6

The Hindi Political Sphere*

Francesca Orsini

I n the history of political culture in India, the year 1920 marked the
beginning of a new phase in the nationalist movement. Mass politics,
indigenous languages, popular participants, counter symbols, and
counter authority began to play an unprecedented role. The ‘public’
that was the target of nationalist rhetoric seemed finally to be physically
there. New leaders and a new Congress party emerged from this phase
of the movement, and by the end of the 1930s, an indigenous political
leadership was ready to inherit the reins of the country.1 Many of the
activists and leaders, who emerged in north India during the campaign
of 1920, came from the world of Hindi journalism. Writers also believed
that they were serving the movement, by fighting with their pens.
Literature, the press, and politics were seen as a continuum, a joint
effort to liberate the country.
Yet, the relationship between the literary and the political spheres
was far more complex than most accounts would have us believe.
Indeed, as we shall see, it was a difficult and often, very bitter one.
*Originally published as ‘The Hindi Political Sphere’, in Francesca Orsini’s The Hindi

Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002, pp. 309–22.
1For political histories, Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in the Uttar

Pradesh, 1926–34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978;
Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1974; Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885 to 1947, Delhi: Macmillan, 1983.
122 The Indian Public Sphere

This had partly to do with the predicament of Hindi as a language,

snubbed by non-Hindi politicians and yet picked as the national
language. Other difficulties stemmed from the peculiar development of
the nationalist political sphere. In order to understand the relationship
between the Hindi literary sphere and this expanding political sphere,
several angles are needed. First of all, that of ‘institutional’ spaces and
activities, both within and outside the spaces allowed by the colonial
state—what I have termed ‘constitutional’ and ‘non-constitutional’
domains. There are several questions to be asked. Who had access to
political institutions? Was language a barrier and, if so, how was it
circumvented? Did ‘constitutional’ and ‘non-constitutional’ politics
imply two different attitudes to the state and to the public?

CONSTITUTIONAL AND NON-CONSTITUTIONAL DOMAINS

How can we get svarajya with the Boards?
Srikrsnadatt Palival
How can we get svarajya by leaving schools?
Sumangal Prakas’s father2

In the literary sphere, autonomous activism and institution building

went side by side with pressure on, and cooperation with, the colonial
state. Literary associations from the nineteenth century onwards not
only pursued their autonomous literary agenda, they were also
convinced that independent activities were always best enhanced by
state support; even when the colonial state had long ceased having the
semblance of a benevolent agency, the presence of nationalist-minded
officers, sensitive to the Hindi project, always left open a channel of
communication. One finds a similar double track in the political
sphere. The nationalist movement was concerned both with entering
colonial institutions, gradually occupying the state in order to change
it from within, and with autonomous activism, mobilizing an increasing
number of popular groups, antagonizing the state, and creating a
counter authority. Both aspects need to be taken into consideration
when analysing the political culture of Indian nationalism.
2Srikrsnadatt Palival, ‘Kaunsilorh dvara svarajya’, Visal Bharat, February 1936, p. 449;

‘Sri Sumangal Prakas ke samsmaran’, in Krsnanath (ed.), Kasi vidyapith hirak jayanti.
Abhinandan granth, Benares: Jnanmandal, 1983, p. 185.
 The Hindi Political Sphere 123

In this section, then, constitutional and non-constitutional politics

signify two styles of politics, of mediating within society and between
society and the state. By constitutional politics, I mean a political
culture that was largely shaped by colonial expectations and by the
spaces offered by the colonial state, and which reproduced those
expectations in the vernacular. By non-constitutional politics, I signify
a political culture which tried to grow more autonomously, with an
original cultural content and independent institutions that provided
spaces where colonial culture could be replaced by a national one.
This does not mean that it was not influenced by the colonial context,
of course, only that in its self-representation, it self-consciously
emphasized autonomous genealogies and alternative idioms. It was
here that non-literate sections of society gained access to the political
sphere and made their presence felt to literate elites, as we shall see.
Some of the peculiarities of the state that these political actors had
to face need to be recalled.3 The European bourgeois public sphere,
described by Habermas, struggled to impose an impersonal notion of
political power and to gradually transform the absolutist state into a
limited constitutional one, subject to public scrutiny, pressure, and
(however partial) influence. The institutions, language, and discourses
of the public sphere emerged from the social terrain of this struggle.
In India, these institutions and discourses were introduced into a
different social universe and under different structural arrangements:
they had to contend with different pressures from the British and the
colonial state itself, and from different groups of Indian subjects.
The colonial state that late nineteenth and early twentieth century
Hindi intellectuals faced was an ostensibly benevolent and liberal state
which appeared amenable to reasonable arguments and claimed to be
equally neutral towards all its Indian subjects. Under colonial rule, all
Indian citizens, irrespective of status, were subjected to the same set
of impersonal laws and public courts. Thus, any complaint against
the law or against other citizens had to take the same form of public
procedure, through formal complaints and petitions, magistrates, and
courts of law.

