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W A I T I N G F O R T H E ­P E O P L E
WAITING FOR THE P
­ EOPLE
The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought

• NAZMUL SULTAN

T H E B E L K N A P P R E S S O F H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, & London, ­England

2024
​Copyright © 2024 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca

First printing

9780674295049 (EPUB)
97806742945070 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Sultan, Nazmul, author.
Title: Waiting for the people : the idea of democracy in Indian anticolonial thought /
Nazmul Sultan.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023008350 | ISBN 9780674290372 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Democracy—India. | Sovereignty. | Liberalism—India—History. |
Self-determination, National—India. | Anti-imperialist movements—India. |
Decolonization—India. | Postcolonialism—India. | India—Politics and
government—19th century. | India—Politics and government—20th century.
Classification: LCC JQ281 .S85 2024 | DDC 320.454—dc23/eng/20230705
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023008350
​C O N T E N T S

Introduction
Waiting for the ­People 1

CHAPTER ONE

A Global Hierarchy of ­Peoples

The Rise of Developmentalism in the Nineteenth ­Century 36

CHAPTER TWO

The Birth of the ­People

Liberalism and the Origins of the Anticolonial Demo­cratic Proj­ect in India 67

CHAPTER THREE

The Colonial Paradox of Peoplehood

Swaraj and the Gandhian Moment 97

CHAPTER FOUR

Between the Many and the One

The Anticolonial Federalist Challenge 130
 CHAPTER FIVE

To “Carry” the ­People through History

Postcolonial Founding and the Idea of ­Independence 159

CHAPTER SIX

The Two Times of the ­People

The Boundary Prob­lem, or the Burden of Unity 191

Conclusion
The ­Futures of Anticolonial ­Political Thought 219

NOTES 235
ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS 289
INDEX 293

vi C ontents
W A I T I N G F O R T H E ­P E O P L E
VLADIMIR: . . . ​What do we do now?

ESTRAGON: Wait.

VLADIMIR: Yes, but while waiting.

—­Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

INTRODUCTION

Waiting for the ­People

the early years of ­

I N 1 8 8 7 —­S T I L L organized anticolonial politics in
India—­Bipin Chandra Pal (1858–1932) observed that “the glorious an-
nals of the Hindoo and Mahomedan periods of Indian history have re-
corded the achievements of priests and princes, of skillful generals and
wise statesmen, and profound thinkers, but the name of the people is
­nowhere to be found in them.” Pal surmised that “the Indian p­ eople”
simply did not exist as a p ­ olitical entity prior to British rule. For all his
discontent with the colonial state, the future “prophet of [Indian] nation-
alism” concluded that the Indian p ­ eople w­ ere being “called into exis-
1
tence” by the British. By this point, Pal’s argument was widely shared by
­political thinkers across the imperial divide. Two d ­ ecades before Pal,
Edwin Arnold, a noted Indologist and historian of British India, had
proudly claimed: “We are making a p ­ eople in India where hitherto t­ here
have been a hundred tribes but no p ­ eople. . . . ​We are introducing an idea
unknown to the East, as it was unknown to E ­ urope before commerce—­the
idea of ­popular rights and equality.”2 Hidden in his mammoth history of
Governor Dalhousie’s regime in India, Arnold’s cele­bration of the demo­
cratic “contribution” of colonialism was very much a distillation of the
argument that foundational British ­ political thinkers such as John

1

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 Stuart Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay had already helped estab-
lish. Yet the question of the Indian p ­ eople—­despite its putative historical
nonbeing—­proved to be both tenacious and decisive. This book is the
story of the abstract figure that s­ haped the terms of anticolonial strug­gle
and the pursuit of democracy in India: the p ­ eople.
The Indian anticolonial demo­cratic proj­ect would be fundamentally
driven by the perceived need to transform the historically “backward” and
po­liti­cally amorphous colonial “masses” into the ­people: this I call the
prob­lem of peoplehood. ­There was more to the prob­lem than the chal-
lenge of constituting preexisting groups into a cohesive p ­ eople, which
is an indispensable ele­ment of demo­cratic politics anywhere. Rather,
­because the ­political qualities of peoplehood themselves appeared to be a
product of historical development, the proj­ect of turning the masses into
the p­ eople became embroiled in a set of paradigmatic problems ulti-
mately to do with the conditions of possibility of democracy in the colo-
nial world. As a conceptual dilemma proper, this prob­lem of peoplehood
transcended its British uses as a legitimating trope. Nearly all the canon-
ical anticolonial thinkers—­ranging from Surendranath Banerjea (1848–
1925) to Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)—­strug­gled with the seemingly
irrefutable premise of an absent Indian peoplehood. Having offered com-
pelling arguments for Indian self-­rule, thinkers as dif­fer­ent as Dadabhai
Naoroji (1825–1917) and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) found them-
selves left with a “not-­yet” ­people whose right to self-­government could
not be articulated in sovereign terms. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), a­ fter
submitting the draft constitution of the new republic of India, considered
it necessary to remind his audience that Indians w ­ ere still not a p
­ eople at
3
home with the demands of democracy. The figure of the p ­ eople—­the sine
qua non of modern democracy—­had turned out to be the marker of an
enduring prob­lem in India.
Contrary to the well-­worn trope, the history of ­popular sovereignty
in the colonial world was not simply one of sovereignty denied (by em-
pire) and reclaimed (by anticolonial actors). The structure of the “denial”
unalterably transformed the meaning of p ­ opular sovereignty and demo­
cratic government for Indian ­political thinkers. Modern colonialism
was not simply a new spin on the timeless trope of conquest, nor was an-
ticolonial ­political thought a mere exercise in overcoming foreign rule.
From the nineteenth ­century onward, colonialism was understood and

