This lecture will explore how a foundational set of disputes over the terms of modern peoplehood underwrote the formation of the democratic project in colonial India. Situating the question of popular sovereignty at the center of the monumental clash between the British Empire and the Indian anticolonial movement, the lecture will reconsider a competing set of Indian attempts to redefine the meaning of the people, ranging from a skeptical approach to the criterion of popular authorization to a persistent questioning of the idea of popular unity. In so doing, the lecture will also reflect on anticolonialism as a theoretical and historical problem.

Nazmul Sultan is an assistant professor of Political Theory at the University of British Columbia and is the author of Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024). His research interests include the history of political thought, empire and anticolonial thought, popular sovereignty, South Asian intellectual history, and ideas of the global.

Made possible with the generous support of the Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Free and open to the public