3The following discussion is heavily indebted to Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On the Construction

of Colonial Power: Structure Discourse Hegemony’, in Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks
(eds), Contesting Colonial Hegemony, London: British Academic Press, 1994, pp. 19–54.
124 The Indian Public Sphere

Yet this state, which swore by liberal principles, pursued interests

that were subordinate to those of the mother country, even when they
differed from the interests of the colonial subjects. The British colonial
state in India contended with several conflicting demands of
accountability and different needs for legitimacy. First and foremost,
it was accountable to the regime in England and to British public
opinion. But, and in this lay the first paradox of the colonial state, it
was far more powerful than the state was in the mother country, and
not bound by the democratic rules, restraints, and demands that
restricted elitist politics there. On the other hand, it was an Indian state,
that is, it had to respond in an intelligible and effective way to the
pressures and the social logic of India. In its interaction with the
dissimilar and largely unrelated publics of Indian society, and in its
discourse of legitimacy both in India and in England, colonial rule
adopted different attitudes and idioms. In Sudipta Kaviraj’s words,
‘In its dialogue with British public opinion it adopted a tone of
reasonableness; with the indigenous middle class, it carried on a
dialogue through education and legislation; while vis-a-vis the sullenly
distant popular masses, it adopted primarily a monologue of force.’4
Without relinquishing its first vocation of economic extraction,
the post-1858 Indian state became more of a ‘strong’, national state. It
intervened to restructure the economy, social processes (through
education, bills of social reform, etc.), and relations between the state
and society, thus opening new grounds of public confrontation with
Indian subjects. Bilingualism—the hierarchy of English and Indian
‘vernaculars’—was written into all the relations between the colonial
state and its subjects and became duplicated in Indian society. Finally,
although power under the colonial regime was public in the sense of
being at least a formal and impersonal set of laws and institutions,
however iniquitous to large sections of the population, it was heavily
‘personified’ in local figures of authority—landlords—who usually
had at least some control of the impersonal and ‘legal’ state machinery,
the police, and the courts.
However, to the extent that colonial state power was impersonal
and public and, at least formally, not absolute, it potentially implied
a democratic discourse, which both imperialists and nationalists
4Ibid., p. 21.
 The Hindi Political Sphere 125

tried to exploit to different ends.5 This fostered a culture of petition

and of confidence in state patronage that was a direct consequence
of state publicity: if the state claimed that its laws applied to all, and
that subjects could and should appeal by public means, colonial
intellectuals believed that changing the letter of the law would bring
about actual change.
However limited, the colonial state did open some spaces for Indian
participation, and encouraged the formation and expression of ‘Indian
public opinion’ to a certain extent. Indians co-opted through
nomination belonged to two groups: they were either ‘native chiefs’,
who were supposed to command the natural obedience of the masses;
or western-educated, bilingual civil servants and professionals, often
lawyers, who formed a bourgeoning educated public opinion.6 Since
these limited constitutional proceedings were carried on in English,
bilingual professionals had an advantage over local notables who did
not know the language.7 They became familiar with the official ‘public
idiom’, both in speech and in writing, in order to understand and
interact with the state machinery. These first politicians, of whom
Madan Mohan Malaviya is an excellent example, then translated such
concepts and language into the vernacular, and publicly held the state
up against its own rules.8 This was a creative process; in Malaviya’s
case, for example, it meant espousing Britain’s colonizing mission to
demand that the rule of the liberal state be applied to the Indian state,

5See the section on ‘The Colonial Context’, a chapter in Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and

Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat city, 1852–1928, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991.
6Restricted franchise structurally limited participation in ‘constitutional politics’, before

