Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought 100930559X, 9781009305594

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Series information
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Popular Sovereignty and the End of Empire
1.1 ''The Fate of the Common People''
1.2 ''The Awakening of the Orient'': Empire and Colonial Freedom
1.3 Anti-Colonialism as Political Thought
1.4 Situating the Book
2 ''The Genius of the People'': The 1923 Constitution of Mysore
2.1 Princely States and Quasi-Sovereignty
2.2 Monarchy and Reform in Mysore
2.3 Brajendra Nath Seal as Philosopher
2.4 The Constitution of 1923
2.5 A Defeated Vision?
3 ''A Vast Subterranean Democracy'': Pluralism in the 1920s
3.1 Democracy Ancient and Modern
3.2 Political Representation and the Indian National Congress
3.3 The Pluralist Turn
3.4 Democracies of the East (1923) and Its Legacy
3.5 The Pluralist Moment of the 1920s
4 ''A Living Union'': The Project of Gandhian Democracy
4.1 ''A Genuine Democratic State''
4.2 Gandhi and Representative Government
4.3 Gandhianism at Wardha
4.4 Gandhian Constitution for Free India (1946)
4.5 The Moral Order of Democracy
5 Representation, Popular Sovereignty, and the Indian Founding
5.1 A Republican Moment
5.2 Dissent in the Constituent Assembly
5.3 Marxist Critics
5.4 The Constitution and the People
6 ''Towards Total Revolution'': The Aftermath of Independence
6.1 A New Era?
6.2 A Moment of Reconstruction
6.3 Total Revolution
6.4 End of an Era
7 Conclusion: The Challenge of Representative Democracy
Bibliography
Archival Sources
British Library, London
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi
International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam
Newspaper Records
Published Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index

Citation preview

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Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought

Between the 1910s and the 1970s, an eclectic group of Indian thinkers, constitutional reformers, and political activists articulated a theory of robustly democratic, participatory popular sovereignty. Taking parliamentary government and the modern nation-state to be prone to corruption, these thinkers advocated for ambitious federalist projects of popular government as alternatives to liberal, representative democracy. Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought is the first study of this countertradition of democratic politics in South Asia. Examining wellknown historical figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, M. K. Gandhi, and M. N. Roy, alongside long-neglected thinkers from the Indian socialist movement, Tejas Parasher illuminates the diversity of political futures imagined at the end of the British Empire in South Asia. This book reframes the history of twentieth-century anti-colonialism in novel terms – as a contest over the nature of modern political representation – and pushes readers to rethink accepted understandings of democracy today. tejas parasher is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019 and was formerly Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge.

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by DAVID ARMITAGE, RICHARD BOURKE and JENNIFER PITTS The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. A full list of titles in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/IdeasContext

Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought tejas parasher University of California, Los Angeles

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009305594 DOI: 10.1017/9781009305563 © Tejas Parasher 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Parasher, Tejas, author. Title: Radical democracy in modern Indian political thought / Tejas Parasher, University of California, Los Angeles. Description: First Edition. | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Ideas in context | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022059818 (print) | LCCN 2022059819 (ebook) | ISBN 9781009305594 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781009305600 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781009305563 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Democracy–India. | Representative government and representation– India. | Self-determination, National–India. | Political science–India–Philosophy. Classification: LCC JQ281 .P383 2023 (print) | LCC JQ281 (ebook) | DDC 320.954–dc23/eng/20230118 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022059818 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022059819 ISBN 978-1-009-30559-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To the memory of my grandmother, Radhika Sharma

This is real democracy. Otherwise that kind of representative government which consists in a mere parliament of intermediaries or middlemen, ‘representing’ the people because they manage to get themselves elected, is only a disguised oligarchy. There the representatives soon grow into a bourgeoisie or bosses or a group of labor sardars [lords], they form rings and caucuses, with vested interests. The real people – the millions in the fields, factories, and workshops – are deprived of all share and voice in the government – even universal adult suffrage cannot prevent this, for the middlemen or intermediary representatives manage the whole show in their own interests. —The Modern Review (August 1923)

Contents

Acknowledgments

page viii

1

Popular Sovereignty and the End of Empire

2

“The Genius of the People”: The 1923 Constitution of Mysore

31

3

“A Vast Subterranean Democracy”: Pluralism in the 1920s

60

4

“A Living Union”: The Project of Gandhian Democracy

93

5

Representation, Popular Sovereignty, and the Indian Founding

121

“Towards Total Revolution”: The Aftermath of Independence

146

Conclusion: The Challenge of Representative Democracy

165

6 7

1

Bibliography

172

Index

193

vii

Acknowledgments

I have long been waiting for an opportunity to thank everyone involved in this project. The book began as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. My foremost debt is to my dissertation committee: Jennifer Pitts, Sankar Muthu, John McCormick, and Lisa Wedeen. Jennifer was an exceptional advisor from my first semester of graduate school. Much of my work has been shaped by her intellectual rigor, her generosity, and her vision for taking the history of political thought in a more global direction. The University of Chicago as a whole provided a wonderfully nurturing academic environment. I have learned greatly from conversations with Adom Getachew over the years. Colleagues in the Departments of Political Science, History, and Law sustained my research through regular feedback: Chiara Cordelli, Tom Ginsburg, Daragh Grant, Alex Haskins, Annie Heffernan, Isaac Hock, Joel Isaac, Sana Jaffrey, Sarah Johnson, Demetra Kasimis, Matt Landauer, Zachary Leonard, Patchen Markell, Natasha Piano, Sarath Pillai, Erin Pineda, Lucas Pinheiro, Paul Staniland, Nazmul Sultan, Lael Weinberger, and James Lindley Wilson. Will Levine very kindly read multiple iterations of each chapter. Kathy Anderson in the Department of Political Science made my dissertation (and many other dissertations) possible. I could not have asked for a better institution than King’s College, University of Cambridge, to continue the project. I must first thank Provost Michael Proctor and the Research Committee for electing me to a Junior Research Fellowship in 2019. Richard Bourke was a supportive, generous, and encouraging mentor from the day I arrived in England. Discussions with John Dunn taught me to think critically about twentieth-century politics. During my fellowship at King’s, I was fortunate to find a remarkable group of interlocutors working at the intersections of history, politics, and philosophy: Anna Alexandrova, John Arnold, Gareth Austin, John Filling, Freddy Foks, David Good, viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Caroline Goodson, Ryan Heuser, Caroline Humphrey, Peter Jones, Douglas Moggach, Robin Osborne, Surabhi Ranganathan, Jason Sharman, Mira Siegelberg, Michael Sonenscher, and Sharath Srinivasan. Special thanks are due to Sally Thorp for arranging the logistics of my time at Cambridge through the difficult circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since moving to my new home in Los Angeles, I have found an incredibly dynamic, welcoming, and supportive community in the Department of Political Science and the International Institute at UCLA. I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Political Science, particularly the UCLA political theory community around Davide Panagia, Anthony Pagden, and Giulia Sissa. I am excited for many further conversations to come. I also appreciate the administrative support of Stephanie Jeffers, Evelyn Godinez, Belinda Sunnu, and Barbara Wakasa. This book was shaped by the incisive feedback given by colleagues spread across institutions and countries, including Rochana Bajpai, Mukulika Banerjee, Duncan Bell, Udit Bhatia, Annabel Brett, Chris Brooke, Arudra Burra, Donal Coffey, Sandipto Dasgupta, Rohit De, Arvind Elangovan, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Burke Hendrix, Leigh Jenco, Charlotte Johann, Lisa Kattenberg, Sudipta Kaviraj, Duncan Kelly, Tarunabh Khaitan, Steven Klein, Harshan Kumarasingham, Adam Lebovitz, Karuna Mantena, Rama Mantena, Robyn Marasco, Jaby Mathew, Chris Meckstroth, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Eleanor Newbigin, Hussein Omar, Bhikhu Parekh, Dinyar Patel, Srinath Raghavan, Hari Ramesh, Shaunna Rodrigues, Lucia Rubinelli, Rahul Sagar, Will Selinger, Joshua Simon, Boyd van Dijk, Georgios Varouxakis, Lydia Walker, Melissa Williams, and Samuel Zeitlin. Archivists at the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi and at the British Library’s India Office Records in London were invaluable in helping track down primary sources and newspaper records, as were Sue Donnelly at the LSE Records Office in London; Laura Ring at the Regenstein Library, South Asia Collections, in Chicago; and Rachel Rowe and Kevin Greenbank at the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge. Sections of the book were previously presented at the American Political Science Association, the Association for Asian Studies, Columbia University, Duke University, the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, University College London, UCLA, University

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Acknowledgments

of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Wisconsin Madison, and Yale University. I have benefited greatly from the productive engagement of audiences at each institution. Financial support for research and writing was generously provided by the Department of Political Science and the International Institute at UCLA; the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, the Division of Social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago; the Fellows’ Research Fund at King’s College, Cambridge; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I am grateful to all these institutions. I am also very grateful to the American Political Science Association for recognizing an earlier version of the book with the 2020 Leo Strauss Award in Political Philosophy. Liz Friend-Smith has been an absolute pleasure to work with as an editor for Cambridge University Press. Insightful comments from two anonymous readers sharpened the stakes of the manuscript. A version of Chapter 2 was previously published as “Federalism, Representation, and Direct Democracy in 1920s India,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 19, no. 2 (June 2022), 444–72. A version of Chapter 4 was previously published as “Beyond Parliament: Gandhian Democracy and Postcolonial Founding” in Political Theory, vol. 50, no. 6 (December 2022), 837–60. I would like to thank both journals for granting permission to reprint the relevant material here. Meridith Murray of MLM Indexing produced an excellent index for the book. Finally, the love and support of family and friends are the pillars of any writing process. This book is dedicated, above all, to my parents, Alpana Sharma and Sanjay Sharma. Their incredible sacrifices have allowed for all the opportunities in my life. None of what I do would be possible without everything they have taught me.

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Popular Sovereignty and the End of Empire

1.1 “The Fate of the Common People” On November 17, 1935, the Indian economist Joseph Cornelius Kumarappa was invited by a group of students at the University of Allahabad to reflect on the politics of the anti-colonial movement in British India. Writing in a special issue of the campus newspaper The Students’ Outlook, Kumarappa focused his remarks on the meaning that “the sovereignty of the people” – the basis of any “attempt by a community to govern itself” in a democratic manner – should have for countries under European colonial rule.1 He compared the two main political models in front of colonial peoples in the mid-1930s: the liberal representative democracy of Britain and the United States, or Soviet Communism. Both systems promised to base government on the consent, will, and power of “the people”: “when the people were groaning under autocracy and the burden of supporting their autocratic feudal lords they yearned for a ‘Government of the people, for the people, and by the people.’”2 Yet both, in reality, failed to deliver on such lofty republican ideals, formalizing a set of institutions that kept the actual people away from the arena of political rule: “they aim at the masses having power in their hands but in effect the few at the top hold the reins.”3 Kumarappa argued that liberal democracy and Soviet-style Communism shared an attachment to a regime of representation whose organization was inimical to direct popular rule. Whether the task of the state was market regulation or large-scale property redistribution, its internal structure delegated sovereignty to members of political parties and to a limited number of legislative bodies, circumscribing the exercise of popular power. “The fate of 1

2

J. C. Kumarappa, “Communism and the Common People,” in J. C. Kumarappa Private Papers – Articles by Him, vol. 1, no. 29, 174–77, at 174, Manuscripts Collection, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi. 3 Ibid. Ibid., 175.

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Popular Sovereignty and the End of Empire

the common people under a benevolent capitalism,” Kumarappa wrote, “has not been much improved under Soviet Communism. In both cases, public opinion is molded by a small group who also hold the press to strict censorship. Economic activity is planned and controlled from the center.”4 If anti-colonial nationalism was to really allow “a community to govern itself,” then non-European leaders needed to move beyond the capitalist-Communist binary and question the very political form – the modern state premised on political representation – on which the two models rested. This book is an attempt to take seriously, on its own terms, the understanding of anti-colonial popular sovereignty articulated by Joseph Kumarappa in the middle weeks of November 1935. Though written for a regional campus publication with limited readership – and, as far as we know, never reprinted anywhere outside of Allahabad – Kumarappa’s short article encapsulated a growing frustration during the interwar period with many of the accepted maxims of anti-colonial nationalism: the demand for national independence, for a powerful state, and for representative institutions able to secure political rights for those reduced to the status of imperial subjects. The goal of the next seven chapters is to recapture the nature of this critical political imaginary, identifying its intellectual sources and the ideas of its main proponents. By the time Kumarappa’s essay was published in The Students’ Outlook in 1935, much political debate in South Asia revolved around the issue of “self-rule,” often transliterated into the Sanskritic term swaraj. The term swaraj was first deployed in a political sense by the nationalist leader Dadabhai Naoroji during a rally in Tollygunge, Calcutta on December 26, 1906. For Naoroji, swaraj meant the introduction into India of parliamentary government patterned on Britain or on the semi-independent settler states of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.5 It entailed, as Naoroji argued, the creation of “a constitutional representative system” like in “the selfgoverning colonies.”6 Three years later, the pamphlet Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule (1909), authored by the young lawyer Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi during a journey between London and South 4 5

6

Ibid. Dadabhai Naoroji, The Late Dr. Dadabhai Naoroji on Swaraj: Presidential Address at the Calcutta Congress 1906 (Bombay, 1917), 13–14. See Dinyar Patel, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge, MA, 2020), 242–50. Naoroji, The Late Dr. Dadabhai Naoroji on Swaraj, 13–14.

“The Fate of the Common People”

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Africa on the SS Kildonan Castle, both paid homage to Naoroji and criticized how easily swaraj had been collapsed into a matter of electoral reform.7 As swaraj became a concept bandied about back and forth in nationalist circles over the next five decades, it raised fundamental questions about imperial and postimperial political founding. What would self-determination within – and eventually beyond – the British Empire in fact look like? What did it mean for a colonial people to become self-ruling? Kumarappa’s essay in November 1935 was a response to precisely these questions. His answer – and that of a group of others, this book seeks to demonstrate – was that self-determination would remain incomplete under a state that allowed for the elected representation of colonial peoples. The more transformative, more urgent, and more democratic task was to find participatory mechanisms for popular rule, which might make a people into agents rather than objects of government. Indian political thinkers who challenged the relationship between political representation and popular sovereignty in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s did so against the backdrop of enormous global transformations. Recent scholarship in intellectual history has shown how the interwar period was marked by a striking degree of political and legal experimentation, both within Europe and beyond it. The years from 1917/18 to 1945 were beset by what C. A. Bayly has described as a farreaching, drawn-out “world crisis” stretching across continents.8 In Jan-Werner Müller’s memorable phrasing, “no liberal answers for the democratic age had emerged by the mid-1920s,” and, “in the absence of any kind of stable constitutional settlement,” those conscripted into European modernity had to “keep on experimenting with political forms and principles.”9 On the specific question of democracy, 7

8

9

M. K. Gandhi, “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge, 1997), 13–18. C. A. Bayly, Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015: Global Connections and Comparisons (Hoboken, 2018), 12–48. Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven, 2011), 48. On political experimentation around the question of state sovereignty in the interwar period, also see Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–1926 (Oxford, 2008), 128–98; Cécile Laborde, Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France, 1900–1925 (New York, 2000); Jeanne Morefield, “Urgent History: The Sovereignty Debates and Political Theory’s Lost Voices,” Political Theory, vol. 45, no. 2 (2017), 164–91;

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following the cataclysm of WWI, it was no longer clear to many why the demands of newly enfranchised populations should be channeled through constitutional parliamentary states. Writing from London in 1917, the British economist John Hobson observed that WWI had demonstrated the hollowness of modern electoral democracy, particularly the vulnerability of democratic institutions and political parties to capture by oligarchic economic interests. He insisted that it was misguided to consider the liberal states of the West as democracies in any real sense of the term: The forms of political self-government, indeed, exist in Britain, France, America and elsewhere with varying measures of completeness. But nowhere does the will of the people play freely through these forms. In every country the will of certain powerful men or interests is pumped down from above into the party machinery that it may come up with the formal register of an electorate denied the knowledge and opportunity to create and exercise a will that is informed and free. Popular opinion and aspirations act at best as exceedingly imperfect checks on these abuses of political self-government. So evident has been the failure of all democratic forms hitherto devised that hostile critics have pronounced democracy incapable of realization.10

As representative democracy lost its luster after 1917, Hobson suggested there would be an intellectual backlash against many of its core principles, for “not only the spirit but the very forms of popular selfgovernment have suffered violation.”11 Hobson’s prediction was prescient. That same year, W. E. B. Du Bois argued in an essay for the Journal of Race Development that neither the United States under Woodrow Wilson nor the capitalist, constitutional states of Western Europe were full democracies, since they all disenfranchised and subjugated their colonial subjects.12 With the outbreak of socialist revolution in Germany in 1918, Rosa Luxemburg authored a defense of “anti-parliamentarism,” advocating direct self-legislation through workers’ councils.13 Hobson’s fellow

10 12

13

and Mira L. Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA, 2020), 49–154. 11 J. A. Hobson, Democracy after the War (London, 1917), 5. Ibid., 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Culture of White Folk,” Journal of Race Development, vol. 7, no. 4 (1917), 434–47. Rosa Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want?” in Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard (New York, 1971), 366–76.

“The Fate of the Common People”

5

British socialist G. D. H. Cole held that electoral forms of workingclass politics, such as that practiced by the British Labor Party and the trade union movement, had run their course by 1918, and the need of the hour was for more revolutionary alternatives.14 When Carl Schmitt thus declared in 1923 that the liberal ideal of reasoned deliberation within elected representative legislatures, inherited from John Stuart Mill and François Guizot, was no longer tenable in the twentieth century, he was conveying a sentiment as formative for the postWWI left as for the reactionary Caesarist dictatorships that would arise in the 1920s and 1930s.15 Discussions about political representation and swaraj in colonial India were produced by the particular conditions of South Asia in the first half of the twentieth century but were also, at the same time, deeply global phenomena. They were imbricated in a transnational backlash against liberalism and driven by larger ruptures in thinking about parliamentarism and representative democracy after 1917 and 1918. Revisiting the Indian sovereignty debates provides us with a concrete archive to evaluate modern anti-colonialism as a body of democratic thought. To put the point in a slightly different manner: What was the democratic dimension of the protest against European imperial rule? What did opposition to imperialism entail in terms of theories of popular sovereignty and government? How did anticolonial movements respond to the denial of political rights by European empires, and what did they offer as potential correctives?16 The challenge to representative government in thinking about swaraj 14 15

16

G. D. H. Cole, Self-Government in Industry (London, 1918). Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA, 1985). Recent work on twentieth-century anti-colonial democratic thought includes: James Tully, “Civic Freedom contra Imperialism,” in Public Philosophy in a New Key, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2008), 225–309; Margaret Kohn and Keally D. McBride, Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations (New York, 2011); Karuna Mantena, “Popular Sovereignty and Anti-Colonialism,” in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, eds. Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2016), 297–319; and Nazmul S. Sultan, “Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India,” American Political Science Review, vol. 114, no. 1 (2020), 81–94. For an account of anti-imperial popular sovereignty focused on the eighteenth-century Haitian Revolution, see Kevin Olson, Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age (Cambridge, 2016), 144–66.

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underscores how one argument within twentieth-century anti-colonial thought – neither the only nor the most pervasive argument, by any account, but an important one for around six decades – was about the illegitimacy of electoral representation as the primary vehicle for selfdetermination. If the purpose of countering empire was to make a people self-governing, to turn them from subjects to citizens – to give them, as a collective body, the right of authorship over laws – then, it followed, the concentration of lawmaking authority within a limited number of institutions and persons undermined the scope of selfgovernment. Grounding a political alternative to imperial rule within the strictures and constraints of a liberal constitutional order was considered incompatible with a democratic interpretation of the principle of self-determination. From the perspective of this interwar tradition, genuinely anti-colonial political thinking was an experiment in reevaluating the institutional forms of popular rule.

1.2 “The Awakening of the Orient”: Empire and Colonial Freedom The possibility of collective political self-government exercised directly by colonial peoples themselves began to crystallize as an idea in European political thought during the opening decades of the twentieth century. A number of the British commentators whom Gregory Claeys has characterized as “imperial sceptics” greeted national independence movements in India, Iran, Egypt, and East Asia as evidence that European liberalism’s pedagogical mission of rendering non-European peoples fit for modern self-government had finally succeeded, and might now be safely stalled.17 L. T. Hobhouse argued in 1911 that “nothing has been more encouraging to the Liberalism of Western Europe in recent years than the signs of political awakening in the East,” offering as an example Iranian constitutional opposition to the extension of British influence in the country in 1908 and 1909.18 Until the turn of the twentieth century, the sociologist insisted that “it seemed as though it would in the end be impossible to resist the ultimate ‘destiny’ of the 17

18

Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 2010). L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, ed. James Meadowcroft (Cambridge: 1994), 114. On Hobhouse and empire, see Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, 2016), 341–62.

“Awakening of the Orient”: Empire and Colonial Freedom

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white races to be masters of the rest of the world,” but the rising chorus of demands for parliamentary government and independent states in the colonies – “the awakening of the Orient, from Constantinople to Pekin” – was “the greatest and most hopeful fact of our time” for those critical of imperial militarism.19 For the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb in January 1918, the acceleration of colonial home rule signaled that the assumptions of civilizational superiority that had propelled European expansion through the nineteenth century were on the verge of collapse: “just as in the past the civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, and the great Roman Empire have been successively destroyed, so, in the judgement of this detached observer, the civilization of all Europe is even now receiving its death blow.”20 The most systematic and certainly the most influential analysis published in the 1910s of what Leonard Hobhouse called “the awakening of the Orient” came not from the Western European capitals of London, Paris, or Brussels, but from a tottering, tumultuous Russian Empire on the eve of WWI. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914), published as a set of essays in the St. Petersburg Bolshevik journal Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) between April and June 1914 (while Lenin himself was in exile in Poland), was an attempt to give a comparative account of nonEuropean nationalist struggle, within the framework of the Marxist tradition as Lenin understood it. Lenin took there to be an important functional difference between successive waves of national revolution in Europe through the nineteenth century and national revolution in the colonies of European powers. Europe between the French Revolution of 1789 and the unification of Germany in 1871 had undergone “an epoch of bourgeois-democratic revolutions,” as popular national movements sought to establish commercial, representative republics led by a national bourgeoisie – an observation Marx had made often in his late work, Engels had famously reiterated in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (1880), and Lenin adopted from them both.21 European colonies in the early twentieth century confronted 19 20

21

Hobhouse, Liberalism, 114. Sidney Webb, Labor and the New Social Order: A Report on Reconstruction (London, 1918), 3. See Claeys, Imperial Sceptics, 228. V. I. Lenin, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Lenin: Collected Works (CW), vol. 20 (December 1913–August 1914), trans. Bernard Isaacs and Joe Fineberg, ed. Julius Katzer (Moscow, 1964), 393–454, at 405–6. Also see

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a different situation, subject to an extractive, monopolistic global market extending outward from Western Europe and its satellite states, woven into the material networks of empire, a system Lenin analyzed at greater length in the pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).22 The demand for popular government in national terms in a colonial setting was, consequently, a demand for control over the imperialist world-system. Unlike most European national movements of the previous century, anti-imperial nationalism in the colonies challenged the expansion of European commercial power. Lenin upheld support for colonial independence movements as a pillar of Bolshevik foreign policy, stating that “the nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support.”23 His model was Marx’s enthusiasm for Polish independence in the mid-1860s.24 What did Lenin’s theory of anti-imperial nationalism imply for political strategy in the colonial world? For one thing, as Sanjay Seth has argued, Lenin failed to adequately distinguish between antiimperialism seeking to counter European domination out of opposition to capitalism, and anti-imperialism seeking to counter European domination in order to build up state-led domestic capitalism.25 The Indian Marxist Manabendra Nath Roy (M. N. Roy) thus criticized Lenin’s blanket support for anti-imperialism.26 But, going further, by 1917 Lenin was adamant, with what Rosa Luxemburg described as an

22

23 24

25

26

Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), 683–717. V. I. Lenin, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” in Lenin: CW, vol. 22 (December 1915–July 1916), 185–304. Lenin, “The Right of Nations,” 412. Ibid., 432–33; and Karl Marx, “Poland’s European Mission (1867),” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe: A Collection of Articles, Speeches, Letters, eds. Paul W. Blackstock and Bert F. Hoselitz (Glencoe, IL, 1952), 104–8. On Marx and Poland, see Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago, 2010), 42–78. Sanjay Seth, Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India (New Delhi, 1995), 48–51. M. N. Roy, “Original Draft of the Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Question,” in Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. I, ed. Sibnarayan Roy (New Delhi, 1987), 165–68.

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“iron consistency,”27 that the only truly revolutionary regime in the colonies, as in Russia, would need to be a militarily powerful, fiscally centralized, and coercive workers’ state. In the important pamphlet State and Revolution (1918), Lenin elaborated a theory of state power rooted in a historical and sociological account of the inevitability of violent class conflict. The modern state and its various organs – a standing military and police force, representation through parliament, and monopoly over territory, citizenship, and population – were products of a rising bourgeoisie’s efforts to consolidate its power over other classes. The origins of the European state lay in its capacity to act as a “‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, of millions of working people by handfuls of the rich.”28 As an organized working class began to gain political power, it confronted the intransigence of a bourgeoisie resisting the dismantling of its political and economic domination. During the period of revolutionary struggle, the coercive apparatus of the modern state provided the proletariat with institutions to expropriate private capitalist production. What Lenin called “the dictatorship of the proletariat” carried out a revolution against the resurgence of capitalism using the tools of the bourgeoisie, relying on “state power, a centralized organization of force.”29 Like the democratic republics it replaced, Lenin’s revolutionary state was premised on political representation. Lenin stated that he did not aim for “the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle,” but for the “conversion of representative institutions from talking shops into ‘working’ bodies.”30

27

28

29

30

Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? ed. Bertram D. Wolfe (Ann Arbor, 1961), 25–80, at 34–35. V. I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution,” in Lenin: CW, vol. 25 (June– September 1917), 385–497, at 402. Ibid., 409. On the longer intellectual genealogy of Lenin’s ideas about dictatorship and revolution, see Dan Edelstein, “Revolution in Permanence and the Fall of Popular Sovereignty,” in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept, eds. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr (New York, 2017), 371–92, at 384–86. On the Marxist conception of dictatorship more generally, see Lea Ypi, “Democratic Dictatorship: Political Legitimacy in Marxist Perspective,” European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 28, no. 2 (2020), 277–91. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” 428.

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In practice, this meant the concentration of sovereign lawmaking power within a vanguard workers’ party legislating on behalf of the proletariat from a single state assembly. Lenin rejected ideas about the federalist devolution of legislative power to local communes outlined in the middle of the nineteenth century by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin as unhelpful utopianism, echoing Marx’s critique in 1874 of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1873).31 Lenin’s commitment to a centralized representative state, as Tracy Strong has observed, derived from a realistic assessment of the constraints imposed by conflict on political founding.32 Unsurprisingly, with Lenin’s rise, support for the construction of Leninist states became part of the official Bolshevik approach to antiimperial nationalism from the mid-1910s. Joseph Stalin’s “Marxism and the National Question” (1913), an essay Lenin commissioned from Stalin in Vienna, accepted the normative value of the nation as a political community, advocated a strong centralized state in opposition to empire, and decried “unlimited federalism” as a pernicious form of “separatism.”33 Over eight days between August 31 and September 7, 1920, the Bolshevik-dominated Third Communist International (Comintern) convened the “Congress of the Peoples of the East” in Baku, Azerbaijan, an ambitious gathering of nationalists from Central Asia, the Caucasus, Iran, and India. The Red Army was still fighting a brutal civil war on three fronts, but Lenin’s Bolsheviks were also making rapid gains into the border regions of the erstwhile Russian Empire, including into Azerbaijan itself. Part of the goal of the Congress of the Peoples of the East was to endear the Bolsheviks to non-European nationalities and to present the newly ascendant Russian regime as an ally of Asian opposition to British, French, and American imperialism. The meeting was led by Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek, both prominent Bolsheviks who would fall victim to Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.34 31 32

33

34

Ibid., 434. Tracy B. Strong, Politics without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2012), 184–217. Joseph Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” in Marxism and the National Question: Selected Writings and Speeches (New York, 1942), 7–68, at 65. See Eric D. Weitz, A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (Princeton, 2019), 288–89. The Baku Congress has been surprisingly neglected by historians, despite Congress proceedings having been available in Russian since the 1920s and in

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Much of the Congress was consumed by criticism of the 1919 Paris Peace Settlement. The settlement was widely viewed by delegates as a strategic agreement intended to extend the victorious Entente powers’ control over Asia (an undeniably accurate observation, as we shall see later in the chapter). Radek declared to the Congress on its second day that “Entente capital,” spearheaded by Britain, France, and now the United States, “having struck down its German competitor, the German brigand, has obtained control of the hundreds of millions who make up the peoples of the East, in order to enslave them.”35 Bolshevik delegates like Radek presented the Leninist form of the state to the assembled nationalist leaders as the only effective bulwark against imperial expansion by the Entente and the specter of colonial “enslavement.” On September 6, Béla Kun of the new Hungarian Soviet Republic argued for collectivist, centralized states in the colonies, capable of breaking the exploitative alliance between local business interests and European capitalists, an alliance Kun considered a way of rendering non-European societies subject to European states. Without state power at its disposal, Kun insisted that “the revolution of the peoples of the East” would invariably bend to the European bourgeoisie and to local “agents of foreign imperialists.”36 Only after a political party representing agricultural and industrial workers took command of a powerful state did it possess an effective instrument to resist the incursions of foreign capital. Anatoly Skachko from the Ukraine repeated Béla Kun’s point in a speech later that evening, stressing the need for a political system in Anatolia, Persia, and India where all products of labor belonged to a single, central state.37

35

36

English translation since the 1970s – and despite Zinoviev’s actions at the Congress having been popularized through Warren Beatty’s film Reds (1981). For the few existing studies, see Stephen White, “Communism and the East: The Baku Congress, 1920,” Slavic Review, vol. 33, no. 3 (1974), 492–514; Ronald Grigor Suny, “‘Don’t Paint Nationalism Red!’: National Revolution and Socialist Anti-Imperialism,” in Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then, ed. Prasenjit Duara (London, 2004), 176–98, at 193–96; and Alp Yenen, “The Other Jihad: Enver Pasha, Bolsheviks, and Politics of Anticolonial Muslim Nationalism during the Baku Congress 1920,” in The First World War and Its Aftermath: The Shaping of the Middle East, ed. T. G. Fraser (Chicago, 2015), 273–94. Congress of the Peoples of the East (Baku, September 1920): Stenographic Report, trans. Brian Pearce (London, 1977), 44. 37 Ibid., 127–28. Ibid., 135.

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The stenographic report of the Congress of the Peoples of the East reveals that doctrinaire Leninism was not the only ideology circulating in Baku in September 1920. On September 5, Mikhail Pavlovich, a well-known commentator on Iranian and Chinese affairs from Odessa, advocated for the creation of peasant assemblies in the colonies modeled on Russian soviets from the early days of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. By establishing “peasant soviets, soviets of the toilers” as mechanisms for direct self-government, Pavlovich argued in the spirited millenarian language typical of the Baku Congress, nationalists and the leadership of the Comintern would “significantly advance the cause of the revolutionary education and organization of the masses of the East in the struggle against the world of the predators.”38 Pavlovich’s proposal contained faint traces of Bakunin’s program of decentralized federalist socialism from the 1870s. But Pavlovich’s was a minor voice, and the Leninist line clearly carried the day. As the Moscow Comintern became the key European supporter of anticolonial nationalism between 1919 and the outbreak of WWII, its propaganda consistently extolled the virtues of a centralist party-state. Within the League Against Imperialism (LAI), a transnational network of anti-colonial activists backed by the Comintern from 1927 to 1937, a fairly narrow imagination of the sovereign political community dominated. The manifesto adopted at the LAI’s second meeting in Frankfurt on July 31, 1929 hailed the Soviet state of the 1920s as “a powerful stimulus to the colonial peoples to struggle for national freedom and independence.”39 Insofar as there was a coherent Soviet view of anti-colonial self-determination in the interwar decades, it was oriented toward moulding independence movements into demands for unitary party-states. At the same time, the discourses of anti-imperialism and selfdetermination were taken up not just by the Bolsheviks but by the other rising power of the post-1919 world: the United States. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was reelected to his second term as U.S. President. 38 39

Ibid., 100. “Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the League Against Imperialism,” 2a. 1929. Stencil. 5 pages. No. 78. League Against Imperialism Digital Archives (Collection ID ARCH00804), International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam. On the LAI, see the volume The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives, eds. Michele Luoro, Carolien Stolte, Heather Streets-Salter, and Sana Tannoury-Karam (Leiden, 2020).

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The former academic soon began to present himself as an arbiter in the diplomatic gridlock of Europe’s Great War.40 Wilson’s address to the U.S. Senate in January 1917 laid out the general framework of an American-led postwar settlement. Amongst other things, Wilson’s settlement maintained that securing peace entailed giving attention to the internal organization of individual states. Along with the regulation of interstate relations, Wilson argued, international agreements after the war needed to integrate democracy as a core principle of political order: “no peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed.”41 Accepting the value of “the consent of the governed” meant that national groups had to be given a voice in political rule and that “no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.”42 Wilson went on to assert that “the consent of the governed” was embedded in a particularly Anglo-American political tradition and had been produced by the long experience of English constitutionalism since the Magna Carta and by “those who have sought to build up liberty” in North America since the eighteenth century.43 Very broadly, “the consent of the governed” meant representative government on the American model. Wilson reiterated these arguments as he prepared to lead peace negotiations in France in 1918. In his famous “Fourteen Points” (“War Aims”) speech to Congress on January 8, 1918, Wilson presented “the consent of the governed” as a way to reform European imperial practice in the 1910s. The fifth of Wilson’s fourteen points held that an “adjustment” of “colonial claims” by European powers should accommodate the express consent of non-European subject

40

41

42

Wilson’s internationalist turn after 1917 is the subject of a substantial historiography. See, for example, Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York, 1992); David Steigerwald, Wilsonian Idealism in America (Ithaca, 1994); Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (London, 2002), 11–33; Trygve Throntveit, “The Fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination,” Diplomatic History, vol. 35, no. 3 (2011), 445–81; and Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2007), 16–53. Woodrow Wilson, “Last Hopes of Peace with Germany – Address to the United States Senate, January 22, 1917,” in President Wilson’s Great Speeches and Other History Making Documents (Chicago, 1919), 144–52, at 148. 43 Ibid. Ibid., 149.

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populations.44 In “determining all such questions of sovereignty,” European powers should incorporate “the interests of the populations concerned.”45 Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing recognized that the president’s turn to national self-determination to rectify imperial misrule on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference was not particularly novel; it was an older Anglo-American ideal of “consent of the governed,” which had “for three centuries been repeatedly declared to be sound by political philosophers, and generally accepted as just by civilized peoples” dressed up with some new, ambitiously idealistic terminology directed at Britain and France, especially at Clemenceau and Lloyd George.46 Wilson opened up the possibility that imperial subjects were at least morally entitled to political self-rule, then proceeded to define self-rule as a historically specific form of representative government.47 If peoples outside the Anglo-American civilizational sphere wanted to rule themselves independently, they needed to first adopt the political institutions that were its distinctive achievements. The tangible result of Wilson’s thinking on democracy during the Paris Peace Conference was the establishment of the League of Nations Mandates system in 1919. Large swathes of territory belonging to Germany, Austria, and the Ottomans in Central and Southwestern Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands were made over to Britain and France. Under the periodic oversight of a multimember Permanent Mandates Commission linked to the League, Britain and France were supposed to gradually introduce their new subjects to Western European, or more narrowly transatlantic, norms of statehood and representative democracy. In colonies “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” Paris delegates agreed during the ratification of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant on February 14, 1919, it 44

45 46

47

Woodrow Wilson, “President Wilson’s Address to Congress Proclaiming the War Aims of the United States January 8, 1918,” in President Wilson’s Great Speeches, 339–48, at 344. Ibid. Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston, 1921), 96. On national character, political representation, and the modern state in Wilson, see Duncan Kelly, “Woodrow Wilson and the Challenge of Federalism in World War One,” in The Federal Idea: Public Law between Governance and Political Life, ed. Amnon Lev (Oxford, 2017), 167–88.

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fell onto the “advanced nations” of Western Europe to undertake “tutelage,” as “mandatories on behalf of the League.”48 The nature of “tutelage” depended on “the stage of the development of the people,” but in all cases it meant laying the rudimentary foundations of the bureaucratic, representative, centralized nation-state.49 Taken beyond Western Europe, Wilson’s vision of a world remade through a cascade of republican democracy thus became part of an imperial system projecting the territorial state and representative government as universal standards. Indeed, as Susan Pedersen has noted, “Britain found Wilsonian ideas easy to accommodate because they dovetailed so nicely with British imperial practice.”50 There were, of course, categorical differences in the options put forward by Wilson and Lenin. John Maynard Keynes, who attended the Paris talks as an advisor for the British Treasury, warned of the likelihood of a polarized international system with “no moral solidarity” between constituent countries, divided between a Wilsonian Anglo-American-French camp, an authoritarian Germany, and a Russian-led network of new revolutionary states.51 Wilson’s ideal regime, a multiparty representative democracy with legally protected property rights and free commercial exchange, was precisely the kind of Trojan horse for capital accumulation attacked in Lenin’s State and Revolution. There was also the important question of racial and civilizational difference. Lenin and others in the Bolshevik inner circle like Zinoviev and Radek were committed to direct political action on the part of Asian anti-colonial leaders. By all accounts, Wilson never imagined any kind of non-European political agency outside of European supervision, at least not in the foreseeable future. There was undeniably an ideological struggle between two paradigms of colonial self-determination in 1919 and 1920. In his classic study of 48

49 50

51

“Comparison between the Draft Covenant and the Final Text,” in Documents on the League of Nations, ed. C. A. Kluyver (Leiden, 1920), 49–61, at 58–59. Ibid., 59. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York, 2015), 25. On the Mandates System and European empire, also see Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2005), 115–95; and Rose Parfitt, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance (Cambridge, 2019), 154–222. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, 1920), 295.

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the Paris Peace Conference, the historian Arno Mayer thus described Wilson’s Fourteen Points as a “counter-manifesto” aimed at Lenin.52 Wilson’s underlying motivation, according to Mayer, was to prevent Soviet forces from monopolizing the languages of anti-imperialism and collective self-government and to render the ideas compatible with American interest. But in locating a sort of proto–Cold War in 1919, Mayer’s interpretation also had the effect of eliding deeper connections between the Leninist and Wilsonian views. Though they never admitted as much, the two leaders converged on the nature of the political community to be created through self-determination: a territorially sovereign polity with a strong centralized administration and a representative system of government. For Lenin, a single political party would use the representative institutions it inherited from previous regimes to govern on behalf of a nation’s working people. For Wilson, popular representation of national groups would occur through an elected central legislature. In both cases – and in the movements at Baku, Frankfurt, and Paris, which were their respective interwar legacies – colonial selfdetermination was meant to buttress the power of states claiming to represent and speak for the people.53 It was this structural homology between Western and Soviet anti-colonialism that Joseph Kumarappa perceptively identified, and tried to challenge, in November 1935.