2 W A I T I N G F O R T H E ­P E O P L E
justified in what might be called demo­cratic terms. Central to the demo­
cratic signification of colonialism had been the framework of develop-
mentalism, whose historical and analytical purchase surpassed its use
as an imperial promise of pro­gress. That British rule was an undemo­
cratic form of foreign rule was not in doubt. Yet the developmental ho-
rizon initially claimed by the empire ultimately became inseparable from
the emergence of democracy as a globally legible category. The develop-
mental vision located the source of global p ­ olitical differences in dif­
fer­ent stages of peoplehood, thereby rendering the globe po­liti­cally
thinkable as a hierarchy of ­peoples.
The question of the ­people consumed Indian ­political life well be-
fore its juridical triumph at postcolonial founding: the force of its pur-
ported absence had already begun to shape p ­ olitical imagination in the
nineteenth ­century. That the power exercised by “the authority of the
‘absent ­people’ ” is a constitutive ele­ment of modern parliamentary de-
mocracy has been underscored by scholars of democracy.4 Its reach, how-
ever, was deeper in colonial India and of a fundamentally dif­fer­ent sort,
for it originated a ­political tradition where democracy itself was experi-
enced in a distinct manner. Thanks to the diagnosis that the p ­ eople as a
­political entity was lacking in India, the premise of sovereign peoplehood
could not be taken for granted; it had instead turned into the goal to be
aspired for. Self-­government, then, appeared to be something not so
much authorized by the ­people as generative of sovereign peoplehood.
Against this backdrop, Indian p ­ olitical thinkers took it upon themselves
not just to reclaim the sovereignty denied to their ­people but also to ad-
dress the theoretical assumptions that rendered the demo­cratic ideal
compatible with the imperial geography of the globe. At once the ground
and promise of colonialism, the figure of the p ­ eople came to be central
to Indian anticolonial thinkers’ quest for democracy in a world fractured
along the purportedly m ­ easurable capacity for self-­rule.

T H E G L O B A L ­C A R E E R O F ­P O P U L A R S O V E R E I G N T Y

Though the study of p ­ opular sovereignty has long been beset with fun-
damental disagreements, the conflicting series of propositions associ-
ated with the discourse of p
­ opular sovereignty have propelled, rather than
stymied, its emergence as the ground of modern democracy. ­Popular

I ntro d uction 3
 sovereignty thrived, as it w ­ ere, on its many claimants and detractors.
Reflecting on the revolutionary origins of the idea of p ­ opular sovereignty,
Hannah Arendt speculated that “if this notion [le peuple] has reached
four corners of the earth, it is not ­because of any influence of abstract
ideas but b ­ ecause of its obvious plausibility u ­ nder conditions of abject
5
poverty.” I do not share the assumption that “abstract ideas” of the
­people ­were unimportant in the global ­career of ­popular sovereignty, or
that “abject poverty” has a universal ­political import.6 However, Ar-
endt’s underscoring of the singular global reach of the p ­ opular sover-
eignty discourse captures a point of utmost importance: if democracy
has now acquired the status of the sole “secular claimant” of p ­ olitical
7
legitimacy, it is primarily b ­ ecause of the incontestability of the founda-
tion of p­ opular sovereignty.
While representative and centralized forms of demo­cratic govern-
ment faced much skepticism in the global nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the sovereignty of the p ­ eople, as an ideal, met with no mean-
ingful normative challenge. A ­ fter storming the heaven of sovereignty, 8
the “­people” seemed to have conquered the globe—­sometime between
the g­ reat eighteenth-­century revolutions and mid-­t wentieth-­century
decolonization, and somewhere ­behind the main stage of social and
economic history. The story of this singular conquest is generally told
with reference to the tremendous social and economic transformations
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But alongside ­these changes,
the global rise of the p ­ eople was also a story of intellectual transforma-
tions. The stubborn per­sis­tence of diffusionist approaches in the
global history of democracy means that the framework of dissemina-
tion and reception tends to obfuscate the transformation and reconsti-
tution of demo­cratic ideas themselves. As we ­shall see, anticolonial
aspirants for ­popular sovereignty ­were locked in a conflict with an impe-
rial proj­ect that had—­however contradictorily—­sought to derive its le-
gitimacy from a contesting, global narrative of peoplehood. It is partly
due to the history of this conflict that the age of decolonization dou-
bled as the global vindication of p ­ opular sovereignty.
The strength and ubiquity of ­popular sovereignty lies in its roots as
a discourse of authorization. The modern recognition that the figure of
the p
­ eople no longer amounts to a “visibly identifiable gathering of au-
tonomous citizens”9 shifted the primary stake of the ­popular sovereignty