1920, to landed and moneyed elites and to educated professionals, the latter often tied to the
former as clients. Being an honorary magistrate or sitting on the local boards became a
mark of prestige and a way of securing a new venue of patronage and influence. Nomination
was also considered a sign of official benevolence and was one way of showing the kind of
‘public commitment’ British authorities so appreciated; see C.A. Bayly, The Local Roots of
Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 and Douglas Haynes,
Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India, 1991.
7Actual participation at meetings was usually low, and it was occasionally remarked

that the notables or their courtiers who sat on them sometimes did not know English.
8For example, each year the Chairman of the Municipal Board submitted an annual

report to the Commissioner for comment (samalochna). In 1920, The Kashi Central
Ratepayers’ Association submitted a similar detailed report ‘on behalf of the general public’
(sarvasadharan ki aur se), which the Benares daily, Aj, translated into Hindi and published
over several issues in September. Aj, 12 September 1920 and ff.
126 The Indian Public Sphere

and refuting Indians’ incapacity for self-government. He adduced

textual evidence to argue that, in fact, self-rule had existed in ancient
India, that is, the demand for it by modern Indians was not imitative
of British democracy.
Constitutional politicians spoke in the name of the ‘general public’
(sarvasadharan), yet, as with Hindi reformist intellectuals, the public
they claimed to represent was only vaguely defined and intrinsically
restricted. As Malaviya’s case shows, constitutional politics raised their
claims only in the spaces allowed by the colonial state; even svarajya
was envisaged as a gradual reform and paternalistic democracy. Despite
the occasionally fiery tones, the kind of popular participation Malaviya
requested was very limited. It was more important that the dialogue
and cooperation with the government should not halt. Thus, Malaviya
invited the Prince of Wales to BHU in 1929 and conferred upon him a
degree honoris causa, while the Congress in the whole province
boycotted the visit and staged black-flag demonstrations.
This style of constitutional politics self-consciously upheld
boundaries between different areas of life: there was the official public
sphere of the board–assembly–law court, there was the civic public
sphere, which could overlap with that of the community in religious
and political terms, and there was the sphere of the family biradari
(brotherhood), each with its distinct idiom, ideology, and behaviour.
To take Malaviya again: in the parliamentary arena, he used a strictly
constitutional idiom; at the same time, he worked to create a Hindu
constituency around symbols like the cow and Hindi, and yet, he
strongly opposed official and unofficial interference with personal and
family practices and beliefs.
Successive constitutional innovations, motivated by the twin
requirements of financial devolution and the need for a wider circle
of Indian collaborators, partially enlarged this constitutional space,
first at the local and then at the provincial level. Gradually election
supplanted nomination.9 However inconsequential, elections turned
9For constitutional reforms, see Sarkar, Modern India, 1983. Briefly, the 1916 UP

Municipalities Act and the 1922 UP District Boards Act introduced election at the local
level and had important consequences, especially in terms of expectations and opportunities.
The 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford constitution introduced partly elective provincial
legislatures; despite the extended franchise, its bias in favour of land-owning classes ensured
the return of a loyal majority. The act also provided representation without responsibility:
 The Hindi Political Sphere 127

constitutional politics into more of a political arena and forced

candidates to turn to ‘the public’ and develop proper idioms in the
vernaculars, carefully nuanced to match each particular audience.10 Even
‘traditional leaders’ favoured by the policy of nomination, now had to
make active efforts to ensure their erstwhile influence,11 while separate
electorates favoured the politics and idiom of community interests.
When Congress activists and leaders, legitimized by the non-
constitutional movement, were elected to the boards and provincial
councils, this was saluted as a popular victory in that they seemed to
‘occupy the state’. Although they insisted on certain signs of change
(dress, the use of the vernacular, and of course ideology), the
Congressmen broadly adapted to the constitutional style. This involved
a certain formality of countenance, obeisance to parliamentary rules,
and the ability to use the official idiom, albeit in the vernacular. In
fact, the ability to master the idiom of constitutional politics remained
a fundamental skill, a symbol of the bilingualism Indian politicians
had to command. The first time Sampurnanand spoke in the UP
Legislative Council, after the 1926 elections, he began his speech in Hindi:
The Speaker, Dr Sita Ram, pulled me up, the rule being that unless a member
was unable to speak in English, he must use that language. In my heart, I was
thankful to the President, because I was anxious that what I was going to say
should be understood by the English members opposite. But as a Hindi writer

certain matters remained ‘reserved’ (‘diarchy’); governors had special powers of veto and
‘certification’ (that is, to enact legislation refused by the Legislative Assemblies); and ministers
were responsible to the governors and not to the assembly. See Pandey, 1978, pp. 24 ff.
10For example, it was difficult for C.Y. Chintamani, the renowned editor of The Leader,