1.3 Anti-Colonialism as Political Thought As historians and political scientists in Western Europe and the United States turned their attention to “the awakening of the Orient” from the 1940s, the Lenin-Wilson perspective proved remarkably resilient. The 52

53

Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, 1959), 329–67. Eric Weitz is alone among historians in highlighting the broad similarities, rather than the differences, between Lenin and Wilson in 1918 and 1919. As he has noted, by the end of the Paris Peace Conference, a collectivist understanding of self-determination that applied to ‘peoples’ rather than to individuals came to be shared by liberal internationalists and Marxists. I build on Weitz’s insight in this section, though my contention is that the idea of state-based political representation, and not just the community of the nation, became dominant in 1919. See Eric D. Weitz, “Self-Determination: How a German Enlightenment Idea Became the Slogan of National Liberation and a Human Right,” American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 2 (2015), 462–96; and Weitz, A World Divided.

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first academic study of twentieth-century anti-colonial movements was authored in 1944 by Alfred Cobban, the great English scholar of Burke, Rousseau, and the French Revolution, for the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, or what is now the Chatham House think tank in St. James’s Square).54 The main theme in Cobban’s discussion was that modern anti-colonialism had a clear, traceable genealogy. It was the latest iteration of a world-historical process begun in the late eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions, when popular sovereignty first came to be linked to national independence. With the French Revolution in particular, “the people itself became the supreme authority, the single active principle in the state.”55 But the revolutionary and postrevolutionary people never acted as individuals; they came together collectively in units called nations, and each individual nation thereby gained a right to author its own laws. “The people ceased to be an atomic dust of individuals” and instead “became a whole, was called the Nation, endowed with sovereignty.”56 Cobban considered the post-1789 theory of popular rule as an essentially national phenomenon to be the source of the principle of selfdetermination in 1919. The Bolsheviks and Wilson gave new currency to national liberation as a democratic ideal, but did not fundamentally offer a new definition of the concept.57 As a political movement oriented toward giving lawmaking power to colonial nationalities, to be exercised by them collectively as national peoples, anti-colonialism in the twentieth century was similarly adopting the legacy of the French Revolution. The third aspect of the modern revolutionary tradition, making possible the relationship between people and nation, was the state. The nation as a whole carried out its sovereignty indirectly, by selecting 54

55 56

57

On the interest in non-European politics at Chatham House in the 1940s, see Inderjeet Parmar, “Anglo-American Elites in the Interwar Years: Idealism and Power in the Intellectual Roots of Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations,” International Relations, vol. 16, no. 1 (2002), 53–75. Alfred Cobban, National Self-Determination (London, 1944), 5. Ibid. On the theme of popular sovereignty and national communities generally, see Istvan Hont, “The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: ‘Nation-State’ and ‘Nationalism’ in Historical Perspective,” in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 447–528; and Bernard Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism,” Political Theory, vol. 29, no. 4 (2001), 517–36. Cobban, National Self-Determination, 12–13.

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deputies from amongst itself. The modern state enabled such delegation to take place, as the mechanism of representation required the existence of a central assembly whose members would be able to legislate for the entire nation, and would then have the power to enforce this legislation. Following the French Revolution, Cobban wrote, “to give effect to the new conception of the democratic nation-state a rigidly centralized system of government was set up, as a result of which the nature of the state was drastically altered.”58 As anti-colonial leaders extended the French Revolution beyond Europe, they reproduced its fidelity to the centralized, representative state. The demand for the national sovereignty of non-European peoples after 1919 “saw the idea of the centralized nation-state pushed to its furthest point.”59 Cobban viewed anti-colonial nationalism with deep apprehension. It threatened to reenact in new settings the violence of statism experienced in Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially “the frustration of democratic institutions in the centralized nation-state” resulting from the replacement of local self-rule with the rule of representatives.60 He was certainly much more straightforwardly critical of the nation-state as a political form than either Woodrow Wilson or Lenin had been in 1918 and 1919. In a review of Cobban’s book, Hans Morgenthau complained that the historian had taken his criticisms of the ideal of sovereign power too far.61 Despite his misgivings about statism, however, Cobban continued Wilson and Lenin’s shared verdict on the nature of anti-colonial selfdetermination: It was above all a project of constructing statist forms of political representation on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century European model. A broadly similar assessment was given by John Petrov Plamenatz, Isaiah Berlin’s successor as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls’ College, Oxford, in his On Alien Rule and SelfGovernment (1960). In Plamenatz’s eyes, anti-colonialism was a fraught process from the very beginning. Non-European leaders were adopting theories of national sovereignty from the Age of Revolutions, but were transposing them onto societies accustomed to personalistic, 58 61

59 60 Ibid., 140. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 151. Hans Morgenthau, “International Affairs,” Review of Politics, vol. 10, no. 4 (1948), 493–97, at 497.

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autocratic monarchical government. Plamenatz found it easy to differentiate, for example, between the political culture of the American colonies in the late eighteenth century and that of Asian and African peoples in the twentieth: the colonies now claiming independence are not societies of the same kind as the thirteen colonies which signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The freedom of the individual was about as well respected in those colonies as in the mother-country . . .. It is by no means clear that the colonies now clamoring for independence are all fit for self-government in the same sense.62

Non-European colonies took the revolutionary theory of the popular nation-state without the revolutionary commitment to individual freedom. Such an account combined a diffusionist understanding of popular sovereignty as cascading outward from the French and American revolutions with well-worn tropes of intractable Oriental difference and despotism. Indeed, in a revealing passage Plamenatz contrasted “effective self-government” such as was practiced in Britain and the United States with “what Montesquieu called Oriental despotism.”63 The suggestion was that anti-colonialism was both formed in the shadow of the European Age of Revolutions and that it reproduced only one strand of the era’s legacy, namely domineering state power. When a “backward people” who had not fully undergone “the process of westernization” ruled themselves collectively through a modern state, they “resorted to practices fatal to freedom and democracy.”64 Plamenatz thus proposed that the transfer of political power to nonEuropean peoples (a broad civilizational category that encompassed Balkan nationalities on the European periphery) should occur under international supervision. He called for an “International Authority” of liberal democracies, led by Britain, the United States, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, to be made responsible for drafting suitably liberal constitutions for newly independent countries.65 The organization was to be kept separate from the United Nations, which after fifteen years was coming to be dominated by new powers and giving “the critics of ‘imperialism’ with an excuse for raising a clamor.”66 It is 62

63

John Petrov Plamenatz, On Alien Rule and Self-Government (London, 1960), 28. 64 65 66 Ibid., 51. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 211.

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worth noting that the immediate context for Plamenatz’s complaint about the United Nations in 1960 was the rise of a Soviet-backed AfroAsian bloc in the General Assembly.67 Plamenatz’s plan for the postimperial world order had some overlaps with the interwar Mandates System of the League of Nations. It was also similar to a number of other ambitious midcentury plans for a transnational federation of Western liberal democracies, proposed by British and American thinkers such as Lionel Curtis, Clarence Streit, and Ernest Bevin.68 But while European tutelage in the Mandates System and in Anglo-American proposals from the 1940s was intended to prepare colonies for eventual statehood, Plamenatz’s International Authority was presented as a response to the looming threat of a global proliferation of powerful, authoritarian nation-states. Here, the compositional history of On Alien Rule and Self-Government is relevant. Plamenatz began writing On Alien Rule at Oxford in 1958, the year that Isaiah Berlin delivered his famous lecture on two concepts of liberty at the university. Plamenatz was personally quite close to Berlin – Berlin later spoke movingly of their friendship at Plamenatz’s memorial service in 1975 – and his 1960 book used many arguments from the philosopher’s 1958 lecture.69 Of particular importance was Berlin’s spirited defense of “negative freedom” as a general principle for safeguarding the individual from being subordinated to externally imposed doctrines.70 In Berlinian language, Plamenatz wrote that “in a free society” the “rule of freedom is essentially negative.”71 Berlin provided a framework for Plamenatz to classify anti-colonial movements 67

68

69

70

71

See Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, 2009), 149–89; and Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2010). On these plans, see Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton, 2017), 100–67. Isaiah Berlin, “John Petrov Plamenatz,” in Personal Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, 2014), 177–86. Plamenatz’s relationship with Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s is further detailed in Joshua L. Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford, 2013), 144–87. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, eds. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London, 1997), 191–242. See James Tully, “‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in Context,” in Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom: “Two Concepts of Liberty” Fifty Years Later, eds. Bruce Baum and Robert Nichols (London, 2013), 26–51. Plamenatz, On Alien Rule, 59.

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within an existing rubric of modern political theory. The statism of anti-colonialism undermined negative freedom and posed a challenge to the creation of “free” societies outside of a Western European and North American core. Meanwhile, in the United States, the political scientist Rupert Emerson gave his own analysis of Afro-Asian independence movements in the influential volume From Empire to Nation (1960). Emerson was an American who had studied under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics from 1922 to 1927. From Empire to Nation was the first of a number of studies of anti-colonialism he published in the 1960s and 1970s.72 According to Emerson, though commentators persisted in viewing anti-colonialism as a protest against Western domination, in substance it was a Europeanization of the world, able to challenge the West only “in its own terms.”73 The seeds of anti-colonial thought lay in the modern idea of “the sovereignty of the people,” understood as the right of a preexisting national community to shape its own political life.74 Emerson highlighted the eighteenth-century origins of “the argument linking democracy and nationalism,” singling out what he saw as the pivotal role of Rousseau, and, citing Alfred Cobban, located “the rise to self-assertion of Asian and African peoples” in the legacy of the Atlantic eighteenth century.75 For anti-colonial nationalists as for revolutionaries two centuries earlier in North America and especially France, “the nation-state was regarded as the political expression of the democratic will of the people.”76 The form of the nation-state adopted most commonly was a thoroughly centralized one. In the “democratic constitutions” imagined by independence leaders, Emerson remarked that political power would be “almost as much imposed on the people from above 72

73

74 75

76

Two other important subsequent publications were: Rupert Emerson, “Colonialism,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 4, no. 1 (1969), 3–16; and Rupert Emerson, “Self-Determination,” American Journal of International Law, vol. 65, no. 3 (1971), 459–75. Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Cambridge, MA, 1960), 203. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 215–18. On Emerson’s treatment of nationalism, see Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 103; and Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of SelfDetermination (Princeton, 2019), 15–16. Emerson, From Empire to Nation, 217.

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as in any of the previous regimes,” creating “a government which tells the people what to do than one in which they must exercise freedom of choice.”77 Before he turned his attention to anti-colonialism in 1960, Rupert Emerson was primarily known as a historian of German political thought. His 1927 LSE dissertation under Harold Laski was titled State and Sovereignty in Modern Germany. It was a study of debates on the nature of state power over a half-century from Bismarck’s unification of Germany in 1871 to the adoption of the Weimar Constitution in 1919.78 The focus of Emerson’s thesis was the division in modern German history between unitary and pluralist notions of sovereignty. He contrasted the state theories of Heinrich von Treitschke and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli with the organicist conception of diffuse, group-based political life in Otto von Gierke’s writings. Not altogether surprisingly, the publication of Emerson’s dissertation in 1928 was shepherded by his Harvard colleague Carl Friedrich, the preeminent scholar of Gierke and German pluralism in interwar America.79 The difference between Emerson’s early scholarship on Germany and his later scholarship on non-European nationalism was striking. Little of the intellectual diversity Emerson detailed in his early writings was present in his works from the 1960s. He simply did not consider popular sovereignty to be as contentious a topic for anti-colonial figures as it had been for a generation of pre-Weimar German thinkers. By the early 1960s, then, an interpretation of anti-colonial political thought as hopelessly, almost tragically statist was dominant in AngloAmerican political theory. The interpretation was founded on the twin historiographical premises that a nationalist republican discourse from the era of the great Atlantic revolutions remained unchanged as it travelled over nearly two centuries and crossed borders, and, relatedly, that only those strands of this republican discourse in which sovereignty was to be represented through the state gained traction within independence movements. The narrative bound the logic of

77 78

79

Ibid., 280. The dissertation was published as Rupert Emerson, State and Sovereignty in Modern Germany (New Haven, 1928). Ibid., xi. On Carl Friedrich, see Udi Greenberg, The Weimar Century: German Emigres and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton, 2014), 25–75.

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anti-colonial nationalism to a prior historical precedent and highlighted the circumscribed nature of its political imagination. Midcentury political theorists shared with the dueling liberal and Soviet ideologies of the post-1919 years the assumption that non-European nationalists could only ever take state-based representative government to be the appropriate answer to the problem of institutionalizing popular sovereignty in an imperial and postimperial setting. As late as 1984, the Oxford international relations theorist Hedley Bull reduced “the revolt against the West” to the struggle of colonial peoples “to achieve equal rights as sovereign states.”80 The conventional statist narrative of anti-colonialism has persisted into our contemporary moment. Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment (2007) recapitulates key themes of the older account, especially of its liberal internationalist variant. Manela’s book documents how the Wilsonian idea of self-determination was taken up by nationalists in India, Egypt, China, and Korea over six months between autumn 1918 and spring 1919.81 Manela constructs a diffusionist narrative wherein the appropriation of Woodrow Wilson marks a critical point of origin for anti-colonial nationalism, leading to the acceptance of republican government and the institutional apparatus of the modern nation-state as aspirational goals for critics of European empire. This is a highly partial, selective understanding of anti-colonial thought of the interwar period. It obfuscates movements that not only did not align themselves with the president’s Anglo-American liberalism in 1919 but also frontally challenged the liberal tradition’s core assumptions about representation and sovereignty. As Adam Tooze notes, “appealing as it may be to construct a ‘Wilsonian moment’ in India, it existed, if it existed at all, in the minds of no more than a handful of nationalists.”82 The Wilsonian paradigm cannot explain 80

81

82

Hedley Bull, “The Revolt against the West,” in The Expansion of International Society, eds. Adam Watson and Hedley Bull (Oxford, 1984), 217–28, at 220. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 55–157. A similarly celebratory depiction of Wilson’s influence, though one largely limited to Europe, is Macmillan, Paris 1919, 11–43. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916–1931 (London, 2014), 190. Cf. also the limitations of Wilsonianism in Egypt in 1919: Hussein Omar, “Conscript and Sacrifice: The Political Theology of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919,” talk given at Department of History, SOAS University of London, March 19, 2018. I am grateful to Hussein Omar for sharing a draft of the talk.

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Popular Sovereignty and the End of Empire

why an economist writing from a North Indian town in 1935 might have viewed liberal, representative democracy as a problem to be overcome, rather than a promising route out of imperial domination. The Wilsonian Moment joins an emerging body of scholarship in international history and the history of modern legal and political thought seeking to recover the role played by non-European actors in the disintegration of empire and the formation of international society during the first half of the twentieth century. Anti-colonialism in its various guises – in independence movements, in petitions to the League of Nations, and in activism through the LAI, the UN General Assembly, or the 1955 Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian Peoples – occupies a prominent place in the story. Yet the precise architecture of the political community propounded by nationalists of the period is all too frequently taken to be predicated upon the capacity of state institutions to represent the colonial people.83 The nation-state forged in the violent crucible of Atlantic revolution and entrenched in European politics by the early twentieth century is treated as a sort of modular template for popular self-determination, to be adopted by all other societies one by one in an uninterrupted cascade of nation-building. Such a narrative is sanitized of all the messiness of disagreement that marked the actual history of nationalism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. It turns into a unilinear story of state formation what was in reality a very lengthy, drawn-out process beset by competing, conflicting, and often irreconcilable political visions. If we take seriously the insight that anti-colonial political thought was concerned above all with political and economic sovereignty and only marginally with the ideology of pre-political individual rights, then, I would argue, we also

83

See, for example, Weitz, A World Divided; Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 (Cambridge, 2014), 225–62; Jörg Fisch, The Right of Self-Determination of Peoples: The Domestication of an Illusion, trans. Anita Mage (Cambridge, 2015), 190–217; Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 13–58; Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge, 2015), 251–77; and Talbot C. Imlay, “International Socialism and Decolonization during the 1950s: Competing Rights and the Postcolonial Order,” American Historical Review, vol. 118, no. 4 (2013), 1105–32. On the limits of basing a ‘democratic’ justification for decolonization primarily on political representation, see the discussion in Anna Stilz, “Decolonization and Self-Determination,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 32, no. 1 (2015), 1–24.

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need to recognize the multiplicity of meanings attached to the concept of anti-colonial sovereignty in the twentieth century.84

1.4 Situating the Book Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought is part of, and a contribution to, an ongoing revisionist turn in studies of political decolonization within British and French imperial history. Over the past fifteen years or so, historians have tried to move away from positing the nation-state as the only or even the preferred political unit embraced by leaders of colonial independence movements. The pivotal reason for the revisionist turn has been Frederick Cooper’s important work since the mid-2000s on empire, labor, and political belonging.85 Writing against teleological histories of an old world of empires giving way to a new world of territorially autonomous nation-states, Cooper has unearthed the myriad ways that political leaders in French West Africa negotiated for social citizenship rights within the constitutional framework of the wider French Empire between 1945 and 1960. The goal of many West African leaders was a transnational French imperial federation with equality of political status between its constituent national units, a “composite political entity” to be “transformed into a structure that would ensure the rights and cultural integrity of all citizens.”86 Cooper’s interpretation has been transformative for the study of the French Empire in the mid-twentieth century.87 It has also 84

85

86 87

On the priority of political sovereignty in anti-colonial movements, see especially Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 84–119. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), 153–214; Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, 2014); Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010); Frederick Cooper, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (Cambridge, MA, 2014). Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 9. See Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005); Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC, 2015); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, 2006); and Adria Lawrence, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire (Cambridge, 2013). For a critical discussion of imperial federalism in French Africa, see Richard Drayton, “Federal Utopias and the Realities of Imperial

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more recently begun to inform scholarship on decolonization in other contexts, to the extent that, as Michael Collins puts it, it is now possible to speak comparatively of a global “decolonizing federal moment” stretching across the British, French, and Dutch empires from about the 1930s to the mid-1960s.88 In the South Asian case, a new group of historians has excavated long-neglected federalist plans from the 1930s and 1940s advocating the territorial autonomy of Muslim-majority provinces and of native-ruled princely states.89 Radical Democracy is shaped by the critical sensibility of the new federalist historiography. It is similarly attentive to the defeated alternatives of anti-colonial politics – the paths not taken, or taken only to be abandoned – and tries to resist seeing the entire period of interwar anti-colonial struggle as a teleological progression toward national independence. Yet there are crucial differences between the federalist projects analyzed in this book and those retrieved from the archives by other imperial historians over the past few years. This book is a study of federalist visions of direct democracy. The broad tradition of political thought examined here opposed centralized state authority on the grounds that it entailed an exclusively representative system of selfgovernment, delegating the making and execution of public law to

88

89

Power,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 37, no. 2 (2017), 401–6. Michael Collins, “Decolonization and the ‘Federal Moment,’” Diplomacy and Statecraft, vol. 24, no. 1 (2013), 21–40, at 36. On federalism and anticolonialism in the British imperial context, see, for example, Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 107–41; and Ismay Milford, “Federation, Partnership, and the Chronologies of Space in 1950s East and Central Africa,” The Historical Journal, vol. 63, no. 5 (2020), 1325–48. For an overview of the historiography, see Merve Fejzula, “Historiographical Review: The Cosmopolitan Historiography of Twentieth-Century Federalism,” The Historical Journal, vol. 64, no. 2 (2021), 1–24. On provincial territorial autonomy along religious lines, see Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge, 2012), 185–98; and Sunil Purushotham, “Federating the Raj: Hyderabad, Sovereign Kingship, and Partition,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 54, no. 1 (2020), 157–98, at 180–88. On the federalism of the princely states, see Purushotham, “Federating the Raj,” 168–79; Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 2015), 54–70; Sarath Pillai, “Fragmenting the Nation: Divisible Sovereignty and Travancore’s Quest for Federal Independence,” Law and History Review, vol. 34, no. 3 (2016), 743–82; and Rama S. Mantena, “Anticolonialism and Federation in Colonial India,” Ab Imperio, vol. 3 (2018), 36–62.

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state officials. Statism in both its monarchical and parliamentary variants was seen as putting into place a hierarchical structure of command. The ‘people’ could act only through the organs of the state, such as an elected parliament, which stood in for (‘represented’) the entire body of citizens – the precise definition of self-determination endorsed unquestioningly, as we have seen, by Woodrow Wilson and Lenin after the Great War. For the constitutional reformers, historians, political scientists, economists, and pamphleteers who form the subject of the following chapters, the problem of statism was fundamentally about how it filtered and disciplined national sovereignty into only being performed in an indirect, representative way. The thinkers envisaged a federal network of independently governed citizen assemblies as the correlative response. Their federalism, then, went far beyond securing mutual relations between an aggregate of sub-imperial polities. It became a critique of regnant understandings of representative government and was oriented toward imagining the self-rule of imperial subjects in a historically novel fashion, through mechanisms for directly participatory decision-making. As a project aimed at recovering a lost model of anti-colonial federalism, Radical Democracy also illustrates the existence of direct democracy as an ideal within twentieth-century Indian political thought – certainly a much more prevalent ideal than has been acknowledged by political theorists. Studies of Indian nationalism generally tend to identify the critique of representative, parliamentary democracy with M. K. Gandhi, both with the seminal pamphlet Hind Swaraj (1909) and with the escalation of Gandhian mass mobilization after 1919.90 Significantly less attention has been paid to other movements – whether intellectual or more avowedly political – trying to break out of the tangled web of electoral politics, parliamentarism, and representation through the twentieth century, even within intellectual histories of popular sovereignty in Indian constitutional discourse.91 90

91

See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis, 1993), 85–130; Uday Singh Mehta, “Gandhi on Democracy, Politics, and the Ethics of Everyday Life,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 7, no. 2 (2010), 355–71; and Ajay Skaria, “Relinquishing Republican Democracy: Gandhi’s Ramarajya,” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (2011), 203–29. See, for example, Sarbani Sen, The Constitution of India: Popular Sovereignty and Democratic Transformations (New Delhi, 2007).

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There has been little cognizance of the decades-long tradition of thinking about direct democracy examined here, stretching from the early 1920s to the mid-1970s. Taking as its guiding framework the conceptual link between federalism and popular sovereignty, Chapter 2 turns to an analysis of a draft constitution prepared for the state of Mysore in southern India by the philosopher Brajendra Nath Seal. Mysore was one of colonial India’s approximately 600 ‘princely states’ – territories of varying size and population governed through indirect imperial control, with local monarchical dynasties allowed to retain political power. Mysore began to experiment with democratic reforms in the early 1880s; the 1923 constitution was a particularly ambitious attempt to imagine popular government under the conditions of indirect British rule. Though Seal’s constitution never fully came into effect, Chapter 2 details its program of federalist decentralization and popular lawmaking, and situates its provisions within the context of a debate in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mysore about the efficacy of the British model of parliamentary government. The chapter also brings to light how the native-ruled princely states were seen by some idiosyncratic reformers of the time as sites of potential constitutional experimentation. Chapter 3 traces the rearticulation of democratic elements of the 1923 Mysore draft in the writings of a group of nationalist historians. In particular, it focuses on Radhakumud Mookerji, Radhakamal Mukerjee, and Beni Prasad, all three of whom were based at the North Indian universities of Allahabad and Lucknow and were important figures in a genre of historical writing on the premodern Indian state, what has sometimes been termed the “historiography of the ancient Indian polity.”92 The chapter examines the intellectual origins of the genre and shows how Radhakumud, Radhakamal, and Beni Prasad constructed a federalist, republican narrative of Indian political history, one whose constitutional systems could be revived in the twentieth century. I locate the three historians’ ambitious project of historical restoration as a response to demands for elected representation, state sovereignty, and parliamentarism made by the Indian

92

R. S. Sharma, Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient India (New Delhi, 1959), 1–13.

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National Congress (INC), the main nationalist outfit in British India, between 1885 and WWI. Chapter 4 moves into the 1930s and 1940s and turns its attention to an intellectual tradition I call “Gandhian democracy.” From the mid1930s on, four key thinkers influenced by M. K. Gandhi – Joseph Kumarappa, Kishorlal Mashruwala, Vinoba Bhave, and Shriman Narayan Agarwal – expanded on Hind Swaraj to argue that capitalist economics were a threat to democratic equality and produced the kinds of unaccountability and elite capture of legislatures which they identified in Western European parliamentary states. In response, Gandhian thinkers developed proposals for federalist postcolonial constitutions, combining a system of participatory legislative councils with collectivist agrarian socialism. I trace the intellectual origins of Gandhian democratic thought in the 1930s and 1940s and outline how its main proponents articulated ideas of anti-parliamentarism and moral economics. Revisiting the Gandhian tradition, I suggest, highlights the importance of economic ethics in participatory theories of democracy and popular sovereignty. Chapter 5 examines in detail the interaction between parliamentary and anti-parliamentary views of popular government during the drafting of India’s postimperial constitution, when delegates convened on Curzon Road in New Delhi from the second week of December 1946 to the final week of January 1950. Scholars have long seen the drafting debates as a consolidation of republican self-government and an ethos of political transformation. Such a focus has overlooked the role of ideas about participatory democracy in shaping the Constituent Assembly debates. Yet these ideas, with their roots in the interwar years, were part of a discernible line of political argument during the constitution-making process. Chapter 5 shows how the doctrine of statist, parliamentary supremacy emerged – and triumphed – as a rejection of proposals for popular lawmaking and control of representatives. The chapter is about both the lingering influence and the constitutional defeat of a political theory of direct democracy in the lead-up to colonial independence. In the aftermath of political independence, Chapter 6 argues, direct democracy was turned into a discourse of protest against the parliamentary structure of the postcolonial Indian state. Chapter 6 charts the career of Jayaprakash Narayan, a veteran of the Indian socialist movement who came to be given the moniker loknayak (“the people’s

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Popular Sovereignty and the End of Empire

leader”). I focus on a sixteen-year period from 1959 to 1975 and trace how Jayaprakash Narayan formulated a democratic theory built around three concepts: loksatta (“popular sovereignty”), janata sarkar (“people’s government”), and sampurna kranti (“total revolution”). The resulting theory called for a radical departure from the electoral democracy of the 1950 constitution. It necessitated a new political order based on direct legislation by citizens’ assemblies. Chapter 6 reads the theory of “total revolution” as the final iteration of interwar federalist thought, redefined in opposition to a dominant notion of collective self-rule through the periodic election of party leaders. What are the stakes of revisiting this story now? What do we gain conceptually by recognizing the depth and range of the critiques of representative democracy within twentieth-century Indian political thought? I take up these questions in the Conclusion. Since the end of the Cold War, the idea that governments derive their legitimacy from the will of their people – the old Wilsonian mantra of “the consent of the governed” – has become something of a sacred maxim of progressive political life. Political democracy has become a defining – perhaps the defining – element of the liberal world order. Yet it is an often uncritical enthusiasm for electoral representation, individual rights, global capitalism, and statist governance that has been the most salient feature of our liberal age, a political orientation Susan Marks describes as a way of strategically “legitimating low-intensity democracy.”93 As John Dunn has written, just as representative democracy has risen and risen triumphantly to become “an index of global normality,” the multilayered concept of democracy itself has been rendered compatible with elite governance and private accumulation.94 It is of course not possible, within the political and especially the economic constraints of the twenty-first century, to fully recover all elements of a prior historical point when things were imagined in other ways. But it is the hope of this book that mapping out a defeated tradition of popular sovereignty gives us resources to at least begin to think past the iron cage of liberal representative democracy. 93

94

Susan Marks, The Riddle of All Constitutions: International Law, Democracy, and the Critique of Ideology (Oxford, 2000), 62–67. John Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 2019), 154–58.

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2

“The Genius of the People” The 1923 Constitution of Mysore

2.1 Princely States and Quasi-Sovereignty The British Empire in India was always a deeply fragmented place, a patchwork of overlapping, often competing jurisdictions and sovereignties. This was especially true after the disbanding of the East India Company and the onset of Crown Rule in 1858, when the territory of Britain’s Indian empire was dotted with over 600 ‘princely states.’ The princely states were, broadly speaking, monarchical regimes governed by native rulers. They covered about two-fifths of the Indian subcontinent and collectively included a population of around 80 million. After 1858, relations between the British Empire and the princely states occurred through the complex legal mechanism of ‘paramountcy’: Individual states maintained a certain degree of autonomy over their internal affairs, subject to supervision by British officers known as either ‘Residents’ or ‘Agents.’ As Ian Copland has described, paramountcy veered between “the policy of laissez-faire” and an attempt to keep native states “shackled” to the Government of India.1 The native states varied greatly in their size, their political structures, and even their histories: some were long-standing entities from the medieval period accommodated by British expansionism; others emerged during the fragmentation of the Mughal, Maratha, and Sikh Empires in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; while others still were creations of the British.2 Constructed as what Lauren Benton has called “quasi-sovereign” spaces possessing a certain degree of control over internal affairs,3 1

2

3

Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge, 1997), 44–72. Barbara Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge, 2004), 12–47. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010), 222–72.

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“The Genius of the People”: 1923 Constitution of Mysore

many princely states were able to maneuver the framework of empire in order to fashion their own political systems, systems which, moreover, often departed from the modes of politics dominant in Crown territories. A recent body of historiography has begun to trace the diverse political languages formulated and deployed in the princely states. These include (to cite a few) an ethos of elitist Hindu social reformism,4 conceptions of urban development based on rajadharma (the Sanskritic idea that princes have a duty to provide patronage to religious institutions),5 experiments in education,6 administrative reforms rooted in modernist readings of Islamic ethics,7 and monarchical visions of imperial sovereignty.8 New archival research has also unearthed how the very genre of a written constitution was perceived in states like Baroda in the second half of the nineteenth century.9 What united these geographically, temporally, and ideologically disparate projects was their origin in intellectual lifeworlds not fully disciplined by the operations of imperial power. As Eric Beverley has argued, quasi-sovereign native jurisdictions were spaces wherein “European developments were neither taken as static modal templates nor did they exhaust the range of political possibilities.”10 The present chapter seeks to contribute to ongoing efforts to reconstruct political thought and practice in the Indian princely states. I examine a constitution prepared for the state of Mysore in the early months of 1923. Mysore was India’s third-largest princely state, with 4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Janaki Nair, Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (Minneapolis, 2011). Aya Ikegame, Princely India Re-Imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present (London, 2013). Manu Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education, and Empire in Colonial India (New Delhi, 2003). Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 2015). Sarath Pillai, “Fragmenting the Nation: Divisible Sovereignty and Travancore’s Quest for Federal Independence,” Law and History Review, vol. 34, no. 3 (2016), 743–82; Sunil Purushotham, “Federating the Raj: Hyderabad, Sovereign Kingship, and Partition,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 54, no. 1 (2020), 157–98. Rahul Sagar, “How, and Why, the First Constitution in Modern India Was Written, 75 Years before the One We Follow,” Scroll India, January 19, 2020, https://scroll.in/article/950118/how-and-why-the-first-constitution-in-modernindia-was-written-75-years-before-the-one-we-follow (accessed August 23, 2020). I am grateful to Rahul Sagar for sharing a copy of the 1874 Baroda Constitution. Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World, 30.

Princely States and Quasi-Sovereignty

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an area of around 29,000 square miles and a population of 5.9 million in the 1920s. It was located in the southern part of the subcontinent, hemmed in on three sides by the British province of Madras (presently Tamil Nadu) and bordered to the north by the province of Bombay (presently Maharashtra). It had a particularly chequered history. It was brought under British control in 1799, following the East India Company’s military victory over Tipu Sultan and his French allies at the Battle of Seringapatam. The East India Company installed the Wodeyars, a family of regional chieftains politically powerful in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as the new rulers of Mysore. In 1830, Governor-General William Bentinck dismissed the Wodeyar monarchy and brought the entire region under direct control of the East India Company, citing ‘misrule’ during a period of agrarian disturbances in the northern district of Nagara.11 A commitment to return the throne to the Wodeyars was made in 1867 (and actualized in 1881), as a concession to reformist opinion.12 By the early twentieth century, Mysore was governed by the Wodeyar dynasty aided by an Indian dewan (prime minister), though with a British Resident always present at court. The focus of this chapter is on a constitution prepared for Mysore by the philosopher Brajendra Nath Seal (1864–1938). Brajendra Nath Seal was recruited by the Wodeyar regime as a constitutional advisor in October 1922, to put together a new, reformed political arrangement for the state. Seal submitted a draft constitution five months later in March 1923. The draft was published and circulated in Mysore in April 1924. The Mysorean historian M. Shama Rao reported in 1936 that Seal’s constitution was “widely discussed by public bodies and also at various conferences,” reaching an audience beyond its

11

12

A lengthy justification for removing the monarchy and extending direct European control after the 1830 riots was outlined in a report prepared for William Bentinck: The Origin, Progress, and Suppression of the Recent Disturbances in Mysore (Bangalore, 1833), 68. On the early nineteenth-century history of Mysore, see C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1998), 113; and Nigel H. Chancellor, “Mysore: The Making and Unmaking of a Model State,” South Asian Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 (1997), 109–26. On the restoration of Wodeyar rule, see Zak Leonard, “Law of Nations Theory and the Native Sovereignty Debates in Colonial India,” Law and History Review, vol. 38, no. 2 (2020), 373–407.

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“The Genius of the People”: 1923 Constitution of Mysore

intended readership of members of the state’s political establishment.13 A manuscript copy is currently stored in the archives of the British Library in London. Examining the British Library’s copy of Seal’s constitution, I argue that the draft articulated a distinctive theory of popular government. While preserving monarchy, it sought to widen political participation through self-ruling local citizen assemblies and to circumscribe the power of elected legislative institutions. Seal also attempted to formalize rights to referendum and legislative initiation for the Mysorean citizenry. His 1923 draft, I suggest, can be read as an early expression of a directly democratic, anti-electoral theory of popular sovereignty. Brajendra Nath Seal’s draft has been more or less entirely forgotten in the historiography of modern Indian constitutionalism. Even in the early twentieth century, it was left out of textbooks such as Arthur Berriedale Keith’s seminal A Constitutional History of India, 1600–1935 (1936).14 Where it has been remembered at all – mostly in studies of Mysore State – it is for its monarchical sympathies.15 One historian in the 1970s described the entire constitution as “a sophisticated defence of the principle of autocratic rule.”16 In contrast, I highlight the overlooked democratic elements of Seal’s draft, elements that sat alongside its support for the Wodeyar monarchy. Seal’s constitution emerged from and responded to a number of political and intellectual contexts. It was shaped by the politics of Mysore in the early twentieth century and by Seal’s own academic career as a philosopher. Writing from the milieu of a princely state critical of colonial 13

14

15

16

M. Shama Rao, Modern Mysore: From 1868 to the Present, vol. 2 (Bangalore, 1936), 316. Arthur Berriedale Keith, A Constitutional History of India, 1600–1935 (London, 1936). Later works that similarly leave out Seal’s constitution include M. V. Pylee, Constitutional History of India, 1600–1950 (Bombay, 1967); Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford, 1966); Anil Chandra Banerjee, The Constitutional History of India (New Delhi, 1977); Rohit De, “Constitutional Antecedents,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, eds. Sujit Choudhry, Madhav Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Oxford, 2016), 17–37; and Arun K. Thiruvengadam, The Constitution of India: A Contextual Analysis (Oxford, 2017), 11–38. The elision of the Mysore constitution is indicative of a more general lack of attention to the internal politics of the princely states in Indian constitutional history. Chancellor, “Mysore,” 109–11; and Bjørn Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule: Mysore 1881–1947 (London, 1978), 101–4. Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule, 101.

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strategies of reform through the gradual introduction of parliamentary representation, Seal was pushed to imagine non-electoral expressions of democracy. My goal in examining his constitution is to investigate the intellectual origins of a democratic vision defined in opposition to parliamentary government.

2.2 Monarchy and Reform in Mysore The decision to draft a new constitution for Mysore in October 1922 was the result of a series of political developments set in motion in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. On August 25, 1881, Mysore established the first representative assembly in any of the princely states.17 Just five months earlier in March 1881, the gaddi (throne) of Mysore had been returned to the Wodeyar family following fifty years of direct British administration. The British government almost single-handedly set the terms of the transfer of power. The new ruler Chamarajendra Wodeyar was to be aided by the dewan C. V. Rangacharlu, an experienced civil servant from the British-ruled province of Madras, recruited to Mysore by Commissioner Lewin Bentham Bowring in 1868. Bowring stated that his goal in recruiting Rangacharlu from Madras to serve as dewan was “to assimilate native rule as much as possible to that of the British Government.”18 The creation of a representative assembly upon the resumption of Wodeyar rule was largely due to Rangacharlu’s plans for the state. For Rangacharlu, a representative assembly would demonstrate the Wodeyar dynasty’s willingness to abide by constitutional principles and thus offset British concerns about misrule in the native states.19 At the same time, Rangacharlu was careful not to exceed British expectations about the degree of representative government necessary for central and southern India in the 1870s and 1880s. Across the board, colonial administrators during the period of direct British rule in Mysore (1830–81) had viewed the participation of Mysoreans in lawmaking processes to be an unnecessary, even dangerous proposition. An 1864 report submitted to Viceroy John Lawrence insisted 17

18 19

Ramusack, The Indian Princes, 177. The state of Travancore established an assembly seven years later in 1888. See Pillai, “Fragmenting the Nation,” 770. Lewin Bentham Bowring, Eastern Experiences (London, 1871), 212. N. S. Chandrasekhara, Dewan Rangacharlu (New Delhi, 1968), 120–21.

