The subject at stake in movements for linguistic rights was turned into the Indian political subject during the 1910s and 1920s as discussions about regional boundaries, linguistic identity, and political franchise came to figure prominently in Indian national politics. This is particularly true of regional linguistic politics and its resolution with all-India nationalism in the 1920s. How does the cultural subject of early Indian nationalism turn into the political subject at stake in later agitational populism in India? If we accept that there are continuities between these two phases then we need to acknowledge that cultural identities fostered in the early phase do linger in the later definition of the uniform Indian citizen subject. What is lost in the separation of early culturalism and later political activism is a denser history of transition in the development of politics in India. Footnote 3 When we look at the history of cultural politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we see that the argument for political rights was already immanent in demands posed by social organizations seeking to represent the interests of their constituencies. Footnote 2 However, this taxonomy of Indian nationalism into early culturalism and later political agitation can sometimes be overdetermined. Histories of Indian politics have often seen this early phase as a precursor to more political and populist anticolonial nationalism of the twentieth century. The early life of Indian nationalism was inaugurated by local cultural politics. By including a brief discussion of emergence of colonial franchise and the changing attitudes of the Indian National Congress towards linguistic politics during this period, I show that the politicization of the Odia public into a liberal representative category is part of a larger narrative of the politicization of the Indian masses. I describe the ways in which the demand for an Odia province reconfigured nineteenth-century Odia cultural activism into a clearly articulated argument for the political representation of the Odia people as a unified constituency. In Chapter 3, I show that debates within and about the Sammillani frequently turned to discussions about the meaning of politics, citizenship, and the status of the Odia constituency in relation to the colonial state. The Sammillani quickly came to serve as the most prominent pan-Odia site for presenting Odia interests to the colonial authorities. In 1903 an organization called the Utkal Sammillani was created to lobby for the amalgamation of all Odia-speaking areas under a single provincial administration. The developing idea of a social identity based in the Odia language became politicized during the first decade of the twentieth century.
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