to campaign for a seat in Jhansi in 1920 without knowing any Hindi; finally, he had to utter
a few sentences in a restricted public meeting just to disavow criticism on this point. See
Vrindavanlal Varma, Apni kahani, Delhi: Prabhat Prakashan, 1993 (First published in 1962),
pp. 55 ff.
11The real quandaries brought about by this process are poignantly captured in the

following incident, reported in the pro-Congress daily, Aj, in 1920, as ‘A fight between kshatriyas
and non-kshatriyas’. A local zamindar had called a ‘public meeting’ to ensure peasant support
for his anti-Congress candidate, who tried to play the card of the solidarity between rural
classes. However, since the meeting was public, it was open to local Congress supporters. One
of them stood up in protest and mentioned the satyagraha Gandhi had undertaken for the
peasants in Kheri and Champaran. The villagers started rumbling in agreement. At this point,
the chairman of the meeting declared it a private meeting: ‘We have spent Rs 1000’, he said,
‘this is our praivet miting. It is we who decide whether to allow others to speak if we want to’
(Aj, 22 September 1920, p. 6). At this, other local activists stood up in protest and said that it
was a public meeting and it was extremely despicable for them to stop or threaten anyone.
128 The Indian Public Sphere

I had to show preference to Hindi. I, therefore, protested mildly against the

President’s order and continued in English.12

In the constitutional arena, then, Hindi was a symbol, while English

was the language of substance.
Expectations from Congress participation in constitutional politics
were always likely to exceed what circumstances allowed. With the
emergence of popular, non-constitutional politics led by Gandhi,
however, criticism of the boards became structurally different. Whereas
earlier criticism tended to focus on individual malpractice, now it was
the structure itself that came under fire. Hindi editor and Congress
leader, Srikrisnadatt Palival, noted in 1936 that popular opinion was
very much against the Legislative Council, which it ‘rightly’ considered
the ‘temple of Maya’:
The Councils are temples of Maya because ostensibly (pratyaks men) they are
there to help people rule, to put the strings of power in the hands of their
representatives; but actually they are there to fulfil the interests of the ruling
and capitalist classes! The whole electoral procedure is a demonic Maya
(raksasi maya) from the beginning to the end. In our country not everybody
has yet the right to vote. Those who have it do not control the registration of
names. As a result, there is quite a bundle when the list of registers is made.
This malpractice has reached its peak in the Municipalities...13

Besides, constitutional boards only appeared to make power public, in

other words, transparent and accessible: ‘In councils and assemblies one
meets power and wealth face to face...[but] the rulers’ rights are kept
safe in a temple where representatives, like untouchables, are denied
entry’.14 Yet, after denouncing the serious limitations on political activity
within the assemblies, and agreeing with the popular perception that
they were a travesty (svang), Palival concluded that to ‘enter the enemy’s
fortress’ was a necessary part of the overall strategy for winning svarajya.15
12Sampurnanand, Memories and Reflections, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962, p.

46. It is significant that this major Hindi politician chose to write his autobiography in
English, probably aiming at a pan-Indian audience.
13Palival, ‘Kaunsilon dvara svarajya’, Visal Bharat, February 1936, pp. 449–52.
14Ibid.
15‘There is no other way. Even Lenin reached this conclusion, even Gandhi has reached

it now...We neither have or should have any hope in the councils; but we should also stop
talking of boycott. Council-entry is a necessary evil, and with this in mind we should put up
with them;’ ibid.
 The Hindi Political Sphere 129

Disappointment over the performance of elected Congress boards

could even be turned into an indictment of the conflict between ‘our
boards’ and the alien state. When the Benares Municipal Board was
threatened (and then met) with suspension for corruption in 1932,
Premchand wrote that the boards were still to be valued as a political
space, open for the public to exercise some degree of activity and power
in the administration. Its achievements (for example, in the field of
education) should not be belittled, and enthusiastic non-official
members could always open the possibility of reform. ‘Whatever
progress there has been in Kasi Municipality’, he wrote, ‘it has happened
during the period of the non-official (gair-sarkari) board, and in my
opinion the administration of a non-official board is always the best;
at least it is not unrestrained (nirankus)’.16
Implied in Palival’s critique was the notion that legitimacy rested
with the ‘people’, the ‘true’ nation shut outside the ‘temples of Maya’.
Taking on the fictitious persona of a ‘shack-dweller’ (jhonpra vala),
editor, poet, and Congress activist Makhanlal Chaturvedi voiced a plea
to the ‘travellers on the national path’ (rastriy path ke pathik) entitled,
‘Ham jansadharan hain’ (We are the common people). Through
mimicry of the stereotypical deferential attitude of the subordinate to
the powerful, he measured the distance between constitutional
nationalists and the aspirations of common people.