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“The Genius of the People”: 1923 Constitution of Mysore

that there was no need for municipal self-government due to “the disposition of the people”: “the people are perfectly indifferent to the subject . . . every measure being pressed on them solely by the influence of the European Officers interested in the subject.”20 A dispatch to the Secretary of State in May 1879 declared in no uncertain terms that the introduction of representative institutions upon the restoration of native rule would be ill-advised and “premature.”21 Seeking both to demonstrate the Wodeyar rulers’ liberal commitments and to work within an existing British system of governance for Mysore, Rangacharlu devised a constitutional arrangement, which was representative but certainly not ‘democratic’ in any real sense.22 As formulated in 1881, the Mysore Representative Assembly (or Maharajah’s Council) consisted of 144 nominated members. The members were all raiyats (landholders) and merchants nominated by the Deputy Commissioners of each taluka (district) in the state.23 The Assembly convened every mid-October in Mysore city for a session lasting around eight days. Each session opened with an address from the monarch and the dewan. The dewan presented a report on the previous year’s administration. The members then spent the remainder of the meeting deliberating possible amendments and proposals to submit to the dewan. Crucially, the Representative Assembly had no lawmaking power. It could put forward suggestions to the dewan, his circle of ministers, or the court, but it had no means of ensuring that the suggestions would in fact be taken into consideration. Rangacharlu opened the Assembly’s inaugural meeting on October 7, 1881, by imploring the gathered representatives to place their trust in the monarch and the prime minister’s office: “His Highness’ Government will be glad to receive any observations and suggestions which you may wish to make in the public interests, and I need not assure you that they 20

21

22

23

Report on the Administration of Mysore for 1863–1864 (Bangalore, 1864), § 235. “File 209(1) 1902 Note on Restoration of Mysore to Native Rule (May 1879).” IOR/R/2/Box 14/89, Item 1: 1876–79. India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library. Seven years before taking up the post of dewan, Rangacharlu indicated his support for the British system of governing Mysore in a pamphlet published anonymously from London: The British Administration of Mysore, by a Native of Mysore (London, 1874). On the authorship of the pamphlet, see Chandrasekhara, Dewan Rangacharlu, viii. Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule, 87–88.

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will meet with every consideration.”24 In terms of its distribution of political power, the Assembly did not significantly overturn the limitations on popular government imposed by the British government in the 1870s. In his address to the Assembly on October 26, 1882, Rangacharlu offered a succinct description of the place of representative institutions in his political vision. He highlighted two justifications for creating an assembly to mediate between the administration and the people. The first was primarily pedagogical, as a step in “education for self-government.”25 The act of regular, collective deliberation on civic affairs created a class of persons conscious of “the interest of the public at large.”26 Rangacharlu expressed a hope that these newly trained representatives would return to their respective talukas and influence members of the local bureaucracy: “[T]he Representatives thus brought in direct communication with the Government will carry back with them to the Districts a higher status, and a higher tone and sense of responsibility to guide them and their fellow-members on the Municipal and Local Fund Boards.”27 Secondly, and more importantly for Rangacharlu, an intermediary representative assembly brought the monarch and dewan in touch with a wider range of public sentiment. Members of the Mysore Assembly were “exponents of public opinion on public matters entitled to respectful consideration from Government.”28 Their goal was to convey the concerns of individual jurisdictions to the monarch, an office that could only be occupied by members of the Wodeyar family, and to the dewan, a post nominated by the monarch subject to approval by the British Resident. In other words, representative government for Rangacharlu served an exclusively consultative function. His address defended the concentration of all legislative functions in un-elected offices and delinked political representation from lawmaking power. That Rangacharlu’s Representative Assembly did not, in fact, amount to anything like an independent legislature drew the attention and the ire of reformist voices in Mysore. On May 3, 1886, a correspondent 24

25

26

“Address of the Dewan of Mysore to the Dasara Representative Assembly at Mysore on the 7th October 1881,” in Addresses of the Dewans of Mysore to the Dasara Representative Assembly from 1881 to 1899, vol. I (Bangalore, 1914), 1. “Address of the Dewan of Mysore to the Dasara Representative Assembly at Mysore on the 26th October 1882,” in Addresses of the Dewans of Mysore, 11. 27 28 Ibid. Ibid., 13. Ibid.

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for the weekly periodical Karnataka Prakashika opined that “the so-called Representative Assembly” was “a simple farce”: “it is not representative in any sense and the members are too servile, perhaps with a few honourable exceptions . . . It is either gagged or roughly ridden over.”29 Another article in the same periodical on June 21, 1886, polemically referred to the Assembly as “but a useless and effete body merely ornamental.”30 Perhaps in response to such criticisms, the process of nomination was changed in 1887. Instead of individual District Commissioners, local boards and municipalities were given the authority to nominate members. The journal Vrittanta Chintamani, edited by the well-known political radical M. Venkatakrishnaiah, responded in dismissive tones in July 1889: The Representative Assembly is another farce. This is supposed to correspond to the Imperial Parliament, with this difference that the Member of Mysore Parliament is wanting in independence. As thus constituted, they have no voice in the administration of the State. A better state of things may be expected when the so-called Representative Assembly develops itself into a really representative assembly capable of exercising some sort of check over the doings of the Dewan.31

In 1891, election was finally introduced. The number of Assembly members was increased from 144 to 212, and property-owning adult citizens of each taluka were given the right to vote for their representatives.32 Venkatakrishnaiah’s Vrittanta Chintamani, clashing again with the government, “strongly condemned” the franchise qualifications for “confining the election only to ryots and merchants.”33 More crucially, the reformed Representative Assembly after 1891 remained the consultative, advisory body Rangacharlu envisaged in 1882. 29

30

31

32 33

“Public Opinion in Mysore (May 3, 1886),” Karnataka Prakashika. Reprinted in History of Freedom Movement in Karnataka, vol. II, ed. G. S. Halappa (Bangalore, 1964), 731. On the growth of a public sphere demanding political reform in Mysore, see Vijayakumar M. Boratti, “Politicized Literature: Dramas, Democracy and the Mysore Princely State,” Studies in History, vol. 35, no. 1 (2019), 37–58. “The Mysore Maharaja’s Council (June 21, 1886),” Karnataka Prakashika. Reprinted in History of Freedom Movement in Karnataka, vol. II, 732. “Representative Assembly (July 9, 1889),” Vrittanta Chintamani. Reprinted in History of Freedom Movement in Karnataka, vol. II, 736. Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule, 88–89. “[untitled],” Vrittanta Chintamani, June 27, 1894. Reprinted in History of Freedom Movement in Karnataka, vol. II, 739.

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Even with elected members, it lacked any semblance of legislative sovereignty. A firsthand account of the Mysore Assembly in the 1890s survives in the memoirs of a Scottish settler named Robert Henry Elliot. Elliot arrived in Mysore from Kelso, Scotland, in 1856 to set up a coffee plantation in the region around Manjarabad. He was part of a group of British entrepreneurs in the 1850s and 1860s actively encouraged by the colonial government to settle the hilly, forested areas of Mysore and begin growing coffee for export.34 In 1891, Elliot, as a member of the South Mysore Planters’ Association, was elected to the state’s Representative Assembly. He appears to have had no illusions about the kind of institution he had joined: “[T]he Assembly thus constituted was a purely consultative body, and had no power whatever except that of publicly stating to the rulers of the country all the grievances and wants of the people.”35 Elliot was invited to preside over the Representative Assembly’s first session following the 1891 electoral reforms. In his memoirs, he left behind a detailed summary of the Assembly’s meetings between October 11 and October 19, 1891. After the second day’s proceedings, Elliot recounted, members of the Assembly drafted a list of recommendations for the government, touching on topics such as famine prevention, wages for laborers, and the establishment of a central agricultural bank. A lawyer named C. Rangienar was deputed to compose a memorandum addressed to the government detailing the Assembly’s suggestions and formally requesting “that it should be prayed that the measures now asked for might be granted.”36 From the third day, K. Seshadri Iyer, Rangacharlu’s successor as dewan, presided over the Assembly in a supervisory role. Elliot’s description of the meeting on October 15 reads uncannily like the description of a royal court: The ruler – in other words the Dewan – was sitting like a judge on the bench, patiently listening to and taking notes of the various wants of the people as the representatives came forward – occasionally consulting with his officials – granting some things, absolutely refusing others, and announcing sometimes 34

35

36

See Bhaswati Bhattacharya, “Local History of a Global Commodity: Production of Coffee in Mysore and Coorg in the Nineteenth Century,” Indian Historical Review, vol. 41, no. 1 (2014), 67–86. Robert H. Elliot, Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore, Being the 38 Years’ Experiences of a Mysore Planter (Westminster, 1894), 58–59. Ibid., 64.

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“The Genius of the People”: 1923 Constitution of Mysore

that the subject brought forward would be taken into consideration, while the representatives seemed to be perfectly satisfied that the ruler would willingly do, and was willingly doing, the best he could for the common interest.37

As a result, Robert Elliot concluded, it was wholly misplaced to consider the Representative Assembly a way of “controlling, or directing the Government”: “[T]he representatives have no power whatever except . . . of ventilating in public, and in the presence of the Dewan and the leading officers of State, whatever grievances and wants they may desire to call attention to.”38 Mysore’s constitution in the 1890s could best be understood as having created “the machinery for this ventilation.”39 In more acerbic language, George Robert Harris, then governor of Bombay, wrote to his friend William Lee-Warner in 1895 about how the reformed Mysore Assembly was “the shrewdest bit of Constitution mongering I have come across. Much display of the elective principle; but no delegation of executive or legislative power.”40 Such perceptions and protestations seem to have had little impact on the state administration. The Representative Assembly continued into the early years of the twentieth century more or less unchanged. For the state’s British Resident Donald Robertson in 1902, the Mysore constitution was “mistakenly described as securing popular representation.”41 Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV opened the Assembly’s October 1903 session by reminding the 212 elected officials of their limited powers: “[T]he sphere and functions of an Assembly like that of yours must necessarily have its limitations and it is obviously not in a position to accept any portion of the responsibility for the good Government of the State, which must exclusively remain with me.”42 Representatives needed to

37 40

41

42

38 39 Ibid., 76. Ibid., 77. Ibid. “Letter from Harris, George Robert Canning, 4th Baron Harris (January 29, 1895).” Papers of Sir William Lee-Warner, Indian Civil Service 1869–95; India Office official 1895–1903; Member of Council of India 1902–12. Mss Eur F92: 1863–1917. India Office Records. “File 1 1902 Sir D. Robertson’s Note on the Administration of the Mysore Council during Mr. Krishnamurthi’s Dewanship since the Installation of the Maharaja.” IOR/R/2/Box 31/292. India Office Records. Krishnaraja Wadiyar, “Speech at the Representative Assembly (October 5, 1903),” in Speeches by His Highness Sri Krishnaraja Wadiyar Bahadur, G.C.S.I, G.B.E., Maharaja of Mysore, 1902–1920 (Bangalore, 1921), 19–23.

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see their role as offering “a valuable adjunct to the administration.”43 The Assembly as a whole was a forum “whereby my people can make their requirements, aspirations, and grievances known.”44 Evan Maconochie, private secretary to Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV from 1902 to 1909, affirmed that during his tenure the state was still governed in “an autocratic tradition” wherein substantive power was vested in the ruler and especially the dewans – P. N. Krishnamurti (1901–6) and then V. P. Madhava Rao (1906–9).45 The only significant constitutional change occurred under Madhava Rao in 1907. That year, a second representative body called the Legislative Council was added to supplement the Representative Assembly. The Legislative Council was composed of fifteen delegates, six of whom were selected by the Assembly from among its members and the other nine were nominated by the ruler and dewan. The Council provided another forum for deliberation, convening approximately every two months independently of the Assembly.46 It drafted bills to submit to the government for consideration; upon review by three bodies – first the dewan, then the monarch, and finally the British Resident – the bills were made into law. The dewan held a similarly supervisory role over the Council as over the Representative Assembly. In 1914, the size of the Council was increased to twenty-four and it was given the power of legislative interpellation – of demanding explanation about specific legislative bills from the ruler or dewan – but it still could not formulate legislation on its own. For Madhava Rao’s successor M. Visvesvaraya, the “increased representative nature” of the Legislative Council after 1914 did not alter the fundamental fact of its being a supplementary body and not the primary locus of lawmaking.47 By 1920, the state of Mysore was in curious position. The size of its bureaucracy and the technocratic nature of its administration far surpassed many provinces of British India, particularly on questions of

43 45 46

47

44 Ibid., 22. Ibid., 21. Evan Maconochie, Life in the Indian Civil Service (London, 1926), 143. See K. Veerathappa, “Mysore Legislative Council (1907–1947),” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 48 (1987), 404–10. M. Visvesvaraya, “No. 18 – Speech at the Mysore Legislative Council (April 14, 1914),” in Speeches by Sir M. Visvesvaraya, K.C.I.E, Dewan of Mysore, 1910–1911 to 1916–1917 (Bangalore, 1917), 142.

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“The Genius of the People”: 1923 Constitution of Mysore

state-led enterprise and industrialization.48 Politically, however, Mysore in 1920 was considerably less democratic than the Crown territories.49 After the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909 and especially after the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, areas under direct British jurisdiction contained elected assemblies with considerable independence at the local and provincial levels. A Madras-based writer for The Hindu thus complained in December 1920 that “from the standpoint of democratic progress” states like Mysore lagged “a generation behind British India.”50 The decision to safeguard sovereignty from elected representative institutions had emerged in the 1880s as part of C. V. Rangacharlu’s attempt to satiate British officials. By the early twentieth century, it was firmly established as a guiding principle of Mysorean constitutional practice. A policy that began its life as a way to ensure continuity with colonial rule became, ironically, a marker of Mysore’s difference from the British Empire. This was the political landscape greeting the Bristol-born administrator Albion Rajkumar Banerjee when he took up the post of dewan in the autumn of 1922. Banerjee was appointed by Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV; as a deeply anglicized civil servant of Bengali origin, Banerjee was the first dewan not to have come from either Mysore or neighboring Madras Presidency. His first address to the Representative Assembly on October 10, 1922, reflected on the pressing need for a “liberalization” of Mysore’s constitution.51 Nevertheless, Banerjee was quick to add in the same breath, any reform of the state would have to be circumscribed within the bounds of “Mysore history and Mysore traditions.”52 The creation of a fully sovereign legislature more powerful than the existing Representative Assembly and Legislative Council would defeat “the absolute solidarity of interest between the Ruler and the ruled that exists in the State.”53 Defending a delicate (and strategic) balance between local “traditions” of monarchy and weak electoral institutions on the one hand and the introduction of greater popular 48

49

50 51

Nair, Mysore Modern, 14–18. The highly technocratic, interventionist nature of the Mysore government was comparable to that of two other ‘progressive’ princely states in the early twentieth century: Travancore and Baroda. See Ramusack, The Indian Princes, 170–205. James Manor, Political Change in an Indian State: Mysore, 1917–1955 (Canberra, 1977), 15. “The Congress and the Indian Princes,” The Hindu (December 7, 1920), 2. 52 53 Quoted in Shama Rao, Modern Mysore, vol. II, 315. Ibid. Ibid.

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government on the other, Banerjee promised the Assembly on October 10 that a committee would immediately be appointed under Brajendra Nath Seal, the vice-chancellor of the University of Mysore, to work out a new constitutional scheme.54 Brajendra Nath Seal would have a twofold task: to make Mysore more democratic than it was in 1922, and to do so without transposing the representative assemblies prevalent in British India.

2.3 Brajendra Nath Seal as Philosopher Before moving on to consider how the committee responded to Albion Banerjee’s challenge, it is worth saying a few words about the man asked to lead its investigations. By the time he was selected by Banerjee, Brajendra Nath Seal (or B. N. Seal) was nearing the end of his first year at the University of Mysore. Seal was born in Bengal on September 3, 1864, the second son of a vakil (lawyer) of the Calcutta High Court. He was first trained in Sanskrit by a pandit (priest) at a local pathshala (Sanskrit school) and then received a broadly European humanist education in mathematics, literature, and philosophy at the Presbyterian Scottish Church College in Calcutta.55 At Scottish Church College, Seal became a member of the Brahmo Samaj, a reformist Hindu sect influenced by nineteenth-century English liberalism and Unitarian Christianity.56 Through the 1880s, Seal lectured in philosophy at a number of institutions across India: City College in Calcutta, Morris College in Nagpur, and Krishnath College in Berhampore. Then in 1896, at the age of thirty-two, Seal was recruited by Maharaja Nripendra Narayan of the princely state of Cooch Behar, in northern Bengal, to direct the newly established Cooch Behar College. After moving to Cooch Behar, Brajendra Nath Seal became preoccupied with the place of philosophy, as a discipline and a mode of inquiry, within Indian history. In 1903, he published an ambitious collection of essays from Calcutta entitled New Essays in Criticism. 54 55

56

Ibid. Bibhutibhusan Sircar, “Acharya Brajendra Nath Seal – A Life Sketch,” in Acharya Brajendra Nath Seal Birth Centenary Volume, 1864–1964 (Calcutta, 1964), 12–19. See David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, 1979), 60–65.

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The collection had a polemical goal, to challenge the premise that the development of philosophy in Asia followed the same trajectory as modern philosophy in Europe, passing through similar stages, using similar methods and categories, and arriving at generally similar conclusions – a premise Seal associated most closely with Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822–30).57 In contrast to “Hegel’s view of historic development as a unilinear series,” Seal proposed taking each philosophical tradition as an independent, selfcontained unit undergoing its own evolutionary trajectory.58 A truly “comparative” approach to the history of philosophy entailed departing from interpretations of Asian intellectual life in European terms: The Egypto-Babylonian, the Graeco-Italian, the Indo Sino-Japanese artseries and culture-histories, cannot be evolved one from another, and are relatively independent in origin as well as development. In tracing the historic world-process, at whatever point we begin, and whether we proceed up or down, the genealogical line breaks up more and more into a network or relationship so that the Hegelian conception of a punctual movement in a unilinear series is as obsolete from the stand-point of the philosophy of history and the historic method proper as the Lamarckian view in the domain of biology.59

As an alternative to the “Hegelian conception” of world history as a “unilinear series” converging on Western European modernity, Seal’s own approach to the history of philosophy was predicated on “recognition of the divers origins and independent developments of the separate culture-histories.”60 Seal tried to deploy his anti-Hegelian 57

58 60

Brajendra Nath Seal, New Essays in Criticism (Calcutta, 1903), i. Seal’s critique of Hegel’s Berlin lectures on world history has been the most widely noted aspect of his philosophy. See Viswanath Prasad Varma, “Brajendra Nath Seal: A Short Survey,” Visvabharati Quarterly, vol. 38, nos. 1–2 (1972), 81–92; Amita Chatterjee, “Brajendra Nath Seal: A Disenchanted Hegelian,” in Philosophy in Colonial India, ed. Sharad Deshpande (Shimla, 2015), 81–101; and, especially, Nazmul S. Sultan, “Between the Many and the One: Anticolonial Federalism and Popular Sovereignty,” Political Theory, vol. 50, no. 2 (2022), 247–74, at 252–56. On Eurocentrism in Hegel’s world history, more generally, see Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York, 2012). 59 Seal, New Essays, i. Ibid., i–ii. Ibid., ii. Even while stressing the role of discrete national communities to political development, Seal often spoke of ‘Europe’ as a single, coherent unit. This was a common rhetorical move among nineteenth-century Indian writers, particularly in Bengal. See, generally, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe

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“historic method” in his subsequent publication, an essay on scientific thinking in ancient India prepared for volume II of Prafulla Chandra Ray’s A History of Hindu Chemistry (1909). Drawing on Sanskrit and Pali sources, Seal insisted that ideas about induction, causality, and experimentation held by Indian philosophical schools such as the Nyaya, Carvaka, and Vaisheshika (c. 500 BCE to c. 500 CE) should not be viewed as a prefiguration of the kind of scientific method formulated centuries later in early modern Europe by figures like Francis Bacon.61 To study Indian thought as an approximation of already formulated European categories was to fail to treat it according to its own terms. By 1910, Brajendra Nath Seal had an established reputation in Indian academic circles as a vocal critic of Eurocentric paradigms of Indian intellectual history. The renegade social scientist Benoy Kumar Sarkar dedicated The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology (1914) to Seal, praising him as “the distinguished savant Dr Brajendranath Seal, a living encyclopaedia of modern sciences and Oriental vidya (knowledge) and inspirer of Young India in philosophico-comparative studies.”62 It was also during the 1910s that Seal began to develop the expertise that eventually led to his appointment as head of the committee on Mysore constitutional reforms. From being interested in philosophy in a general sense, after 1910 B. N. Seal came to focus specifically on the question of political philosophy. If the history of Indian philosophy and science could not be seen as a mirror image of the history of European philosophy and science, then what was one to make of Indian thinking about the state, government, and citizenship? Seal supplied a similar answer: political ideas in India, as in the rest of the non-European world, had not simply followed the path of political

61

62

Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (New Delhi, 1988). Brajendra Nath Seal, “On the Scientific Method of the Hindus,” in Prafulla Chandra Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry, from the Earliest Times to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century A.D., vol. II (Calcutta, 1909), 225–90. Seal’s essay was significantly expanded and republished in 1915 as a volume entitled The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus. For a discussion, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, 1999), 100–1. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology (Allahabad, 1914). On Sarkar’s engagement with Seal’s comparative historical method, see Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5 (2012), 1461–85.

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ideas in Europe, to the point that Indian thinkers were merely reciting precepts of European provenance. Rather, the study of Indian politics needed to be approached as the study of a distinctive family of ideas about the self and sovereignty, rooted in indigenous intellectual sources. Seal elaborated his analytic of political philosophy in a lecture to the 1911 Universal Races Congress held at the Imperial Institute in London. He attended the Congress with Maharaja Nripendra Narayan’s financial support; it was his third visit to Europe as the principal of Cooch Behar College, following two earlier trips to meetings of the International Congress of Orientalists in Rome in 1899 and 1906, respectively.63 Delivering the opening address of the Universal Races Congress on July 26, 1911, Seal underlined the formative role of the “nation” as a historical community, in the evolution of ideas about politics: A nation, then, is a conscious social personality, exercising rational choice as determined by a scheme of ideal ends or values, and having an organ, the State, for announcing and executing its will. Law is nothing but the standing Will of the national Personality, and the old customary now receives its sanction explicitly or implicitly from this Will. All members of a truly National State are integral members of this Composite Personality, but the individual units are themselves Persons, and, therefore, self-determining Wills.64

While the ‘state’ was common to all human communities that had moved beyond the stage of living in isolated, self-contained settlements, its particular form varied according to the history of each community, the “scheme of ideal ends or values” that formed the accumulated layers of its “national Personality.” There was no abstract universal standard for “constitutions and constitutionalism”; 63

64

Kopf, Brahmo Samaj, 61. On the context of the 1911 Universal Races Congress, see John Holton, “Cosmopolitanism or Cosmopolitanisms? The Universal Races Congress of 1911,” Global Networks, vol. 2, no. 2 (2002), 153–70; and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008), 241–62. Brajendra Nath Seal, “Meaning of Race, Tribe, Nation,” in Papers on InterRacial Problems Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911, ed. Gustave Spiller (London, 1911), 11.

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there were, rather, as many iterations of constitutionalism as there were national groups.65 “The recent case of Japan” in the first decade of the twentieth century illustrated how a highly centralized, modern regime could be shaped by a preexisting tradition of deified imperial sovereignty.66 In order to examine the nature of the state beyond Europe, it was necessary to “expound the origin and developments of social institutions in the different national histories.”67 Ambitiously, Seal called for the establishment of an International Journal of Comparative Civilization to undertake “the application of the biological, sociological, and historical Sciences to the problem of present-day legislation and administration.”68 The London lecture brought to the study of the state Seal’s broader methodological criticism of Hegelian notions of universal historical development. It followed that Indian theories of sovereignty would diverge from existing European templates of state formation. One of Seal’s students from Cooch Behar College, a civil servant named Kshitish Chandra Sen, later recounted that upon returning from London, the philosopher turned his attention to identifying the treatment of concepts like civil disobedience, law, and statehood in Sanskrit texts. Sen noted that Seal became particularly invested in comparing depictions of civic struggle in the fifth century CE text Vishnupurana to theories of civil disobedience in Thoreau and Tolstoy.69 Brajendra Nath Seal’s academic efforts were focused on demonstrating the characteristic grammars of Indian political philosophy when he was recruited by Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV in 1921 to serve as vice-chancellor of the University of Mysore, replacing the previous vice-chancellor H. V. Nanjundaiah.70 Seal’s first publication from Mysore was a short pamphlet titled Syllabus of Indian Philosophy (1924). Written largely for postgraduate students, the pamphlet canvassed a range of primary sources in ancient and medieval Indian philosophy and included a lengthy section on “Political and Juristic Philosophy – Canons of Interpretation of Codes, Civil or Religious.”71 The “Political and 65 69

70 71

66 67 68 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Kshitish Chandra Sen, “[untitled note],” in Acharya Brajendra Nath Seal Birth Centenary Volume 1864–1964 (Calcutta, 1964) 58. Sircar, “Acharya Brajendra Nath Seal,” 16. Brajendra Nath Seal, Syllabus of Indian Philosophy: Based on the Lectures of Brajendra Nath Seal (Bangalore, 1924), 60–72. While the syllabus was published from Bangalore in 1924, Seal began delivering the lectures that

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Juristic Philosophy” section of the syllabus was an experiment in identifying a set of recurrent political concepts within premodern Indian thought – like the idea of lokasreyas or “common good” – without interpreting them through the lens of modern “liberal” categories.72 Seal’s reputation at the University of Mysore in 1921–22 was that of a philosopher setting out to construct (or, in his language, to reconstruct) a distinctive Indian political tradition. From this perspective, Albion Rajkumar Banerjee’s choice of Brajendra Nath Seal to lead the Mysore Constitutional Developments Committee in 1922 made perfect strategic sense. Seal could be trusted to furnish theoretical justifications for Banerjee’s own argument: that political reform in an Indian state need not be modeled on political reform in Britain or elsewhere in the British Empire.

2.4 The Constitution of 1923 Banerjee’s reforms committee commenced its meetings on October 23, thirteen days after his speech to the Representative Assembly. The committee convened thirty-six times over the next five months and submitted its final report to the dewan in the third week of March 1923.73 It was comprised of twelve members, all of whom were elected delegates to either the Representative Assembly or the Legislative Council; one member of the Legislative Council, V. R. Thyagaraja Iyer, served as secretary. Brajendra Nath Seal was certainly the most important member. He served as chairman, the committee as a whole bore his name (the Seal Committee on Constitutional Reforms), and much of the final report of March 1923 was of Seal’s authorship. In the opening essay of the report, Seal laid out the general contours of his plan. A new constitution, he wrote, was shaped by a nation’s

72

73

constituted its core chapters in the early 1920s. See Chatterjee, “Brajendra Nath Seal,” 98–100. Seal, Syllabus of Indian Philosophy, 65–68. Seal returned to the idea of lokasreyas as a governing principle of classical Indian theories of legislation three years later in a lecture he delivered in Bangalore on September 27, 1924, on the nineteenth-century Bengali reformer Ram Mohan Roy: Brajendra Nath Seal, “Rammohun Roy: The Universal Man,” in Rammohun Roy: The Man and His Work, Centenary Publicity Booklet No. 1, ed. Amal Home (Calcutta, 1933), 93–109. “Mysore Constitutional Developments (Seal) Committee 1922–1923: Report. Bangalore, 1923.” IOR/V/26/272/9. India Office Records.

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existing set of political ideals: “[A] constitution is not made but grows. The new plan must evolve out of historic conditions and traditions in response to new needs and new facts.”74 In Seal’s own terms, his goal was to formulate a constitution to aid “in the evolution of the Indian type of civilization.”75 For “any sound political organization to be built up in India,” it was necessary to “take count of the deeply embedded social instincts and social postulates of the Indian peoples.”76 After having spent the 1910s and early 1920s identifying principles of premodern Indian politics, Seal approached the Mysore constitutional reforms as an opportunity to make some of these principles into the bases of a modern polity. Seal accepted that the kind of absolutist monarchical rule dominant in early twentieth-century Mysore was now untenable. Yet the “democratic” alternative to absolutism need not be “of the nineteenth century pattern,” with all of the latter’s emphasis on “party government and the infallible rule of the majority.”77 In section II (“The Ground Plan”) and section III (“The Problem in Brief”) of his opening essay, Seal discussed two aspects of the political tradition inherited by modern Mysore. The first was monarchical rule. From the Vijayanagara Empire (c. fourteenth-century CE) through the sultanate years (c. 1760–79), and into the period of Wodeyar rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the region around Mysore had always been governed by hereditary royal dynasties. Sovereignty, or the power of lawmaking, derived from the sanction of a single ruler. The personhood of the ruler contained within itself the final authorization for all political action within the borders of the state. “As in the case of the Mikado [Emperor of Japan],” Seal wrote, the ruler of Mysore “represented the people directly and primarily in his person.”78 Monarchical rule had created a system of “unitary sovereignty,” wherein power flowed outwards from a single office.79 Repeatedly deploying the metaphor of the “Body Politic,” Seal described the Mysore ruler as “the Head of the State.”80 Alongside the office of the monarch, Mysore since the fourteenth century had also contained a network of local assemblies (“primary assemblies”) through which individual villages, towns, and other constituencies governed themselves. If the monarch was the “Head of the 74 79

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 5.

75 80

Ibid., 2. Ibid.

76

Ibid.

77

Ibid., 3.

78

Ibid., 4.

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State,” then the primary assemblies were its “various limbs and organs.”81 While primary assemblies were subject to the final dictates of the monarch, in daily affairs they had possessed considerable independence of legislation. Seal wrote: “[W]e have always had intermediary groups between the State and the individual . . . These assemblies had an independent origin and sanction; and the State, even when it came to incorporate them, and grant them charters, did not and could not wholly suppress their quasi-independent character or usurp their jurisdiction or functions.”82 Despite their considerable power, successive monarchs of Mysore had allowed individual local jurisdictions to remain self-governing. In their internal constitution, moreover, primary assemblies were not elected bodies. They were widely participatory, with offices rotating among different adult inhabitants of a town or village.83 Taken together, kingship and lawmaking through participatory local assemblies had formed two parallel tracks for the exercise of sovereignty since approximately the fourteenth century. It is not entirely clear how Brajendra Nath Seal arrived at his understanding of Mysore’s political evolution. A likely inspiration may have been volume I of Historical Sketches of the South of India, written by the East India Company soldier-statesman Mark Wilks in Fort St. George (Madras) in 1810, one of the first English-language histories of southern India by a British author. Surveying the history of Mysore down to the fall of Tipu Sultan and the onset of British rule in 1799, Wilks described the state in the medieval period as both a princely regime and a loosely amalgamated “congeries of little republics,” a patchwork of self-ruling “townships,” each with its own internal arrangement of popular government.84 Echoing Wilks’ early nineteenth-century assessment, Seal too presented monarchy integrated into a framework of republican assemblies as a long-standing characteristic of Mysorean politics.

81 84

82 83 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Lieut. Col. Mark Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India in an Attempt to Trace the History of Mysoor, from the Origin of the Hindoo Government of that State, to the Extinction of the Mohammedan Dynasty in 1799, vol. I (London, 1810), 120–21. On Wilks’ volume, see Rama S. Mantena, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780–1880 (New York, 2012), 57–60; and Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York, 2002), 50–52.

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Absent from Seal’s account was anything resembling an elected popular institution. In Mysore and in the rest of India, he insisted, “the political machinery of the orthodox Parliamentary pattern,” in which members of political parties were elected on the basis of the vote to legislate on behalf of a wider populace, was uncommon.85 Such institutions, even if they existed, were not the primary sites of sovereignty. They were subordinate to the ruler above and to local primary assemblies below. Seal proceeded to historicize “the orthodox Parliamentary pattern” as a political theory deriving specifically from the British constitution and from Britain’s national political tradition after the eighteenth century: “[T]he British Constitution, which is the model set up in British India, secures representative and responsible government in one way,” on the basis of empowering “the elected representatives.”86 Wedded to a doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, modern British constitutional thought sought to route popular sovereignty through “the constitutional media of Houses or Electorates.”87 A political scheme attempting to avoid the transposition of British paradigms into India, focused instead on “institutional construction from within in response to the forces of the region and environment,” would, accordingly, need to avoid the creation of powerful elected legislatures. From section IV (“The New Polity – Constituent Bodies”) onwards, Seal delineated the details of such a scheme. His model constitution revolved around a three-tiered system of government. At its apex stood, predictably, the Wodeyar prince. The monarch had executive powers to create and disband a Council of Ministers, legislative powers to veto any laws formulated by subordinate bodies, as well as exclusive authority over Mysore’s relations with other princely states and with the British government.88 The monarch was aided by the dewan and a Council, all of which were appointed positions. The second tier of government contained two elected bodies: the Representative Assembly and the Legislative Council. Election into both bodies was open to adult citizens of Mysore.89 Both the Representative Assembly and the Legislative Council proposed legislation to the dewan and the ruler. They had no independent lawmaking powers. Indeed, Seal was emphatic that the Assembly and Council together “do not correspond 85 86

“Mysore Constitutional Developments (Seal) Committee 1922–1923: Report,” 9. 87 88 89 Ibid., 18. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 10, 88–89. Ibid., 169–205.

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to a double Chamber of Legislature. And the Reforms as announced do not have a bi-cameral legislature in view.”90 He dismissed any supposed benefits to be gained from converting the two assemblies into an upper and a lower house of legislature, akin to the Houses of Parliament: “[A] double Chamber here would be economically wasteful, and politically unsound. It would breed friction and dissension without corresponding gain in deliberation, and is also likely to produce congestion and a morbid hyper-excitation in the body politic.”91 Thus far, Seal’s embrace of monarchy and his rejection of representative government closely tracked the views of Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV and Albion Banerjee regarding the Mysorean political system in the early 1920s. The only significant reforms Seal proposed for the Representative Assembly and the Legislative Council were to increase the number of delegates and to reduce property qualifications for voting and office-holding.92 (This second suggestion, it is worth noting parenthetically, was challenged by two of the constitutional committee’s more staunchly royalist members – Kuriyan Matthan and Mohammed Abbas Khan – out of elite fears about the “the ‘intuitive’ and ‘unsophisticated’ views and wishes of the people.”93) Seal’s more far-reaching recommendations were instead focused on the third tier of Mysore’s government, the sphere of local lawmaking. “While there is no room for revision from above by hereditary, oligarchic, or other interests,” he noted, “there is ample room for corrective from below.”94 The democratization of Mysore was oriented towards the expansion of local self-government. In section VI (“Decentralization – Local Self-Government”), Seal made the primary assemblies he had first discussed in section III into the foundation of Mysore’s new constitution, its “ultimate constituent units.”95 In flowery language, he declared self-government through primary assemblies to be “the true Jacob’s ladder for a safe and sure ascent to the democrat’s Heaven.”96 More concretely, he outlined two routes to his “democrat’s Heaven.” First, every individual jurisdiction within Mysore would contain an assembly open to all its adult citizens. While local assemblies had historically been prominent in Mysore’s politics, Seal argued, by the early twentieth century, many had become corrupted and had lost their original functions. He underlined that these 90 94

91 92 Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 125–28. 95 Ibid., 7. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 22.

93

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 110.

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assemblies were to be revived and then reconstituted “on modern liberal lines” – with an eye, that is, to removing barriers to participation based on caste, wealth, and gender.97 As Seal imagined them, primary assemblies were politically egalitarian spaces comprised of any and all citizens from a village or township. The assemblies were distinct for being directly accessible to the citizenry, rather than being deliberative fora for members of political parties chosen through election. Seal’s plan then went on to give primary assemblies “revised and brought up-to-date” on suitably egalitarian lines three main powers: (1) to be sovereign in their respective territorial jurisdictions, (2) to put laws passed by the monarch and the dewan to a referendum, and (3) to initiate legislation through submissions to the Representative Assembly and the Legislative Council. On the first point, each assembly had a right of lawmaking over its area and its population. The right was certainly qualified in various ways – the Wodeyar ruler continued to have veto power and the authority to control foreign affairs, for instance. But Seal had as his goal a federalist state with a monarchical central government, self-ruling citizens’ assemblies in each jurisdiction, and two consultative, intermediary representative assemblies elected on the basis of a wide franchise. He described it as a “national polity of a federal character,” with independent local assemblies “which this Central Association, this constitutional co-partnership, the State, only co-ordinates, harmonizes, and fulfils.”98 The second and third points of Seal’s plan deepened the democratic nature of his federal polity. By giving rights of referendum and initiation to appropriately reconstructed assemblies, Seal sought to give citizens direct control over laws made by the unelected office of the monarch. Each local assembly could request a referendum among its citizens on laws passed by the central government and, additionally, could approach the Legislative Council and Representative Assembly with bills to submit as draft legislation to the dewan.99 Again, the 97 99

98 Ibid., 22. Ibid. Ibid., 26–27. This appears to have been the earliest instance of formal rights to referendum and initiation in an Indian constitution. As I show in Chapter 3, none of the schemes proposed by Indian nationalists between the 1870s and the 1910s entertained the possibility of a popular referendum. A detailed history of referenda in modern India – or, indeed, in British colonies more generally – still remains to be written.

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exercise of referenda was qualified – all assemblies had to work within the existing framework of monarchy, and an individual assembly could not vote to alter the basic structure of the state. In spite of these limitations, Seal viewed local referenda and legislative initiation as a way to widen popular political participation: The delegates should come from the primary assemblies which constitute the body of the people and work by direct action in the sphere of their daily lives and interests. They should bear mandates regarding the people’s wants, desires, and grievances which the Assembly may formulate for the purposes of an initiative. They should be consulted in all important legislative measures, and the general principles of all bills (including bills of taxation) should be referred to them and their views ascertained.100

The mechanisms of federalist decentralization, referenda, and initiation working together, he further declared, prevented “the will of the people” from being collapsed into the “derivative formations” of representative politics: “[T]he will of the people is dissolved into the disjecta membra, the original primary units, and not organized into secondary groups or other derivative formations.”101 As noted earlier, Seal presented his federalist constitution as the inheritance of a premodern Indian political tradition. By giving the power of local lawmaking and oversight over central government actions to citizens’ assemblies, he saw his constitution as the recovery of an older Indian practice of non-electoral forms of popular rule, “forms of polity suited to the genius (and the socio-economic condition) of the Indian people.”102 Seal’s report for the Mysore Constitutional Developments Committee was thus continuous with the argument he gave to the Universal Races Congress in July 1911, that the form of the state should vary in each national context, according to existing historical patterns. Undergirding such language of national specificity was a more general challenge to Hegelian ideas about the uniformity of modern historical development, which Seal had been tackling since 1903. But there was also a second justification for assembly-based federalism given in the reforms report. Throughout, Seal considered primary assemblies to be more democratic than representative government. In representative systems, he asserted, lawmaking was confined to a limited number of elected 100 101

“Mysore Constitutional Developments (Seal) Committee 1922–1923: Report,” 9. 102 Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11.

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political officials. Representative democracy imposed institutional constraints on the active political participation of the people as a whole: A vital political need is strongly felt in most countries under representative Government to-day. The constituted central legislatures in such Governments (taking both Houses together) are filled in great part by representatives who come in by a secondary or a tertiary election, or who are thrice removed from the spheres and interests of life they legislate upon, or whose composition does not even fairly reflect the actual balance of social forces in the country. Owing to these inherent disadvantages of representative Government by majorities (which can hardly be redressed by any scheme of proportional representation) it happens that direct action by primary groups in various spheres of life comes into the arena.103

Political action outside of the formal ambit of representative assemblies resorted to “direct” methods. Without being integrated into the structure of the state, direct methods came to be viewed as illegitimate and opposed to the accepted institutional channels of legislation: “[A]s direct action has not been regularized (or constitutionalized), it is always revolutionary in character and set up in opposition to the Parliamentary Government or other constituted authority.”104 As “correctives to the machinery of formal constitutional representation,” local self-government and the exercise of referenda were a more widely participatory and much more immediate expression of popular will. Seal therefore gave both culturalist and more avowedly republican reasons for turning Mysore State into a federal monarchy with a network of localized direct democracy. His constitution was rooted in the promonarchic views of the Mysore political establishment and, paradoxically, was also more democratic – or at least more participatory – than demands made in the reformist press to transform the Representative Assembly and the Legislative Council into sovereign legislatures. Seal agreed with every ruler and dewan of Mysore after C. V. Rangacharlu that princely rule needed to be preserved and that the state should not be given anything like a parliamentary form of government. Taking the monarchical critique of parliament as his point of departure, Seal proceeded to add a caveat: In the absence of proper electoral institutions, popular rule in Mysore might occur through large citizens’ assemblies at the local level. The result was a 103

Ibid., 8.

