What, then, was the importance of the ‘masses’ in colonial Indian
politics? Since the vast majority didn’t qualify for the vote, it could not
have been in electoral terms. Radical groups sought to organise them
outside the constraints of communal electorates and elections – although
various kinds of legitimacy were habitually claimed by winners of
elections, in the 1937 and 1946–7 elections, whose results were widely
regarded as critical to the eventual partition of India, about 16 and 30%,
respectively, of the adult population were eligible to vote, and many did
not even register to do so.^3 But more moderate groups wishing to show
strength of numbers also sought mass support outside the boundaries
of electoral politics. The importance of making up numbers from among
the ‘masses’ becomes clearer when seen in terms of the political equations
of late colonial rule. The colonial rulers, as far as possible, refused to
recognise hostile nationalists as legitimate – although at times more
acceptable forms of nationalism, willing to co-exist with imperial control,
might be encouraged. This is where the ‘masses’ came in. In order to force
colonial rulers to recognise them, and therefore to negotiate with them
rather than with the ruler’s own loyalist notables, anti-colonial nationalists
had to demonstrate mass support – this was a prerequisite for effective
bargaining with the government. By demonstrating mass support, a group
could demand recognition by the rulers, posing as interpreter of the
popular will, as intermediary between the ‘masses’ and the government,
and in effect offer to act as a buffer zone between potential popular unrest
and the colonial rulers. Once a group was so recognised, it also gained
a relative monopoly over voicing the demands of the masses it claimedto
represent. Whether it actually did so or not is a different matter.
There was, therefore, always the danger of the ‘masses’ turning into
a somewhat abstract concept – which is not to say that all political groups
invoked the ‘masses’ in an instrumental manner. Mass support was
far from an insignificant factor both in the claiming of legitimacy by
a political group and in the running of a successful movement. But many
of the claims made by elite groups to understanding what ‘the people’
really wanted must be treated with some scepticism. ‘They cannot
represent themselves; they must be represented’ was a phrase which would
have accurately summed up most organised political groups’ opinion of
the masses.
In some respects, of course, this was not peculiar to nationalism in a
colony. If nationalism is the intellectual and ideological sleight-of-hand6 INTRODUCTION