This is the voice of a wretched man, a common, ignorant man, only proud to
serve. You are the leaders, strongwilled and wise. [...]
Your Reform Bill has been passed, very well. We also speak your praise
with great joy, but in our huts our wives ask us: ‘Will this new law bring us
food to fill our stomachs?’ We also believe that education is necessary, but
education cannot fill an empty stomach!...Therefore, mahatmas with lofty
ideals, we salute you. We thank you, all we have got is tears and we wash your
feet with them, but nobody listens to our cry. You are clearing the road at the
top. It will take centuries to reach the bottom. We don’t have food to eat
tomorrow, how can we wait patiently for centuries?17

16Jagaran, 21 November 1932, in Premchand, Vividh Prasang, vol. 2, p. 515. See also

Paripurnanda Varma’s articles on the history of Kasi Municipal Board since the Bhagvan
Das-led Congress board of 1923, revealing instances of official responsibility in sabotaging
the elected board; Aj, February 1933.
17Makhanlal Chaturvedi, ‘Ham jansadharan hain’, Karmavir, 14 February 1920, in S.

Joshi (ed.), Makhanlal Chaturvedi Racnavali, vol. 2. Delhi: Vani Prakasan, 1983, pp. 13–14.
130 The Indian Public Sphere

This critique of constitutional politics, and the acknowledgement of

the non-constitutional domain as the true sphere of the public, had
several implications. First of all, it emphasized the importance of the
institutions of the public sphere—from the press to book publishing
and education—as political activities, and of literary figures as
nationalist actors. Writing or teaching were ‘constructive’ activities,
and were as important as any other in ‘serving’ the nation and
furthering the cause of the nationalist movement. Premchand’s
political stories, written during the campaigns of 1920 and 1930,
provide the ideal example: for the writer they were a way of putting
his pen at the direct service of the movement and of propagating its
message; for the readers they were a way of making sense of radical
political slogans through realistic human stories. Typically, they climax
at moments of ‘conversion’ to the nationalist cause, almost helping
the reader to take the same step.18
Second, non-constitutional politics emphasized the political role
of the press as a vehicle of popular public opinion. It was especially
the duty of the vernacular press to mirror the real nation. The Hindi
political press actually changed from being ‘journals of ideas’ for the
educated few, to newspapers rooted in local society, reflecting and
addressing the ‘sadharan samaj’:
Now the time has come for our political ideology and movement not to be
restricted to the English-educated, and to spread among the common people
(samanya janta), and for Indian public opinion (lokmat) to be not the opinion
of those few educated people, but to mirror the thoughts of all the classes of
the country. When we agitate for svarajya we should not forget the principle
of a famous political thinker, that democratic rule is actually the rule of public
opinion. And one very important way of creating a wide informed public
opinion is to use Indian (svadeshi) languages along with English for our
political interactions and debates.19

18See Premchand’s stories such as ‘Lagdant’ (The Competitors, July 1921); ‘Chakma’ (‘A

Little Trick’, Prabha, November 1922); ‘Julus’ (‘The Procession’, Hams, March 1930); Samar-
yatra (The Battle March), Benares: Saraswati Press, 1930. The collection Samar-yatra was
published in 1930, in the heat of the Civil Disobedience campaign, at the specially low price
of two and a half annas; see Statement of Publications, Allahabad: Government Press, 1930.
19Vidyarthi’s editorial on the forthcoming Lucknow Congress, Pratap, 3 July 1916, in

Radhakrishna Avasthi (ed.), Kranti ka udghos. Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi ki kalam se, vol. 1.
Kanpur: Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi Shiksha Samiti, 1978, p. 240.
 The Hindi Political Sphere 131