104

Ibid., 8–9.

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“The Genius of the People”: 1923 Constitution of Mysore

program of reform concerned above all with disentangling popular sovereignty from elected representation.

2.5 A Defeated Vision? Brajendra Nath Seal submitted his recommendations to Albion Banerjee on March 15, 1923. The Seal Committee Report, as the document came to be known in the Indian public sphere, was well received by the dewan and by Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV. Both figures took it as an affirmation of their desire to keep any future political reform within the bounds of a constructed Mysorean “tradition.”105 Those demanding the expansion and supremacy of the Representative Assembly in 1923 were, unsurprisingly, not as impressed. The staunchly pro-Congress Andhra Patrika drew unflattering comparisons between the Seal Report and the 1919 electoral reforms introduced in Crown territories by the British government. They were portrayed as similar bits of constitutional hand-wringing, offering the promise of self-rule but refusing to establish truly powerful elected legislatures: Though it is stated that the report on the political reforms in Mysore has been prepared with reference to the peculiar conditions of that province, yet they are of the same nature as the reforms in force in British India. They may be different in form, but in subject matter, they resemble each other. Neither the Mysore reforms nor those of British India grant the right of selfgovernment. The Representative Assembly and Legislative Council are mere advisory bodies and there is no provision to restrain the arbitrariness of the Government.106

The Andhra Patrika did not give much weight either to Seal’s refrains about reviving an Indian theory of popular sovereignty or to his proposals for local self-government and referenda. The weakness of representative institutions was taken as the most salient aspect of the Seal Report and was the only proof needed of its antidemocratic orientation. Srinivas Setlur, a liberal judge on the Chief Court of Madras and a prominent critic of the Mysore monarchy in the 1920s, was even more blunt. Writing in The Hindu on December 8,

105 106

Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule, 103–4. “Note on Mysore,” Andhra Patrika (April 21, 1923), 7.

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1923, Setlur admonished Brajendra Nath Seal for having produced an apologia for “absolutism.”107 Part of the problem was the ad-hoc way the Seal Report was integrated into Mysorean law. M. Shama Rao wrote that Albion Rajkumar Banerjee accepted the bulk of Seal’s proposals. The franchise was augmented fourfold from approximately 28,000 eligible voters in 1922 to over 100,000 in 1924 and a number of local governing assemblies were created.108 Yet contra Shama Rao’s account, there is nothing to indicate that the local councils Banerjee created in 1924 were given the lawmaking powers detailed in Seal’s original rubric, or that the councils were constituted as directly participatory bodies. Data compiled by James Manor for Hassan and Chitradurga Districts (northern Mysore) over a twenty-year period between 1921 and 1941 shows no significant uptick in local political participation after 1924.109 The right to demand local referenda was also nowhere to be seen. Any further reform stalled when, in 1926, Albion Banerjee left the post of dewan and was replaced by Mirza Muhammad Ismail, a vocal opponent of too rapid a process of democratization.110 A manual prepared for members of the Representative Assembly under Ismail’s tenure in 1933 made it abundantly clear that the only real political power held by local constituencies, whether urban or rural, was to elect delegates for the two intermediary consultative assemblies.111 Put simply, the directly democratic aspects of the Seal Report never saw the light of day. They instead became talking points for the Indian press outside of Mysore. The Calcutta nationalist monthly Modern Review ran a seven-page special feature on the report in its August 107 108

109 110

111

S. S. Setlur, “Mysore Reforms,” The Hindu (December 8, 1923), 4. Shama Rao, Modern Mysore, vol. II, 328–29. An increased electorate of 100,000 in 1924 would still only have accounted for a paltry 2.7 percent of Mysore’s voting-age population. The March 1921 census estimated the state’s adult population (measured as age fifteen and above) to be 61.8 percent of a total population of 5,978,892, which would come to approximately 3,694,955 persons: Census of India, 1921. Volume XXIII: Mysore, Part I – Report, ed. V. R. Thyagaraja Iyer (Bangalore, 1923), 45. Manor, Political Change in an Indian State, 23. See Mirza Ismail’s own account in his autobiography: Sir Mirza Ismail, My Public Life: Recollections and Reflections (London, 1954), 22–29. Mysore Representative Assembly Manual, Containing the Representative Assembly Regulation and the Electoral Rules Thereunder, vol. I (Mysore, 1933), 2–35.

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1923 issue. While echoing Srinivas Setlur’s criticisms of Brajendra Nath Seal’s support for monarchy, the journal observed that a scheme of direct rule through primary assemblies contained the kernel of a robust democratic system. Seal’s plan was, if anything, more of a “real democracy” than constitutions premised on elected representation: Whether we consider the population, size, or traditions and conditions of the Indian States, their future becomes hopeful only if they have this constitution with a Referendum and Initiative in the hands of the real body of the people (the primary assemblies in the country comprising all adult citizens). This is real democracy. Otherwise that kind of representative government which consists in a mere parliament of intermediaries or middlemen, ‘representing’ the people because they manage to get themselves elected, is only a disguised oligarchy. There the representatives soon grow into a bourgeoisie or bosses or a group of labour sardars [lords], they form rings and caucuses, with vested interests. The real people – the millions in the fields, factories, and workshops – are deprived of all share and voice in the government – even universal adult suffrage cannot prevent this, for the middlemen or intermediary representatives manage the whole show in their own interests.112

The unattributed article in the Modern Review picked up Seal’s arguments about the limits on political participation under even an inclusive electoral franchise. In sharp contrast to the writers of the Andhra Patrika, the Modern Review saw clear differences between the Seal Report and the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms in British India. The journal set itself against the British Indian reforms on the grounds that a parliamentary system at the provincial level, however limited in its scope, made politics into the exclusive business of “a class of intermediaries.” It put forward Seal’s federalist model as “an ideal constitution for small states” beyond the borders of Mysore, “better than the Provincial and Central British Indian constitutions.”113 Favorable assessments of the Seal Report also came from more unexpected quarters. Lawrence Dundas, the Earl of Ronaldshay and Governor of Bengal from 1917 to 1922, found the proposed Mysore constitution’s combination of “local self-government on lines according with ancient Indian sentiment and tradition” and “the right of initiative and referendum vested in the General Assembly of the delegates of the whole people” to be a promising alternative to Indian nationalists’ and colonial reformers’ preoccupations with the 112

“The Mysore Report,” Modern Review (August 1923), 232.

113

Ibid.

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parliamentary system.114 Dundas appears to have known Brajendra Nath Seal personally, or at least to have corresponded with him prior to 1925. In a footnote, he referenced “the words of Dr Seal in a letter to me on the subject [of Indian theories of the state].”115 As late as 1933, a volume titled India: What Now? by Nagendranath Ganguly (son-inlaw of Rabindranath Tagore) located in Seal’s theory of direct local participation a way out of the “chessboard of various sects, groups, and interests” created by group-based representation in the wake of the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms.116 Brajendra Nath Seal’s plan for Mysore was an ambitious and ultimately defeated contribution to debates about constitutionalism in India’s native-ruled princely states. Working outside the established structures of the colonial government, Seal possessed a certain degree of freedom to imagine a political future not predetermined by British constitutional antecedents. The 1923 Mysore Report wove together discourses about an ancient constitution and about the democratic limitations of electoral politics and political parties. The irony, of course, was that the same monarchical setup that encouraged B. N. Seal to find democratic alternatives to parliamentarism ended up suppressing the most radical sections of his constitution. Seal himself left the post of vice-chancellor of Mysore and returned to Calcutta in 1930, in failing health at the age of sixty-six.117 He never again wrote anything substantial about Indian political philosophy. Yet his Mysore Report did not simply become a forgotten footnote in the din of the 1920s. As these examples illustrate, the document continued to be invoked in British India for at least a decade, a model for critics of parliamentary government. As we will see in Chapter 3, two of Brajendra Nath Seal’s own students invoked the 1923 constitution in particularly original ways, in an attempt to translate parts of it into a new political vision. 114

115 116

117

Earl of Ronaldshay, The Heart of Aryâvarta: A Study of the Psychology of Indian Unrest (London, 1925), 256. Ibid., 251fn1. N. Gangulee, India: What Now? A Study of the Realities of Indian Problems (London, 1933), 266. Sircar, “Acharya Brajendra Nath Seal,” 17.

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3

“A Vast Subterranean Democracy” Pluralism in the 1920s

3.1 Democracy Ancient and Modern “The defects of democracy show that the problem of government cannot be solved by representative or electoral methods alone.”1 Thus, the historian Radhakumud Mookerji (1884–1963) stated in a course of lectures at the University of Lucknow in April 1927. The topic of Radhakumud’s lecture was the life of the Buddhist emperor Asoka (c. 268–232 BCE) and the political formation of the Mauryan Empire (third century BCE), drawing on a spate of recent finds made by the Archaeological Survey of India. But, as he was wont to do, Radhakumud peppered his historical survey with observations about the politics of the day. As he explained it, modern democracy was based on representation of the people’s will through a state, implying “a consensual relationship of the electorate and the elected.”2 But this was, he argued, an assumption. There was no guarantee that the will of the people and the will of their chosen representatives would always coincide. A union between the two had only ever been achieved “partially, in different degrees, in even the most democratically advanced countries in the West.”3 Turning to the Mauryan polity under Asoka, one found a different theory of representation, sovereignty, and the “body politic.” In the absence of formal electoral mechanisms, most lawmaking occurred through “various political assemblies and organizations,” intermediaries between the monarch and the individual.4 The effect of intermediary assemblies was to create a “direct and intimate” link between the will of the people in a territory and the actual process of legislation.5 Thus, Radhakumud continued, while the Mauryan Empire could be as autocratic as any other monarchy, “it was an autocracy limited from below by a vast subterranean democracy, so to speak, a complete 1 2

Radhakumud Mookerji, Asoka (Gaekwad Lectures) (London, 1928), 49. 3 4 5 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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system of local self-government embodied in various types of institutions.”6 In the space of a few short paragraphs, Radhakumud Mookerjee managed to make a number of far-reaching claims about the nature of modern democracy, about the nature of an imperial polity from the third century BCE, and, most pointedly, about what he saw as the limits of electoral representation. He implied that the system of assemblies in the ancient empire had been more democratic than modern constitutions, if one understood democracy to mean a people’s ability to collectively transform their general will into law. This chapter situates the arguments made in Radhakumud Mookerji’s Lucknow lecture within a series of developments internal to Indian political thought of the 1920s. Between 1919 and 1928, I show, a group of Indian historians and political scientists began to argue that the predominant form of the state in premodern India had been federal and, relatedly, that popular government had been exercised through participatory citizens’ assemblies at the local level – precisely the kinds of ideas expressed by Radhakumud Mookerji in 1927. Based on such a narrative, the group held up a historic Indian constitution as an alternative to representative democracy. The intellectual roots of the federalists lay in three early twentieth-century contexts: the rise of a movement led by the Indian National Congress demanding political reform in the British Empire (a movement to which the federalists saw themselves as giving a direct response); the politics of the revolutionary swadeshi movement in Bengal between 1905 and 1912, when a preoccupation with nationalist uses of the Indian past arose with particular zeal and urgency; and the proliferation of a genre of historical writing about the premodern Indian state at universities in Calcutta, Madras, Mysore, Bombay, Lucknow, and Allahabad in the 1910s. By the 1920s, historians such as Radhakumud Mookerji were using investigations into Indian history to formulate attacks on nationalist demands for popular self-rule (swaraj) through electoral government. The chapter tracks the writings of three historians over a nine-year period from 1919 to 1928: Radhakumud Mookerji, Radhakamal Mukerjee, and Beni Prasad. Where these writers have been studied at all, it has been in terms of their critiques of the modern state. They are seen as political pluralists, oriented, like European pluralists of the 6

Ibid., 50.

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early twentieth century, towards the disaggregation of lawmaking power between semiautonomous associational groups.7 Ronald Inden, for instance, has highlighted how Radhakumud Mookerji and Beni Prasad sought to “deny the validity of the monist or absolutist state for India.”8 I foreground an additional, overlooked aspect of political pluralism in 1920s India: its critique of representative democracy.9 I show how all three of the writers analyzed here linked their criticisms of unitary state structures to a more general repudiation of democratic representation – the premise that popular sovereignty could be reconciled with an elected assembly authorized as the primary site of lawmaking. Unitary sovereign states were seen as inherently representative; the pluralist move to resurrect sites of lawmaking beyond the state was an attempt to find arrangements of sovereignty more participatory than representative institutions could ever be.

3.2 Political Representation and the Indian National Congress The concept of representation became central to Indian nationalism after the 1880s in opposition to the un-representative nature of British imperial rule. Through the 1860s and 1870s, Crown Territories in British India were administered by three successive Indian Councils Acts (1861, 1871, 1874) and the Government of India Act (1870).

7

8

9

On political pluralism, see Mark Bevir, “A History of Modern Pluralism,” in Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates since 1880, ed. Mark Bevir (Cambridge, 2012), 1–20; and David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge, 1997). Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1990), 194–95. For similar interpretations, see Karuna Mantena, “On Gandhi’s Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjunctures,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 9, no. 3 (2012), 535–63; Karuna Mantena, “Popular Sovereignty and Anti-Colonialism,” in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, eds. Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2016), 297–319, at 311–13; C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2012), 283–90; and Madhav Khosla, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2020), 81–89. I build on brief comments made by Mantena, who has noted Radhakamal Mukerjee’s concerns about “elite-driven and constrictive systems of territorial representation”: Mantena, “On Gandhi’s Critique of the State,” 546. The essay further contextualizes and expands upon this aspect of Indian pluralism.

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The acts divided legislative and executive powers between two levels of government – the governor-general and his Council, with jurisdiction over all of British India, and separate provincial councils headed by lieutenant governors in five provinces: Bombay, Madras, Bengal, Punjab, and the North-West. The provincial councils were legislative bodies with authority to pass laws subject to approval and veto from the governor-general. At least 50 percent of their membership had to be drawn from the civil or military service; the others, generally ranging between six and twelve members, could be nonofficial persons nominated by the governor-general or lieutenant governors.10 There was also a complex network of subsidiary jurisdictions involving local municipal boards and village councils, tasked with varying degrees of administrative function. This structure began to change slightly from 1880, as the Government of India was swept up in the reformist wave of Gladstonian Britain prior to the Third Reform (Representation of the People) Act of 1884. On May 18, 1882, the Liberal Viceroy Lord Ripon introduced his Resolution on Local Self-Government for India. Ripon’s Resolution encouraged the establishment of municipal councils with substantive powers in large cities and towns of British India, consisting of members elected on the basis of a (very) qualified franchise.11 While the Resolution carried no statutory force, it had the rhetorical effect of presenting the introduction of elected representation as an important pillar of a reformist imperial liberalism. During the three years between May 1882 and the formal establishment of the Indian National Congress in December 1885, voluntary reformist groups such as the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, the Bombay Presidency Association, the Madras Mahajan Sabha, the Calcutta-based Indian Association, and the London-based East India Association repeatedly invoked the Resolution to lobby for Indian participation in municipal bodies. In the final months of 1882, for example, a group calling itself the “Central Committee for Promoting Local Self-Government in Gujarat” drew on Ripon to argue for the need to have local representatives chosen

10 11

The Government of India Act, 1870 (33 Vict., c.3). “Resolution by the Government of India: Local Self-Government – Dated 18th May 1882 (No. 17/747-759),” in Speeches and Political Resolutions of Lord Ripon (Viceroy of India), from June 1880 to May 1882, ed. Ram Chandra Lalit, vol. 2 (Calcutta, 1882), 35–51.

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through election within the Bombay city government.12 An article in the Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha in October 1883 demanded an extension of Ripon’s resolution to allow electoral representation in bodies beyond just urban and rural local boards, proposing a franchise limited to all those earning at least ₹20 of land revenue.13 Ripon himself viewed the May 1882 Resolution as a way of educating more Indians in the practices of modern representative government and of gradually training people in electoral processes.14 The inaugural Bombay session of the Indian National Congress in December 1885 therefore took place during a decade marked by tentative steps towards imperial reform. Through its first fifteen years, the Indian National Congress concentrated on three issues: administrative reform (gaining Indian admission into the civil services); economic reform (addressing the drain of wealth from India to England); and political reform (allowing for the election of Indian subjects into colonial assemblies). Of these, political reform usually took precedence, though in the late nineteenth century it never went so far as to question the fact of imperial rule itself.15 Congress leaders of the 1880s and 1890s such as W. C. Bonnerji, Surendranath Banerjea, A. O. Hume, Kashinath Telang, Badruddin Tyabji, Pherozeshah Mehta, and Dadabhai Naoroji all took Ripon at his word and sought to extend electoral access beyond municipal institutions into local and provincial assemblies, while accepting Ripon’s proposal for a franchise defined by educational and property qualifications. 12

13

14

15

Jhaverilala Umiyasankara Yajnika, Note on Local Self-government in the Bombay Presidency. By Javerilál Umiáshankar Yájnik [Written for the Central Committee for Promoting Local Self-Government in Gujarát] (Bombay, 1882). “Local Self-Government in the Bombay Presidency,” Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, vol. 2 (1883), 27–76. On Ripon’s pedagogical understanding of the 1882 Resolution, see Benjamin Weinstein, “Liberalism, Local Government Reform, and Political Education in Great Britain and British India, 1880–1886,” The Historical Journal, vol. 61, no. 1 (2018), 181–203. For older accounts of the 1882 Resolution, see Hugh Tinker, The Foundations of Local Self-Government in India, Pakistan, and Burma (London, 1954), 43–63; and Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1968), 156–58. See Sanjay Seth, “Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: The Politics of ‘Moderate Nationalism’ in India, 1870–1905,” American Historical Review, vol. 104, no. 1 (1999), 95–116.

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Dadabhai Naoroji provided the classic articulation of this view in his address to the Congress at the Calcutta Town Hall on December 27, 1886. Naoroji’s immediate target was the 1870 Government of India Act, and his speech was based on an important conceptual distinction between “nomination” and “representation.” Naoroji acknowledged that the 1870 Act allowed the presence of non-British assembly members. But because nonofficial members were nominated by central authorities, there was no guarantee they would legislate on behalf of those they governed: “[I]t is true that we have some of our own people in the Councils. But we have no right to demand any explanation even from them; they are not our representatives, and the Government cannot relieve themselves from any dissatisfaction we may feel against any law we don’t like.”16 On the other hand, elected representation allowed lawmakers to be vetted by their constituents, making it more likely that a law would be passed in the interest of the people themselves: “[I]f you have therefore your representatives to represent your feelings, you will then have an opportunity of getting something which is congenial and satisfactory to yourselves.”17 Supporting Ripon’s reformist gestures and expressing a hope that they would be continued under his successor Lord Dufferin, Naoroji pushed the Congress to lobby for Indian representation in the provincial councils and in the British parliament itself: “[O]ur resolution is the improvement and enlargement of the Legislative Councils, and the introduction into them of an elective element.”18 But Naoroji also characterized “educated native classes of the country” as uniquely fit for the legislative councils.19 Just lawmaking required knowledge of “political rights” and constitutional means. The interests of India’s rural poor could best be secured when an educated, mostly urban elite governed on their behalf. Naoroji insisted: If a proper system of representation in the Councils be conceded, our representatives will then be able to make clear to these Councils and to our rulers those causes which are operating to undermine our wealth and prosperity, and guide the Government to the proper remedies for the greatest of all evils – the poverty of the masses. All the benefits we have derived from 16

17

Dadabhai Naoroji, “Second Indian National Congress: Inaugural Address of the Hon. Dadabhai Naoroji, President of the Congress,” in Essays, Speeches, Addresses and Writings (on Indian Politics) of the Hon’ble Dadabhai Naoroji, ed. Chunilal Lallubhai Parekh (Bombay, 1887), 331–45, at 341. 18 19 Ibid. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 338.

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British rule, all the noble projects of our British rulers, will go for nothing if after all the country is to continue sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss of destitution.20

While political representation was a more “popular” form of government than the existing system of central nomination, it could only be carried out by certain sections of Indian society. Representatives would legislate on behalf of those considered unfit to hold office. Naoroji’s view of representative institutions was amplified by other Congress leaders of the time. The same year as Naoroji’s Calcutta Town Hall speech, the pamphlet Must Social Reform Precede Political Reform in India? (1886), authored by Kashinath Trimbak Telang, argued that the election of educated Indians into legislative councils was a precondition for any further social and economic transformation in the country.21 In his Presidential Address to the sixth Congress meeting four years later in December 1890, Pherozeshah Mehta challenged the “disdainful attitude” of some British officials towards “our capacity for representative institutions.”22 Following Naoroji, Mehta urged the introduction of elected legislative councils with wide-ranging powers over taxation and local administrative affairs, as a way of controlling the potentially arbitrary nature of unelected rule: “[I]t is high time that we should raise our united voice to demand local Councils possessing some guarantees for energy and efficiency.”23 At the same time, a government responsive to popular needs and sentiments could only be secured through the election of educated elites into colonial assemblies. Although the “masses” of India lacked knowledge of constitutional politics, their concerns nevertheless needed to be voiced in legislative councils. This could be done 20 21

22

23

Ibid., 342–43. Kashinath Trimbak Telang, “Must Social Reform Precede Political Reform in India?” in Selected Writings & Speeches (Bombay, 1912), 269–99. Telang’s pamphlet appears to have initially been published in 1886 by the Jam-e-Jamshed printing press in Bombay, although I have been unable to find the original copy. I am grateful to Dinyar Patel for help with this source. Pherozeshah Mehta, “Congress Presidential Address,” in Speeches and Writings of the Honorable Sir Pherozeshah Merwariji Mehta, K.C.I.E., ed. C. Y. Chintamani (Allahabad, 1905), 292–312, at 302. On Mehta’s activism around representation, voting rights, and election in the Bombay municipality in the early 1870s, prior to the establishment of the Congress, see Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 164–65. Mehta, “Congress Presidential Address,” 309.

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by those with adequate education and political training, chosen through election. Since the masses themselves were still incapable of “giving articulate expression to definite political demands,” Mehta argued, it fell on elites to ensure that their voice was heard within lawmaking bodies – “the function and the duty devolve upon their educated and enlightened compatriots to feel, to understand, and to interpret their grievances and requirements, and to suggest and indicate how these best be redressed and met.”24 In 1895, Surendranath Banerjee similarly had no reservations about the limitations on office-holding in the Congress program: “[W]e should be satisfied if we obtain representative institutions of a modified character for the educated community who by reason of their culture and enlightenment might be presumed to be qualified for such a boon.”25 Such assessments continued into the first decade of the twentieth century. In March 1908, Gopal Krishna Gokhale was invited to testify in front of the Royal Commission on Decentralization headed by Charles Edward Hobhouse, Undersecretary of State for India.26 Gokhale’s evidence to the Royal Commission submitted in Bombay on Saturday, March 7, argued for a broadly federal division of powers with elected positions at the village, district, and provincial levels. A program of decentralization, Gokhale argued, would urgently expand the scope of Indian self-government. But self-government also needed to be combined with educational and property qualifications for office. Through representative institutions, the “educated classes” would lead the country as a whole: The educated classes are only critics of the Administration today because the Government does not realize the wisdom of enlisting their co-operation. Some people imagine an antagonism between the interests of the educated classes and those of the masses and they hope to fortify themselves by winning the gratitude of the latter as against their unpopularity with the former. This, however, is a delusion of which the sooner they get rid the 24 25

26

Ibid., 310. Surendranath Banerjea, “Congress Presidential Address, Poona, 1895,” in Speeches and Writings of Hon. Surendranath Banerjea, Selected by Himself (Madras, 1917), 11–99, at 13. “The Hon’ble Mr. G. K. Gokhale – Saturday, 7th March, 1908,” in Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Royal Commission upon Decentralization in Bombay: Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty, vol. 8 (London, 1908), 57–69.

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better. The educated classes are the brain of the country, and what they think today, the rest of the people will think tomorrow. The problem of bringing the Administration into closer relations with the people is essentially a problem of associating the educated classes with the actual work of the Administration.27

Gokhale’s report for the Royal Commission on Decentralization in March 1908 reproduced a key political argument developing within Indian National Congress circles from 1885: Self-government for India’s rural poor would best be achieved through the leadership of an educated elite. Representative government was the primary mechanism to enable such leadership. As Niraja Jayal has observed, in the self-understanding of Indian liberals, “the middle class was the obvious custodian of democracy” and needed to have political rights “to represent the masses.”28 The gradual unraveling by 1910 of the liberal consensus created by Naoroji, Banerjea, Mehta, and Gokhale is one of the most striking and well-studied chapters of Indian nationalism. Historians have documented how dissatisfaction with the anglicized discourse and conciliatory constitutional methods of the Congress elite between 1885 and 1905 created a backlash of more militant, culturally revivalist anticolonial movements, concentrated in early twentieth-century Bengal, Bombay, and Punjab.29 Yet obvious differences belied deeper continuities between the new revolutionary (or “Extremist”) and the earlier liberal (or “Moderate”) phases of anti-colonial politics. Many of the revolutionaries who engaged seriously with state politics continued to equate self-government with representative government. The Indian people would become self-ruling by electing party elites to rule on their behalf. For Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the most prominent revolutionary leader of the period, political representation was the core institution through which swaraj could be given a concrete, “visible” shape. As Mithi Mukherjee has argued, political representation was central to Tilak’s 27

28

29

Gopal Krishna Gokhale, “Decentralization Commission – Written Evidence,” in Speeches and Writings of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, vol. 2, eds. D. G. Karve and D. V. Ambekar (Bombay, 1966), 252–63, at 263. Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 41. See, especially, Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi, 1973).

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rejection of the colonial law of sedition and the idea of imperial justice.30 Tilak’s remarks to the 1908 Royal Commission on Decentralization showed some striking parallels with those of the consummate ‘Moderate,’ Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Addressing Hobhouse’s Royal Commission just two days after Gokhale – on the morning of Monday, March 9 – Tilak proposed a similar federal system with Indian representation at each level of government, under an overarching central authority.31 Representation, whether at the district or the provincial level, entailed the election of party members through a broad franchise.32 After his release from political prison in Burma in 1914, Tilak embarked on a series of speeches across western India about his understanding of swaraj. The ideal of representative government permeated every one of his more political speeches. At a rally in Akola (Bombay Presidency) in mid-January 1917, for instance, Tilak defined “self-government” as a political system wherein elected officials had sufficient power to directly (as lawmakers) or indirectly (as advisors to an unelected imperial executive) dictate the terms of political life: Self-government, as I told you, means Representative Government in which the wishes of the people will be respected and acted upon and not disregarded as now, in the interests of a small minority of Civil Servants. Let there be a Viceroy and let him be an Englishman if you like, but let him act according to the advice of the representatives of the people. Let our money be spent upon us and with our consent. Let public servants be really servants of the public and not their masters as they at present are. The question as to how many members will sit in this Council is immaterial. The material question is, will the greater majority of them represent the Indian public or not, will they be able to dictate the policy of Government or not? This then is what Home Rule really means.33

30

31

32 33

See Mithi Mukherjee, “Sedition, Law, and the British Empire in India: The Trial of Tilak (1908),” Law, Culture, and the Humanities, vol. 16, no. 3 (2020), 454–76. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, “The Decentralization Commission,” in Bal Gangadhar Tilak: His Writings and Speeches (Madras, 1918), 90–99. Also see “Bal Gangadhar Tilak – Monday, 9th March, 1908,” in Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Royal Commission upon Decentralization in Bombay, vol. 8, 83–88. Tilak, “The Decentralization Commission,” 95–96. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, “Home Rule [Jan. 1917],” in Bal Gangadhar Tilak, 210–15, at 213.

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“Self-government” for the Indian people could be measured according to the degree of political power their chosen representatives possessed within legislative assemblies. Tilak certainly had a much wider conception of the franchise than Pherozeshah Mehta or Gokhale. In an essay written for the Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha in July 1917, six months after the Akola rally, he argued against having literacy qualifications for voting.34 But self-government in his view, as in the view of his opponents in the liberal wing of Congress, amounted to appropriately qualified members of political parties being elected into lawmaking bodies from the local to, eventually, the central level. Tilak’s close associate in the Congress, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, repeated his understanding of swaraj the following year. Responding to the constitutional reforms proposed by Edwin Montagu and Lord Chelmsford, Malaviya insisted in a pamphlet published from Allahabad in 1918 that the Congress demand for access to representative institutions was necessary because elected party leaders, unlike appointed colonial officials, would speak for the people, and especially for the rural poor, as a whole: “[T]he educated Indian can safely claim that he has proved that he is in sympathy with and capable of representing the illiterate masses.”35 Over an approximately thirty-year period from the founding of the Indian National Congress in December 1885 to the writings and speeches of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Madan Mohan Malaviya in the late 1910s, then, there was a general consensus regarding the value of elected representation. Even as some Congress leaders pushed for an expansion of the limited colonial franchise, they continued to define swaraj as a representative form of popular sovereignty. The mass of the Indian population would achieve self-rule when they chose qualified members of political parties to legislate on their behalf. The Congress’ program between 1885 and 1918 was based on the premise that elected officials could ‘represent’ in a very literal sense the needs of the people. It embodied the hierarchical dynamic that Partha Chatterjee has identified more generally within anti-colonial nationalist movements, the dynamic through which these movements were simultaneously “popular” – mobilizing a language of the “we the people” – and exclusionary, 34

35

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, “Karma-Yoga and Swaraj,” Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, vol. 2, no. 2 (1917), 1–3, at 3. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, A Criticism of the Montagu Chelmsford Proposals of Indian Constitutional Reform (Allahabad, 1918), 25–26.

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marked by a “distancing of those [popular] elements from the structure of the state.”36 Insofar as a theory of popular government was central to the political imagination of the early Congress, it was a theory aimed resolutely towards a ventriloquizing of the voice of the masses, anchored in the indirect, electoral institutions of government, which made legislators the primary agents of popular will.

3.3 The Pluralist Turn Just as a link between swaraj and elected representation came to be accepted in the Indian National Congress by 1918, a counter-discourse of self-rule began to emerge in response within Indian academic circles. The rise of this alternate vision was prompted by a development far removed from the mass rallies and crowded town-hall meetings of nationalist politics. The immediate motivation was a historiographical debate unfolding in the 1910s about the appropriate method of studying ancient Indian politics. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, a striking number of practitioners of the burgeoning academic field of professional history in India were fixated on whether recent discoveries – archival and archaeological – could reveal something about precolonial conceptions of government, constitutional type, and citizenship. In 1905, a palm-leaf manuscript of the Arthasastra – a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft said to date from the Mauryan period and presumed to have been lost for more than eight centuries – was fortuitously donated to the Government Oriental Library of Mysore State by a pandit (priest) visiting from a village in Madras. The Oriental Library’s archivist Rudrapatna Shamasastry immediately published an extract, with English translation and commentary, in the Bombay journal Indian Antiquary, and then spent several years editing the manuscript.37 A Sanskrit version was published from Mysore in 1909, after having been serialized in the Mysore Review

36

37

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis, 1993), 51. R. Shamasastry, “Chanakya’s Land and Revenue Policy (4th century B.C.),” The Indian Antiquary: A Journal of Oriental Research, vol. 34 (1905), 5–10. On the authorship and compositional history of the manuscript received by Shamasastry in 1905, see Mark McClish, The History of the Artha´sastra: ¯ Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India (Cambridge, 2019), 28–51.

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between 1906 and 1908, and an English translation of the full treatise (done by Shamasastry) was published from Bangalore in 1915.38 The availability of these two editions spurred a flurry of debate among Indologists in India, Britain, and Germany about the nature of the manuscript and, more importantly, about the contours of the state and political life in India in the second and third centuries BCE.39 Over a fifteen-year period between 1910 and 1925, more than twenty books and articles on various aspects of political institutions in ancient India were put out by publishing houses in Calcutta, Pune, Bombay, Madras, and Mysore. They ranged from relatively short lectures, such as K. V. Rangaswami Aiyangar’s Considerations on Some Aspects of Ancient Indian Polity (1916), to lengthy longue durée works like Upendranath Ghoshal’s A History of Hindu Political Theories: From the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. (1923). Scholarship on the ancient Indian polity mined Shamasastry’s 1909 and 1915 editions of the Arthasastra, along with recently unearthed Sanskrit legal texts, the Buddhist Pali canon, and temple and numismatic inscriptions compiled by the Archaeological Survey of India under its director John Marshall (1902–28), in order to try and reconstruct a coherent understanding of the ancient Indian constitution. The shared goal, as one of the historiography’s early proponents Narendra Nath Law described it in 1914, was to excavate “the features and activities of civil government,” distinct from theories “spiritual and intellectual, which latter are more widely studied and appreciated.”40 From 1910 to 1918, work on the ancient Indian constitution remained resolutely historicist, even proudly antiquarian. Commentators such as Narendra Nath Law spurned any hint of an underlying political 38

39

40

R. Shamasastry, ed., The Arthasastra of Kautilya (Kautiliyam Arthashastram) (Mysore, 1909). On the reception of the Arthasastra, see Johannes H. Voigt, “Nationalist Interpretations of the Artha´sastra in Indian Historical Writing,” in South Asian ¯ Affairs No. 2 (St. Antony’s Papers No. 18), ed. S. N. Mukherjee (London, 1966), 46–66; Maria Misra, “The Indian Machiavelli: Pragmatism versus Morality, and the Reception of the Arthasastra in India, 1905–2014,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 1 (2016), 310–44; Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 197–99; and Milinda Banerjee, The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2017), 233–36. Narendra Nath Law, Studies in Ancient Hindu Polity (Based on the Artha´sâstra of Kautilya), vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1914), v.

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motivation to their studies. In a lecture delivered at Pachaiyappa’s College, Madras, on March 18, 1914, Rangaswami Aiyangar went so far as to reject the temptation “to look into the armory of our ancient polity for weapons to be used in the arena of modern political controversies.”41 For Aiyangar, the political commitments created by “resurgent national feeling” were an impediment to a truly objective “scientific study of ancient polities.”42 In Public Administration in Ancient India (1916), Pramathanath Banerjea similarly insisted that studies of the classical Indian state should limit themselves to collating, examining, and presenting as much primary source material as possible.43 An intellectual shift away from such Rankean assessments of historical method occurred after January 1919, with the publication of Local Government in Ancient India (1919) by the historian Radhakumud Mookerji. Local Government was the first work of premodern Indian constitutional history to challenge Aiyangar’s mode of historiography and to instead seek to “place an ideological weapon in the hands of Indian nationalists.”44 The author of this politically ambitious text, Radhakumud Mookerji, was a product of the revolutionary upsurge of the swadeshi movement in early twentieth-century Bengal.45 Upon moving to Calcutta from the town of Berhampore in 1897 for his secondary and then postsecondary education, Radhakumud came under the spell of the charismatic swadeshi educationist Satischandra Mukherjee, a man he later described as his “much-needed guide and guardian in 41

42 43

44

45

K. V. Rangaswami Aiyangar, Considerations on Some Aspects of Ancient Indian Polity: Sir Subrahmanya Aiyar Lecture, 1914 (Madras, 1916), 3. Ibid. Pramathanath Banerjea, Public Administration in Ancient India (London, 1916), 1–14. R. S. Sharma, “Historiography of Ancient Indian Polity up to 1930,” in Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient India (New Delhi, 1959), 1–13, at 9. The swadeshi movement began as a protest against Curzon’s decision to partition Bengal along Hindu-Muslim lines in June 1905, and quickly snowballed into political militancy and a far-reaching program of economic boycott and cultural revivalism. See Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal; Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 108–21; Andrew Sartori, “The Categorial Logic of a Colonial Nationalism: Swadeshi Bengal, 1904–1908,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 23, nos. 1–2 (2003), 271–85; and Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004), 242–76.

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strange surroundings.”46 Under Satischandra’s encouragement, Radhakumud began to focus his studies at the University of Calcutta on ancient Indian history and to write historical essays for the nationalist periodical Dawn.47 In the second week of August 1906, Satischandra persuaded the twenty-two-year-old Radhakumud to forego an academic career as a historian at British-run institutions and to instead join the National Council of Education (jatiya shiksha parishad), a network of schools and universities outside the formal control of the colonial government established by swadeshi activists. The National Council’s flagship institution, Bengal National College on 191/1 Bowbazar Street in Calcutta, was intended by its founder Gurudas Banerjee to provide nationalist interpretations of “oriental ideals of life and thought” and to train a cadre of swadeshi activists.48 Radhakumud was recruited as Hemchandra Basu Malik Professor of Indian History at Bengal National College and was tasked with creating textbooks about the uses of Indian history for anti-colonial nationalism. His first two books, Indian Shipping (1912) and The Fundamental Unity of India (1914), grew out of his attempt to design curricula for Bengal National College according to Satischandra Mukherjee and Gurudas Banerjee’s directives.49 In Indian Shipping, for instance, Radhakumud surveyed premodern India’s maritime networks from the early Mauryan to the late Mughal period and insisted on “the importance and necessity of reviving and restoring on modern lines a lost industry.”50 The story of a distant past, in other words, was written with an eye trained on a possible political future. 46

47

48

49

50

Radhakumud Mookerji, “Foreword,” in Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee, The Origins of the National Education Movement (1905–1910) (Calcutta, 1957), vii–xi, at viii. For example, “Part I: Indiana,” The Dawn and Dawn Society’s Magazine, vol. 1, no. 2 (1904), 29–60. For a firsthand account of Radhakumud’s involvement with Dawn between 1902 and 1906, see Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Creative India: From Mohenjo-Daro to the Age of Ramkrsna-Vivekananda ¯ (Lahore, 1937), 663. Gurudas Banerjee, “National Council of Education Bengal: Statement of Objects and Plan of Work,” in Reminiscences, Speeches and Writings of Sir Gooroo Dass Banerjee Kt., vol. 2, ed. Upendra Chandra Banerjee (Calcutta, 1927), 207–28, at 208. Mukherjee and Mukherjee, The Origins of the National Education Movement, 87. Radhakumud Mookerji, Indian Shipping: A History of the Sea-Borne Trade and Maritime Activity of the Indians from the Earliest Times (Calcutta, 1912), 256.