4 W A I T I N G F O R T H E ­P E O P L E
discourse to the pro­cesses of claiming authorization from the abstraction
called “the p ­ eople.” Invocations of the p­ eople in p
­ olitical modernity are
necessarily an exercise in speaking in the name of an entity that does not
empirically exist as a homogeneous, empirically locatable subject. This
foundational abstraction of “the p ­ eople” notwithstanding, much of the
con­temporary theoretical dispute around ­popular sovereignty concerns
not ­whether the ­people is the ultimate ­political authority but instead
how to enact and institutionalize the authority vested in it. Regardless
of how critical of p ­ opular rule a con­temporary liberal ­political thinker
might be, the procedure of p ­ opular consent—­which traces the sovereignty
of the state to the p ­ eople—is essential.10 Radical d­ emocrats—­while over-
whelmingly critical of representative democracy—­a rticulate their extra-­
institutional vision of democracy through the figure of the p ­ eople.11
Deliberative demo­cratic theorists too find it necessary to account for a
procedural authorization of rights and laws in the ­w ill of the ­people,
notwithstanding their attempts to render the ­people as “ ‘subjectless’
forms of communication circulating through forums and legislative
bodies.”12 Though disagreements over what exactly constitutes p ­ opular
authorization—­and how it must be po­liti­cally instituted—­are abundant,13
what has come to be beyond dispute, barring some residual protesta-
tions, is the idea that demo­cratic legitimacy requires an authorization
from the ­people.
The distinction between sovereignty and government was crucial to
the formation of modern ­popular sovereignty as an authorizing ideal.
The concept of sovereignty, since its medieval origin, had implied that
“authorising the actions of a government” is not the same as “governing.”
Sovereignty thus meant not so much the holding of p ­ olitical offices as
the power to decide who would constitute the government and to pass
fundamental legislation. As Richard Tuck has shown, the sovereignty–­
government distinction was constitutive of the idea of p ­ opular sover-
eignty since Jean Bodin and ran through canonical modern ­political
­philosophers ranging from Thomas Hobbes to Jean-­Jacques Rousseau.14
The very emergence of a constitutional theory of public authority in the
early modern era was likewise indebted to the incipient doctrine of
­popular sovereignty. The ­limited government of the constitutional order
had become theoretically pos­si­ble owing to the “unlimited” power ascribed
­ eople.15 It was, however, only with the two classical revolutions
to the p

I ntro d uction 5
 of the late eigh­teenth ­century—­the French and the American—­that
­popular sovereignty began to acquire the public legitimacy that it now
enjoys. The French and American revolutionaries vigorously debated
the meaning of ­popular sovereignty, taking paths that ­were neither
identical nor short of novel challenges. The ­limited government of
American constitutionalism and the transformative vision of French re-
publicanism both nevertheless emboldened the idea that the p ­ eople are
the source of authority and the foundation of legitimacy.
For all its centrality to the modern constitutional order, p ­ opular sov-
ereignty has been no less salient to extraconstitutional claims of
­political authorization. The invocation of ­popular sovereignty both by
institutional and extra-­institutional actors, as Jason Frank has argued,
is enabled by the fact that “the p ­ eople” is more of a claim than a deter-
minate object. The “constitutive surplus” of ­popular sovereignty—­t he
surplus that remains despite institutional authorization derived from
the p­ eople—­tends to outlive the founding event and continues to serve
as a reservoir for ­popular claim-­m aking.16 Modern ­democracy rode
the waves of many ­popular insurrections, and the founding power
associated with the self-­ authorizing ­ people ­shaped institutional
ideals of democracy as much as the dictions of p ­ opular politics. To
complicate the ­m atter further, the essential claimability of the ­people
means that both governmental and extragovernmental actors could
invoke the name of the p ­ eople, thus transcending strict constitutional
protocols for ­popular authorization. Indeed, as Bryan Garsten ar-
gues, the multiplication and contestability of “governmental claims
to represent the ­people” is a germane feature of modern representa-
tive democracy.17
The figure of the insurrectionary p ­ eople no doubt coexists with the
specter of the riotous mob. The “strong cleanser of rationality and the
stiff brush of virtue” notwithstanding, the idea of the p ­ eople has proved
to be hard to sanitize,18 resisting its circumscription to ­either constitu-
tional or extraconstitutional guises. Though the power of the ­people may
seem to be anchored in a naturalized “folk foundationalism,” the plural
purchase of p ­ opular sovereignty is more than a symptom of its intellec-
tual deficiency.19 The concept of the p ­ eople works as more of a “bedrock”
(in a Wittgensteinian sense) than as a transparent epistemic foundation: it
is the ground where “the spade turns,” not so much ­because it is an

