Citizenship, Regional Identity and Nationalism in Eastern India
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Divided Loyalties: Citizenship, Regional Identity and Nationalism in Eastern India (1866- 1931) A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Pritipuspa Amarnath Mishra IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Ajay Skaria December 2008 © Pritipuspa Amarnath Mishra, December, 2008 Acknowledgements I have incurred many debts while researching and writing this dissertation. I am especially thankful to my advisor, Ajay Skaria. His guidance—an incredible mix of kindness and intellectual challenge—has helped me to come to some of the central questions of this dissertation. Simona Sawhney, whose generous mentorship over the last few years has pushed me to find my academic voice, has my eternal gratitude. Her insightful yet cryptic questions have often shown me the promise of my own work when I failed see it myself. Several other professors have influenced this work significantly, and I am particularly indebted to Qadri Ismail, Tom Wolfe, John Mowitt, Anna Clark and Barbara Welke for their liberality of time and expertise. Finally, I must express my gratitude towards my teachers at St. Xaviers College, Mumbai and the University of Hyderabad who encouraged me to pursue academics in the first place. Without support and guidance from Prof. Fleur D’Souza of St Xavier’s College and Dr. Anindita Mukhopadhyay and Dr. Dilip Menon at the University of Hyderabad, this fledgling academic would have never embarked on this exciting intellectual journey. I have been fortunate to receive funding at critical points while developing, researching, and completing this project. Several timely grants from the University of Minnesota’s graduate school and history department all helped me to complete the travel necessary for my research. This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of the American Institute of Indian Studies in the form of a year long junior research fellowship. i My research on the history of Orissa took me to a number of archives and libraries. I would like to thank the staff at the Orissa State Archives, the Madras State Archives, the Nehru Memorial Museum, the National Archives, Utkal Sahitya Samaj, Kedarnath Gabesana Sansad, Orissa State Museum and the British Library for their generous assistance. I have a number of colleagues and friends I would also like to thanks. N’Jai-An Patters has been a dear friend and comrade in arms since the beginning of the project. Her ambition and drive has inspired me to push myself. Her generosity and emotional support has been one of the influences that have helped me complete this dissertation. Intense conversations over cheap gin and tonics with Papori Bora have helped sustain my enthusiasm for my research. Graduate classes and drunken dinners shared with Emily Rook-Koepsel, Aditi Chandra and Julietta Singh have provided me with a sense of academic community that was crucial for the completion of this dissertation. I am truly honored to share this experience with N’Jai-An, Papori, Emily, Aditi and Julietta and look forward to many more years of friendship. I am also lucky to have benefited from a wonderful group of people who have helped me professionally and personally. Among them are: Sarah Crabtree, Sreeparna Chattopadhyay, Neely Mahapatra, Siddharth Satpathy, Abir Bazaz, Nadeem Asrar, Lisa Ramos, Jason Parker, Olga Dror and Riaz Latif. I would also like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Katie Levin, Assistant Director the Writing Center at the University of Minnesota. She has read and commented on more drafts of this dissertation than anyone else. She has motivated me ii to write consistently as I struggled to finish this dissertation. I thank her for her patience and wisdom. Finally, I have been blessed with the support of a wonderful family who has walked alongside of me every step in this process. My parents Amarnath Mishra and Puspamitra Mishra have shown me through their love and support that “I can do anything I put my mind to”. Furthermore, they have been central to the research enterprise involved in this project. They have enthusiastically accompanied me in my meandering journey through many Indian archives. As I continued to read and analyze Oriya documents, my parents exposed me to the complex texture of nineteenth century Oriya prose. Irrespective of its outcome, this project has enabled me to have glimpse into the intellectual lives of my parents. It is not often that children have that privilege. I thank them for allowing me in. My sister, Swapnapushpa Mishra’s uncompromising insistence that I pursue a graduate career has been a continuing source of motivation. Her quiet strength and perseverance has inspired me to see this project through. As he joined the family, my brother-in-law Deepak Konale has shown me a unique outlook on life and ambition. I thank him for