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In Local Government, Radhakumud sought to bring the presentist historical approach he adopted at Bengal National College to the study of ancient political institutions. Aligning himself with swadeshi revolutionaries’ commitment to pedagogical, nationalist uses of the past, Radhakumud broke with the aspiration to apolitical objectivity held by Rangaswami Aiyangar. In the Introduction to Local Government, Radhakumud declared that his investigations into Indian history were motivated by “an eminently practical interest.”51 His professed goal was to distil from the reconstructed ancient polity possible regimetypes for twentieth-century politics. The purpose of the treatise was to highlight the “educative value” of constitutional history and to suggest specific republican institutions to those seeking political reform in the late 1910s.52 Robert Crewe-Milnes, the 1st Marquess of Crewe and Secretary of State for India from 1911 to 1915, was invited to write a foreword to the book, and remarked on precisely this point about historical method. Crewe noted that Radhakumud’s “comparative study of past annals” was driven by “a moral, not to be ignored by ourselves” about the shape self-government should take in British India.53 A presentist political orientation was immediately evident in the opening sections of Local Government, wherein Radhakumud attacked the Indian National Congress’ preoccupation with representative government. The dominant nationalist “school of political thought” of the 1910s, he argued in a thinly veiled reference to the Congress, was seeking to “introduce self-government from above.”54 By defining swaraj as the selection of qualified members of political parties by an enfranchised citizenry, the Indian National Congress was precluding “the major part of the people” from political office.55 The various schemes put forward after 1885 by leaders like Naoroji, Gokhale, and Tilak all limited substantive political power to a small minority of social and economic elites. Their schemes compelled most

51

52 53

54

The first edition of Indian Shipping carried an introductory foreword by Brajendra Nath Seal. Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India, 1st ed. (Oxford, 1919), 20. Ibid., 21. Marquess of Crewe, “Foreword,” in Mookerji, Local Government, 1st ed., vii–ix, at vii. 55 Mookerji, Local Government, 1st ed., 20. Ibid.

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of the Indian people – those who could not join parties or be adequately trained in constitutional politics – to rely on the judgment of elites. Representation created one class of persons allowed to access government and to formulate laws, and another class of citizens whose primary political act was the minimal one of periodically selecting their lawmakers: “[T]he masses living in the villages cannot take part in the provincial or the central government except through their few representatives.”56 Embedding a critique of the Congress program of the 1910s into a more general critique of representative democracy, Radhakumud insisted that the equation of swaraj with elected legislative assemblies was insufficiently democratic. The Indian people could not be considered “essentially self-governing or enjoying the blessings of free institutions” if they were unable to “themselves” shape their collective will into law.57 The criticism of Congress was outlined in section 2 of the introductory essay of Local Government. It functioned as a sort of rhetorical framing device for the rest of the volume. Given that the lack of widespread political participation was a problem created by nationalist politics, then, Radhakumud suggested, a study of India’s past constitutional forms might reveal more genuinely popular models of government. Adopting a deliberate political motivation to his research, Radhakumud spent the remaining ten chapters of Local Government in Ancient India unearthing alternatives to the representative vision of swaraj. In chapter 1 (“Preliminary Considerations”), he argued that a characteristic political body in the history of Indian government was the local citizens’ assembly, known by various terms in Sanskrit and Pali literature: sabha, gana, puga, vrata, s´ ren¯ı, sangha, samudaya, ¯ ¯ samuha, sambhuya-samutth ana, parisat, and charana.58 All these ¯ ¯ ¯ terms described directly participatory units of administration, with authority over legislative, executive, and judicial matters in their respective jurisdictions. There were three broad categories of assemblies: caste and kinship-based (samudaya), occupation-based (´sren¯ı), and territorial (sabha). The third type – territorial assemblies or sabha – occupied most of Radhakumud’s attention. They were the topic of six of the ten chapters of Local Government. According to Radhakumud, territorial assemblies were cross-caste, cross-occupation bodies that individually governed towns and villages. From chapter 4, section 2 56

Ibid., 21.

57

Ibid.

58

Ibid., 29.

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(“Administrative Machinery”) onwards, Radhakumud reconstructed their internal constitution and range of functions, drawing on legal texts from the early centuries CE, the Arthasastra manuscript, and temple inscriptions from Telugu and Tamil-speaking regions of southern India. He highlighted two key features of the ancient sabha. First, the sabha was a legislative, administrative, and judicial body combined into one. It held paramount authority over its territory and did not alienate to higher bodies any powers related to governance of the territory. The primary unit in each territory was the sabha itself, the body of the assembled citizenry. The sabha was open to all adult residents of a locality; it convened regularly in the public hall (nigamsabha) for meetings that could include over 1,500 persons at once.59 Once a year, the sabha selected subcommittees of between six and twelve members to deal with particular spheres of government: “[T]he assemblies of ancient India developed a considerable differentiation of functions and also different organs for the exercise of each function.”60 Chapter 6 of Local Government listed ten such subcommittees, focused on public infrastructure, education, maintenance of temples and shrines, poor relief, agriculture, irrigation, finances, taxation, trade, and judicial arbitration.61 At its meetings, the sabha collectively formulated laws to be implemented by the subcommittees. Individual subcommittees also provided regular reports of their activities in front of the entire assembly, with the assembly maintaining power to recall, override, or dissolve any of the subcommittees. “The superiority of the general assembly,” Radhakumud wrote, was consolidated “by the fact that every member of the committees was bound to render an account of his stewardship” throughout his tenure.62 The general assembly was thus supreme, with sole power to fashion law and supervise its execution. The second significant feature of the sabha was its method of selecting political deputies. In the more democratic of India’s many sabhas, committees were drawn from the ranks of the citizenry through the casting of lots. The paradigmatic example of a sortition-based assembly was detailed in two inscriptions found on a wall of the tenth-century Vaikuntha Perumal temple in Uthiramerur, Madras

59

Ibid., 171–73.

60

Ibid., 147.

61

Ibid., 132–44.

62

Ibid., 174.

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Presidency.63 Relying on the Archaeological Survey of India’s reconstruction of the two Tamil inscriptions in its 1913 Madras Epigraphy Report, Radhakumud described how the formation of subcommittees at Uthiramerur occurred through a complex ticketing system. The village was first divided into thirty separate “wards” or “electoral units.”64 Residents of each ward marked their nominations for a given subcommittee on a palm-leaf ticket. The ticket collections of each ward were then brought in front of the sabha assembled as a whole, compiled together into a single vessel and shuffled, and counted out one by one by a madhyastha (“arbitrator”).65 Each subcommittee had a tenure of 360 days, during which it was required to participate in (and report to) the wider community sabha.66 After 360 days, the sabha selected a new set of committees from within itself; selection happened more frequently in cases of emergency or if a committee member was recalled. In the second edition of Local Government published in June 1920, Radhakumud praised a further aspect of the Uthiramerur selection process. The entire system, he argued, was designed to ensure equal access to office for all adult citizens: “[T]he change of office-bearers opened out opportunities to every qualified man in the village of being associated with its administration and acquainted with all its details and facts.”67 Sortition also meant that Uthiramerur lacked anything resembling a modern political party or a class of professional politicians. Due to “the method of casting lots,” there was “no scope for canvassing or other electioneering methods” characteristic of modern representative republics.68 In both the 1919 and the 1920 editions of his text, then, Radhakumud depicted ancient and medieval India as a landscape dotted with participatory, self-ruling assemblies through which laws were made and affairs administered “by all the inhabitants collectively.”69 His view of the Indian polity was distinctive. Its closest approximation was an essay written by the historian Kashi Prasad Jayaswal seven years earlier. Addressing the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (Hindi Literary Conference) in Calcutta in December 1912, Kashi 63 67

68

64 65 66 Ibid., 150. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 154–55. Ibid., 156–57. Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1920), 180–81. This sentence (in chapter 7, section 2) was absent from the 1919 edition of the text and appears to have been added in only for the second edition. 69 Ibid., 173. Mookerji, Local Government, 1st ed., 210.

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Prasad Jayaswal argued that in classical republics (gana) ruled by citizens’ assemblies (sabha), “the principle of representation was not operative.”70 The talk was translated into English by a writer named Mukundi Lal and published by the nationalist monthly Modern Review in early 1913.71 Radhakumud encountered Jayaswal’s study in the pages of the Modern Review and, referring to it as a “brilliant essay,” cited it in the first footnote to chapter 7 of the 1919 edition of Local Government.72 Yet, crucially, the practice of sortition and powers of recall and absolute sovereignty were nowhere present in Jayaswal’s account of the sabha. While Radhakumud was certainly influenced by Jayaswal, the direct democracy he identified in Indian history was far more institutionally robust. If past republics allowed citizens to control public affairs more fully than electoral representation ever could, then what would it mean for their democratic arrangements to become the bases of modern political reform? How could a forgotten constitution like that of tenth-century Uthiramerur become a realistic alternative to the Indian National Congress program? It was here that Radhakumud turned to the topic of federalism. In his interpretation, direct democracy had survived through the centuries in premodern India because of the internally fragmented nature of the country’s successive regimes. The central government of Indian dynasties had always been weak; rule occurred through the delegation of legislative and administrative powers to subsidiary jurisdictions. A citizens’ assembly in any one village or town could control its local affairs and rotate offices through sortition, even as the central government of the state remained a hereditary monarchy. The state was a coordinating body at best, addressing conflicts of jurisdiction, drawing taxes, and managing military and trade relations with neighboring powers. Its authority did not entail legislating for each political community within its borders. The state instead gave “utmost latitude to the operations of local government.”73 Radhakumud deemed “an elastic system of federalism” to be the reason behind the proliferation of mini-republics centered on the sabha

70

71

72

Kashi Prasad Jayaswal, “An Introduction to Hindu Polity,” Modern Review, vol. 13, nos. 1–6 (1913), 535–41, at 536. Ratan Lal, Kashi Prasad Jayaswal: The Making of a “Nationalist” Historian (New Delhi, 2018), 155. 73 Mookerji, Local Government, 1st ed., 164n1. Ibid., 9.

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within large monarchical empires like the Mauryas (third century BCE) and the Cholas (tenth century CE): [The imperial state] did not cherish the ambition of setting up a centralized government consciously legislating for and controlling the life of every part of that vast whole, but aimed only at an elastic system of federalism or confederation in which were incorporated, along with the central government at the metropolis, as parts of the same system, the indigenous local administrations. The essence of this imperial system was thus a recognition of local autonomy at the expense of the authority of the central government, which was physically unfit to assert itself except by its enforced affiliation to the pre-existing system of local government.74

In such a system, the directly democratic politics of Uthiramerur could flourish under the imperial rule of Parantaka Chola I (c. 907–955 CE), whose dominions extended from southern India into the Deccan. On one hand, Radhakumud’s pluralist depiction of Indian empires challenged the historians who immediately preceded him, many of whom took premodern empires to be powerful, autocratic monarchies.75 But Radhakumud went further. He insisted that the premodern federal structure was instructive for modern politics: it was the only way for direct democracy to exist on an expansive geographical scale. Unitary states were necessarily representative. If a large territory was administered by legislating for all jurisdictions from a single site of power – a monarch, a council of ministers, or an elected national assembly – then only those who had access to this single legislating body could transform the public

74 75

Ibid., 10. All three studies of the ancient Indian polity published between 1914 and 1918 – by Rangaswami Aiyangar, Narendra Nath Law, and Pramathanath Banerjea – saw premodern empires as sovereign monarchical orders, bound by dharma (duty) but centralized in political form and fully in command of subordinate jurisdictions. For Aiyangar, these empires were marked “by intense centralization of the Government which aims at uniformity of administration throughout the kingdom.” For Law, imperial constitutions revolved around states with far-reaching powers of regulation and punishment (dandaniti) and unitary legislation. Finally, for Banerjea, Indian politics after the second century BCE saw a steady growth in “centralized administration,” after which local political power “lost much of its power and prestige.” See, respectively, Aiyangar, Considerations on Some Aspects of Ancient Indian Polity, 35; Law, Studies in Ancient Hindu Polity, vol. 1, 88–135; and Banerjea, Public Administration in Ancient India, 291.

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will into law. In republican governments, the people might elect members of the national legislature. However, if the state’s constitution gave the national legislature sole authority to dictate matters to each territory, then it was elected assembly members, and not the electing citizenry, who were engaging in the formulation of law. In unitary republics, Radhakumud argued, “the state, beginning as agent of society, becomes its master and representative; society is merged in the state to which it surrenders its functions, dropping its independent life.”76 The scope and content of law was wholly “determined by the national legislature.”77 In contrast, the combination of weak central government and the devolution of legislative and administrative powers to local assemblies within premodern federal empires allowed direct political participation to occur in each jurisdiction separately. By the concluding chapter 10 of Local Government in Ancient India, Radhakumud maintained that a federalist constitution of powerful, independent assemblies coordinated by a limited state was the only way for the maximum number of common citizens to exercise popular sovereignty in the context of a large modern nation. Federalism modeled on early empires provided constitutional conditions for the revival of classical republican practices, practices more attentive to the value of comprehensive political participation than any of the schemes of swaraj put forward by the Indian National Congress. Local Government left its initial readers puzzled in both India and England. The Times of India, on October 15, 1919, praised Radhakumud’s “masterly” grasp of ancient and medieval history, but discerned a conspicuous lack of concrete detail about how the text’s imagined federal constitution would be designed or enacted: “[H]ow, if at all, the extinct democratic faith can be revived are questions which the author does not attempt to enlarge upon.”78 Historians and Indologists found even less to admire. E. J. Rapson, Professor of Sanskrit at St. John’s College, Cambridge, criticized Radhakumud for selectively discussing those aspects of the Indian past that seemed obviously different from dominant modes of twentiethcentury nationalist politics. “Many students of Indian history,” Rapson wrote in the English Historical Review, “may be unable to

76 78

77 Mookerji, Local Government, 1st ed., 4. Ibid., 6. “Local Government,” Times of India (October 15, 1919), 11.

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accept some of Dr Mookerji’s conclusions.”79 For an anonymous essayist in the Times Literary Supplement on August 14, 1919, Local Government was only acceptable as a work of history; its call to resurrect a network of citizen assemblies from the medieval Chola Empire was laughably impractical: “[T]he elaborate institutions described by Dr Mookerji perished long ago . . . Nobody claims that the local institutions which worked vigorously at the time of the Norman Conquest should be revived. They are dead and buried beyond the possibility of resurrection.”80 The most polemical review was published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in January 1920. The Orientalist Frederick Eden Pargiter objected to Radhakumud’s presentation of ancient Indian polities as directly democratic. Pargiter was skeptical that political power would have been distributed in an egalitarian fashion in a society bound by strict hierarchical codes: “[the author] speaks of the popular assemblies or councils as ‘democratic,’ but the constitutions do not warrant that description. It is highly improbable that the lower classes ever had elective power along with the upper classes.”81 Radhakumud’s orientation towards Indian history was, in Pargiter’s estimation, little more than a politically motivated, romantic fantasy. The review compared Local Government unfavorably with Ramesh Chandra Majumdar’s Corporate Life in Ancient India (1918), describing the latter as “written more sanely and with no political flavor.”82

3.4 Democracies of the East (1923) and Its Legacy By 1920, a strand of historiography engendered by the swadeshi revolutionary movement was thus trying to challenge the consensus that had emerged around political representation in the Indian National Congress from the 1880s. After Radhakumud Mookerji, 79

80

81

82

E. J. Rapson, “Book Review: Local Government in Ancient India by Radhakumud Mookerji,” English Historical Review, vol. 35, no. 138 (1920), 260–61, at 261. “Guilds and Village Councils in Hindu India,” Times Literary Supplement (August 14, 1919), 433. Frederick Eden Pargiter, “Reviewed Works: Corporate Life in Ancient India by Ramesh Chandra Majumdar and Local Government in Ancient India by Radhakumud Mookerji,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 1 (1920), 114–18, at 116. Ibid., 118.

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the key proponent of the swadeshi discourse about ancient democracy was Radhakumud’s own younger brother, Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968). Radhakamal followed the same general trajectory as his elder sibling, moving from Berhampore to Calcutta for further education in his late teens. He was quickly drawn into the circle around Radhakumud, Satischandra Mukherjee, and the Dawn journal. Between 1906 and 1908, Radhakamal shared a large house on Cornwallis Street with his brother, Satischandra, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, and Rabindra Narayan Ghose. This house became a meeting ground for many of the swadeshi movement’s leading intellectual figures.83 After four years in Calcutta, Radhakamal also began to view Brajendra Nath Seal as his mentor. He was a regular visitor to the philosopher’s baithak-khana (salon) on Ram Mohan Shah Lane and was largely responsible for preparing the manuscript of Seal’s The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus for publication in 1915.84 In September 1923, Radhakamal published a book entitled Democracies of the East: A Study in Comparative Politics, his own contribution to the corpus of writings on Indian models of popular rule. The book was in the direct lineage of Local Government in Ancient India and Seal’s Mysore constitution, prepared six months earlier. In the first footnote to the Preface, Radhakamal affirmed that “the present work” followed Radhakumud’s efforts in 1919 to recover “ancient Eastern political theory.”85 In chapter 21, he cited Seal’s Mysore plan as the inspiration for his own constructive program.86 Like these two works, Democracies of the East was framed as a riposte to the constitutional philosophy of the Indian National Congress. Radhakamal made an emphatic case that the Congress’ advocacy of electoral government rendered its politics an elite enterprise that evoked “little feeling among the masses.”87 An impoverished definition of swaraj as the ability of elected deputies to legislate in the interests of the citizenry led to a hierarchy of sovereignty, limiting political power to “a certain small and well-defined class which packs 83

84 85

86

Radhakamal Mukerjee, India: The Dawn of a New Era (An Autobiography) (New Delhi, 1997), 63–64; Sarkar, Creative India, 663. Also see Mukherjee and Mukherjee, The Origins of the National Education Movement, 232. Mukerjee, India: The Dawn of a New Era, 87–89. Radhakamal Mukerjee, Democracies of the East: A Study in Comparative Politics (London, 1923), viiin1. 87 Ibid., 356n1. Ibid.

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and directs the assembly, and speaks in the name of the people.”88 The metaphor of ventriloquizing the popular will through representative government (the act of ‘speaking in the name of the people’) – deployed by figures like Naoroji, Tilak, and Malaviya to indicate their republican ethos – was transformed by Radhakamal into a sign of anticolonial nationalism’s stifling of mass politics. Though the Congress had begun as a protest movement against a lack of political participation, he pointed out, the party’s understanding of self-rule as elite representation had ironically made it hostile to fully participatory government – to allow the people to speak for themselves. Complaints about the “inertia of the masses” initially directed by nationalists at the British government in the 1880s had come to be “perpetuated and encouraged” by party leaders themselves.89 The source of the problem was in the very attempt to try to represent popular sovereignty, a process Radhakamal traced back to the evolution of democracy in Western Europe and the United States after the second half of the eighteenth century. In chapter 9, Radhakamal linked representative democracy to the growth of the modern state. As a central organ of government began to monopolize an increasingly large range of social and economic functions within a territory, it became the primary site of legislative authority. The result was a “monistic” polity, where one institution – the state – was “regarded as most vital, and hence most authoritative, exercising the sovereign power over the entire body politic.”90 Democracy under monistic states invariably imposed limits on who could exercise political power, and where. Since the state was recognized as the sole legitimate source of lawmaking, only those involved in its central legislative branch had the right to formulate and administer law, even if they were doing so as delegates of their respective constituencies. Locating “the undivided will of the community” within “the organs of representative government” buttressed the state and created a fundamental disparity in legislative power, marking off members of the state assembly from their electors. In effect, Radhakamal argued, unitary democratic states became representative republics, compelling those who did not themselves engage in lawmaking to abide by the directives of an elected political class “which represents the original, unlimited, and central

88

Ibid.

89

Ibid.

90

Ibid., 119.

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ratifying will or fiat imposed upon all persons, associations, and things within its jurisdiction.”91 Radhakamal identified monistic representative states as the dominant type of Western European democracy from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, culminating most obviously for him in the tradition of British parliamentarism. The development of representative states undermined a foundational aspect of popular sovereignty which, in chapter 9, he drew from a reading of Rousseau – that there was normative value in a people being able to shape the laws that governed them: “Rousseau’s postulate that the individual is at once the subject and the sovereign expresses a profound truth, but is fundamentally at variance with the general trend of political evolution in the West.”92 In fighting for the authority of elected legislatures, then, the Indian National Congress was accepting “the diseases of the present system of representative government” and was throwing its weight behind a political practice that had emerged in European states to subject the people as a whole to the will of a minority of public officials.93 The Congress was criticized for seeking to transpose the diluted popular rule characteristic of the monistic states of modern Europe: “[R]epresentative institutions have been considered as coming only from the West as a result of the British connection with India.”94 Radhakamal’s view was that, in sharp contrast to modern European states, democracy in ancient and medieval India had never coalesced into a representative regime. The account of Indian political history given in Democracies of the East drew on several sections of Local Government, going so far as to use the same source-material: Sanskrit and Pali texts for North India, and temple inscriptions from the Chola period for South India. The important addition Radhakamal made to his brother’s historiography was to locate the Indian political 91 92

93

Ibid., 146. Ibid., 147. There was a history of reading Rousseau in India prior to the publication of Democracies of the East in 1923, particularly around the question of social equality. However, Radhakamal Mukerjee was the first Indian writer to examine Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty and to deploy the Genevan’s arguments in a critique of political representation. On the tensions between legislative power (sovereignty) and representative government in Rousseau, see Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge, 2016), 135–45. 94 Mukerjee, Democracies of the East, 152. Ibid., 162.

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tradition within a wider Asian or “Eastern” tradition encompassing China, the Malay Peninsula, and Japan. “Asia” was an important geographic and civilizational category for Radhakamal, whereas the term was not used even once in either of the two editions of Local Government. The Asianist orientation of Democracies of the East was a product of Radhakamal’s swadeshi years, a period when Bengali and English translations of Japanese pan-Asianist pamphlets produced in the wake of the 1904 war with Russia were circulated within revolutionary circles in both Calcutta and the mofussil (countryside).95 Though with a more ambitious historical goal of comparing the Mauryan and Chola empires to premodern states in China and Japan, Radhakamal continued Radhakumud’s central argument: selfrule in premodern India occurred through mixed-occupation territorial assemblies (sabha) at the level of the village and town. The assemblies were of “heterogenous composition” and open to all persons and functional groups within a territory; offices and subcommittees were chosen from within the assemblies at regular intervals.96 As citizen bodies, the assemblies held power over all internal administrative and judicial matters. They paid taxes to a central monarchical regime responsible for maintaining infrastructure between jurisdictions and for overseeing trade and military affairs with other states. The limited legislative reach of the monarchy enabled “a large autonomy enjoyed by local groups” and rendered the assemblies the state’s main lawmaking bodies.97 “Among peoples in the East,” Radhakamal claimed, “the problem of uniting large areas and great populations on the basis of common citizenship was solved not by the principle of representation,” but by “the principle of federalism.”98 Juxtaposing India’s republican federalism with the European “principle of representation,” Radhakamal delineated a political program opposed to the Congress understanding of swaraj, intended to “make possible the realization of the older ideals of direct democracy

95

96

Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 24–25; Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 54, no. 1 (2012), 65–92; and Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York, 2007), 111–14. 97 98 Mukerjee, Democracies of the East, 90. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 83.

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in spite of the complexities of modern politics.”99 His alternative constitutional arrangement was described at length in chapter 10 (“The Coming Polity”) and was predicated on a dual system of government. The first tier contained a multitude of local assemblies, fully sovereign over their territories. The assemblies carried out “by far the greatest part of legislative and administrative work in the State.”100 The assemblies functioned not on the basis of election and “the old machinery of delegation-cum-responsibility evolved by the system of representative government” but through “direct action” – a phrase Radhakamal adopted from Seal’s Mysore constitution, to mean antielectoral, mass decision-making procedures.101 To solve the logistical problem of coordinating between independent legislative bodies dispersed over a large area, the assemblies were under the authority of an overarching federal state: “[T]hose affairs the want of correlation or co-ordination in which brings about the inefficiency of the nation as a whole will be left to the organs of the central authority.”102 Radhakamal conceded that some degree of electoral representation was necessary to allow assemblies to send delegates to the central government. His plan then proceeded to vest in each assembly the right to hold a referendum on legislation passed by the elected federal government.103 The referendum could only be exercised locally; an individual assembly could not demand a national vote on federal legislation. But the very possibility of a local referendum served to make the actions of a national assembly subject to the majority will of every sabha under its jurisdiction. As it had been for Brajendra Nath Seal, the referendum for Radhakamal was a check wielded by citizens over representative bodies. It allowed the unmediated popular decisionmaking characteristic of local politics to be applied to the actions of an elected tier of government: “[A] referendum implies the same direct primary and immediate choice, as is the basis of the procedure of all local groups.”104 Democracies of the East was a synthesis of the perspectives of Radhakamal Mukerjee’s two mentors from the swadeshi movement. Radhakamal adhered to his elder brother’s reading of Indian history through the lens of federalist direct democracy and formulated a program of political revival using elements of Seal’s 1923 constitution 99 104

Ibid., xvii. Ibid.

100

Ibid., 156.

101

Ibid.

102

Ibid., 155.

103

Ibid.

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for Mysore (while dropping Seal’s monarchism): legislative autonomy for local assemblies, combined with the power to demand referenda. He shared with Radhakumud and Seal two important arguments. Like them, he viewed the Indian National Congress’ constitutional schemes for representation as deeply hierarchical, incompletely democratic when evaluated against a Rousseauian standard of inalienable popular sovereignty. And like them, he proposed a federal combination of direct democracy and a coordinating central government – in his case an elected central government. The affinities between Democracies of the East and Local Government in Ancient India were clear to Radhakamal’s academic contemporaries. Pratapgiri Ramamurti from Wilson College, Bombay, criticized the brothers for “reading their modern theories” of federalism and popular rule back into history.105 Radhakamal’s presentation of his pluralist program in the language of an ancient constitution was fanciful at best and bad history at worst. “Dr Radhakamal Mukerjee, it seems to us,” Ramamurti remarked wryly, “is trying to identify what he wished the Polity to have been with what it actually was.”106 Democracies of the East also had its vocal supporters. Following the book’s publication in September 1923, Radhakamal’s recovery of historic alternatives to representative democracy was defended in the writings of the political scientist Beni Prasad (1900–45). Prasad was initially trained as a historian of the Mughal Empire at Muir Central College, Allahabad – his first publication was titled History of Jahangir (1922) – and then travelled to England in 1923 for graduate studies in sociology and political science. He received a doctorate from the University of London in 1927, where he was tutored by Harold Laski, Arthur Berriedale Keith, Lionel Barnett, and Alfred Zimmern. Prasad’s thesis under Laski, published the following year as The State in Ancient India: A Study in the Structure and Practical Working of Political Institutions in North India in Ancient Times (1928), drew heavily on Local Government in Ancient India and Democracies of the East. Quoting from both works, Prasad argued in his dissertation that the state in ancient India existed to coordinate between local assemblies. Sovereignty was “saturated through and through with the

105 106

Pratapgiri Ramamurti, The Problem of the Indian Polity (Bombay, 1935), 290. Ibid., 203.

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principles of what for convenience may be called federalism,” rooted in the “ultimate unit” of the local sabha.107 In 1927, Beni Prasad returned to India from London to take up a lectureship in the newly established Department of Civics and Political Science at the University of Allahabad, becoming full Professor in 1929. He quickly drew close to Radhakamal Mukerjee, who was then based at the nearby University of Lucknow.108 Under Radhakamal’s influence, Prasad prepared A Few Suggestions on the Problem of the Indian Constitution (1928), a book-length response to the demands for an elected national parliament, legislative representation, and imperial Dominion Status outlined by the Congress under Motilal Nehru, Tej Bahadur Sapru, and others on August 10, 1928, in what had come to be known as the ‘Nehru Report.’109 The 1928 Nehru Report was an important moment in the evolution of Indian nationalism’s relationship to mass politics through the interwar period. While the report repeated Dadabhai Naoroji’s 1906 demand for imperial dominion status, it also marked the first time that the Congress leadership unequivocally supported the introduction of universal adult suffrage.110 In A Few Suggestions on the Problem of the Indian Constitution, Beni Prasad acknowledged the importance of the Nehru Report from the perspective of democracy, but still charged the Congress with uncritically accepting election into a national legislature modeled on parliaments in the British Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as the only means of self-government. The distinction between modern representative government and the “despotic monarchy and close oligarchy” of imperial rule, a central trope in the vocabulary of the Nehru Report, was for Prasad quite exaggerated.111 Even with full adult franchise, representative parliamentary systems just as easily concentrated power in the hands of a political 107

108

109

110

111

Beni Prasad, The State in Ancient India: A Study in the Structure and Practical Working of Political Institutions in North India in Ancient Times (Allahabad, 1928), 504–5. See Heramb Chaturvedi, “Professor Beni Prasad,” in Allahabad School of History (1915–1955) (New Delhi, 2016), 146–74. Beni Prasad, A Few Suggestions on the Problem of the Indian Constitution (Allahabad, 1928), ii. All Parties’ Conference, The Nehru Report: An Anti-Separatist Manifesto (New Delhi, 1928). See Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (New Delhi, 1983), 227. Prasad, A Few Suggestions, 8.

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class as monarchies or oligarchies, leaving “the mass of voters . . . too apathetic, too indolent.”112 Prasad viewed theories of mass democracy articulated by writers like Radhakamal Mukerjee in the early 1920s as correctives to the democratic blind spots of Congress nationalism. As proposals to transfer both lawmaking and administrative power “from legislatures to the people for direct exercise,” these theories were part of a new intellectual “movement”: [It is] a movement which strikes at the root of representative government and tends to reproduce, mutatis mutandis in the altered geographical circumstances, the features of the direct democracy of classical history. Modern statesmanship has reverted to the ideal of Rousseau who declared sovereignty to be inalienable and unrepresentable. Thus, proposals for constitutional amendment and other important measures may be referred to the people and directly voted upon.113

This passage was deeply informed by chapters 9 and 10 of Democracies of the East. Beni Prasad repeated Radhakamal’s reading of Rousseau’s Social Contract in chapter 9 of Democracies as a text espousing “unrepresentable” popular sovereignty. He similarly regarded Rousseauian direct democracy not as the introduction of a radically new political concept for India but as a reversion to “classical history.” The “altered geographical circumstances” of large modern states meant that the participatory local democracy of premodern India could only be recovered on a systematic federal basis and would have to be combined with the power of local referendum, as detailed in chapter 10 of Democracies of the East. The critical point, Prasad asserted in chapter 7 of A Few Suggestions, was that such a turn away from the constitutional paradigms of the Congress should be seen as a return to an older tradition of “direct or primary democracy, as distinct from representative democracy.”114

3.5 The Pluralist Moment of the 1920s Between the mid-1880s and the mid-1920s, attitudes toward the constitutional mechanism of electoral representation underwent a considerable shift in Indian political discourse. From being accepted 112

Ibid., 9.

113

Ibid., 33.

114

Ibid., 222.

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uncritically as the means of attaining swaraj, it came be to be seen as the primary institutional obstacle to the rule of the people. In response to nationalist thinking on the need to filter sovereignty through representatives, a circle of historians and social scientists emerging initially out of the swadeshi movement tried to identify and rehabilitate premodern Indian practices of participatory democracy. They adopted the swadeshi movement’s politically motivated approach to national history and contributed to a growing literature in the 1910s about the ancient Indian state. Out of this scholarship, the federalist writers simultaneously generated a portrait of ancient and medieval Indian constitutions as governed by republican citizens’ assemblies (sabha) and outlined schemes to make these assemblies the foundational bodies of a future democratic state. A republican interpretation of national history and a move to resurrect the distinctive institutions of an invented national republican tradition were produced out of frustration with the limits on political participation embedded within popular regimes premised on the election of lawmakers, what Bernard Manin has described as “the delegation of government to a limited number of citizens that differentiates representation from government by the people.”115 Direct democracy never cohered into a tangible political program in the late 1910s or the 1920s. In spite of their obvious polemics against the Congress, Indian pluralists were averse to making their own ideas the bases of any kind of organized opposition movement. M. D. Joshi, one of Radhakamal Mukerjee’s students at the University of Lucknow, noted that the author of Democracies of the East “never indulged in politics.”116 Similar observations were made about Beni Prasad at the University of Allahabad – particularly striking, given that A Few Suggestions on the Problem of the Indian Constitution was published two months after the Nehru Report and engaged directly with its demand for adult suffrage.117 Radhakumud, meanwhile, had a decidedly socially conservative turn from the late 1920s. Like a number of his former revolutionary comrades from the early swadeshi years – Rash Behari Bose, Benoy Sarkar, and others – Radhakumud 115

116

117

Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge, 1997), 165–66. M. D. Joshi, “Professor Radhakamal Mukerjee: As I Knew Him,” in India: The Dawn of a New Era, 215–17, at 217. Chaturvedi, “Professor Beni Prasad,” 151.

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Mookerji increasingly came to define the national community of his political imagination in narrowly Hindu terms, often through direct engagement with the growing obsession with race and civilization in Japanese imperialist nationalism of the 1930s. The collectivist, organicist corporatism undergirding Local Government became a way of asserting the self-ruling potential of caste and kinship groups. Radhakumud’s later writings amounted to deeply reactionary defenses of existing social practices against state intervention. As long as the discourse of pluralist democracy remained an important intellectual current at Lucknow and Allahabad in the 1920s, there continued to be resonances between it and political movements of the time. The most obvious connection was with Gandhi, whose Hind Swaraj (1909) contained a similar denunciation of “parliamentary swaraj” and party politics in its chapter 5 (“The Condition of England”). Radhakamal Mukerjee appears to have met Gandhi at least once, most notably during a lecture on agrarian economics at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, on November 28, 1917.118 Beyond this passing encounter, however, there is nothing to indicate that Radhakamal or other pluralist writers ever engaged with Gandhi or saw themselves as Gandhians. Indeed, Gandhian politics as a whole was a curious omission from their texts. Even as pluralists decried the Indian National Congress as an elite-driven organization, they never discussed Gandhi’s efforts to turn the party into a genuine mass movement after 1919. The vision of a Gandhian direct democracy would have to wait until well into the 1930s. 118

Mukerjee, India: The Dawn of a New Era, 123.

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4.1 “A Genuine Democratic State” Following the intellectual career of radical democracy from the late 1920s into the 1930s and early 1940s moves us from academic debates among historians and political scientists into the realm of more concrete politics. The decade from 1935 to 1945 was a remarkably fertile period for constitutional thought and practice in India. On one hand, by the late 1930s there were increasingly strident demands for a constitution drafted with greater Indian involvement. The definition of purna swaraj (complete self-rule) outlined by the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress over three days from February 27 to March 1, 1937 associated the term with the existence of a locally authored constitution: A genuine democratic state can only be created by the Indian people themselves, and the Congress has therefore insisted on a Constituent Assembly, elected by adult franchise, to determine the constitution of the country. The Constituent Assembly can only come into existence when the Indian people have developed sufficient power . . . to shape their destiny without external interference.1

At its session in Tripuri (Central Provinces) two years later in March 1939, the party adopted a resolution reiterating the need for “a Constituent Assembly elected by the people on the basis of adult franchise and without any interference by a foreign authority.”2 There also emerged a cluster of political visions critical of the nationalist language of purna swaraj. The princely states, for instance, 1

2

“Resolution of the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress, 27 February to 1 March 1937,” in Speeches and Documents on the Indian Constitution, 1921–1947, vol. I, eds. Maurice Gwyer and A. Appadorai (Bombay, 1957), 389. “Tripuri – March 1939,” in B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, History of the Indian National Congress (1935–1947), vol. II (New Delhi, 1969), 112.

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formulated various proposals that deployed the framework of imperial federation enacted by the 1935 Government of India Act.3 The influential jurist Benegal Narsing Rau similarly experimented with the 1935 Act’s provisions around provincial autonomy, a move that often brought him into conflict with those seeking full national independence.4 Marked by competing projects trying either to rupture or to work within the British Empire, the late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed one of the most intense bouts of public debate about the architecture of colonial self-determination since the founding of the Congress in the late nineteenth century. Amid the enormous deluge of resolutions, pamphlets, speeches, and draft constitutions produced over these ten years, the contributions of one group of writers were especially notable. From the village of Wardha in the Central Provinces, four writers – Joseph Kumarappa (1892–1960), Kishorlal Mashruwala (1890–1952), Vinoba Bhave (1895–1982), and Shriman Narayan Agarwal (1912–78) – challenged the notion that independence from imperial rule entailed the creation of representative, constitutional democracy on the Western European model. They built on M. K. Gandhi’s views of parliamentary democracy as elite rule and used the Gandhian framework to advocate for a participatory, federalist system of democracy. For the most part, these ‘Gandhian democrats,’ as one might call them, have escaped the attention of political and legal theorists. When they do enter into current narratives of twentieth-century political or constitutional thought, whether individually or as a group, it is mostly for their anti-statism.5 3

4

5

See, especially, Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge, 1997), 144–82. Bhimrao Ambedkar critically reviewed constitutional proposals for imperial federation put forward by the princely states after 1935, in a lecture delivered in Pune on January 29, 1939. See B. R. Ambedkar, Federation versus Freedom (Poona, 1939). See Arvind Elangovan, “Provincial Autonomy, Sir Benegal Narsing Rau, and an Improbable Imagination of Constitutionalism in India, 1935–1938,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 36, no. 1 (2016), 66–82. See Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford, 1966), 30–32; Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 143; Karuna Mantena, “On Gandhi’s Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjunctures,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 9, no. 3 (2012), 535–63, at 550; and Taylor C. Sherman, “A Gandhian Answer to the Threat of Communism? Sarvodaya and Postcolonial Nationalism in India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 53, no. 2 (2016), 249–70.

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I focus here, instead, on the group’s critiques of representative and especially parliamentary democracy. I trace the evolution of Gandhian democracy as a body of political thought over twelve years from the mid-1930s to the post-WWII period, showing how its theorists both adopted and departed from Gandhi’s ideas. What, then, was Gandhian democracy? I argue that it was as much an economic project as a political one. Gandhian democrats foregrounded industrial capitalism as a cause of corruption and elite domination in electoral politics. They held that the drive for capital accumulation created a wealthy class disconnected from the people and willing to exploit the masses for private gain. Accordingly, a more just and more popular distribution of sovereignty necessitated a new mode of economic production. I show how Gandhian democrats’ focus on political economy departed from Gandhi’s own ideas in Hind Swaraj and brought at least some Gandhians to the threshold of Marxism. Concretely, their proposals amounted to a constitutional program of decentralized council democracy, comprised of selfgoverning village republics and a system of agrarian socialism, with cooperative ownership and production of resources. Gandhian democrats relied on an idea of a collectivist ‘moral economy,’ which many of the tradition’s proponents located within rural India’s premodern past. Such a moral economy cultivated habits of fraternity necessary to sustain an egalitarian federalist democracy. The idea of the moral economy itself, of course, has had a long career within twentieth-century political and social theory.6 Often associated with strands of Marxist historiography and scholarship, the moral economy describes forms of production and exchange embedded within a larger matrix of often pre-capitalist social duties and obligations. For writers on the moral economy, such as G. D. H. Cole, R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and James Scott, the social embeddedness of exchange creates a disciplinary framework, putting into place economic motivations beyond the mere accumulation of capital. In his seminal theorization of the moral economy, Karl Polanyi defined it as a corporatist worldview aiming for “social harmony” between persons and groups, at odds with the focus on

6

For an overview, see William James Booth, “On the Idea of the Moral Economy,” American Political Science Review, vol. 88, no. 3 (1994), 653–67.