6 W A I T I N G F O R T H E ­P E O P L E
intrinsically self-­justifying foundation but rather ­because it is “held fast
by what lies around.”20 The concept of the ­people operates as the legiti-
mating ground for almost all modern demo­cratic reasoning and prac-
tices, from the constitution to routine electoral politics. The self-­
evident character of ­popular sovereignty owes essentially to the way in
which the complex order of modern demo­cratic norms and institutions
trace their ultimate foundation in it.
That the question of ­popular sovereignty also animated the modern
history of colonialism and anticolonial ­resistance in all its messiness
has been less studied and less understood. This is in part ­because in the
colonial world the emergence of the ­people was neither historically par-
allel nor conceptually analogous to the ­European experience. The begin-
ning of the British conquest of India in the mid-­eighteenth ­century
triggered thorny questions of conquest and legitimacy (without any
meaningful reference to p ­ opular sovereignty), leading to Edmund
Burke’s famous trial of Warren Hastings and the larger “scandal of
empire.”21 The framework of ancient constitutionalism ­shaped the
terms of the dispute concerning what gave the British the right to rule
over India in the final d ­ ecades of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. 22 As the self-­
understanding and legitimating discourses of imperial rule went
through a transformation in the early nineteenth ­century, the question
of the ­people—or rather its absence in India—­slowly emerged as the main
framework for the p ­ olitical legitimation of British rule. The British claim
that the justification of imperial rule consisted in developing the ­people
so as to make India fit for self-­government paradoxically conceded
the supremacy of the princi­ple of ­popular sovereignty. A princi­ple but
not a fact, the question of peoplehood turned into the end goal of for-
eign government. In this way, as we s­ hall see throughout the book, the
modern distinction between sovereignty and government found a new
expression in the colonial world. This colonial birth of ­popular sover-
eignty was not centered on debates around democracy ancient and
modern; rather, it was born out of a paradigmatic conviction about the
untimeliness of democracy in the backward non-­European world vis-­
à-­vis the ­European world.
“The ­people,” argues Bernard Yack, “exists in a kind of eternal pre­sent.
It never ages or dies.”23 Though Yack notes that the concept of the p ­ eople
is of relatively modern origin, its conceptual significance, he contends,

I ntro d uction 7
 is primarily spatial, not temporal. In its global unfolding, the concept
of the ­people, on the contrary, has been entangled in temporal—or to be
more specific, developmentalist—­concerns. To be sure, in normative
and constitutional reasoning, the ­people necessarily features as a given
entity. While one might dispute who the “real” ­people are and what
their authority may entail, the question as to the existence of the ­people
is not a prob­lem that one is ordinarily faced with. This was precisely the
assumption that came to be undone in the colonial world. In colonial
India, as we s­ hall see, the name of the p ­ eople was replete with temporal
markers—­its existence as a recognizable p ­ olitical entity was rendered
conditional on prior historical criteria. The conceptual birth of the
­people in India, strangely, amounted to its historical absence.
From the nineteenth c­ entury onward, the figure of the Indian p ­ eople
came to descriptively embody the underdevelopment ascribed to its
moral and material history. If, in the modern ­European history of
­popular sovereignty, the s­ ociological deprivation and historical subjec-
tion of the masses bolstered the argument concerning their unrealized
sovereignty,24 ­these same phenomena would stand for the disqualification
of the sovereign claim of the ­people in India. The social lack attributed
to the Indian p ­ eople directly undermined its claim to “­political abstrac-
tion.”25 Throughout the colonial era, repre­sen­ta­tions of mass underde-
velopment pervaded Indian ­political thought: expressions such as “the
starving millions” and “ignorant masses” bled into the characterization
of the Indian ­people as po­liti­cally unfit. Likewise, the diversity of India
across regional and religious lines appeared as evidence of the absence
of a unified entity called the ­people. Normatively, the perceived inade-
quacy of Indian peoplehood helped legitimate the suspension of their
sovereignty, for only a fit ­people could institute and practice self-­
government. The institution of self-­government among a backward
­people was claimed to be not just impractical but, more damningly, a
hindrance ­toward the growth of developed peoplehood. The ultimate
promise that the empire made was not simply the prosaic objective of
training a p­ eople in the institution of self-­government; it was to bring
into being the Indian ­people itself.
In established accounts of anticolonial p ­ olitical thought, the nation-
alist claim to ­popular sovereignty is understood to be central to over-
turning imperial sovereignty in the twentieth ­century, with l­ ittle or no

