from language to shared space. This space, “Natural Orissa” was already a discrete space in the Odia imagination but not yet an officially defined territory. As Gopabandhu’s speech suggests, this imagined shared space of natural Odisha was also marked by specific qualities of sacredness and religious inclusivity. With the Indian National Congress’ establishment of Provincial Congress Committees on linguistic lines, the demand for a separate territory contiguous with natural Odisha could be made in earnest. From this moment on, Odisha as a spatial and territorial category came to be central to Odia politics of the 1920s and 1930s. In the next half of the book, we will see how this spatial and territorial idea of Odisha is elaborated through the use of the discourse of inclusive humanism that was at the root of the sublimation of exclusive language politics in Odia regional politics and eventually in debates about regional territory at the national level. We will see how this sublimation of language and its attendant discourse of shared everyday life was employed to claim areas inhabited by adivasi communities as part of Odisha in Chapter 5. But in the next chapter, I will illustrate how the foundations of this discourse of shared everyday life were established in spatial imaginaries of Odisha that were elaborated as part of colonial, regional, and national descriptions of Odisha. This spatial imaginary of Odisha as a sacred, inclusive land is what legitimized Odia claims to adivasi areas during the formation of the new province in 1936.