Hindi editors such as G.S. Vidyarthi in Kanpur, Srikrsnadatt Palival in

Agra, Makhanlal Chaturvedi in Jabalpur, Dasarath Prasad Dvivedi in
Gorakhpur, and Baburao Visnu Pararkar in Benares were at the
forefront of this change. Prosecuted and even jailed when censorship
and repression grew stricter during mass campaigns, they often became
local heroes. With such events, the press became even more clearly
identified with the political movement, and it was the Hindi press
that first voiced the need to include larger sections of society in the
movement, primarily peasants and women.20 ‘Let’s go to the villages’
(chaliye ganvon ki taraf), urged G.S. Vidyarthi, ‘Whoever wants to work
should turn to the villages. Work in the towns has already been done.’21
This popular leaning inspired direct criticism of the pre-Gandhian
Congress: if it really claimed to be the ‘voice of the whole of India’
(samyukt bharat ki avaz) ‘now...those doors must be open which for
some reason have been kept closed so far’, wrote Vidyarthi.22
Another implication of non-constitutional politics was that the
politics of the street came to be valued above the ‘politics of the
library’.23 Even before 1920, there had been clear signs of dissatisfaction
in the United Provinces24 with the moderate, constitutional Congress
of the province.25 During the Non-Cooperation movement, joining
the movement was expressed in terms of a battle (larai, sangram), an
arena which one ‘jumped into’, with akhara-style metaphors. It was
20For an informative study, see Brahmanand, Bhartiy svatantrata andolan. For

information on censorship and repression of the Hindi press after Civil Disobedience, see
editorial note in Sudhd, IV, 1, 3, October 1930, pp. 434–5.
21Editorial, Pratap, 19 January 1925, in R. Avasthi (ed.), Kranti ka udghos, vol. 2, 1978,

p. 767.
22G.S. Vidyarthi’s editorial, Pratap, 11 January 1915, in R. Avasthi (ed.), Kranti ka udghos,

vol. 1, 1978, p. 103.

23For an excellent example of an early satire on the nature and limitations of

constitutional political culture as ‘politics of the library’, see the fifth scene of Bhartendu
Harishchandra’s play Bharat durdasa (1880), in S. Misra (ed.), Bhartendu Granthavali, vol.
1. Benares: Nagari Pracharini Sabha, 1974.
24After independence, the United Provinces were renamed Uttar Pradesh.
25Hindi editors looked elsewhere, to Bengal and Maharastra, for radicalism and heroic

terrorism. Tilak’s popularity among students, Hindi scribes, and future politicians proves
the case. For example, both G.S. Vidyarthi and Narendra Deva claimed Tilak as the greatest
political influence before Gandhi; see M.L. Bhargava, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, Delhi:
Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1988, p. 53; and B.V. Keskar
and V.K.N. Menon (eds), Acharya Narendra Dev: A Commemoration Volume. New Delhi:
National Book Trust, 1971, p. 25.
132 The Indian Public Sphere

there that the nationalist struggle was to be fought. Yet, the crowd at
nationalist demonstrations awakened mixed reactions, even among
Congressmen. On the one hand, it was celebrated as a visible symbol
of the ‘true nation’ and its power; from the point of view of the common
participants, the experience of the crowd was one of exhilarating
empowerment, in which it defied colonial authority and claimed
legitimacy and authority for itself ‘in the name of Gandhi and Nehru’.26
In Hindi literature, the crowd is often both the stage for heroic
nationalist acts and the audience before which the brutality of the
British and their lackeys is exposed.27 For women in particular, after
svadeshi had provided them with ways of being nationalist at home,
crossing the threshold to take part in picketing, meetings, and
demonstrations was a hugely liberating experience, and it was the
presence of a crowd, its emotional charge, and its self-asserted
legitimacy that allowed individual women to take the first step and
face the consequences. Similarly, the peasant leader, Sahajanand
Sarasvati, learned to take advantage of the emotional impact generated
by massive peasant rallies and demonstrations. On the other hand,
crowds were feared by Congress politicians for their ‘unruliness’ and
their potential to disrupt the exemplary tactics of Congress volunteers,
and were sometimes despised for their naivete. Here, elite and popular
perceptions tended to come into conflict.28
As the concept of svadeshi showed, implicit in the non-constitutional
style of politics was the tendency to cross boundaries and conflate
publics. There were many ways in which one could be ‘nationalist’,
many possible symbolic changes one could make in things ranging