8 W A I T I N G F O R T H E ­P E O P L E
differentiation between the “nation” and the “­people.”26 In Waiting for the
­People I pre­sent a dif­fer­ent story. The demo­cratic dilemma that was con-
stitutive of modern colonialism can scarcely be captured through the
category of the nation. From Bipin Chandra Pal to Jawaharlal Nehru, In-
dian ­political thinkers, despite their qualified ­acceptance of “anticolo-
nial nationalism,” strug­gled to posit sovereign authority in the Indian
­people. For most of the colonial era, the questions pertaining to the
boundary and common belonging of the ­people—­the standard ele­ments
of nationhood—­were recognized and yet understood in relation to the
broader normative horizon centered on the prob­lem of the demo­cratic
fitness of the Indian masses. The entanglement of the concept of the
­people with a power­ful narrative concerning the global progression of
democracy meant that Indian p ­ olitical thinkers could not simply claim
the atemporal universality of ­popular sovereignty, turning a blind eye
to their all-­too-­developmental existence. What they did—­a nd what I re-
cover in this book—is wrestle with the terms and times of modern p ­ opular
sovereignty, and thereby investigate the meaning of democracy itself.

D E V E L O P M E N TA L I S M A N D T H E D E M O ­C R AT I C L E G I T I M AT I O N
OF EMPIRE

Adam Smith famously characterized the twin events of “the discovery

of Amer­i­ca, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good
Hope” as two of the “greatest and most impor­tant events recorded in the
history of mankind.”27 The E ­ uropean discovery of the rest of the world
eventually metamorphized into global imperial proj­ects, leaving in its
trail a set of entwined questions about the expanded vista of the
globe and the bounded p ­ olitical community. The archive of modern
­European ­political thought faithfully reflects the force of Smith’s ob-
servation. ­European ­political thinkers before and ­a fter Smith, from
Francisco de Vitoria to Karl Marx, directly or indirectly reckoned with the
inescapable prob­lem of ­Europe’s imperial expansion. Despite the obvious
continuity of the themes of conquest and colonization, the stake of the
empire question was never static or self-­evident.28 The many material
and intellectual prob­lems traveling to and from the non-­European
world normatively challenged the established natu­ral law framework,
gave impetus to the Age of Enlightenment, and s­ haped the cores of the

I ntro d uction 9
 developmentalist paradigm. It is curious, then, that for most of the
twentieth c­ entury, an age of global democracy marked by innumerable
anticolonial rebellions and foundings, the prob­lems of empire and an-
ticolonialism posed questions pertaining to the applicability of ideas
and norms rather than foundational ­matters in the discipline of
­political theory. This neglect had much to do with the p ­ olitical success
of anticolonialism. The rise of new postcolonial states, along with the
normative codification of the right to self-­determination in the inter-
national domain, had seemingly settled the colonial question. It had
become simply a “morally objectionable form of ­political relation”: the
unjust domination of one ­people over another.29 The moralization of
the question of colonialism, however, runs a distinct risk: it obscures
how colonial rule in Asia and Africa was fundamentally predicated on
claims about the condition of possibility of the other­wise unquestioned
(moral) norm of demo­cratic self-­r ule.
The reinvention of empire in the age of the demo­cratic revolution
transformed the ideal of democracy as much as it remade the meaning
of imperial rule. The temporal texture of the demo­cratic revolution—­that
the rise of equality was the sign of a universal ­future to come—­not only
facilitated a new approach to pre-­democratic pasts but also rendered
philosophically superfluous the question concerning the immediate uni-
versality of p ­ olitical norms. The lesson of the nineteenth ­century, John
Stuart Mill once noted revealingly, was to historicize the “­ought”: “dif­
fer­ent stages of h ­ uman pro­gress not only ­will have (which must always
have been evident), but ­ought to have, dif­fer­ent institutions.”30 The norms
­were not to be simply relativized; if anything, the universality of a
­political norm such as self-­government rested directly on the necessarily
provisional history of its antecedent. The entwined history of empire and
democracy lay in this very conjuncture.
In the wake of the postcolonial turn ­later in the twentieth ­century,
historians debated the exact manner in which colonialism constituted
a break with the precolonial past and the new forms of practice global-
ized through colonial governmentality. 31 The ensuing reconsideration
of colonial statehood and ideology further established that colonialism
could be neither reduced to universal sociology nor analytically circum-
scribed to the realm of exceptions. ­Political theorists have also amply
demonstrated that the extraordinary confidence with which E ­ uropean