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individual growth within economic liberalism.7 The stress on maintaining harmonious relations was a check on corrosive competition and unregulated private domination. More recent depictions of the moral economy have continued to foreground its anti-capitalist dimensions. As a logic of socioeconomic organization, the ideal of solidaritybound exchange can replace liberalism’s reductively ‘atomized’ and possessive conception of the economic agent.8 Communal possession and use of resources also offers a different orientation to the triangular relationship between individual, society, and nature than that contained within the grammar of capitalism.9 The Gandhian articulation of an agrarian moral economy, I suggest, was born out of more directly political considerations regarding the corrupting influence of private wealth on legislators. Gandhians tethered communal ownership to a theory of direct popular sovereignty, using it to work towards an anti-parliamentary postcolonial future. In so doing, they made novel use of the trope of a moral economy for the purposes of a constitutional project. While the Gandhian alternative did not triumph politically in the aftermath of Indian independence after 1947, its grappling with the social and behavioral demands of participatory democracy raised fundamental questions about the link between economic ethics and representative government.

4.2 Gandhi and Representative Government To grasp the distinctive character of Gandhian democratic thought, it is useful to first revisit M. K. Gandhi’s own stance on modern democracy. Gandhi’s views on democracy and representative government changed considerably over the course of his career. He first broached the topic in South Africa in the 1890s. In 1894, John Robinson, the prime minister of the British Colony of Natal, put forward a proposal to debar Indians from voting, in an effort to limit the South African electorate to “the Anglo-Saxon race.” The twenty-four-year-old 7

8

9

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York, 1944), 163. Tim Rogan, The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism (Princeton, 2018). See, for instance, Massimiliano Tomba, Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (New York, 2019), 223–34.

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Gandhi’s first political campaign was a protest against Robinson’s Franchise Law Amendment Bill.10 In June 1894, Gandhi drafted a petition to the Natal Legislative Assembly, arguing, contra Robinson, that India had a long history of representative government. “The Indian nation has known and has exercised,” the petition announced, “the power of election from times far prior to the time when the AngloSaxon races first became acquainted with the principles of representation.”11 Each village in India “almost from time immemorial” had been governed by an elected council, “an exact prototype of the Saxon Witans, from which have sprung the present Parliamentary institutions.”12 The scattered electoral institutions introduced by the Government of British India from the 1870s did not mark a departure from India’s political past – they were “no extension of a new privilege they [Indians] have never before known or enjoyed” – but were rather a return to the country’s original system of government: “[T]he disqualification to exercise [the franchise] would be an unjust restriction which would never be put on them [Indians] in the land of their birth.”13 The aim of Gandhi’s petition was to counter Robinson’s racialized construction of modern democracy – the notion that electoral institutions were a uniquely Anglo-Saxon heritage – and, as a retort, to present representative government as an indigenous Indian system. At no point in the Natal petition did Gandhi question the legitimacy of parliamentarism. His goal was rather to demonstrate Indians’ readiness for parliamentary government. By the time he came to compose Hind Swaraj in 1909, the now-unofficial leader of South Africa’s expatriate Indian community had changed his views radically. In chapter 5 of Hind Swaraj, Gandhi famously (or infamously) decried the British parliament as “a sterile woman and a prostitute” – a metaphor he later regretted using, following protestations from readers.14 Throughout chapter 5, the British parliament was described as a 10

11

12 14

M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahadev Desai (London, 2001), 137–43. M. K. Gandhi, “Petition to Natal Legislative Assembly – Durban (June 28, 1894),” in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), vol. I (New Delhi, 1999), 144–48, at 144. 13 Ibid. Ibid., 146. M. K. Gandhi, “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge, 1997), 29.

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corrupt institution, occupied by a self-interested political class seeking above all to preserve its own power. Parliamentary legislation did not occur “under public pressure,” but rather according to directives set by competing political parties. To transpose parliamentary government on the British model into India, Gandhi argued, would be to import a system that was, in effect, unaccountable elite rule: “[I]f India copies England, it is my firm conviction that she will be ruined.”15 Later, in chapters 13 and 14 of Hind Swaraj, Gandhi presented Indian history as an alternative to the pathologies of “modern civilization,” including to the corruptions of parliamentarism. In contrast to modern Europe, Indian civilization had long been confined to a world of self-governing “small villages”; professional politicians and lawyers, insofar as they existed, “were considered people’s dependants, not their masters.”16 The revival of such an agrarian civilization, imagined as politically egalitarian, was considered a corrective to the disconnect between rulers and the ruled within elected representative governments. Hind Swaraj marked an inflection point in Gandhi’s thinking about political representation. Shifting away from his early enthusiasm about parliament and his commitment to securing voting rights for colonial subjects, Gandhi increasingly began to view party-based, electoral representation as a fundamentally flawed version of democracy, one that created a political class separated from the wider body of the citizenry. Hind Swaraj was first written in Gujarati in November 1909, around a quarter century before anything like a functioning self-governing parliament existed in British India. Gandhi’s criticisms in chapter 5 were directed at the Indian National Congress and at the ways it had evolved as an organization since the 1880s, emulating Western European parties of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and aspiring for a Westminster-style political arrangement – in Gandhi’s words, essentially “copying England.” As a response to the Congress, Gandhi turned to history to locate alternate models of selfrule. Yet, as a text, Hind Swaraj left details about possible alternatives unspecified. How exactly did premodern polities govern themselves in Indian history? How could they possibly be revived in the twentieth century? Gandhi rarely addressed these questions directly, whether in the years following the publication of the English translation of Hind Swaraj in March 1910 or after his return to India in 1915. Until the 15

Ibid., 32.

16

Ibid., 67.

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1930s, in fact, the precise constitutional implications of Gandhi’s call to revive a premodern, agrarian civilization as a substitute for parliamentarism were quite hazy. Certainly, much of Gandhi’s lack of attention to issues of concrete political order was a result of what Uday Mehta has identified as his principled antipathy to state-based sovereignty and institutional politics.17 Nonetheless, a key moment of clarification occurred during an approximately two-month period between late November 1938 and mid-January 1939, when Gandhi – now the central figure of the Indian anti-colonial movement – agreed to serve as an informal constitutional advisor for the small princely state of Aundh, in the western Deccan. The raja of Aundh, a colorful character named Bhavanrao Pant (as well known for his writings on bodybuilding and his attempts to popularize yoga as for his liberal politics), was keen to introduce political reforms in his state, and travelled to Wardha to ask Gandhi for help on November 29, 1938.18 Gandhi offered his help readily; in a letter to his then secretary Amrit Kaur dated November 30, Gandhi expressed great enthusiasm for the opportunity.19 The constitution Gandhi drafted for Bhavanrao Pant in January 1939 built on ideas about the exclusionary nature of British parliamentarism and the democratic tradition of Indian village society expressed earlier in Hind Swaraj. The constitution outlined a scheme of self-ruling councils, each individually elected on the basis of universal adult franchise.20 Every council elected a president from its members. The Council Presidents from each village then convened in a regional 17

18

19

20

Uday Mehta, “Gandhi on Democracy, Politics, and the Ethics of Everyday Life,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 7, no. 2 (2010), 355–71. M. K. Gandhi, “Letter to S.D. Satavlekar (Oct. 5, 1938),” in CWMG, vol. 74, 86. A firsthand account of Bhavanrao’s meeting with Gandhi in November 1938 survives in a series of recollections published by the raja’s son Apasaheb in the 1980s: Apasaheb Pant, An Unusual Raja: Mahatma Gandhi and the Aundh Experiment (Hyderabad, 1989), 40–60. M. K. Gandhi, “Letter to Amrit Kaur (Nov. 30, 1938),” in CWMG, vol. 74, 262–63. Indira Rothermund, The Aundh Experiment: A Gandhian Grass-Roots Democracy (Bombay, 1983), 38–40; Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia, 2000), 92–94. Granville Austin has argued that Gandhi did not himself draft the 1939 Aundh constitution, but more likely just influenced Bhavanrao and his ministers. But Gandhi’s correspondence with Amrit Kaur in November and December 1938 makes clear that he was very directly involved in the plan’s composition. See Austin, Indian Constitution, 37n18.

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council or taluka. There were to be five talukas in the princely state, which chose two representatives each to proceed to a fifteen-member legislative assembly, with the remaining five assembly members nominated by the monarch. Considerable lawmaking and judicial power was devolved to individual village councils. A detailed report on the Aundh reforms in The Hindu on January 3, 1939 praised Gandhi and Bhavanrao’s joint draft for shifting the locus of self-government from central assemblies to the local level.21 During a speech in Bardoli on January 10, Gandhi described his reforms as an experiment in making lawmaking and judicial processes more directly accessible to the rural masses; the Aundh plan, he insisted, aimed at “abolition of the cumbrous procedure” of party politics and law courts.22 Aundh’s constitution came into effect eleven days later on January 21, 1939, a moment Bhavanrao described in excited terms to a reporter for The Bombay Chronicle as “a great step which will be watched by all India.”23 It was certainly Gandhi’s most systematic attempt to give tangible shape to his critique of the parliamentary model and to his ideas about resurrecting premodern forms of rule. The 1939 Aundh constitution continued to exist in variously amended forms until 1945. It finally became obsolete once Aundh State joined the Union of India in August 1947. While the intellectual formation and concerns of Gandhi were of course very different from those of a figure such as B. N. Seal, there were some broad similarities between his Aundh constitution and the 1923 draft for Mysore examined in chapter 2. In both cases, the political structure of imperial indirect rule opened up a space for thinking about systems of representation that went beyond British liberalism. Gandhi returned to institutional experiments in anti-parliamentary politics in the late 1940s. On January 29, 1948, just one day before his assassination, Gandhi wrote out the “Draft Constitution of Congress,” the last statement of his political vision for India. Gandhi recommended dismantling the entire “parliamentary machine” of electoral 21

22

23

“Aundh Reform Scheme,” The Hindu (January 3, 1939), 4. Reprinted in Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India – 1939, vol. I, ed. Mushirul Hassan (New Delhi, 2008), 770–71. M. K. Gandhi, “Aundh Constitution (January 10, 1939),” in CWMG, vol. 74, 409. “Responsible Government for Aundh,” The Bombay Chronicle (January 23, 1939), 7.

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party politics, derisively referring to political parties as “propaganda vehicles” mired in “unhealthy competition” between unaccountable elites.24 In lieu of elected representation through a central legislative assembly, he held up village councils consisting of five adults each as primary legislative, administrative, and judicial units. The councils were to be elected through adult suffrage and remain legislatively semi-independent within their respective jurisdictions. The “Draft Constitution of Congress,” which Gandhi’s secretary Pyarelal called his “last will and testament,”25 was essentially the Aundh constitution transposed to the national level. Thus, after largely abandoning (in rhetoric if not always in political practice) the support for British political systems characteristic of his early years in South Africa, Gandhi became a vocal critic of the link between political representation and parliamentary democracy. Whether in Hind Swaraj from 1909, the Aundh experiment of 1939, or the “Draft Constitution” from January 1948, Gandhi viewed parliamentarism as a regime-type inherently vulnerable to elite capture. By giving power to a class of professional politicians vetted and nominated by political parties, Gandhi argued, the kind of representative democracy dominant in nineteenth and twentieth-century Western Europe prevented swaraj from being exercised by the people at large.

4.3 Gandhianism at Wardha Gandhi’s view of parliamentary democracy as elite rule was developed in further detail by the ‘Wardha Circle,’ a group of philosophers, social scientists, and reformers who gathered around him in the 1930s and 1940s. Wardha was a small village in central India that served as Gandhi’s ashram (religious sanctuary) from 1933. The village quickly grew to attract those who were drawn to Gandhi’s philosophy and wanted to make it the foundation of a new social order. Visiting the village in the 1940s, the socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan described “a group of bold and original experimenters,” attempting to translate Gandhi’s writings into constitutional practice.26 Of 24

25 26

M. K. Gandhi, “Draft Constitution of Congress (Jan. 29, 1948),” in CWMG, vol. 98, 333. Ibid. Jayaprakash Narayan, “Wardha Shows the Way,” in Towards Total Revolution, vol. 2, ed. Brahmanand (Bombay, 1978), 181–85, at 182.

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particular interest to the Wardha Circle – as the group often informally described itself – were the implications of the diagnosis of parliamentarism sketched out in the pages of Hind Swaraj. Joseph Cornelius Kumarappa, the best-known member of the Wardha Circle, outlined a Gandhian framework of democracy in a series of writings from 1936 onwards. For Kumarappa, the problem of elite capture that Gandhi located within modern parliamentary governments could be traced back to the ethos of capitalism. The “capitalist way of life,” Kumarappa wrote, was fundamentally based on the principle of “self-interest.”27 As a system of production and exchange that encouraged the maximization of private profit, capitalism created incentives for individuals to view social relations in competitive terms. The valorization of self-interest justified the use of political and economic institutions towards one’s own benefit, even if at the expense of others. Maintaining that “it is much the same approach that characterizes the behavior of animals of prey,” Kumarappa described capitalist societies as governed by a “jungle law,” wherein “the race is for the fleetest, the most valiant, or the most violent.”28 When electoral democracy existed within the framework of a capitalist society, politics too became an arena ruled by the “jungle law.” Those elected to office sought to deploy the resources of the state for private gain. Democracy was seen not as a mechanism to institutionalize the collective will of a people, but rather as a means for the further private accumulation of capital. Kumarappa took the “capitalist way of life” to be the real source for the lack of popular accountability on the part of political elites in parliamentary systems, which Gandhi had identified in more general terms in chapter 5 of Hind Swaraj. Kumarappa also spoke of “imperialism” and the “capitalist way of life” together, challenging Britain’s imperial polity for the ways it facilitated the global diffusion of private expropriation. Following Gandhi in finding alternate models of political democracy that broke with the colonial lifeworld therefore entailed addressing – and overcoming – the forms of subjectivity and selfhood produced by capitalism. Only once an economic system had moved beyond rewarding “purely selfish considerations” could it coexist with a 27

28

J. C. Kumarappa, “Gandhian Approach to Planning (1939),” in J. C. Kumarappa Private Papers, S/W by Him, vol. 7, no. 5. Manuscripts Collection, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi. Ibid., 1.

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genuinely popular and accountable democracy.29 Said differently, for Kumarappa, an economic system based on private accumulation would continue to allow wealthy, powerful persons to use political office to dominate others. A participatory democracy wherein citizens engaged with each other as political equals could be sustained only when capitalism was supplanted by a socialized, communal system of ownership, production, and exchange. When economic action took place as a cooperative enterprise, the use of political institutions for the accumulation of private wealth became much less likely. Thus, Kumarappa suggested that the decentralized, council-based democracy being advocated by Gandhi for the State of Aundh in the late 1930s needed to be accompanied by collective ownership and production. The outlines of such collectivist ideas could be found scattered throughout Gandhi’s own writings and speeches, especially in Gandhi’s references to the principle of sarvodaya (“the good of all” or “the uplift of all”) – a curious amalgamation of Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Indian philosophy – and in the importance Gandhi attached to collective duties over individual rights.30 For Kumarappa, only once modern citizens came to see property and natural resources as “the unalienable property of the people as a whole,” unable to be “exploited for private profit,” would they come to see themselves as bound to obey the collective will of a political community, rather than their private interest.31 Kumarappa elaborated on the economic dimensions of parliamentarism (and its participatory alternatives) in a pamphlet published from Wardha in December 1936 under the title Why the Village Movement? This was a seminal text of Gandhian political thought. As Benjamin Zachariah has noted, “Why the Village Movement? is, after Hind Swaraj, the closest example we have to a manifesto of Gandhism.”32 Indeed, the pamphlet’s importance and popularity at the time is evidenced by the fact that it went through no less than four separate 29 30

31 32

Ibid. Gandhi first used the term sarvodaya in a Gujarati translation of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1860) prepared in South Africa in 1905. He continued to use the term to describe his economic ideals after returning to India. See Anthony J. Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony (Cambridge, 2006), 68–83. Kumarappa, “Gandhian Approach to Planning,” 5. Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–50 (New Delhi, 2005), 159.

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editions over nine years between 1936 and 1945. The first edition was prepared for publication by Gandhi’s secretary Amrit Kaur; the third edition, published at the beginning of 1939, carried a lengthy, laudatory introductory foreword written by Gandhi.33 Why the Village Movement? drew a sharp distinction between capitalism and what Kumarappa called “communal economics.” The essence of capitalism, Kumarappa contended, was an acceptance of exploitation as a necessary corollary of the drive for private gain: “[U]nder capitalism, the profit motive is given free play and individuals are allowed to exploit every situation to their gain even at the cost of injuring society.”34 When combined with representative democracy, capitalism led to the domination of the people by the elected few seeking their private gain. “Under the cloak of parliamentary organization” and competitive elections between political parties, capitalist democracies became plutocracies, with power exercised for the benefit of the wealthy.35 In chapter 19 of the pamphlet, titled “Democracy in the Orient,” Kumarappa referred to capitalist electoral democracies in Western Europe and North America as “functional democracies” (the very title of chapter 19, meanwhile, reached back to Radhakamal Mukerjee’s Democracies of the East, published thirteen years earlier).36 In functional democracies, the franchise might be distributed widely and universally; such constitutions had the “outward form” of popular government. Yet the process of legislation itself was dominated by the “money power” – wealthy interests – trying to obtain ever-greater influence and dominance. Another code of behavior, and another political constitution, was offered by the precapitalist ideal of “communal economics.” Here, the ownership of wealth and resources, as well as the production of goods, occurred through groups such as villages, families, and guilds. In communal systems of ownership and production, “the community was regarded as a corporate unit with its various members performing their own functions and contributing to the life of the community as a whole.”37 Such systems “promoted solidarity and co-operation” 33

34

35

On the pamphlet’s publication history, see Venu Madhav Govindu and Deepak Malghan, The Web of Freedom: J.C. Kumarappa and Gandhi’s Struggle for Economic Justice (New Delhi, 2016), 150–51. J. C. Kumarappa, Why the Village Movement? [A Plea for a Village-Centered Economic Order in India] (Wardha, 1936), 10. 36 37 Ibid., 16. Ibid., 167–68. Ibid., 15–16. Emphasis in original.

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among participants and discouraged the kind of private self-interest that might result in corrosive competition and exploitation. Kumarappa identified a solidaristic, communal social arrangement most closely with an “Oriental” mode of economic life, locating it within practices of premodern rural collectivism in India, China, and Japan.38 The political implication of “communal” or “Oriental” economics was a fraternal state whose citizens were more likely to recognize each other as equals, or as participants in a shared social and political project. Socially inculcated values of cooperative solidarity would “help and safeguard the interests of the weak” by discouraging the pursuit of private interest.39 When combined with institutions for increasing popular participation, such as democratic councils, Kumarappa argued that communal economics would result in a “cultural democracy.” In a cultural democracy, as opposed to a merely formal “functional democracy,” there was widespread acceptance of the need for an egalitarian distribution of political rights and political power. Legislation was also viewed in collectivist terms as a way to give shape to a general will overriding the interests of any particular group or person. Eleven years later in 1947, in an essay composed originally in English and then published in March 1950 in a bilingual EnglishHindi journal titled Gram udyog patrika, Kumarappa again defended “cultural democracy” against a “formal democracy” of universal suffrage and competitive elections. Formal constitutional democracies based on electoral representation contained a class of representatives ruling largely in their own interests. Below them were “the people,” asked to “elect the representatives, and hibernate.”40 A more robustly active model of democratic citizenship was marked by the dispersal of legislative sovereignty in a state among citizens’ assemblies and councils. Active citizenship created a “a living union between the 38

39 40

Kumarappa’s Why the Village Movement? invoked a long tradition of viewing the “Asiatic mode of production” as communal and precapitalist – a tradition that went at least as far back as Marx’s reflections on Indian and Russian village society in the 1860s and 1870s. See Gareth Stedman Jones, “Radicalism and the Extra-European World: The Case of Karl Marx,” in Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge, 2007), 186–214. Kumarappa, Why the Village Movement?, 16. J. C. Kumarappa, “Democracy – Formal or Dharmic?,” in J. C. Kumarappa Private Papers, S/W by Him, vol. 7, no. 27, NMML, 3.

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Government and the people” (the phrase “a living union” was underlined in pen in Kumarappa’s hand in the typed English manuscript of the essay).41 As an ideal regime-type, a direct democracy governed through active citizenship was further undergirded by a “duty-based,” collectivist economic arrangement. The daily practice of economic collectivism developed a “consciousness of unity” within individual citizens, leading to “a submerging of the self for the sake of the family, the taluk (region), the District, and finally the nation.”42 Collectivism brought about a refashioning of the profit-seeking capitalist impulse and, in the sphere of legislation, instilled an awareness about the political rights and needs of others. Joseph Kumarappa introduced political economy as a key problem for the Gandhian approach to democracy. He certainly did so in a much more systematic fashion than Gandhi himself. Gandhi, for instance, did not outline a clear economic program in the Aundh experiment. While drawing from Gandhi’s polemical remarks about parliamentarism, Kumarappa specified capitalism as the driving force behind the unaccountability of elected representatives in modern liberal states. A democracy with more direct political power, it followed, needed to be predicated upon a moral economy that actively disciplined and dissuaded individuals from the pursuit of personal gain. These two arguments – the diagnosis of representative democracy on one hand, and the correlative solutions of direct democracy and economic collectivism on the other – were taken up repeatedly in the writings of the Wardha Circle. From mid-December 1936, Kishorlal Mashruwala, another of Gandhi’s followers living in Wardha, began to compose a series of English and Gujarati-language essays on socialism, later collected and published from Ahmedabad in a volume titled Gandhi and Marx (1951); the volume was, incidentally, edited for publication by Joseph Kumarappa’s younger brother Bharatan. Mashruwala’s essays confronted the verdict given by a number of Communist leaders in colonial India that Gandhianism and Marxism were antithetical to one another. This had been the central thesis, most influentially, of S. A. Dange’s Gandhi vs. Lenin (1921), one of the first works of Marxist literature produced in India.43 Mashruwala accepted Dange’s 41 43

42 Ibid. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 4. S. A. Dange, Gandhi vs. Lenin (Bombay, 1921).

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argument that the two philosophies diverged radically on the questions of revolutionary violence and the need for statist dictatorship. Yet, he remarked, at a deeper level, Gandhi and Marx shared an antipathy to the possessive individualism underlying capitalism: “[B]oth Gandhi and Marx want to establish an order which would make the masses co-sharers in the gifts of nature.”44 For both, the existence of capitalism eroded the egalitarian political power promised by democracy. If one read Marx’s political writings alongside Gandhi’s thoughts on representative democracy, one could see that, in both paradigms, capitalist democracy was just “the semblance of democracy.”45 Gandhian efforts to create participatory, council-based democracy in the 1930s appeared to Mashruwala as an important opportunity to imagine a postcapitalist social future, one that simultaneously hearkened back to the ethics of a precapitalist past – a project that, for Mashruwala, again had echoes of Marx. “The problem of stopping exploitation” in the political realm was inseparable from redressing the violence underlying capital accumulation and “the institution of private property.”46 The constitutional form of a directly democratic Gandhian republic needed to include a cooperative, collectivist economic program. While not all political literature composed in Wardha in the late 1930s and early 1940s was so directly in conversation with Marxism, all of it was similarly preoccupied with the link between types of democracy and economic ethics. A third important contribution to the genre, Vinoba Bhave’s Swaraj Shastra [A Treatise on Self-Rule] from 1940, formulated an elaborate typology of modern regimes, classifying each according to what Bhave perceived as its degree of democracy. Representative, parliamentary democracy under the conditions of twentieth-century capitalism was, according to Bhave, “a form of government which assumes the name of rule by the people, and the outward appearance of such rule.”47 Underneath the veneer of formal democracy in representative governments, Bhave argued – reiterating arguments from Kumarappa and Mashruwala – was an economic order allowing for “private violence” as a means of seeking profit. The interaction of political democracy with acquisitive 44

45 47

Kishorlal G. Mashruwala, Gandhi and Marx, ed. Bharatan Kumarappa (Ahmedabad, 1951), 45. 46 Ibid., 98. Ibid., 82. Vinoba Bhave, Swaraj Shastra (Varanasi, 1940), 26.

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capitalism led to the familiar problem of elite capture. A constitutional commitment to “the rule of all” became corrupted into the “rule of a few.” To truly enable the “rule of all” – as, in Bhave’s formulation, Gandhians like himself were trying to do through experiments in council democracy – meant to allow for socialized ownership.

4.4 Gandhian Constitution for Free India (1946) Such reflections paved the way for the most detailed exposition of the Wardha Circle’s political philosophy: Shriman Narayan Agarwal’s Gandhian Constitution for Free India, published from Allahabad by the nationalist publication house Kitabistan in January 1946. The author of this ambitious text, Shriman Narayan, was one of M. K. Gandhi’s closest acolytes.48 Narayan moved to Wardha in April 1936 at the age of twenty-four, after a brief but formative stint in England, and remained there until Gandhi’s death in 1948. He worked closely alongside Kumarappa and Mashruwala; later, in 1970, he also went on to publish a somewhat hagiographic biography of Vinoba Bhave.49 Gandhian Constitution for Free India from 1946 was, unsurprisingly, deeply shaped by the attempt to explore the economic dimensions of Gandhian thought at Wardha after 1936. Narayan’s pamphlet contained two sections: a wide-ranging essay wherein Narayan outlined the stakes of his project, followed by a complete draft constitution. Narayan had his eye trained on the drafting assembly that would soon be elected to formulate India’s postimperial constitution. Gandhi, who wrote an introductory foreword dated November 30, 1945, rightly identified the text as “a contribution to the many attempts at presenting India with constitutions” in the early and mid1940s.50 In the opening essay, Narayan first asserted, in strikingly vehement tones that spoke to the urgency of his intervention, that democracy in 48

49

50

From the 1930s, Shriman Narayan Agarwal dropped his last name and generally went by ‘Shriman Narayan.’ I also refer to him as ‘Shriman Narayan’ for the most part. Shriman Narayan Agarwal, Memoirs: Window on Gandhi and Nehru (Bombay, 1971), 33. Also see Shriman Narayan Agarwal, Vinoba: His Life and Work (Bombay, 1970). M. K. Gandhi, “Foreword,” in Shriman Narayan Agarwal, Gandhian Constitution for Free India (Allahabad, 1946), 3.

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the mid-1940s was “at a crossroads.”51 The interwar period had revealed the fragility of liberal parliamentary constitutions in Russia, Germany, Italy, and Britain; such constitutions could clearly devolve into elite-dominated plutocracies and even into outright dictatorships. The antidemocratic dangers of representative democracy, Narayan asserted, derived from economic factors. Citing R. H. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society (1921) – itself a Christian Socialist moral denunciation of the degradations of capitalism and mass society – Narayan identified “acquisitive society” as “the root cause of our political malaise.”52 He described “an inherent contradiction between capitalism and democracy.”53 Since “the motive to production” in capitalism was “profit for the owner of the instruments of production,” it created incentives for private individuals to “use the authority of the State to increase the material well-being at their disposal.”54 Ultimately, the “unhealthy power of money in modern Democracies” led to democracy itself becoming “the handmaid of capitalism,” an oligarchic system of rule in which “the moneyed class, directly or indirectly, controls the legislatures.”55 Shriman Narayan expressed concern that representative, electoral democracy and forms of stateled capitalism were being proposed as models of postwar reconstruction in Western Europe. Such systems, in his estimation, would revert into the cycles of plutocratic rule and political violence characteristic of the 1920s and 1930s. Closer to home, Narayan criticized the liberal wing of the Indian National Congress for unquestioningly advocating industrial capitalism and parliamentary government as the goals of postcolonial state building. Beyond the regnant postwar paradigms of capitalism and liberal democracy, and opposed to both, Shriman Narayan identified “the Gandhian way.” A Gandhian approach to modern politics could be distilled from Hind Swaraj, from the 1939 Aundh experiment (which Narayan cited and praised), and from the writings of Kumarappa, 51 52

53

Agarwal, Gandhian Constitution, 26. Ibid., 28. Prior to travelling to Wardha to meet Gandhi in April 1936, Shriman Narayan spent one year in London in 1935. Here, he interacted extensively with Christian socialist and guild socialist circles, which included R. H. Tawney, who was then Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. While Narayan did not write anything substantial during his time in London, the experience left a clear intellectual imprint on his subsequent career. See Agarwal, Memoirs, 134–45. 54 55 Agarwal, Gandhian Constitution, 28. Ibid., 28–29. Ibid., 29–30.

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Bhave, and Mashruwala. Narayan foregrounded two aspects of Gandhianism. The first was a thoroughgoing decentralization of legislative sovereignty to directly elected local councils, in the process removing intermediary organizations such as political parties. The second was a largely agrarian economy based on cooperative collectivism, with resources held in common and wealth managed by public bodies. At the center of Gandhianism stood the self-ruling “commune” or village republic. With legislative power accessible to all adult inhabitants through participation in the local council and an underlying system of cooperative property ownership and economic production, the village republic instilled into citizens the fraternity needed to sustain direct democracy. “In villages, townships, or communes,” Narayan wrote, the proximity of every citizen to legislative sovereignty and the practice of collectivist duty consolidated “the advantages of direct democracy, rousing civic patriotism, lifting the individual beyond himself, encouraging habits of co-operation, training the judgement and imparting administrative experience to millions who cannot hope to enter representative assemblies.”56 Far from being the atavistic, conservative project that Communist leaders like Dange repeatedly alleged it to be, the Gandhian scheme of agrarian republicanism was, for Narayan, the most revolutionary alternative to liberalism available to South Asian thinkers in the 1940s. Part II of Gandhian Constitution proceeded to outline the architecture of a postcolonial state based on direct democracy. Sections 6 to 11 sought to create a network of self-governing village republics. Each constituency was to be governed by two councils: a large citizens’ assembly open to all adult inhabitants (sabha) and an executive committee (panchayat) whose size varied between five and eleven persons, depending on the size of the village. The executive committee and its head (sarpanch) were to be elected by members of the sabha from among itself, for three-year terms. The committee would deal with the daily administration of the community and act on laws formulated separately by the sabha. Critically, the committee would be answerable to the sabha and would report to its meetings at regular intervals. If the assembly decided by a two-thirds supermajority that either one or all members of the panchayat had “lost the confidence of the community,” then the committee would be recalled and new 56

Ibid., 42.

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members would be selected.57 There were also to be various specialized subcommittees dealing with issues of education, security, agriculture, industry, regional trade, judicial arbitration, and taxation. The subcommittees answered to the head panchayat and were also elected by the assembly from the whole body of citizens. There were to be no formal qualifications for voting or for holding office, though literacy and “experience of civic life” would be weighed as factors in election to specialized positions.58 In section 11 (“System of Elections”), Narayan suggested that election to the executive council and to as many subcommittees as possible should be on the basis of random lot, or sortition. Citing Radhakumud Mookerji’s account of local voting procedures in the Chola Empire in Local Government, Narayan argued that sortition had been recorded in states in medieval southern India, and might be reintroduced at the local level to make access to political office as democratic as possible.59 Both administrative and judicial power would be vested in the head panchayat and the numerous subcommittees chosen through sortition, while supreme legislative power and a right of recall would be vested in the assembly as a whole. Coordinating between individual assemblies was a taluka panchayat (district council). The taluka panchayat would consist of directly elected sarpanch (panchayat heads) from a group of twenty local councils. Narayan approximated that each taluka, comprising of 20 sarpanch, would represent about 20,000 citizens. The taluka would deal with inter-council infrastructure and function as an advisory body for individual assemblies within its jurisdiction. Yet the taluka would have no authority over the internal management of communities; assemblies could recall the representatives they had sent on to the taluka. Each taluka would elect one of its members to send to a provincial assembly, which in turn would have a three-year tenure and biannual meetings. Provincial assemblies would deal with potential conflicts between district taluka. In cases of regional emergency such as famine, provincial assemblies would also coordinate relief efforts. Each provincial assembly would then select one or two of its members (depending on the size of the province) to proceed to a National Assembly, the “All-India Panchayat.” The National Assembly would be a small, unicameral body of around twenty-five representatives. Narayan viewed its role primarily in terms of foreign 57

Ibid., 71–72.

58

Ibid., 103.

59

Ibid., 104–5.

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policy. The national assembly would deal with issues of international conflict, customs regulation, and tariff imposition on foreign goods (foreign trade would be heavily restrained to maintain local selfsufficiency), and manage all-India systems of transport and communication. Its authority over lower jurisdictions would be quite weak. With a sufficient two-thirds supermajority vote in its assembly, any constituency could ask to withdraw from participation in the provincial council or the national federation: “[N]o territorial unit could be compelled to join the All-India Federation against the declared and established will of the adults of that territory.”60 Finally, each assembly had the right to propose an amendment to the national constitution, upon approval by two-thirds of its members. The political aspects of Narayan’s scheme – small, self-governing republics linked together within a federalist national state – were complemented by extensive economic socialism. Narayan was adamant that the authority of village councils needed to extend into the economic sphere and should include reorganizing agriculture and industrial production through cooperative societies. He expanded on the economic dimensions of his “Swaraj Constitution” in section 17 of the draft, titled “National Property.” While private property as such would not be abolished in the Gandhian republic, land tenure and any industrial assets would be held by the sabha and the panchayat. Private individuals might be given leases to manage certain resources, but they were subject to oversight and control from the councils. Most critically, Shriman Narayan framed his economic program as a project of moral education. The goal of restricting private accumulation was to “eschew the patent evils of the present Acquisitive Society” – a phrase which again referenced R. H. Tawney’s Christian Socialism from the 1920s – and to form the character of an anti-capitalist self, bound by notions of fidelity to the public good.61 A brief comparison with Tawney helps illustrate the distinctive uses to which Narayan put the idea of a moral economy in section 17 of his Gandhian Constitution. The Acquisitive Society was published in April 1921, while Tawney was affiliated with Balliol College, Oxford. The book was especially popular within Fabian Society and guild socialist

60

Ibid., 96.

61

Ibid., 126.

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circles in London, where Shriman Narayan may have first encountered it in 1935. When Tawney referenced a duty-bound economic order governed by religious and other social codes – what he called a “functional society”– it was as an ethical check on the exploitation of workers by industrialists for efficiency and profit.62 Speaking of the doctrine of private property rights, for instance, Tawney wrote that “it cannot unite men, for what unites them is the bond of service to a common purpose, and that bond it repudiates, since its very essence is the maintenance of rights irrespective of service.”63 Cooperative ownership recovered the broken “bonds” of “common purpose.” Tawney’s goal through his functional society, then, as Stefan Collini has argued, was the subordination of economic activity to collective understandings of the social good.64 Popular sovereignty was not an important concept for Tawney, at least not in The Acquisitive Society, a book that scarcely discussed political or constitutional democracy. Yet Narayan’s turn to R. H. Tawney’s book in 1946 and his commitment to moral economics were driven above all by confronting the problem of instituting popular sovereignty at the moment of colonial independence. Narayan’s own village-based “functional society” was a way to overcome the strictures of parliamentary government and to enable a postimperial direct democracy. Economic fraternity and fellowship were closely linked to political egalitarianism, in a way that was simply not the case for Tawney. Shriman Narayan’s reading of Christian Socialism was therefore marked by reinvention as much as by influence. In the context of Indian political thought, Gandhian Constitution for Free India was the culmination of a decade-long intellectual development within Gandhian circles, beginning in the middle of the 1930s. Shriman Narayan’s constitutional vision was greatly aided by the efforts of writers like Kumarappa and Mashruwala to give more concrete shape to the Gandhian critique of parliament. Narayan adopted from the Wardha-based writers a focus on political economy, singling out capitalism as a mode of social life eroding the ideals of political democracy. At the same time, Narayan clearly also diverged from the Gandhians who preceded him. His scheme of federalist 62 64

63 R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (London, 1921), 96. Ibid., 94. Stefan Collini, “Moral Mind: R.H. Tawney,” in English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford, 1999), 177–94.

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council democracy was much more participatory than anything envisioned in the 1930s. For example, neither sortition nor popular recall of elected council members were ever seriously entertained by Kumarappa in Why the Village Movement? or by Gandhi at Aundh. While Gandhian Constitution was shaped by the intellectual foment at Wardha, it also remained unique in some respects. The label of “direct democracy” was more apt for it than for any other Gandhian text in the 1930s or 1940s. And at the core of Narayan’s direct democracy was a link between overcoming parliamentary government and overcoming the ethos of capitalism. Outside of Gandhian circles, Narayan’s weaving together of a rhetoric of socialism, moral education, federalism, and direct popular rule placed Gandhian Constitution on the periphery of Indian democratic thought in the 1940s. Most of those involved with imperial political reform during the decade supported the introduction of representative government, for one reason or another. Benegal Narsing Rau, who served as Official Advisor to the Constituent Assembly of India between 1946 and 1950, argued for elected legislatures as the institutional foundations of self-determination. In a paper titled “Systems of Representation” prepared in 1947, Rau insisted that collective selfrule in the twentieth century could only occur through representative means. “Modern democracy is generally representative democracy,” he declared.65 Mechanisms for direct lawmaking by citizens, such as citizens’ assemblies, legislative initiation, and the referendum, played “only a minor part in democratic decisions.”66 Representation was needed for the articulation and then the exercise of the popular will. Decisions about the law, Rau emphasized, should be “taken by the legislatures on behalf of the people.”67 Thus, securing self-rule for a former imperial dominion was fundamentally a matter of designing an adequately representative national legislative assembly: “[T]he setting up of a truly representative legislature is, therefore, of the greatest importance for the success of democracy.”68 The following year, addressing an audience of newly selected civil servants in New Delhi in June 1948, Rau supported the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy 65

66

B. N. Rau, “Systems of Representation,” in India’s Constitution in the Making, ed. B. Shiva Rao (Bombay, 1960), 315. On Rau, see Arvind Elangovan, Norms and Politics: Sir Benegal Narsing Rau in the Making of the Indian Constitution, 1935–1950 (Oxford, 2019). 67 68 Rau, “Systems of Representation,” 315. Ibid. Ibid.

