Addressing the Youth: Emerging Youth Publics in Late Colonial Uttarakhand

Abstract

This essay discusses the formation of political youth publics in the late colonial period in Kumaun and Garhwal in the northwestern Himalayan region of India. More specifically, it highlights forms of address to youth and students in the Hindi press in the period of nationalist mobilization. In published speeches and editorials, educated youth were a target audience for newly fashioned political roles; they were asked to spread regional awareness over rights, to travel to the countryside, to make sacrifices, to make use of time, and to demonstrate their duty towards national causes. Overall, the paper argues that the notion of youth as a form of solidarity and as a distinct public emerged in Uttarakhand at this time, drawing from a regional imaginary. This vocabulary of politics continued in later forms of youth mobilization in the region post-independence.