10 W A I T I N G F O R T H E ­P E O P L E
empires ruled over the world was not unrelated—to put it mildly—to the
heartland of E ­ uropean intellectual preoccupations, be it liberalism
or the rise of social theory.32 The result has been a coming together of
other­wise sequestered worlds of p ­ olitical thought. In par­tic­u­lar, the
framework of liberalism, thanks to its overt commitment to the idea
of pro­g ress, has inspired some of the most power­f ul observations on
the mutual constitution of the metropolitan and colonial intellec-
tual worlds. The pioneering work on liberal imperialism has recov-
ered the pivotal role that the discourses of pro­gress and development
played in nineteenth-­century legitimations of empire. T ­ hese explora-
tions of the intimacy between pro­gress and empire laid bare the forma-
tive reconciliation of the despotic fact of imperial rule with the norms
of liberalism. 33
Though E ­ uropean imperial expansion flourished in the age of demo­
cratic revolutions, the question of democracy has mostly been a foot-
note to the scholarship on liberal imperialism. 34 Beneath the liberal
motifs of civilization and pro­gress, as we ­shall see from the colonial
vantage point, lay the foundational prob­lem of democracy. In this book’s
telling, the category of the p­ eople was central to the theoretical assimi-
lation of pro­g ress and empire in demo­cratic thought. In the global
nineteenth ­century, democracy was neither simply a humanistic cate-
gory nor merely a prob­lem of reason and cognition. ­W hether we look at
Tocqueville’s Democracy in Amer­i­ca or Mill’s Considerations on Represen-
tative Government, democracy was ineluctably mired in a paradoxical
strug­gle with its own historical conditions. This strug­gle si­mul­ta­neously
necessitated the containment of the p ­ eople possessed by sovereign drives
in the metropolitan world, and the prioritization of the development
of modern peoplehood elsewhere. The progressive ordering of the
­people, forged in the global landscape of empire, resulted in an inge-
nious demo­cratic gloss on foreign despotism. The argument that despo-
tism was necessary for certain stages of historical development for the
sake of democracy itself was no doubt a sleight of reason, but it was a
move that capitalized the immanent contradictions of demo­ cratic
thought. The liberal-­imperial discourse of pro­gress, in the p ­ rocess, es-
sentially performed a “demo­cratic” justification of imperial rule.
Perceptive liberal imperialists like Mill, not to mention Indian
­political thinkers, found it difficult to ignore the patent despotism of

I ntro d uction 11
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Poems
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
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Title: Poems

Author: Cushag

Release date: June 15, 2019 [eBook #59756]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***

POEMS
 BY

"CUSHAG"
(Josephine Kermode)

Third Edition

Printed and Published by

G. & L. JOHNSON
DOUGLAS, Isle of Man.
1912.

To my father's friend, the Ven.

Archdeacon Gill, this little Book
is affectionately dedicated.

J.K.

Claghbane,
Ramsey, Isle of Man,
July, 1907.
 CONTENTS.

To the Cushag's Friend

The Wans from Up

Little Boy-Beg

Country Courtship

The Thram

Where I was rarin' to

Guillyn Veggey

The Phynodderee

The Loaghtan Beg

Sweet Etty of Rhenwee

The Passing of the Fairies

Bobby

Traa-dy-liooar

The Gable of the House

Shadow in Harvest

Great Store

Bons

The Inheritance

Longing
Inasmuch

The Days of my Life

The Ride

The Babe of Earey Cushlin

Oie-Vie

Baby Boy Carol

Promise

The Mountain Maid

The Skyes

John the Priest

Kate Cowle

The Church Brings us Home

The Glen of the Twilight

The Tholtan

Calling of the Name

Rhullick-ny-Quakeryn

Oie'll Verrey

Work or Play

The King's Visit

The Mother's Carol

The Sorrowful Crossing

The Little Everin'

TO THE CUSHAG'S FRIEND

O the cushag flower in a fairy bower

Would shine like a star of gold;
But when it grows in the farmer's close
'Tis a shocking weed, we're told.
Yet common things
May have their wings
To help our souls above;
And wayside weeds,
Like kindly deeds,
Spring from a father's love.

The cushag flower had fairy power

In olden times, you know,
To bear you away on a summer's day
Wherever you wished to go.
Its golden wings
Were slender things
To carry souls aloft;
But fairy tales,
Like fresh'ning gales,
May have their uses oft.

The cushag flower in a stormy hour

Shines brighter for the gloom;
So kindly deeds, like wayside weeds,
May shine when troubles loom.
Old folks would say,
 In their own day,
When troubles took their fill,
And times were bad,
And hearts were sad,
"There's gool on the cushag still!"

Now the cushag we know must never grow

Where the farmer's work is done;
But along the rills in the heart of the hills
The cushag may shine like the sun,
Where the golden flowers
Have fairy powers
To gladden our hearts with their grace;
And in Vannin Veg Veen,
In the valleys green,
The cushags have still a place.

THE WANS FROM UP

"Mother," she said, "when you're not by,

There's lil wans talkin' to me,
They're showin' me pictures out in the sky,
Where the sun sets over the sea.
Will I lave a piece of my supper," she said,
"An' a dhrop of milk in the cup?
D'you think its Fairies thass in?" she said.
—I'm thinkin' 'twas Wans from Up.

"Mother," she said, "when the nights is long

There's lil wans comin' to me.
They're bringin' a harp an' makin' a song,
An' houlin' a light to see.
I'll lave a bit of my supper," she said,
 "An' a tase of milk in the cup;
I'm thinkin' its Fayries thass in," she said,
—But I knew it was Wans from Up.