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as the best constitutional model for both independent India and Pakistan.69 A number of Left organizations in the 1940s converged on parliamentarism from another perspective. The Socialist Party of India (SPI) embedded its collectivist economic program within a constitutional structure consisting of a powerful national legislature and various subsidiary provincial assemblies, all elected on the basis of universal adult suffrage. The SPI plan for postimperial India was compiled by the socialist stalwart Jayaprakash Narayan on December 18, 1948. Advancing a view of representatives as delegates of their electors rather than autonomous agents or trustees relying on their independent judgment, Jayaprakash Narayan stressed the importance of a legislature that accurately reflected the ideological composition of a constituency. The SPI’s official recommendation was for a system of multimember districts combined with proportional cumulative voting (CV).70 On the plan, voters divided a set number of votes between different candidates; assembly seats for each district were then assigned to parties or coalitions in proportion to the vote-share of their respective candidates. Narayan saw multimember electoral districts as a means of making legislative assemblies represent the full diversity of public opinion: Under this system the strength of the parties in the legislature will in general correspond with votes cast. The legislature will not distort but represent real public opinion. Big constituencies with multiple seats will tend to discourage disproportionate influence of small cliques. Slight change in public opinion will not cause disproportionate influence on the composition of the legislature. As influence will in general correspond with the change in opinion, such minor issues as appeal only to a certain group will not have very disproportionate influence on public policy.71

The premise of the Socialist Party’s program was that multiplying the number and diversity of legislators for a particular constituency was 69

70

71

B. N. Rau, “The Parliamentary System of Government in India,” in India’s Constitution in the Making, 342–54. Rau’s Delhi lecture was republished as an article in an American law review: B. N. Rau, “The Parliamentary System of Government in India,” Washington Law Review and State Bar Journal, vol. 24, no. 1 (1949), 91–100. Jayaprakash Narayan, “Draft Constitution of Indian Republic by the Socialist Party – 18 December 1948,” in Jayaprakash Narayan: Selected Works, vol. 4 (1946–48), ed. Bimal Prasad (New Delhi, 2003), 322–434. Ibid., 359.

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the most effective way of translating its internally heterogenous “public opinion” into law. Cumulative voting prevented any one party or faction, or the concerns of “a certain group,” from acting on behalf of an entire electorate. Multimember representation thereby preserved the ideological diversity erased by straightforward majority rule.72 The only detailed plan for direct democracy in addition to Shriman Narayan’s between 1940 and 1950 was put forward by a group called the Radical Democratic Party (RDP) and its leader, Manabendra Nath Roy (M. N. Roy). Roy was a controversial veteran of the Indian Communist movement. Though a cofounder of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in exile in Tashkent in October 1920, he was constantly at loggerheads with the Comintern and the CPI leadership through the 1930s. By December 1940, Roy had broken with much of the Indian left in order to establish the RDP as an autonomous movement. Within the general tumult of the three years between 1944 and 1947, the RDP published its own republican constitution for India, penned more or less single-handedly by Roy. The draft envisioned citizen assemblies called “People’s Committees” as the primary legislative bodies in every locality, stating in its Article 4 that “the sovereign democratic power expresses itself through local People’s Committees in villages, towns, and cities.”73 All adult citizens in a village or town were eligible to be selected for a People’s Committee; the size of a committee would be 1/50th of the constituency’s total population.74 People’s Committees had power of independent legislation. They sent representatives to a provincial People’s Council, members of which were subsequently elected into a national-level Federal Assembly. Any People’s 72

73

74

Jayaprakash Narayan’s 1948 plan echoed older British arguments for multimember districts based on an understanding of representation as a mirror for the inherent diversity of public opinion. Victorian advocates of cumulative voting in the 1850s and 1860s – most notably Thomas Hare in A Treatise on the Election of Representatives (1859) – similarly considered it a way of making the House of Commons reflective of variegated constituencies. See Gregory Conti, Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2019), 196–207. M. N. Roy, Constitution of Free India: A Draft. Endorsed and Released for Public Discussion by the Radical Democratic Party (New Delhi, 1945), 14. On Roy’s draft, see Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents, 143; C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2012), 318–19; and Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (London, 2010), 133. Roy, Constitution of Free India, 14.

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Committee could initiate legislation in a Provincial Council or the Federal Assembly, demand referenda, and recall representatives.75 An individual Council could also vote to secede from the federal union.76 On precise matters of constitutional design, there were many similarities between the Radical Democratic Party’s Constitution of Free India and Shriman Narayan’s Gandhian Constitution of Free India. Both proposals delineated a federal system of government centered on local citizens’ assemblies and enshrined rights of referendum, initiation, recall, and secession. We know that Shriman Narayan was familiar with M. N. Roy’s writings. In another of his pamphlets, The Gandhian Plan of Economic Development for India (1944–45), Narayan praised Roy’s focus on economic collectivism.77 He may also have known about the RDP program. One draft of Roy’s constitution was first published by the RDP for its cadres in mid-1944; a second version was republished, and distributed much more widely, in the early months of 1945 by a Delhibased printing house managed by Roy’s associate, the trade-union leader Vasant Karnik.78 It is entirely possible that Narayan had access to either of the two editions of Roy’s text sometime during the eighteen months that he took to compose Gandhian Constitution between March 1944 and November 1945, when he first delivered a full draft of the pamphlet to Gandhi – although there is no firm evidence of this. In any case, beyond the question of direct intellectual influence, there remained one critical difference in the authors’ respective approaches to popular rule. M. N. Roy never couched his proposals in the language of an ancient constitution, a premodern republican tradition, or a precapitalist ‘Asian’ economic order. There was scarcely any discussion of Indian history at any point in the RDP program. As Sudipta Kaviraj has observed in relation to M. N. Roy’s other writings, the revolutionary activist always defined his politics against the indigenist elements of anti-colonial nationalism.79 One year after the publication of the second edition of Constitution of Free India from Delhi, Roy addressed an RDP study camp in Dehradun decrying the tendency of 75 77

78 79

76 Ibid., 15. Ibid., 18. Shriman Narayan Agarwal, The Gandhian Plan of Economic Development for India (Bombay, 1945), 2. Roy, Constitution of Free India, i. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Heteronomous Radicalism of M.N. Roy,” in Political Thought in Modern India, eds. Thomas Pantham and Kenneth L. Deutsch (New Delhi, 1986), 201–27.

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anti-imperial movements to assert national and civilizational identities, a tendency most visible in India among the followers of Gandhi, those “donning the Mahatmic uniform.”80 As Roy saw it, justifying anticolonial politics through supposedly distinctive traditions was a precursor to the wartime excesses of German and Japanese nationalism.81 Given that Shriman Narayan justified his democratic agenda in precisely these terms, with overt references to discourses of “Oriental communism” and Indian republicanism, Roy’s speech might as well have been aimed directly at the author of Gandhian Constitution. Gandhian Constitution for Free India was published in the early weeks of 1946, on the eve of India’s tryst with its postcolonial destiny. Eleven months after the publication of Narayan’s pamphlet, a Constituent Assembly consisting of 299 indirectly elected representatives convened in New Delhi to work out a postimperial constitution for the Republic of India. Neither Shriman Narayan – then at Wardha – nor, famously, Gandhi participated in the Constituent Assembly’s deliberations. Yet that did not prevent Gandhian ideas from having a presence in the drafting assembly. On November 17, 1948, a delegate named Shibban Lal Saksena, a peasant leader from the United Provinces with broadly socialist sympathies, cited “the Gandhian Constitution which is proposed by Professor Aggarwal” in support of a motion to create “village republics,” with semiautonomous rural councils brought together in an elected federation.82 At a very cosmetic level, the final draft ratified by the Constituent Assembly in January 1950 did indeed concede to the demands of delegates like Saksena and accepted some elements of Gandhian political thought. In the nonjusticiable part IV of the 1950 Constitution of India (called the Directive Principles of State Policy), Articles 40 and 43 encouraged parliament to organize village councils as units of self-government and to promote cooperative forms of rural economic production.83 Yet the vague, aspirational, unenforceable language of the two articles and the 80

81 82

83

M. N. Roy, New Orientation: Lectures Delivered at the Political Study Camp Held at Dehradun from May 8th to May 18th, 1946 (Calcutta, 1946), 120. Ibid., 119. Also see Manjapra, M.N. Roy, 130. “Wednesday, 17th November, 1948,” Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report (CAD), 6th ed., vol. 7 (New Delhi, 2014), 429. See the discussion in Peter Ronald deSouza, “Institutional Visions and Sociological Imaginations: The Debate on Panchayati Raj,” in Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi, 2008), 79–91.

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attempt to assimilate council democracy into a larger structure of parliamentary statism, property rights, and capitalist development meant that the 1950 constitutional settlement was a far cry from the thoroughgoing moral-political revolution against liberalism envisaged by Narayan in 1946.

4.5 The Moral Order of Democracy By 1950, Gandhian democracy was becoming a more or less marginal paradigm of postcolonial founding. After Gandhi’s death in January 1948, Kumarappa, Mashruwala, Bhave, and Narayan left Wardha but continued to be active in Indian politics to various degrees (and continued to be in regular correspondence with each other). Mashruwala passed away soon after Gandhi, in 1952. Kumarappa and Narayan both drifted in and out of socialist factions of the Indian National Congress through the 1960s. Vinoba Bhave, most prominently, became the public face of a mass movement for agrarian redistribution in the 1950s. Yet all four figures considerably scaled back the ambition of their plans from the 1930s and early 1940s. From one perspective, perhaps the eclipse of Gandhianism as a theory of political order was inevitable. Its communal, localized economic model could not compete with the modernizing imperatives of the postcolonial nation-state or with the focus on capital development and rapid economic growth that came to orient so many global attitudes to the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s. As M. N. Roy’s public denunciation of “those donning the Mahatmic uniform” in 1946 made clear, Gandhian democracy was also susceptible to the charge of being a conservative traditionalism, a knee-jerk reaction against modern liberalism. However revolutionary the intentions of its proponents might have been in their own eyes, the references in their writings to recovering a precapitalist “Oriental” or “Asiatic” ethos as the basis for twentiethcentury socialist politics could be seen by some as a defense of archaic, premodern structures, a fetishization of the medieval. As an intellectual tradition, we can identify Gandhian democracy as a cluster of ideas circulating between South Africa and colonial India from approximately 1910 to 1950. The intellectual origins of the tradition lay in the deflationary account of modern democracy given in Hind Swaraj. From about 1936 on, Gandhian democracy became more transparently and more avowedly socialist. Associating private

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capital accumulation with elite corruption and unaccountability within legislative assemblies, Gandhians like Joseph Kumarappa, Kishorlal Mashruwala, Vinoba Bhave, and Shriman Narayan advocated a combination of participatory, council-based democracy and collectivist economics. The key conceptual innovation made by Gandhian democrats, especially in relation to Gandhi’s own thought, was their use of ideas about a noncapitalist moral economy to ground an antiparliamentary politics. Insisting that economic life profoundly shaped the ways that persons acted within the political realm, Gandhians undertook the creation of an economic order based on nonacquisitiveness and social fraternity. For Joseph Kumarappa, economic collectivism instilled habits of self-sacrifice and duty. Shriman Narayan, writing in the mid-1940s, put forward “village communism” or “Oriental communism” as a way for individuals to overcome how they had been socialized within the “acquisitive society” of capitalism. In all these cases, a moral transformation of behavior, an economic transformation of ownership, production, and exchange, and a political transformation of representative government were inseparable from one another. Direct democracy was possible only once private ownership was supplanted, only once collectivism existed in the space of the modern economy. Gandhian democrats made the notion of a duty-bound moral economy into the basis of a new vision of popular sovereignty transcending electoral government.

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5

Representation, Popular Sovereignty, and the Indian Founding

5.1 A Republican Moment Historians and political theorists have long recognized that the idea of popular sovereignty was central to political developments in South Asia in the late 1940s, as the territories of British India lurched violently from imperial dominion status towards national independence. Rooting law’s legitimacy in the actions of a political category called janata (‘the people’) undermined the conceptual foundations of monarchy and empire and, concurrently, enabled India’s transformation into a democratic state in 1950. As Jawaharlal Nehru unhesitatingly put the point while introducing the Objectives Resolution – his aspirational plan for independent India – on December 13, 1946, the only legitimate governments of the modern era were those able to express “the will of the people.”1 The anti-colonial movement in British India was just in Nehru’s eyes because it sought to convey the wishes of “the people – not of any party or group but the people as a whole.”2 As a result, Nehru maintained that it was the duty of nationalists to construct a new postimperial political community “wherein all power and authority” of government were “derived from the people.”3 But what precisely did it mean that, in a properly selfgoverning polity, the “people” would be “sovereign”? Nehru again specified. If the anti-colonial revolution was to “stand for democratic institutions,” then it needed to stand for the supreme authority of a legislative assembly comprised of the people’s representatives.4 Ten years later, Nehru continued to insist on an inherent conceptual link between anti-colonial nationalism and parliamentary sovereignty; the latter made possible the former’s promises of popular rule. On the eve of independence in 1946, Nehru argued, Indian leaders “chose this 1

2

“Resolution Re: Aims and Objects (December 13, 1946),” Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report (CAD), 6th ed., vol. 1 (New Delhi, 2014), 57. 3 4 Ibid. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 62.

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system of parliamentary democracy deliberately; we chose it because, to some extent, we had always thought on those lines previously.”5 Given Nehru’s important place in twentieth-century global history, it is perhaps unsurprising that his vision of popular sovereignty has been taken as characteristic of the broader landscape of Indian political thought in the 1940s, as a stand-in of sorts for all manner of nationalist thinking on this key principle of modern democracy. Beginning with Alan Gledhill’s The Republic of India: The Development of Its Laws and Constitution (1951), Ivor Jennings’ Some Characteristics of the Indian Constitution (1953), W. H. Morris-Jones’ Parliament in India (1957), and B. Shiva Rao’s The Framing of India’s Constitution (1968), legal scholars in the 1950s and 1960s began to regard the Nehruvian theory of parliamentarism as the defining element of nationalist democratic and constitutional thought.6 In the estimation of these commentators, the allure of legislative sovereignty for anticolonial leaders was a sign of continuities between Indian nationalism and the well-established British doctrine of parliamentary supremacy – Gledhill, for one, found in midcentury Indian democratic thought “no evidence of revolt against the laws and institutions introduced by the British”7 – and also showed similarities between postimperial India and post–World War II electoral democracies in Western Europe and elsewhere. The ‘parliamentary’ reading of India’s founding moment received its fullest treatment in Granville Austin’s encyclopedic The Indian Constitution (1966), which presented an elected, bicameral legislature as the preferred political model adopted by nationalists in order to “bring popular opinion into the halls of government.”8

5

6

7 8

Jawaharlal Nehru, “Parliamentary Democracy (Speech in Lok Sabha, March 28, 1957),” in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, vol. 3 (March 1953–August 1957) (New Delhi, 1958), 154–57, at 155. Alan Gledhill, The Republic of India: The Development of Its Laws and Constitution (London, 1951); William Ivor Jennings, Some Characteristics of the Indian Constitution: Being Lectures Given in the University of Madras during March 1952 under the Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Aiyer Shashtiabdapoorthi Endowment (Madras, 1953); W. H. Morris-Jones, Parliament in India (London, 1957); B. Shiva Rao, The Framing of India’s Constitution: A Study (New Delhi, 1968). Also see Shibanikinkar Chaube, Constituent Assembly of India: Springboard of Revolution (New Delhi, 1973). Gledhill, The Republic of India, 11. Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford, 1966), 203.

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The equation of popular sovereignty with parliamentary sovereignty, à la Nehru, has proven to be a remarkably tenacious historiographical lens. The past two decades have seen a profusion of scholarship on the framing of India’s constitution between 1946 and 1950 (a development that in itself is notable from an intellectual history standpoint).9 The political thought of this period has come to be seen as staunchly democratic, as a concerted intellectual effort to institutionalize the political self-rule of the Indian people through a new constitutional order.10 Yet, as in the early work of Gledhill, Jennings, and Austin, what nationalist leaders meant by ‘democracy,’ ‘popular sovereignty,’ and ‘self-rule’ in the 1940s continues to be collapsed into the parliamentary form of representative government. On this conception, the Indian anti-colonial movement sought to channel the sovereignty of the people through the kind of democratic system that eventually triumphed with independence. According to the political theorist Bhikhu Parekh, for instance, the adoption of parliamentary democracy based on universal adult suffrage marked the triumph of the revolutionary promise of popular rule: “‘[W]e the people,’ as the Constitution puts it in its striking opening phrase, ‘own the country, underpin the state, and can alone decide what kind of country we wish to create.’”11 Insofar as commentators have found disagreement, dissent, and divergence in the democratic discourse of the founding years, they have focused on competing arguments about the architecture of parliament and about the precise nature of legislative 9

10

11

On the recent resurgence of historical interest in India’s founding, see Rohit De, “The Indian Constitution: Moments, Epics, and Everyday Lives,” International Journal of Constitutional Law, vol. 18, no. 3 (2020), 1022–30. Sumit Sarkar, “Indian Democracy: The Historical Inheritance,” in The Success of India’s Democracy, ed. Atul Kohli (Cambridge, 2001), 23–46; Rajeev Bhargava, “Outline of a Political Theory of the Indian Constitution,” in Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi, 2008), 1–40; Sarbani Sen, The Constitution of India: Popular Sovereignty and Democratic Transformations (New Delhi, 2007); E. Sridharan, “The Origins of the Electoral System: Rules, Representation, and Power-Sharing in India’s Democracy,” in India’s Living Constitution: Ideas, Practices, Controversies, eds. Zoya Hasan, E. Sridharan, and R. Sudarshan (New Delhi, 2002), 344–69; Madhav Khosla, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2020); Christine Keating, Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India (University Park, PA, 2011), 59–76; Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (Cambridge, 2018). Bhikhu Parekh, “The Constitution as a Statement of Indian Identity,” in Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution, 43–58, at 46.

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representation – such as debates about the need for descriptive representation along the lines of caste, religion, and gender.12 The underlying connection between electoral representation and popular sovereignty has never been called into question. The goal of this chapter is to offer a new interpretation of popular sovereignty during India’s constitutional founding. I suggest that between 1946 and 1950, a number of political actors loosely affiliated with the South Asian socialist movement self-consciously departed from the views of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress leadership on the question of legislative representation. If, in the Communist leader M. N. Roy’s formulation, “the parliamentary system fails to establish true democracy,” then what would another form of “People’s Government” look like?13 Socialists – or at least some socialists – defended popular control over lawmaking through self-ruling, randomly selected citizen assemblies combined with formal constitutional rights of referenda, legislative initiation, and recall. They grounded a strident defense of direct mass democracy in a critique of modern electoral representation, insisting that mediating the popular will through the periodic election of party officials would exclude much of the Indian people from political decisionmaking. Importantly, the socialist theory of mass democracy was never a program of spontaneous, direct revolutionary action. It was staunchly, perhaps even narrowly, constitutional, seeking to discipline and channel the collective agency of the people through particular institutions of popular participation. Socialist advocates of direct democracy took it upon themselves to challenge multiparty parliamentary government as a rival constitutional paradigm. A tension between parliamentarism and anti-parliamentarism thus became a constitutive feature of South Asian thinking on popular sovereignty in the late 1940s, albeit one that has long been overlooked.

5.2 Dissent in the Constituent Assembly The constitution of independent India was drafted by a Constituent Assembly that convened in New Delhi for a total of 165 days spread 12

13

See, for example, Rochana Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India (New Delhi, 2011), 32–170; and Shefali Jha, “Representation and Its Epiphanies: A Reading of Constituent Assembly Debates,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 39, no. 39 (2004), 4357–60. M. N. Roy, National Government or People’s Government? (Delhi, 1944), 25.

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out over three years, from December 9, 1946, to January 24, 1950. After the partition of British India into the separate states of India and Pakistan in August 1947, the Constituent Assembly on the Indian side consisted of 299 members. Of these, 229 were indirectly elected through individual provincial legislatures; the latter, in turn, were directly elected in January 1946, prior to the first meeting of the Assembly, based on the limited franchise set by the 1935 Government of India Act.14 The 1946 provincial elections delivered an overwhelming majority for the Indian National Congress. The Congress thus completely dominated the Constituent Assembly, especially after the Muslim League chose to depart for Pakistan in July and August 1947. Other organizations, such as the Communist Party of India (CPI), had a very minor presence. The CPI, which would soon become the Congress’ main electoral rival, had only one representative in the Assembly: Somnath Lahiri from West Bengal. Seventy other members of the Constituent Assembly were nominated by the princely states, with the largest number of delegates from Mysore, Travancore, and Gwalior. The debates themselves were a lively affair, the register often shifting unpredictably between impassioned speeches and incredibly fine-grained discussions of legal terminology. The proceedings were broadcast on All India Radio throughout. When the debates finally wrapped up in the last week of January 1950, Rajendra Prasad, in his capacity as president of the Constituent Assembly, wrote in an editorial for the Times of India that “considering the complexity of the problems and the development of events that have taken place during this period, the time taken has not been too great.”15 The possibility of a tension between the Congress’ ideological commitments to the ‘people’ and its enthusiasm for parliamentary government first became evident in the assembly debates on November 17, 1948. At issue was Article 3 of the proposed draft constitution for

14

15

With property and educational qualifications, the 1935 Government of India Act created an electorate of 30.1 million voters, only about 1/5th of British India’s adult population at the time of the 1946 elections. See Shani, How India Became Democratic, 3; and James Chiriyankandath, “‘Democracy’ under the Raj: Elections and Separate Representation in British India,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, vol. 30, no. 1 (1992), 39–63, at 51–53. Rajendra Prasad, “Making of the Constitution: A Survey of Three Years’ Labor,” Times of India (January 26, 1950), 8.

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India. Article 3 sought to give an elected national parliament unilateral authority to redraw the boundaries of states within its dominion. K. Santhanam, a Congress delegate from Madras and a former editor of the Indian Express and the Hindustan Times, moved to extend parliament’s redistricting powers to include the amalgamation of multiple states.16 There was disagreement over how the central government should determine whether redrawing state borders was necessary – that is, how it should ascertain the wishes of a territory’s population. K. T. Shah (Bihar) made the case that the “proper course” was for parliament to put the issue of state borders to “a direct Referendum to the people affected.”17 A popular vote was the surest way of distilling the majority will from an area. Relying on the judgments of parliamentary representatives from an area, Shah insisted, did not allow voters themselves to exercise a choice: Any question which relates to the alteration of the present units, their territories, boundaries or name, should begin with the people primarily affected, and should not come from the authority or power at the Centre. The authority at the Centre obviously is not familiar with local conditions; or they may have other outlooks, may have other considerations, other reasons, for not accepting or agreeing to such a course. The authority at the Centre, even if moved by the representatives of the areas concerned by some resolution or other procedure, may be guided by the very few persons which, under any scheme of election, will constitute the representatives of those areas in the Central Parliament; and not really consult the entire population, the adult voters of the areas concerned, which I submit is the first requirement of any such readjustment.18

Additionally, Shah proposed that individual territories should have power of legislative initiation, of moving either state legislatures or parliament to lead a referendum over borders.19 The implications of this position were sweeping. For the first time in the Constituent Assembly Debates, a delegate was drawing a distinction between the political voice of the people and that of their representatives. On K. T. Shah’s account, citizens could come to hold (and did come to hold) a different set of priorities and demands from those whom they had authorized to act on their behalf. In a constitutional order predicated on popular power – “if we desire that the people should govern 16 18

“Wednesday, 17th November 1948,” CAD, vol. 7, 437. 19 Ibid., 438. Ibid.

17

Ibid.

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themselves” – direct voting procedures were needed to bridge the epistemic gulf between electors and the elected.20 While K. T. Shah was himself elected to the assembly on an Indian National Congress ticket, he was well aware of the differences between his view of democracy and that of Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, and many others in the Congress, who were adamant that parliament and subordinate legislative assemblies were to be the exclusive sites of sovereignty. He rounded out his remarks by acknowledging, snidely, that “the suggestion of a referendum” would be “too revolutionary to be entertained by a respectable House like this.”21 Indeed, Shah’s amendment for Article 3 was quickly negatived in the ensuing discussion. K. Santhanam maintained that “by Mr. Shah’s amendment instead of democracy we will have absolute autocracy of the majority in every province and State.”22 Referenda would favor the majority will in every constituency, whereas the representative institutions favored by Santhanam created space for possible compromise with other interest groups. While the Parsi leader Rustom K. Sidhwa (Central Provinces and Berar) disagreed with Santhanam’s fears about majority rule, he also rejected Shah’s amendment. If a referendum needed to be carried out, Sidhwa argued, then the decision to do so should be taken exclusively by elected legislatures, not through popular initiative: “[I]f a referendum is to be taken, the legislature has the necessary power to ask that it be done.”23 As it was integrated into the Constitution of India on November 18, 1948, Article 3 allowed parliament to create new states and alter the boundaries of existing states, subject to approval by the relevant state legislatures. Yet K. T. Shah had opened up a line of questioning that could not simply be ignored. How should a democratic state address conflicts of interest between its citizens and their chosen representatives? The issue reemerged on May 19, 1949, during a debate on Article 82, regarding the allocation of parliamentary seats by territory. Hari Vishnu Kamath (Central Provinces and Berar) raised an objection that neither a firstpast-the-post nor a proportional representation system could ensure adequate control of officeholders by voters.24 Kamath introduced an amendment to allow voters in a district to recall both a Member of Parliament (in the central government) and a Member of the 20 24

21 22 23 Ibid. Ibid., 439. Ibid., 440. Ibid., 441. “Thursday, 19th May, 1949,” CAD, vol. 8, 134–35.

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Legislative Assembly (at the state level) with a supermajority decision in a citizens’ assembly. A constitutional right of recall would address what Kamath understood to be the powerlessness that voters in “modern Parliamentary democracies” faced between periodic elections: If it is visualized that there will be adult franchise with a duly and properly educated electorate, then it is desirable that a member of Parliament should fulfil his duties to the satisfaction of his constituents, and the electorate must have the right, must have the feeling, must have the satisfaction, the conviction that, if their elected member does not so fulfil his duties, they have the right to recall him. It is common knowledge that in modern Parliamentary democracies, a member once elected has no responsibility to his constituents and he continues to sit in Parliament till the next election arrives and then he goes to the electorate asking for their votes. This is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs and I feel that there is no harm if an educated electorate is invested with the power to recall a member elected by them.25

Kamath indicated that, on its own, the authorization of representatives through adult franchise was not enough to secure popular power in government. Parliamentarism made lawmakers too autonomous of their electors, for too many years at a time. Once an MP was elected, he or she could abdicate all “responsibility” towards constituents, leaving voters with little recourse until the next election. With the right of recall, however, the legislative body of parliament would be constantly subordinate to the people at large. The idea of legislative recall did not find much support in the Constituent Assembly. Tajamul Husain (Bihar) described it as “a very dangerous provision,” likely to lead to arbitrary action on the part of the electorate.26 Husain viewed the degree of popular control that Kamath had in mind as a source of political instability. R. K. Sidhwa also voted against Kamath’s motion for being “neither workable nor practicable.”27 Sidhwa’s opposition to Kamath echoed his challenge to Shah six months earlier. Allowing an electorate to withdraw its representatives at any point of time created a channel for an unrestrained exercise of popular power outside of “the regular process of voting in a ballot-box,” in turn undermining the importance of the electoral process that the constitution needed to maintain as the main institutional pillar of democracy.28 Article 82 was adopted into the constitution 25

Ibid., 134.

26

Ibid., 136.

27

Ibid.

28

Ibid.

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without Kamath’s amendment. As Uday Mehta has argued, the language of stability was central to the nationalist imagination in the Constituent Assembly, marshaled in a Hobbesian way to justify the rapid construction of a state-apparatus standing against ever-present threats of social disintegration and anarchy.29 During the debate on Article 82 in May 1949, Congress leaders like Rustom Sidhwa depicted representative parliamentary institutions as a more stable and “workable” form of democracy than the direct popular prerogative expressed in the power of recall. The latter, it was suggested, risked political chaos by giving free rein to the wishes of an undisciplined, unmediated mass of the people. Both K. T. Shah and H. V. Kamath’s amendments were intended as correctives to a parliamentary system with universal adult franchise and competitive elections between political parties. Despite Shah’s comment that a referendum could be considered “revolutionary” by the standards of the drafting assembly, neither he nor Kamath were seeking to fundamentally upend representative government. Their prescriptions institutionalized mechanisms for political accountability and popular decision-making while accepting other strictures of parliamentarism. Still, Shah and Kamath refused to fully correlate the principle of popular sovereignty with the regime-type of electoral democracy. The people of a democratic state elected public officials, but continued to have a will and a voice of their own. For a constitution to be based on popular sovereignty, it was necessary to facilitate citizens’ contestation of their representatives. The attempt of these two delegates between November 1948 and May 1949 to shift the locus of sovereignty away from parliament was rejected on the grounds of stability. For critics like R. K. Sidhwa, allocating excessive powers of oversight to ordinary citizens would make legislative assemblies unable to carry out their lawmaking functions in a peaceable manner. Undaunted, K. T. Shah further elaborated on his theory of democracy on November 17, 1949, exactly one year after he first proposed his amendment for Article 3. Shah began by protesting against the model of democracy propounded in the proposed draft constitution for India. While the draft’s Preamble was continuous with 29

Uday Mehta, “Indian Constitutionalism: Crisis, Unity, and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, eds. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Sujit Choudhry, and Madhav Khosla (Oxford, 2016), 38–54.

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Nehru’s Objectives Resolution from 1946 and similarly declared that India would be a “sovereign, democratic republic,” Shah insisted that the document’s emphasis on parliamentary government only guaranteed the sovereignty of a class of professional politicians.30 If “real sovereignty” entailed participation in lawmaking, then voters were not in fact sovereign persons. They elected those who held true sovereign power. “The ideal of Democracy in the shape of the Government of the people, by the people and for the people,” Shah explained, “is far from being realized if one scrutinizes carefully the various Articles of this Constitution.”31 Armed with a democratic critique of the draft, Shah proceeded to address Rajendra Prasad and attributed the central place of political representation within the new constitution to nationalists’ fears about the ‘people’s capacity’: Several suggestions had been brought forward at the proper moment regarding, for instance, the right to consult the people by means of a Referendum or the power of the people to initiate radical legislation to make the Constitution really democratic. But they have been all negatived. The excuse has been given that we are not yet ready for such methods of working democracy in all its fullness. We would need, we were told, greater experience, better education, and more wide-spread consciousness of political power in the masses as well as its responsibilities, to be able to work with success such radical forms of democratic government. I am afraid, Sir, I cannot quite accept and endorse such a view of our people’s capacity, or of a working democracy in this country. The ability to work a democracy comes by having the responsibility to do so, and not by paper professions in its name, and practical negation of its forms. Had we agreed to such arguments in the past, had we accepted the suggestion of the British that the people of India were not educated enough and aware enough of their rights and obligations to be able to work a democratic Government of their own, we should never even now have obtained our independence, and the right to self-government which is now our proud possession.32

In this remarkably polemical intervention, all the more remarkable because it was spoken directly to Prasad, Shah drew comparisons between the Indian National Congress (his own political party) and the departing British government. Just as the colonial regime had denied civil rights to its subjects based on judgments about their readiness for modern politics, so the nationalist leadership was treating 30

“14th to 26th November 1949,” CAD, vol. 11, 619.

31

Ibid.

32

Ibid.

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the “masses” as prone to arbitrary, fickle decisions, in need of being restrained by electoral processes. By limiting sovereign power to members of political parties, the nationalist leadership showed that it was “unable to trust in full the people.”33 The result of its apprehensions about mass politics was an electoral system without “such weapons, such instruments and devices” through which “the will of the people for the benefit of the people” might be framed and asserted by the people themselves. Shah’s thoughts on “radical forms of democratic government” in 1948 and 1949 drew on a set of ideas he had been developing since the 1920s, long before his election to the Constituent Assembly. Born in Gujarat in 1888, Khushal Talaksi Shah moved first to Bombay and then to London for his studies. He graduated in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1913.34 In 1921, Shah was appointed to one of the first Lectureships in Economics at the University of Bombay, where he began a lifelong association with the Indian National Congress. Shah’s academic writing in the 1920s and 1930s was thoroughly informed by his involvement with the nationalist movement; indeed, one of his first books was derided for being too “overtly political” by a British reviewer in 1925.35 Shah’s writings of the period focused on one of three themes: on poverty and state planning in India, on the constitutional framework of the British Empire, and on the general relationship between modern mass democracy and representative government.36 33 34

35

36

Ibid. “Shah, Khushal Talaksi,” in London School of Economics and Political Science Register, 1895–1932 (London, 1934), 172. W. S. Thatcher, “Review: P. P. Pillai, Economic Conditions in India,” Economic Journal, vol. 35, no. 140 (1925), 629–31. K. T. Shah is an incredibly understudied figure in Indian intellectual history. Beyond broad details, not much is actually known about his biography. There do not even seem to be private papers or archives stored anywhere – though a road in the town of Mandvi, Gujarat, currently bears his name. The only existing studies of Shah refer to his writings on state planning, on imperial federation, and on his support for universal adult franchise. Neither his writings on popular sovereignty and representation from the 1920s and 1930s nor their influence on his interventions in the Constituent Assembly have received much attention. See Eleanor Newbigin, “Accounting for the Nation, Marginalizing the Empire: Taxable Capacity and Colonial Rule in the Early Twentieth Century,” History of Political Economy, vol. 52, no. 3 (2020), 455–72; Stephen Legg, “Dyarchy, Democracy, Autocracy, and the Scalar Sovereignty of Interwar

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Shah first addressed the topic of modern democracy in a series of lectures on the Russian Revolution, delivered to graduate students in Economic History at the University of Bombay in November 1927. For Shah, the establishment of the Soviet Union was the “most astounding experiment” of the modern age.37 The socialization of an entire country’s means of production and distribution outstripped any previous attempts at redressing the violence of capitalism. At the same time, the economic transformations brought about by Lenin’s regime did not extend to the political sphere. The Soviet state kept the masses away from “effective power in government,” choosing to vest sovereignty in party officials and revolutionary leaders and creating a new kind of “autocracy,” simultaneously economically radical and politically conservative.38 “From the point of view of an enthusiast in the matter of working democracy,” Shah observed, the Bolshevik revolution fell “very much short of the ideals of democracy.”39 The “ideals of democracy” were in conflict with any political system, which prioritized the representation of popular sovereignty.40 K. T. Shah turned to the “ideals of democracy” in more detail in a slim pamphlet published from Bombay in October 1937, under the title Federal Structure (Under the Government of India Act, 1935).41 Written for and published by the INC, Shah’s pamphlet laid out a sustained critique of the 1935 Government of India Act (as noted in Chapter 4, challenging the GOI Act was part and parcel of the official Congress line between 1935 and 1940). A truly democratic federation, Shah declared, would “postulate the ultimate and absolute sovereignty in the people of the Federation collectively.”42 “Popular sovereignty,” embodied in “the will of the majority,” would be “the sole guarantee

37 38 41

42

India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 36, no. 1 (2016), 44–65; Sunil Purushotham, “Sovereignty, Federation, and Constituent Power in Interwar India, ca. 1917–1939,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 40, no. 3 (2020), 421–33, at 426; and Shani, How India Became Democratic, 23–24. For a brief, unattributed note published upon Shah’s death in 1953, highlighting his lifelong interest in developing an Asian Marxism for India and China, see “Obituary: K.T. Shah,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 5, no. 11 (1953), 990. I am grateful to Eleanor Newbigin for helping with reconstructing Shah’s career. K. T. Shah, The Russian Experiment: 1917–1927 (Bombay, 1927), 12. 39 40 Ibid., 21. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 19. K. T. Shah, Federal Structure (Under the Government of India Act, 1935) (Bombay, 1937). Ibid., 8.

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of the equal rights of all component parts of the Federation.”43 By this metric, the 1935 Act in no way created a democratic federation. Its restrictive franchise meant that lawmaking in Crown territories was the provenance of a small group of propertied elites. The Act’s very understanding of “responsible government” was limited to the election of political parties into provincial legislatures beholden to the British parliament. “The political consciousness of their peoples” had no scope for direct, unmediated expression and was kept “utterly dumb or non-existent.”44 “Real democracy,” in contrast, meant “actual participation of every citizen in the affairs of the community.”45 Shah recognized that such a robustly participatory polity had rarely existed in history and certainly did not fully exist anywhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In most modern democracies, the will of the people was transformed into “delegated authority” and “vicarious responsibility,” channelled through the “device of representative popular institutions.”46 Nonetheless, Shah held that there were ways to secure the ideal of direct, participatory popular government within modern representative states. The task of reformers was to introduce constitutional provisions guaranteeing the legislative independence of citizens’ assemblies over particular jurisdictions, along with rights of referendum, initiation, and recall. In a federal democracy with measures for citizens’ self-governance and popular control of elected officials, “real self-government” could be constitutionally protected: The actual right of the people to real self-government can be exercised, either in framing or formulating the fundamental constitution for the Federation; or by such devices as Referendum or Initiative on given questions of legislative or executive policy. Beyond this, there is nothing but representative – or delegated – self-government . . . [But] insofar as the ultimate authority of the citizen in his aggregate is reserved, in the supreme sovereignty vested in the mass of the people, the evolution of the Federal organization is in no way inconsistent with the Democratic principle.47

The 1935 Government of India Act of course contained no such provisions recognizing “the supreme sovereignty vested in the mass of the people.” The masses were bound and controlled by the decisions of the “alien exploiter” and “his local coadjutor” – colonial officials 43

Ibid.

44

Ibid., 11.

45

Ibid., 27.

46

Ibid.

47

Ibid.

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and subordinate Indian elites elected from a small proportion of the total population.48 The entire document of the 1935 Act, in Shah’s eyes, was marked by “unmitigated distrust” of “the Indian people.”49 Years before he was elected to the Constituent Assembly on a Congress ticket from Gaya (Bihar) in 1946, Khushal Talaksi Shah had therefore developed a coherent theory of popular sovereignty and its relation to modern democracy and constitutionalism. His speech on popular government on November 17, 1949 was reiterating arguments he had made in the pamphlet Federal Structure in 1937. Shah brushed aside the fact that the Constituent Assembly had departed in at least one significant way from the Government of India Act: by adopting universal adult franchise in 1947. He instead presented the Congress’ embrace of representation as continuous with the project of the colonial government in the 1930s. In both instances, he suggested, the ability of the people to legislate outside of the electoral process and to exercise tangible power over their delegates was curtailed out of concerns about the political incapacity of the masses. Like the constitutional framework of the British Empire in the interwar years, the drafted postcolonial constitution of India was not “a real, working, effective democracy” when evaluated against Shah’s definition of popular sovereignty: as the ability of the people to constantly keep lawmaking under participatory popular control.50 As the drafting debates wound down in the final weeks of November 1949, K. T. Shah’s critical observations about parliamentarism clearly struck a chord with other delegates. On Tuesday, November 22, Panjabrao Deshmukh, a veteran labor leader from Bombay (associated with B. R. Ambedkar’s Independent Labor Party and with regional farmers’ movements in western India), repeated Shah’s skepticism about the ability of adult franchise and parliamentary government to redistribute political power.51 Deshmukh warned that, against the background of deep socioeconomic inequality, the introduction of party-based electoral democracy without mechanisms for controlling representatives would lead to the monopolization of political office – and sovereign power – by elites. Political relations between lawmakers and the people would not change significantly from the late colonial period: 48 51

Ibid., 37. Ibid., 777.

