In Waiting for the People, Nazmul Sultan successfully shows how anticolonial thought and democratic theory can go hand in hand—and that it can be a mistake for a theorist interested in one to ignore the other. In doing so, the book anticipates a point made in a 2025 survey of studies of decolonization: it should have been obvious from the beginning that “decolonization involved gigantic experiments in democratic theory.” As Kevin Duong noted in this survey piece for Political Theory, decolonization globally “was the most ambitious exercise of democratization in human history. With Indian independence, every adult, regardless of sex, was enfranchised at a stroke, even before gaining formal citizenship.” Waiting for the People examines how Indian thinkers theorized democracy in the two centuries before Indian independence and partition, providing an “intellectual genealogy for the form of postcolonial democracy we now see in South Asia and beyond” (p. 28).
A key novelty of Sultan’s book is that it examines anticolonial thought through the lens of “peoplehood” rather than “nationalism.” Typical studies of anticolonial thought that emphasize nationalism often focus on how anticolonialists sought to retain national cultural identity amidst modernization. This focus makes the “theoretical ambitions of Indian anticolonial thinkers to reinvent the meaning of democracy” secondary to the narrative (p. 30). But democracy should be primary, Sultan suggests. Because if we look at what Indian anticolonialists were saying, we see that they were primarily concerned with how to create “a people” that can authorize democratic legitimacy and self-determination from colonial rule. By using the lens of “the people,” Sultan is able to show (in ways a nationalist lens could not allow) how Indian anticolonialists grappled with concepts related to democracy, such as sovereign authority, development, self-rule, and self-determination.
Despite the ideological diversity of the Indian thinkers that Sultan engages in his book, all grappled with the same question concerning peoplehood: How can impoverished, illiterate, “backwards” masses be transformed into “a people” fit for self-rule? By accepting the notion of backwardness, Indian thinkers agreed with British colonialists who believed that Indians were on the lower rungs of a global civilizational hierarchy. But, as we see in chapter 1, whereas the British—notably John Stuart Mill—used this notion to justify colonial rule in India, arguing they could uplift Indians to make them fit for self-rule, Indian anticolonialists saw that the British would perpetually defer that political self-determination. Their task, then, was to “transform the historically ‘backward’ and politically amorphous colonial ‘masses’ into the people” (p. 2). But how?
Sultan divides thinkers wrestling with this task into two camps: those who affirm the notion of “developing” the people and those who are critical of it. In chapter 2, Sultan focuses on nineteenth century “development-affirmative” thinkers like Dadabhai Naoroji and Surendranath Banerjea who argued that colonialism had weakened the masses and that the masses could be made into an upright “people” if more native elites were put in government to guide and improve the people into being fit for self-rule.
Thinkers in the “development-critical” camp, however, rejected this top-down approach. Most notably, as discussed in chapter 3, Gandhi rejected the notion of developing or waiting for “the people.” He argued instead that individuals ought to immediately rule their individual selves. For Gandhi, the idea of collective rule makes little sense because individual actors have nothing to do with others (p. 21). Other “development-critical” thinkers took a different approach. Chapter 4 shows how thinkers like Brajendranath Seal, Radhakamal Mukerjee, and Chittaranjan Das embraced the notion of a “many-willed” people—rather than attempt to create a unified people with representative government—and “sought to ground sovereignty on the small scale of village republics, which would then be brought together in a loose federal association” (p. 131). But paradoxically, the federalists also shared the normative commitment to the principle of popular sovereignty. In different ways, then, they tried to reconcile the concept of a many-willed people and the ideal of popular sovereignty (p. 134).
In chapter 5, we see the revival of the “development-affirmative” tradition of the pre-Gandhian era through Jawaharlal Nehru, who became India’s first prime minister upon the country’s independence in 1947. For Nehru, a sovereign state free of imperial constraints could and should develop the masses. What he demanded from the people was not that they prove their capacity for sovereignty but only that they “express their readiness to authorize the acceleration of their own development” (p. 174). In other words, the people had to not only want national independence but also to rapidly transform themselves, because mere independence was not enough to produce “real political freedom” (p. 177). Inspired by the Soviet Union, Nehru became convinced that a planned state was needed to rapidly industrialize the country. But he did not simply copy the Soviet model. Aware that the phase of industrialization by itself could not “be trusted to guide the political path,” Nehru “concluded that a democratic form of planning—led by a republican state at the helm of economic production and distribution—would best facilitate the ‘onward march’ to the future” (p. 180).