"Mother," she said, "my head is sore,

An' the lil wans is callin' me;
They say there's a boat waitin' down at the shore
To take me a sail on the sea.
Keep by a piece of my supper," she said,
"An' lave some milk in the cup;
I'll go with the Fayries a bit," she said.
—An' she went to the Wans from Up.

LITTLE BOY BEG

"Where are you going, little Boy Beg,

With your little grey dog an' all?"
"I'm going to look for the King an' Queen,
To see will they cure me for all."

"Where will you find them, little Boy Beg,

The King an' the Queen so high?"
"I'll watch from the bank where the bluebell grows
To see will they ever pass by."

"How will you know them, little Boy Beg,

When you've wandered many a mile?"
"I'll know the King by his golden crown,
An' the Queen by her lovely smile."

"How will they see you, little Boy Beg,

With your poor little crutch an' all?"
"I'll be houlin' my flow'rs an' makin' my tow,
An' the Queen she'll see me for all."

"What will you say to them, little Boy Beg,

When you stand at the carriage door,"
"I'll give them a flow'r, an' they'll touch my han',
An' I'll never be lame no more."

An' that very same day the King came by,

An' the Lady Queen she smiled;
An' they tuk the flow'r from the little han',
An' they put the cure on the child.

Now little Boy Beg can walk an' run

With his little grey dog an' all.
God bless the King and his lovely Queen—
But he hadn't no crown for all!

COUNTRY COURTSHIP

Johnny an' me was sweethearts

Many a year gone by,
Stannin' aroun' in the haggart,
An' havin' a cooish on the sly.
Till "Mayry, Mayry, Mayry, where's the milk?"
An' "Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, you'll be took!"
An' "Dear me heart, wherever is that gel!"
An' "bless me sowl, that Johnny should be shook!"

Johnny was goin' to market

With priddhas, an' butter, an' eggs,
An' of coorse I was runnin' to meet him,
Jus' for to soople me legs.
Then "Mayry, Mayry, Mayry! Where's that gel!"
An' "Johnny, Johnny, Johnny! Do you hear!"
An' "Bless me sowl, that Mayry should be shook!"
An' "Dear me heart what's keepin' Johnny theer!"

Johnny'd be firin' the chimley

With a wisp of gorse an' sthrow,
An' of coorse I was houlin' the matches
Jus' till he set it aglow.
But "Mayry, Mayry, Mayry, come you here!"
An' "Johnny, Johnny, John, come urrov that!"
An' "Dear me heart, wherever's Mayry gone!"
An' "What in all the worl' is them two at!"

Johnny an' me was married

Many a year ago,
An' a fine scutch of childher at us—
Ma word, how the lumpers grow!
Now its "Mayry, Mayry, Mayry, min' the chile,"
An' "Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, wipe your feet;"
An' I'm spendin' me time washin' dishes,
An' John is kep' running for meat!

THE THRAM

The golden sunshine filled the room,

To every corner stealing;
It glanced on Charlotte's silver hair,
And flashed along the ceiling.

It touched the dingy walls with gold,

And painted all the china;
The "rosy basins" on the shelf
Grew rosier and finer.

The window high above the road

Looked over field and meadow,
To where the sun, fast rolling down,
Left Scacafell in shadow.

And Charlotte placidly enjoyed,

But gazed without emotion;
Something was lacking, I could see,
But what, I had no notion.

"The windhar on the stairs," she said,

And now she showed elation;
"There's where the THRAM is, an' the lights,
An' all the 'Lectric Station!"

"An' all the folks as plain as plain,

That's comin' in or goin'—
That's what I like," she said, "the thram
An' all the lights a-glowin'!"

WHERE I WAS RARIN' TO

The little stream of Ballacowle.

It tumbles down the Glen
And hides beneath the lady-fern
To sparkle out again—
Then plunges underneath the road
To seek a devious way,
Where lost in quarry refuse now,
Its early cradle lay.
A roomy cradle once it was,
O'er-arched with spreading trees;
A tangled Paradise of flowers,
Scarce touched by passing breeze,
And here, among the primrose tufts,
It wound its cheerful way,
When, long ago, we wove our wreaths
To Welcome in the May

On May Day Eve I wandered there,

And, by the old plum tree,
I found a bent and aged man
Who gazed along the lea.
His dress was of the loaghtan-brown,
His hair was white as snow;
And quietly he rested there
And watched the streamlet flow.

"Good evening, friend," I gently said,

"Good everin'," said he;
I said "What do you here so late,
Beneath our old plum tree?"
"Good everin'," he said again,
His voice was soft and low,
"I came to put a sight down here,
Where I was rarin' to."

He laid a bleached and withered hand

Upon the cold grey wall
That once was gable of the house,
The house of Ballacowle—
Though little now remains to show
Where once it stood so fair,
And, but the plum tree lives to mark
The garden that was there.