26See Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–22’, in

Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 1–
55; also his Event, Metaphor, Memory, Chauri-Chaura 1922–1992, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
27See, for example, Premchand’s story ‘Julus’ (1930), with its different crowds: the well-

disciplined body of volunteers, their sympathizers, and the idle passers-by who are transformed
into a nationalist crowd by watching the ‘martyrdom’ of the old Muslim man leading the
volunteers, at the hands of a cruel loyalist policeman. The same crowd then witnesses the
defiant nationalism of the policeman’s wife and, ultimately, his own change of heart.
28Gyan Pandey, ‘Congress and the Nation, c. 1917–1947’, Occasional paper no. 69,

Calcutta: Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences, October 1984; Vinita Damodaran, Broken
Promises: Popular Protest, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 230.
 The Hindi Political Sphere 133

from clothing to speech, work to commensality, relations within the

family and with fellow volunteers. The reversal of values that Gandhi’s
idiom and ideology brought about—the overturned hierarchy and
the centrality of the sarvasadharan, the common people, his emphasis
on self-sacrifice over worldly success, and on Indianness versus
modern/foreign culture—enhanced the sense of importance of Hindi
activists and intellectuals. At least in words, English was devalued in
favour of the vernacular; the very ordinariness of Hindi writers seemed
to place them closer to the ‘true nation’ and give them an advantage in
communicating with the masses. In practice the question of popularity
was a thorny one for Hindi writers, for the taste of ‘the people’ often
did not match their expectations. They also discovered that Congress
rhetoric about the true nation was, in fact, mainly rhetoric.
If we compare constitutional and non-constitutional political styles,
we notice a number of interesting differences in the relationship
between Hindi and English, and in attitudes to colonial and traditional
authorities, to the public, to the Hindi literary intelligentsia, and to
political and social change. Constitutional politics translated English
political vocabulary into Hindi but fostered Hindi as a political
language only within a bilingual hierarchy; non-constitutional politics
tended to refuse (at least symbolically) the bilingual hierarchy
altogether and to replace English with the vernacular. A certain success
was achieved in this direction, although in their enthusiasm for Hindi
as rastrabhasa, the Hindi intelligentsia fuelled the conflict with Urdu
and overlooked the difficulties in actually replacing English at the
supra-regional level. In its relationship with colonial and traditional
Indian authorities, despite the occasionally fiery rhetoric, constitutional
politics took a mediatory, compromising stance. Non-constitutional
politics, instead, tended to adopt a confrontational attitude and
establish counter institutions and figures of counter authority
within the movement. Also, whereas constitutional politics upheld
boundaries between separate spheres, trying to contain, so to speak,
the consequences of political awareness from spilling outside the official
or civic domain, non-constitutional politics conflated boundaries and
politicized literature, the household, gender, and social practices. Thus,
while constitutional politicians aimed at political change without social
change, at least for the bottom rungs of society, non-constitutional
134 The Indian Public Sphere

politicians placed social change at the heart of their political agenda.

Constitutional politicians tended to accept that the Indian public was
divided into hierarchical layers and saw their own role as being
mediators between the elites and the masses as well as between the
colonial state and Indian society, and as educators and guides of the
popular public. Politicians and intellectuals who believed in non-
constitutional politics saw their own role and that of the nationalist
movement as one of ‘breaking the chains’ within Indian society itself,
of forging new relationships, and of empowering new subjects. In the
case of women and of peasants, it was in the non-constitutional domain
that these subjects enthusiastically joined the fray, while their
constitutional participation and representation remained negligible.
‘Tokenism’ is the term sometimes used, for example, to describe
women’s presence within the top rungs of Congress.
These are, of course, simplifications. In practice, the two styles
blended and overlapped: constitutional boards became a necessary
evil and even Malaviya envisaged a measure of social change. During
the two decades the two streams intertwined; at different times one
was more prominent than the other. In the end, bilingualism acted as
a kind of bottleneck for vernacular politicians, and parliamentary style
was acknowledged as the prerequisite for rule. The trajectory of
Congress in the two decades under study, in fact, shows two opposite
but concomitant trends. Non-constitutional politics became an
important locus of legitimacy, and of osmosis between the literary and
the political sphere; it allowed access to new subjects and new publics.
At the same time, constitutional politics remained the path to tread.
In the Hindi political sphere, this is mirrored in the fact that Hindi
editor– and activist–politicians did manage to become prominent local
and regional leaders. They were also elected to legislative assemblies,
often defeating traditional men of influence. Once they became
entrenched in the constitutional arena, however, they espoused the
logic of constitutional politics and forgot their role as representatives
of popular aspirations and public opinion.