However, as we see in chapter 6, the majority principle of representative democracy would become a problem in India. Thinkers like Jinnah and Ambedkar wanted the minority to have “as much control over the time of development as the majority did” (p. 217). Indian minorities worried that the majority would not be able to rise beyond their group identity. Given this split between the majority and the minority, the classic boundary problem of democracy expressed itself in both the caste system and in the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. The unfortunate resolution to such a dilemma, of course, was partition.
Waiting for the People is a brilliant contribution to our understanding of the diversity of colonized peoples’ responses to colonialism. The use of “peoplehood” rather than “nationalism” is a clever vehicle for showcasing such responses. Yet I wonder if the peoplehood framework is as suitable for studying the thought of other colonized peoples as it is for India. Perhaps elsewhere, the nationalist frame is more appropriate. India, which is today’s most populous country in the world, has been home to “dizzying diversity” since the eighteenth century (p. 194). As Sultan shows, Indian thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries recognized the difficulty of identifying a single “nation” in India based on shared language, ethnicity, and religion. Banerjea acknowledged that the masses of India appear to be “separated… by every thing that constitutes the distinctive difference between races and peoples” (p. 54). Whereas one can read about how Indian anticolonial thinkers such as Seal, Mukerjee, and Das conceptualized the people as “many-willed,” one would not easily find, say, a Vietnamese anticolonial thinker even entertaining the idea. Virtually all Vietnamese anticolonialists insisted on a unified “Vietnamese people,” even though the reality, of course, was that the Vietnamese were a many-willed people, evidenced by fratricidal conflicts during both the First and Second Indochina Wars.
Sultan compellingly shows how Indian thinkers conceptualized democracy, but in reading the quotes that he offers as evidence, I sometimes wondered if democracy was really their core concern. I often saw less a desire for democracy and more a desire for pride and dignity for an impoverished, dominated people. Rammohun Roy proudly asserts that Indians “have the same capability of improvement as any other civilized people” (p. 42). Tagore pleads that “hope has to be voiced” inside “these exhausted, sapless, broken hearts” (p. 67). Naoroji laments how despotic rule left India a “degraded nation” lacking “growth and welfare” (p. 70) and how European imperialism produced an India “so much poorer in material and moral wealth” (p. 82). Majumdar argued that the contributions of Indian political thinkers preceded their British counterparts (p. 31). Similarly, Mukkerjee feels national pride in ancient Indian texts (p. 74). Many Indians prefer the word “swaraj” to “democracy” because it is proudly theirs, not foreign. A journal edited by Banerjea lauded Naoroji’s use of the term swaraj because it had “a fullness of meaning, a reality about it, which is denied to words drawn from an alien language” (p. 98). And even if Britain were to offer India “the gift of swaraj,” Sultan notes, it would have been self-defeating for Indians to accept it: “The swaraj that is not willed by Indians themselves would belie its very meaning” (p. 106). This suggests that “self-rule” itself is not the main concern but rather the attainment of a dignified and deserved self-rule. By foregrounding democracy, self-rule, and sovereignty, might we overlook more fundamental desires that motivate these thinkers?
I will close by mentioning that, in reading Sultan’s excellent book in anticipation of this critical dialogue, I could not help but see many parallels with Vietnamese anticolonial thought. Just as Rammohun Roy sought to show the compatibility of European ideas in India and advocated gradual improvements, Vietnam’s first democrat, Phan Chu Trinh, sought to show how democracy and liberalism from Europe were compatible with Confucianism in Vietnam and advocated gradual reform. Whereas Seal envisioned a “higher ideal of ‘universal humanity’” if “each people seeks to realize itself more fully” (p. 136), Phạm Quỳnh envisioned global harmony between what he called the “Eastern ideal of wisdom” and the “Western ideal of power.” Just as Gandhi wanted individual Indians to take themselves to be their own authority, Nguyễn An Ninh—an influential Vietnamese radical in the 1920s—exhorted Vietnamese to think and act for themselves, rather than rely on external authority and tradition. And just as Nehru believed the sovereign planning state should guide the people who are simultaneously “both the master and the object of the postcolonial republic” (p. 184), Hồ Chí Minh saw the Vietnamese people as simultaneously the “masters” of the country and as akin to “children” in need of moral guidance. But although there are striking parallels, there are probably just as many differences.
Overall, Sultan’s book contributes significantly to studies of political decolonization by showing how Indian anticolonialists were concerned not only with nationalism but more so with the democratic fitness of the colonized masses. And by showing how colonized peoples creatively wrestled with the terms of modern popular sovereignty, Sultan expands the horizons of studies of democratic theory and popular sovereignty, which have been far more attentive to European and North American experiences than to the colonial world.