"I mind the day we rode to church,

The hay was nearly teddin',
The apple trees were dressed in pink
As we came through Claghbeddin:
We rode along the Cuckoo Field,
The skies were blue and fair,
And through the Croshag's miry lane,
To Kirk Christ of Lezayre.

I mind th' oul' ancient Masthar well

That lived at the Claghbeddin:
He lent the horse and pillion fine
To take us to our weddin'.
I mind the dogs and childher too,
That scampered to and fro,
And pussy cats wisout no tails,
Where I was rarin' to."

The sunset faded into gray;

I heard the little stream,
It seemed to mingle with his voice
Like music in a dream.
No longer could I see his face,
But still he murmered low:
"I came to put a sight once more
Where I was rarin' to."

GUILLYN VEGGEY

"THE LIL FALLAS."

I heard the Guillyn Veggey at the break of day.

On a merry, merry morning in the month of May.
They were hammering an' clamouring an' making such a din—
An' yet there's fallas doubtin' that the like is in!
Clink-a-link, link-a-link, link, link, lin,
Clink-a-link, link-a-link, the hammers ring;
Clink-a-link, link-a-link, ding, ding, ding—
An' yet there's fallas doubtin' that the like is in!

They were hammering their barrels in the cooper's cave,

Sending out the chips to meet the brimming wave.
Working in the hollows of the Cushlin hill,
Turning out their dandy boats an' tackle still.
Clink-a-link, etc.

I heard them in the cave behind the waterfall,

Merry voices echoed by the rocky wall;
While the bay was covered by the chips that flew.
And every chip became a boat with all its crew.
Clink-a-link, etc.

Oh, lucky is the morning in the month of May,

When you hear the Guillyn Veggey at the break of day,
Hammering an' clamouring an' making such a din—
For they know the herrin's coming, an' there's plenty in!
Clink-a-link, link-a-link, link, link, lin,
Clink-a-link, link-a-link, the hammers ring;
Clink-a-link, link-a-link, ding, ding, ding,
They know the herrin's coming, an' there's plenty in.

THE PHYNODDEREE

Ho! Ho! the Phynodderee!

Swinging by himself in the Trainman Tree.
I once was lord of a fairy clan,
But I loved a lass in the Isle of Man;
Her eyes were like the shallows of the mountain stream,
Her hair was like the cornfield's golden gleam
Her voice was like the ringdove's, soft and slow,
Her smile was like the sunbeam's—come and go;
But alas and alack-a-day!
The jealous fairy maids stole my love away.
And now I'm all alone in the Tramman Tree.
Swinging by myself in the Tramman Tree.
Alas and alack-a-day!

Ho! ho! the Phynodderee!

Swinging by himself in the Tramman Tree.
I was once a prince in the fairy land,
But I failed to come at the king's command;
His wrath was like the thunder in the mountain gills,
His eyes were like the lightning on the lone dark hills;
His voice was like the raging of the boiling tide,
As he hurled me down to the earth to bide,
And alas and alack-a-day!
The whole night long I must work away
Till daylight sends me up to the Tramman Tree,
Swinging by myself in the Tramman Tree.
Alas and alack-a-day!

Ho! ho! the Phynodderee!

Swinging by himself in the Tramman Tree.
I fetched the stone to Tholt-y-Will;
I saved the sheep on the snow-clad hill;
I saw the storm was coming while the farmer snored;
I drove the sheep before me while the Howlaa roared,
I folded them in safety beneath the creg,
And hunted over Snaefell for the loaghtan beg;
But alas and alack-a-day.
A witch she was, and she would not stay
Till daylight sent me up to the Tramman Tree,
To swing by myself in the Tramman Tree.
Alas and alack-a-day!
 Ho! ho! the Phynodderee!
Swinging by himself in the Tramman Tree.
I threshed the corn in the lonely night,
And swept the house in the still moonlight.
I watched the sleeping haggart while the dog took rest,
And drove away the witches that dared molest;
I milked the cows at dawning and eased their heads,
And soothed the patient horses in their tired beds,
But alas and alack-a-day!
The farmer thought I worked because I wanted pay
And left a coat and breeches for the poor Phynodderee;
So his lassie cannot see him in the Tramman Tree
Swinging by himself in the Tramman Tree.

THE LOAGHTAN BEG

"Oh! Is it a sheep or a witch," quoth he;

"Is it only a loaghtan beg?
Or am I awake or asleep," quoth he,
"Or am I the hairy Phynodderee
That started to catch the meg."

"I chased her over Barooil," quoth he,

"And along the side of Clagh Owre;
And three times round Snaefell, like fire went she,
With a screech at the hairy Phynodderee
That turned the night's milk sour."

"I have raced the mountain lambs," quoth he,

"And seen them run like deer;
But I never seen wan like yondher," quoth he,
"That could run like the hairy Phynodderee,
She'll not be no right wan I fear."
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