providing much needed perspective to an otherwise obsessive process. I would also like to thank my in-laws, K.G.S Mani, R. Asha and G. Nithya. They entered my life at a crucial point of this project and joined the rest of my family in cheering me on. I thank them for their unquestioning acceptance and love. Finally, without my Bharath I would have never pushed so hard to complete this dissertation. In the last few years, he was shown me the promise of a iii loving and fulfilling future that has made me impatient to move on to bigger and brighter things. I am grateful for his unwavering love and support. iv For Mama and Papa v Abstract This dissertation poses the following question—What does the co-existence of profound linguistic difference and unitary nationalism reveal about the nature of the Indian nation and the relationship between the region and the nation in India. To this end, I focus on the period when a tactical resolution between the demands of the region and the nation occurred in India. My contention is that at the root of this resolution is the need (both at the regional and national level) to imagine a new citizen of emergent India. Through detailed studies of cultural and intellectual engagement of regional political, literary and historical organizations in early twentieth century Orissa, this dissertation traces the resolution of regional and national interests. I argue that in the period between 1900 and 1920, the emergence of the idea of a universal and politicized Indian citizen occasioned this resolution of the tension between the region and the nation. As the meanings of politics, statehood, rule and subject-hood changed due the colonial state’s efforts to introduce franchise in India, both the Indian National Congress and the major regional political organization in Orissa, the Utkal Sammillani were forced to elaborate a clear relationship between Orissa as a region and the broader Indian nation in order to define the universal Indian citizen. vi Table of Contents 1. Introduction 3 2. Chapter 1: In defense of Oriya: Language, 32 Literature and Community in Nineteenth Century Orissa (1866- 1898) 3. Chapter 2: Naturalizing Orissa: History and the 101 Problem of the Tribal (1872-1931) 4. Chapter 3: Towards a Politics of the Colonized: Utkal Sammillani 143 and the Emergence of a Vocabulary of Nationalism in Colonial Orissa. (1900-1920) 5. Chapter 4: Regionalizing Nationalism: Franchise and 178 the Emerging Oriya Imagination of the Indian Nation (1918-1920) 6. Conclusion 236 7. Works Cited 243 vii List of Figures Figure 1- Distribution of Oriya speaking areas in 1900 1 Figure 2- Distribution of Oriya speaking areas in 1912 2 viii Figure 1 1 Figure 2 2 Introduction Divided Loyalties: Citizenship, Regional Identity and Nationalism In 1950, the Constituent Assembly set up to draft the Constitution of India chose Rabindranath Tagore’s 1911 song Jana Gana Mana as the national anthem of the new Indian republic. The song, which invokes various regions of India, reads in English as follows: Thou are the ruler of the minds of all people, dispenser of India's destiny. Thy name rouses the hearts of Punjab, Sind, Gujurat and Maratha. Of the Dravid and Orissa and Bengal. It Echoes in the hills of Vindhyas and Himalayas, mingles in the music of Yamuna and Ganga and is chanted by the waves of the Indian Sea. They pray for your blessing and sing thy praise. The salvation of all people is thy hand, thou dispenser of India's destiny. Victory, Victory, Victory to thee. This song defined India as a collective of linguistic regions such as Punjab, Sindh, Orissa, Gujarat and Bengal. By choosing this song as the national anthem of the Indian republic, the Constituent Assembly in 1950 acknowledged the constitutive nature of regional linguistic states in the normative understanding of the Indian Union. However, it was between when the song was written in 1911 and its adoption as the Indian national anthem in 1950 that the linguistic regions it mentioned assumed this political and cultural significance for an independent India. In 1911, when this song was written, the precise linguistic nature of these areas was not considered their most dominant feature. At the 3 national level, these areas were seen as merely geographical units not yet marked by the various meanings that the term ‘linguistic region’ would evoke half a century later during the linguistic reorganization of the Indian provinces.1 Indeed, for Tagore areas like Punjab, Sindh and Orissa merely served as parts of India. As actual efforts by the colonial government for the linguistic reorganization of British Indian provinces had not yet begun in 1911, Orissa and Sindh would not become separate provinces until a quarter of a century later. Furthermore, the Indian National Congress, the most influential All India nationalist party, had not yet rethought its understanding of India as a federation of linguistic provinces.