49

Ibid.

50

“14th to 26th November 1949,” CAD, 620.

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135

This parliamentary democracy is essentially meant for maintaining the status quo. It is not meant to bring about a radical change from the existing state of affairs. We are going to keep the various institutions intact. We want to keep the various layers of society where they were and from that point of view I would not be surprised if this Constitution does not last long, because it does not answer the aspirations of the man in the street at the present time.52

Deshmukh accepted the draft constitution, but also maintained that parliamentarism on its own was too conservative a democratic system to bring about a genuine popular revolution. “We have not been able to answer or to satisfy the aspirations of the people,” he continued. “It is no exaggeration to say that there is, however imperceptible, a conflict arising between the Government on the one hand and the people on the other.”53 Later in the same afternoon, Lokanath Misra (Orissa) likewise argued that a constitutional theory rooted in the election of party officials, the delegation of legislation, and the supremacy of a representative assembly created “two classes”: a “ruling class at the helm of affairs” and, underneath, “the common man exercising a vote once in five years.”54 Sovereignty was only practiced by the mass of the people during moments of voting, punctuating lengthy bouts of passive silence. By late 1949 and early 1950, it was clear that K. T. Shah, H. V. Kamath, P. R. Deshmukh, and Lokanath Misra were dissenting voices within the Constituent Assembly. Their proposed amendments regarding citizen assemblies, popular referenda, legislative initiation, and recall of legislators did not find a way into the final document of the constitution. But the interventions of these four delegates served to complicate the republican language of sovereignty espoused in Nehru’s Objectives Resolution and in the preamble to the draft constitution. K. T. Shah and others straightforwardly denied that rule by elected parliamentary representatives was synonymous with the complete sovereignty of the people. A more genuine popular government, on what Shah called his “radical democratic” account, needed to allow for unmediated control over legislation by the people. Accordingly, this view insisted that postimperial self-government would be realized when local assemblies open to adult citizens had powers of legislation and, importantly, had rights to contest and initiate legislation and recall lawmakers within elected tiers of government. The radical 52

Ibid.

53

Ibid.

54

Ibid., 798.

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democratic alternative established two key propositions: that parliament could never be a sufficiently inclusive legislative body, and that a truly popular democracy needed to make it possible for citizens to counteract the power of elected officials.

5.3 Marxist Critics Alongside the debate over legislative processes within the halls of the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi, there was considerable commentary on parliamentarism and its limits in the wider Indian public sphere.55 The socialist wing of the Indian National Congress famously boycotted the Constituent Assembly for being inadequately democratic. The socialist leader Asoka Mehta linked his repudiation of the assembly to the principle of popular sovereignty. The Constituent Assembly, Mehta observed on the eve of the 1946 provincial elections, was to be indirectly elected on the basis of the limited franchise of the Government of India Act.56 It could not in any real sense be considered an expression of the will of the Indian masses. Any constitution framed by the assembly would be framed without the input or participation of much of the country’s population. Thus, while the Constituent Assembly debates were still occurring in March 1948, a faction of the nationalist movement around Asoka Mehta chose to break with the Congress and founded an independent group called the Socialist Party of India (SPI), maintaining a skeptical distance from the drafting process in New Delhi through to January 1950. As we saw in Chapter 4, the SPI’s own draft constitution prepared by Jayaprakash Narayan in December 1948 accepted a parliamentary 55

56

As Ornit Shani has argued, “there is no social history of the making of India’s constitution. Commonly, studies of the drafting of the constitution center on the deliberations in the ‘ivory tower’ of the Constituent Assembly.” Here, I follow Shani’s method of historiography by similarly looking beyond the official assembly debates and highlighting how the debates were received on the ground by civil society. See Shani, How India Became Democratic, 17; and Ornit Shani, “The People and the Making of India’s Constitution,” The Historical Journal, vol. 65, no. 4 (2022), 1102–23. Asoka Mehta, The Simla Triangle: A Projection of the Communal Triangle (Bombay, 1945), 55–56. See also Asim Kumar Chaudhuri, Socialist Movement in India: The Congress Socialist Party, 1934–1947 (Calcutta, 1980), 190. On the elite-driven nature of the Constituent Assembly more generally, see Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Nature of Indian Democracy,” in Handbook of Sociology in India, ed. Veena Das (New Delhi, 2004), 451–70.

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system with cumulative plural voting and multimember districts. Yet there were also alternate voices within the Indian socialist movement. The most vocal proponent of an anti-parliamentary line was Acharya Narendra Deva. Deva helped found the Congress Socialist Party – the predecessor of the SPI – in Patna in 1934 and was a close associate of K. T. Shah, with whom he ran the Congress’ National Publications Society in the 1930s. Deva helped prepare, publish, and circulate Shah’s Federal Structure pamphlet from Bombay in 1937.57 Among the central aims of Deva’s long, formidable intellectual career were the formulation of a Marxist approach to democratization in India and the promotion of worker-peasant involvement in politics.58 He rejected the apparatus of electoral, representative democracy as an impediment to the latter goal. An early articulation of Deva’s view of democracy was delineated in a Hindi volume titled Chunav Padhathiyan Aur Jansatta (broadly, Electoral Procedures and Popular Sovereignty) compiled by the revolutionary peasant leader Vijay Singh Pathik in 1936.59 This forgotten text is fascinating for several reasons, not least because it illustrates the extremely sophisticated manner in which the conceptual foundations of nationalist politics – sovereignty, self-rule, statehood – were debated by non-elite figures using vernacular print cultures.60 Its author, Vijay Singh Pathik (1882–1954), first became known in the 1910s for organizing armed rebellion against colonial authorities in the Punjab. Through the 1920s, he was a leader of the kisan andolan (farmers’ movement) in Bijolia (Ajmer Province), organizing peasants against high land taxation and the practice of begaar (forced, unpaid labor). Deva’s contribution to Pathik’s volume was an introductory essay, 57 58

59

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K. T. Shah, “Preface,” in Federal Structure, i–iv. On Deva’s career and his relationship to Marxism, see Rakesh Ankit, “Marxist Guru, Socialist Neta, Buddhist Acharya, Gandhi’s Shishya: The Many Narendra Deva(s) (1889–1956),” Global Intellectual History, vol. 2, no. 3 (2017), 350–69. As Ankit shows, Deva was the most obviously Marxist member of the Congress Socialist circle in the 1930s, and the one who drew closest to the Communist Party. Vijay Singh Pathik, Chunav Padhathiyan Aur Jansatta (Agra, 1936). All translations from Hindi are mine. Indeed, as Emma Hunter puts it in her study of Tanzania, recovering such primary sources allows us “to move beyond an intellectual history limited to elites.” Emma Hunter, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization (Cambridge, 2015), 9.

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dated May 16, 1936, arguing about an ongoing global crisis of representation. The established method of electing lawmakers to represent constituencies in a sovereign legislature, Deva insisted, was proving incapable of tangibly securing the right of ‘real’ (‘vastavik’) political self-government for the mass of citizens (‘janata ka vastavik adhikar’).61 As representative forms of democracy degenerated into elite rule by party officials (‘pratinidhi,’ or ‘political representatives’), the masses lost faith in the democratic process and were driven to militancy or support for populist authoritarians. (Narendra Deva undoubtedly had in mind here the threat of fascism in the 1930s.) Those who supported democracy were faced with finding alternatives to parliamentary government, whose exclusions were becoming abundantly clear by the day: The accepted form of modern democratic government has proven to be a dismal failure. What true democracy (saccha lokatantra) means and how we might in fact establish the political claims of the people (janata) upon the institutions of government has become an urgently debated question amongst contemporary thinkers. Those persons who accept the ideals of democracy have the difficult, thorny task of finding alternate political mechanisms and finally making real the principle of popular sovereignty (jansatta).62

What might such ‘alternate’ political mechanisms look like within a modern constitution? Narendra Deva pinpointed four constitutional provisions: decentralization of powers to local assemblies, the right to call popular referenda (kanoon par lokman lene ki padhati), the right of citizen assemblies to initiate legislation (vidhan nirmanadhikar), and the right to recall elected officeholders (punaravartan).63 Subsequent sections of the volume contained Vijay Singh Pathik’s elaboration of Narendra Deva’s arguments. Pathik used Deva’s ideas to make a pointed criticism of Congress politics in the second half of the 1930s. His language was also more transparently – and more selfconsciously – Marxist. Where Deva spoke of a general conflict between the electing janata and the elected pratinidhi, Pathik spoke more narrowly about the domination of the laboring masses by the zamindar (landlords) and a growing class of business-interests and indigenous capitalists (punjipati). Pathik’s language of class and labor exploitation 61 62

Acharya Narendra Deva, “Bhoomika,” in Pathik, Chunav Padhathiyan, 1. 63 Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 2.

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was characteristic of a more general rise in appeals to the gareeb janata (“poor people”) or gareeb varg (“poor section”) within Hindi and Urdu political discourse in the 1930s, a development that accompanied the emergence of identifiable socialist and Communist movements in northern India. The focus on class-specific oppression departed from earlier appeals to the somewhat abstract, undifferentiated category of janata.64 With the transformation of the Indian National Congress into an electoral machine seeking to gain provincial assembly seats under the 1935 Government of India Act, Pathik argued, politicians drawn from the propertied classes were increasingly coming to dominate office and make laws governing the working poor (gareeb varg). In the imagination of assembly members: It is implied that – “popular sovereignty and the rule of the people are ideas unsuited to the masses. That the poor will not be able to make any beneficial use of such ideas. That they are still outsiders to the art of modern government.” And so forth, and so forth. Thus an attempt is made to deny to the dispossessed and the downtrodden their full rights within a democratic system of government.65

Assessments about the ability of the Indian masses to govern themselves in a democratic manner had long justified limitations on the electorate. Even as nationalist leaders came to rally behind universal adult suffrage, Pathik held that ideas about the unfitness of the poor continued to be invoked to minimize the degree of direct political power entrusted to laborers and peasants. Like his interlocutor K. T. Shah, Narendra Deva approached the Constituent Assembly Debates in 1946 using ideas about political representation and popular government he had formulated in the 1930s. As elections for the Constituent Assembly concluded during the second week of February 1946, Deva published a short essay in the Delhi socialist journal Janata entitled “The Common Man and the 64

65

See Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early TwentiethCentury India (Cambridge, 2001), 365–419. A tension between the people as a category inclusive of all citizens of a commonwealth and the people as a category referring specifically to the poor or plebeians has also long been characteristic of post-Roman European republicanism. See John P. McCormick, “People and Elites in Republican Constitutions, Traditional and Modern,” in The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form, eds. Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker (Oxford, 2007), 108–25. Pathik, Chunav Padhathiyan, 9.

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Congress,” warning about the “corrupting influence” of “the parliamentary program.”66 Deva was unequivocal in the essay about his understanding of democracy. In a popular state, the most important actors were “the sovereign people.”67 “Any limitations that may be imposed upon the sovereign authority of the people” were fundamentally undemocratic.68 Parliamentarism was precisely a “limitation” of this sort, since it reduced the will of the people to the actions and decisions of a limited number of politicians who emerged victorious “in a scramble for seats in legislatures.”69 So long as the nationalist movement continued to direct its efforts towards the creation of a central parliament and provincial legislatures, Deva declared that “revolutionary fervor” would be in “abeyance,” and the “toiling masses” would be ruled by leaders of political parties – the supposedly competent few.70 Nine months later, right before the Constituent Assembly convened for its inaugural meeting, Deva made a further, more provocative suggestion that the framing of a constitution should not be entrusted entirely to a body of indirectly elected representatives. The constitution itself would only be an expression of popular sovereignty if and when members of the drafting assembly consulted with peasants and workers’ organizations about the provisions under consideration.71 Popular involvement in constitution writing was one way to rectify the antidemocratic character of the drafting assembly, a problem Asoka Mehta had first identified the previous year. Deva delivered a final criticism of the assembly proceedings in March 1949. He drew the attention of SPI cadres in Patna to the defeat 66

67 71

Acharya Narendra Deva, “The Common Man and the Congress,” in Selected Works of Acharya Narendra Deva, vol. 2 (1941–48), ed. Hari Dev Sharma (New Delhi, 1998), 101–6, at 102. 68 69 70 Ibid., 101. Ibid., 102. Ibid. Ibid., 102–3. “Narendra Deva Outlines Task before the Constituent Assembly,” in Acharya Narendra Deva Private Papers, S/W by Him, vol. 7–10, no. 15, p. 2. Manuscripts Collection, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi. Narendra Deva made the suggestion during a rally in the town of Meerut at the end of November 1946. As far as I can tell, this was the only instance of an Indian thinker in the 1940s openly arguing in favor of a constitution drafted not by elected representatives, but with the participation and direct input of a wide range of citizens’ bodies. Even Asoka Mehta, who first criticized the composition of the Constituent Assembly in 1945, did not go so far. On participatory constitution-making, see Hélène Landemore, “Inclusive Constitution-Making: The Icelandic Experiment,” Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 23, no. 2 (2014), 166–91.

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of radical democratic alternatives in the Constituent Assembly and the simultaneous consolidation of a consensus around electoral, partybased democracy. These twin developments signaled for Deva the unfortunate transformation of the anti-colonial struggle into “purely Parliamentary” politics.72 The trope of the “common man” left behind by the machinations of electoral parties and professional politicians was central to Deva’s polemic: Democracy means respect for the common man and a belief in his capacity to contribute to the life of the nation. The common man is not an inert mass which may be despised and disparaged. He is capable of initiative and makes positive demands for action. Those who are wedded to democracy will not ignore and despise the common man. They will educate him and enable him to express his will and exercise his right. Unfortunately the attitude of those in authority is not helpful.73

The phrase “positive demands for action,” contrasted with a view of “the common man” as “an inert mass,” captured the ideal of participatory, engaged citizenship underlying Deva’s vision. For Indian socialism to survive as an opposition movement after independence, he continued, socialists needed to support “the participation of the masses” and advocate for institutional arrangements of popular direct democracy outside of elections, such as referenda, independent local councils, assemblies created through lot, and legislative recall.74 Otherwise socialism would morph into rule of the masses, not rule by the masses. Deva connected his version of Indian socialism to Rosa Luxemburg’s rejection of parliamentary reformism and endorsement of proletarian self-rule in the early twentieth century; the connective thread for him was how both projects, decades apart, sought to prevent democracy from turning into governance by the bourgeoisie.75 Acharya Narendra Deva’s repeated public admonitions about the parliamentary route to power were not widely shared by other currents of the socialist movement in the 1940s. After breaking with the INC in March 1948, the socialists under Jayaprakash Narayan, Asoka Mehta, 72

73 75

Acharya Narendra Deva, “Presidential Address at Patna Socialist Party Conference (March 6, 1949),” in Selected Works of Acharya Narendra Deva, vol. 3 (1948–52), 121–46, at 122. 74 Ibid., 130. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 132. For Luxemburg’s criticism of the parliamentary politics of the German Social Democrats, see Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution,” in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Helen Scott (Chicago, 2008), 41–104.

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Ram Manohar Lohia, Yusuf Meherally, and J. B. Kripalani entered into a tangled, confusing maze of electoral alliances, haphazard campaigns for both state and national elections, and coalitional power-sharing. The SPI turned into the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party (Farmers’, Workers’, and People’s Party), which then fragmented into the Praja Socialist Party (People’s Socialist Party), which then faced a steady decline in its political fortunes through the 1950s. Frustrated, some socialists like Jayaprakash Narayan drifted towards late incarnations of Gandhianism led by Vinoba Bhave; others either drew closer to the more politically successful Communist Party after 1952 or returned to the Nehruvian fold.76 The impact of figures like Narendra Deva and Vijay Singh Pathik, then, was certainly not on the future of postcolonial Indian socialism. Rather, the significance for modern Indian political thought of Narendra Deva in particular was in his role as an interlocutor in the debate on popular sovereignty between 1946 and 1950. Though located outside of the Constituent Assembly of India, Narendra Deva was an attentive, critical observer of the assembly’s labyrinthine proceedings and a firm advocate of alternate, anti-electoral strategies of mass democracy and popular lawmaking. Deva’s originality as a thinker lay in his use of socialist and Marxist ideas about the threat of class rule to denounce the dominance – both political and intellectual – of a procedural democracy centered on representative institutions.

5.4 The Constitution and the People As it came into force on January 26, 1950, the Constitution of independent India declared its steadfast normative commitments to “the people of India” and to the formation of a new “sovereign democratic republic.”77 The architecture of republican sovereignty was detailed in Parts Five and Six of the Constitution. Article 79 created a bicameral legislature or “Union Parliament” with a specified list of lawmaking powers over all constituent parts of the Union of India; the Union 76

77

On the fragmentation of the socialist movement after the 1952 elections, see Taylor C. Sherman, “‘A New Type of Revolution’: Socialist Thought in India, 1940s–1960s,” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (2018), 485–504; and Daniel Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings: Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia, and the Trajectories of Socialism in Early Independent India,” Global Intellectual History, vol. 2, no. 3 (2017), 370–88. Const. of India (1950). Preamble.

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Parliament consisted of a directly elected lower house (Lok Sabha) and an indirectly elected upper house (Rajya Sabha) chosen by individual state legislatures.78 Article 168 created an analogous structure at the state level, with a mix of bicameral and unicameral legislatures in different state jurisdictions.79At the federal level, the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha existed alongside an indirectly elected presidential executive (Article 55) with authority to pass ordinances outside of the standard process of parliamentary legislation, as well as a Supreme Court appointed by the president (Article 124) with powers of judicial oversight.80 The constitution contained a system of checks-andbalances among three separate branches of government. Yet, as a whole, the document tilted heavily towards an ideal of national parliamentary supremacy, both over subsidiary legislative bodies and over the actions of the executive and judiciary. This became immediately apparent in the first year of independence, even before the first general elections through universal franchise were held in 1952. In May 1951, Nehru introduced a bill giving the Union Parliament unilateral authority to amend the federal constitution, in order to impede the Supreme Court’s opposition to land reform legislation.81 The journalist B. Shiva Rao, who himself served in the Constituent Assembly from Madras, commented that the creation of an independent, powerful national legislature was a signal achievement of the 1950 Constitution and was the clearest indication of its link to the ideals of the anti-colonial movement: Such faith in the democratic process had its justification in the principle that the will of the people was paramount. From the beginning of the freedom

78 80

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79 Ibid., Part 5, Art. 79. Ibid., Part 6, Art. 168. On the executive branch in the 1950 Constitution, see Shubhankar Dam, Presidential Legislation in India: The Law and Practice of Ordinances (New York, 2014). On the judiciary, see Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Judicial Review versus Parliamentary Sovereignty: The Struggle over Stateness in India,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, vol. 19, no. 3 (1981), 231–56. See V. Krishna Ananth, The Indian Constitution and Social Revolution: Right to Property since Independence (New Delhi, 2015), 116–61. Harshan Kumarasingham has described the Indian approach to parliamentarism as part of a pattern of ‘Eastminster’ governance, stretching across the British colonies of India, Sri Lanka, and Malaya: Harshan Kumarasingham, A Political Legacy of the British Empire: Power and the Parliamentary System in Post-Colonial India and Sri Lanka (London, 2013).

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struggle the basic purpose had been a government of the people by the people for the people. The instrument in the Constitution to ensure its fulfilment was adult franchise for the elections to the Legislatures, with an executive responsible to the Legislatures so elected. During British rule the demand for adult franchise had been rejected because, among various other reasons, it was considered administratively impossible for the machinery of government in India to handle elections based on adult franchise . . . From the start of the Constituent Assembly’s proceedings, however, opinion in the country was almost overwhelming that elections to the House of the People and to the Legislative Assemblies of the States should be on no other basis.82

Here again was a standard statement of the parliamentary theory of sovereignty, used as a heuristic to locate the drafting process within the longer history of Indian nationalism. By transforming India into an electoral democracy with adult suffrage, the 1950 Constitution was portrayed as an embodiment of the long-standing republicanism of anti-colonial struggle. Like an incantation, the collective pronoun in “we, the people” brought to life the conceptual universe of Indian constitutional thought. The three words strung together, placed at the beginning of the Preamble, declared that it had been the people who had assembled to draft the constitution, and that the people would wield power in the new political community being put into place. Yet the people never existed in an unmediated state within the actual text of the constitution. The document performed a linguistic sleight-of-hand, using the terms “people,” “popular,” and so on in instances where these terms really meant either “voters” or “representatives.” When Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Shiva Rao, and R. K. Sidhwa spoke of “a government of the people, by the people,” they meant a government of elected institutions. When the people acted, it was to select others to act on their behalf. The fundamental moment of popular sovereignty was, paradoxically, the people’s alienation of sovereignty. In an echo of what Quentin Skinner has described as the political theory animating the origins of modern parliamentarism in the mid-seventeenth century – a theory that, as Skinner shows, was reworked most significantly in Thomas Hobbes’ defense of monarchy in Leviathan (1651) – a popular commonwealth only emerged once a people designated one or more

82

Rao, The Framing of India’s Constitution, 835.

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persons to speak in their name.83 Beyond the act of authorizing and reauthorizing a new sovereign at routine intervals, the ‘real’ body of the people stayed inert and held limited power. To rule meant to enable the rule of others over oneself. Restoring the arguments of K. T. Shah and Narendra Deva to the intellectual context that produced the postcolonial constitution of India draws attention to the limitations of popular authorization through the vote. The parliamentarian theory of legislation through general election became formalized into law in 1950, but not before it was subject to considerable sustained criticism. The objections levelled by socialist critics struck at the very root of the Congress program of republican constitutionalism, and arguably at the entire edifice of parliamentary government in an age of mass enfranchisement. What happens when democratic citizenship is equated with selecting lawmakers from a set number of competing political parties? Invariably a system of multiparty elections will favor candidates capable of being approved by party organizations. Additionally, making elected MPs and MLAs independent of their electors during their tenure in office will exclude those outside of party organizations from the process of lawmaking. It is difficult to see how the majority of voters in such a system can be considered ‘sovereign,’ according to an orthodox definition of sovereignty as the power to create public law binding upon citizens.84 In what sense, then, can the constitutional form of any twentieth-century parliamentary state ever be fully rooted in the power of the people? Confronting this question in South Asia on the eve of colonial independence led to the central idea advanced by critics of the 1950 constitutional settlement: that popular sovereignty requires nonelectoral channels of legislation and accountability, or it will exist as a mere shadow of itself. 83

84

Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 2 (2005), 155–84. See Martin Loughlin, The Idea of Public Law (Oxford, 2004), 72–73.

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“Towards Total Revolution” The Aftermath of Independence

6.1 A New Era? It may seem counterintuitive to turn to the 1950s and 1960s in a book about political thought in the interwar and immediate postwar years. The years following formal decolonization in Asia and Africa have been routinely characterized as the first chapter of a new era in world history. The global victory of a modular nation-state form and the intellectual coordinates set in place by the Cold War narrowed the scope of the protest against European imperial rule. Whatever anticolonialism may have meant in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s – in the age of Gandhi, fragmented imperial sovereignty, heterodox Marxisms, and competing internationalisms – it was now a matter of state-based governance, pushed to choose between Washington or Moscow. No one was more attentive to the shift than Jawaharlal Nehru. In many of his speeches of the 1950s – for instance, in addressing student protestors in Patna in 1955 – Nehru asserted that the kinds of direct mass action and civil disobedience that had prevailed in the independence movement had achieved their intended purpose and needed to be abandoned.1 The language of politics needed to become the language of the parliamentary, constitutional, developmental, modernizing nation-state. The 1950s and 1960s were without a doubt very different from the kinds of historical moments I have been discussing thus far. An interwar age of experimental, contending futures was replaced by the rehearsal and reenactment of a more predictable range of political scripts. Whether the scripts were being performed by Nehru, 1

For example, Jawaharlal Nehru, “Students and Discipline (August 30, 1955),” in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru: Second Series, vol. 29, eds. H. Y. Sharada Prasad and A. K. Damodaran (New Delhi, 2001), 68–83. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “‘In the Name of Politics’: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India,” Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 1 (2007), 35–57.

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Sukarno, or Léopold Senghor, similar lines were spoken in Delhi, Jakarta, and Dakar: national unity, state-led socioeconomic development, controlled democracy, and so on. Yet, as is so often the case, the lived history of the 1950s and 1960s was a more complex matter than can be captured in linear narratives of postcolonial state formation. A new body of scholarship has now sought to recover how heterodox strands of anti-colonial thought and praxis from the 1940s and earlier continued to be invoked and reinvented even after formal independence, informing theories of statehood, economic development, internationalism, citizenship, and protest.2 Returning to these stories and their imagined genealogies and geographies – of African socialism, of Gandhian development, or of nonviolence – unsettles assumptions about a single, uniform mode of postcolonial statecraft. Chapter 6 contributes to this turn in colonial/postcolonial studies by focusing especially on the issue of democracy in India. I show how an antiparliamentary, anti-statist theory of popular sovereignty from the interwar years became a counter-discourse of democratic politics through the first twenty-five years of Indian independence. The precise meaning of popular sovereignty, I suggest, remained a source of tension and conflict even as the state was coming to consolidate its power. To do so, I reconstruct the post-1950 career of Jayaprakash Narayan, a leading figure in the Socialist Party of India who we encountered briefly in Chapter 4. Jayaprakash Narayan provides an ideal window to examine the relationship between interwar democratic thought and its postcolonial future. He was a product of the same general milieu that produced thinkers such as Shriman Narayan Agarwal and Acharya Narendra Deva. He was born in Bihar in October 1902 and first became politically engaged during Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement in 1921. Unusually for Indians of his 2

See Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World (Cambridge, 2015); Benjamin Siegel, “The Kibbutz and the Ashram: Sarvodaya Agriculture, Israeli Aid, and the Global Imaginaries of Indian Development,” American Historical Review, vol. 125, no. 4 (2020), 1175–204; Taylor C. Sherman, “A Gandhian Answer to the Threat of Communism? Sarvodaya and Postcolonial Nationalism in India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 53, no. 2 (2016), 249–70; and Christopher J. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Athens, OH, 2010), 1–42.

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generation, though, Jayaprakash Narayan had his encounter with Marxism, socialism, and anti-imperialism in the United States. Between 1922 and 1929, he spent several years in the United States, first in the California Bay Area and then in Chicago, Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, eventually graduating in 1929 with a master’s in Sociology from Ohio State University in Columbus. He later remarked that his interactions with the American labor movement of the 1920s and with anti-imperialist circles in California and the Midwest had been pivotal in his personal growth.3 Upon returning to India, Jayaprakash helped establish the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, took part in Gandhi’s Quit India Movement in 1942, and then joined the non-Congress socialist movement with Asoka Mehta in 1948. My analysis of Jayaprakash Narayan picks up from the 1950s, a few years after the dissolution of the British Empire.

6.2 A Moment of Reconstruction Published by the Gandhian printing house Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan based in Rajghat, Varanasi, Jayaprakash Narayan’s pamphlet A Plea for Reconstruction of Indian Polity (1959) was something of a turning point in the socialist’s intellectual evolution. Narayan, who would shortly emerge as one of the Indian National Congress’ most incendiary and subversive critics, jettisoned the enthusiasm for parliamentary constitutionalism running through his writings of the 1940s. A Plea for Reconstruction was an attack on what the term ‘democracy’ had come to mean during the first wave of political decolonization in South Asia. The pamphlet’s immediate context was the disillusionment that “JP” – as Jayaprakash Narayan was popularly known by his supporters – felt with national-level electoral politics in the 1950s. After the collapse of the Socialist Party of India in the 1952 general elections (when the SPI gained a mere 12 out of 489 seats in the Lok Sabha), a disappointed JP moved away from political campaigning and instead directed his energies towards Vinoba Bhave’s Gandhi-inspired Bhoodan Yajna (‘Land-Gift Movement’), travelling through the countryside to encourage peasants 3

See Pranav Jani, “Bihar, California, and the US Midwest: The Early Radicalization of Jayaprakash Narayan,” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 16, no. 2 (2013), 155–68.

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to voluntarily adopt collectivist forms of property ownership and use.4 The Bhoodan Yajna petered out by the late 1950s, but JP did not return to the electoral arena. As the decade progressed, he grew ever more convinced that the entire system of parliamentary democracy was beyond reprieve. By October 18, 1958, speaking to a group of supporters gathered in New Delhi, JP was urging the need to rethink ‘popular government’ (lokniti) and ‘popular sovereignty’ (loksatta) in terms of a new “partyless democracy.”5 To that end, in A Plea for Reconstruction, he examined modern parliamentarism’s tensions with loksatta and lokniti in order to justify more radical democratic experiments. In accounting for the limitations of representative government, Jayaprakash Narayan first spoke in general terms. That is, the limitations he sought to identify were not unique to colonial or postcolonial India, but had also characterized the rise, fall, and reemergence of democratic states in Western Europe and North America through the first half of the twentieth century. In JP’s account, “the farthest democracy had advanced in the West” was “elected oligarchy”; “Western democracy” was not democracy proper “but democratic oligarchy.”6 How could “oligarchy” exist under the façade of formally democratic constitutions with universal franchise? JP focused on two features. The first was the prevalence of political parties within modern democracies. JP argued that parties were one of a number of “organized interests” within modern states, alongside labor unions and industrial lobby groups.7 With these other interests, political parties shared a top-down, bureaucratic organizational structure, combining mass membership at the grassroots level with the delegation of decisionmaking to a small group of leaders. Parties were more ‘oligarchic’ than other non-state civil organizations, however, due to the caucus system. Caucuses exercised disproportionate influence over setting candidates’ 4

5

6

7

Jayaprakash Narayan, “Introduction,” in Suresh Ram, Vinoba and His Mission [Being an Account of the Rise and Growth of the Bhoodan Yajna Movement] (Varanasi, 1954), vii–viii. Jayaprakash Narayan, “Back to the Mahatma (October 18, 1958),” in Towards Total Revolution: Search for an Ideology, vol. 1, ed. Brahmanand (Bombay, 1978), 185–89. Jayaprakash Narayan, A Plea for Reconstruction of Indian Polity (Varanasi, 1959), 2. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 68.

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lists and creating party platforms.8 JP’s “oligarchic” interpretation of political parties was informed by the work of the French political scientist Maurice Duverger; he cited an English translation of Duverger’s book Political Parties (1954) extensively throughout A Plea for Reconstruction.9 In political systems wherein legislators were elected from among a list of candidates approved by party caucuses, loksatta was merely “fictional”: Parties have become a sort of state within the state. They are now the real arbiters of the people’s fate, whose control over them is fictional. The citizens who cast their votes for the parties have nothing to do with the running of the parties: they are complete outsiders. Even the enrolled members of the parties have no say either in the policy-making or the inner administration of the parties. The parties are run by caucuses that are beyond democratic control.10

Elections for political office occurred according to the needs of party leaders: The claim that parliamentary democratic governments at least represent a majority of the voters breaks down in a still more serious manner. Experience has shown . . . that present-day mass elections manipulated by powerful, centrally controlled parties, with the aid of high finance and diabolically clever methods and super media of communication represent far less the electorate than the forces and interests behind the parties and the propaganda machines.11

Even when enfranchised, most citizens could not control the internal machinations of political parties. Given the caucus system, they only indirectly choose their legislators. Lawmaking was the provenance of a 8

9

10

Cf. the foundational account of the caucus system and its conflict with democratic principles: Moisei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, trans. Frederick Clarke (London, 1902), 183–249. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, trans. Barbara North and Robert North (London, 1954). Duverger, in turn, derived his account of political parties from the Italian sociologist Robert Michels, who first saw parties as elitist structures bound by an “iron law of oligarchy.” See Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York, 1915). For a discussion, see Hugo Drochon, “Robert Michels, the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and Dynamic Democracy,” Constellations, vol. 27, no. 2 (2020), 185–98. 11 Narayan, A Plea for Reconstruction, 70. Ibid., 66.

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small political class vetted for its electability or its adherence to the demands of a caucus. The “deceit” of modern democratic states, in JP’s estimation, was that such states claimed the language of popular rule, when, in reality, “the parties, that is to say, small caucuses of politicians, rule in the name of the people and create the illusion of democracy and self-government.”12 The second problem associated with twentieth-century parliamentarism was an overall centralization of political authority. JP maintained that the rise of representative democracy since the nineteenth century had been accompanied by the rise of increasingly elaborate, bureaucratic nation-states. The functioning of such states necessitated the concentration of power in a limited number of public bodies. The “natural outcome” of political centralization was representation of the people’s sovereignty by institutions linked to the federal government: Perhaps the most serious fault of parliamentary democracy, from the point of view of democracy itself, is its tendency toward centralism. At one extreme of the political spectrum is the national state and at the other the individual voter, with a blank in between . . . The “sovereign people” being dispersed over the length and breadth of the country like particles of sand over the desert and having no other organized political force than the national state itself to interpose between themselves and that state, the latter naturally becomes all powerful. The issue of power in such a state is decided not by the fictitious “people” but by a balance between political parties and such organized interests as industrialists and bankers and powerful labor unions.13

The inverted commas placed around the phrase “sovereign people” surreptitiously signaled the “fictitious” nature of popular rule underlying twentieth-century democracy. The people were sovereign only on the pages of modern constitutions. The reality of statism was incompatible with their direct sovereignty, since large, centralized states could not devolve any substantial power to institutions open to a wide body of citizens. The oligarchic structure of political parties and the centralized state’s monopolization of authority were inherent to modern parliamentarism. They were not incidental accretions that might be cleared away to reveal a more pristine form of electoral representative government. 12

Ibid., 71.

13

Ibid., 70–71.

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Rejecting constitutional reformism, JP argued that the empowerment of the people required moving away from the parliamentary nationstate altogether. Two pivotal chapters of A Plea for Reconstruction examined possible alternatives: chapter 2 (“The Sign-Post from the Past”) and chapter 7 (“Reconstruction of Indian Polity”). Taken together, the two chapters replicated, with striking exactitude, the post-WWI discourse of direct democracy examined thus far in the book. In chapter 2, JP praised the scholarship of Kashi Prasad Jayaswal, Radhakumud Mookerji, Radhakamal Mukerjee, and Beni Prasad for recovering premodern practices of popular rule centered on the sabha.14 Following Radkahumud Mookerji’s depiction in Local Government in Ancient India of the medieval Tamil-speaking region of Uthiramerur, JP viewed the sabha as a body of assembled citizens with legislative power and the right to select executive offices from among itself through a mix of sortition and direct election, while maintaining the power of recall for itself.15 JP’s reading of Local Government in Ancient India was filtered through the work of the historian A. S. Altekar, who, in the late 1940s, had built on the pluralist historians’ efforts to use archival sources to study premodern republicanism in India (incidentally, Altekar had also served as head of the K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute in Patna, a major center for the study of archaeology).16 As a whole, the pluralist historiography of the ancient Indian polity from the late 1910s and early 1920s survived intact in the opening chapters of A Plea for Reconstruction. Chapter 7 sketched out a political program modeled on Shriman Narayan Agarwal’s Gandhian Constitution for Free India. JP singled out Narayan’s 1946 pamphlet as a particular influence on his thinking.17 As I noted earlier in Chapter 4, JP was personally acquainted with Shriman Narayan and had first met the Gandhian writer while visiting Wardha in the 1940s. Much like the second half of Narayan’s Gandhian Constitution, chapter 7 of JP’s A Plea for Reconstruction counterposed a federalist constitution based on local direct democracy against dominant electoral models of parliamentary party government. The primary legislative organ of JP’s draft was the citizens’ assembly, 14 16

17

15 Ibid., 40–41. Ibid., 39–41. See A. S. Altekar, State and Government in Ancient India: From Earliest Times to c. 1200 A.D. (Varanasi, 1949). Narayan, A Plea for Reconstruction, 41.

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or the “General Assembly.” All adult inhabitants of a territory were considered members of its General Assembly and had a right to attend and vote at its meetings. The General Assembly selected executive committees from itself. The method of selection was either through majority voting for particular individuals or through the randomized drawing of lots. JP was adamant that assemblies “should be given an option to choose between the methods of selection by general agreement or by drawing lots.”18 Thus constituted, the General Assembly collectively managed all property and resources within its jurisdiction. In JP’s memorable phrasing, each sabha created “a miniature welfare state”: “being the primary community it must take primary responsibility to provide work and shelter for every family; to organize production so as to fulfill the primary needs of food and clothing, to provide for primary education and primary health services.”19 Such broadly redistributive aims, along with the language of the “welfare state,” underlined how securing participatory, democratic management of the economy was an important motivation for Jayaprakash Narayan’s plan. A Plea for Reconstruction then prescribed a federalist arrangement allowing popular assemblies to function together as part of a single “integrated” polity. There were five levels of government in this arrangement. Each sabha elected delegates for a multimember regional council or samiti. Regional samitis then elected delegates for District Councils, which went on to form State Assemblies and finally a national-level Lok Sabha: “[T]hus the political institution at each level is an integration of all the institutions at the lower level.”20 While election occurred at each level above the General Assembly, there were no formal political parties, and members of each body voted for delegates directly, as individuals. And, as in Shriman Narayan’s 1946 constitutional draft, elected tiers of government legislated in order to coordinate between lower jurisdictions. “Higher bodies” were subject to initiative and recall from below: “‘[H]igher bodies’ derive their powers from the fact that the institutions ‘below’ them, in effect, entrust them with certain authority in order that they might be able to do what the lower bodies themselves find to be beyond their competence.”21 18 20

Ibid., 92. Emphasis in original. 21 Ibid., 95. Ibid., fn2.

19

Ibid., 89. Emphasis in original.

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Animated by a democratic hostility towards the modern system of political parties and statist control, A Plea for Reconstruction of Indian Polity outlined another way of institutionalizing the principle of loksatta. The pamphlet drew more derision than praise. It was attacked both for being overly pessimistic about postwar and postcolonial democratization, and for being overly optimistic about its own constructive program. The political theorist Adi Hormusji Doctor complained in a 1961 article in the Indian Journal of Political Science that JP’s imagined anti-statist polity would “founder on the rock of reality.”22 Hostility towards the text in some Indian academic circles may also have been heightened by the fact that, from the late 1950s, JP was becoming an increasingly vocal opponent of the Nehru administration, especially of its military response to secessionist movements in India’s Northeast.23 Nonetheless, Jayaprakash Narayan did not alter his views on the state, parliament, and electoral democracy – however idiosyncratic these seemed to readers at the end of the 1950s. In 1961, he published a follow-up essay of sorts, under the title “Swaraj for the People.”24 The essay largely recycled arguments from A Plea for Reconstruction, with two important differences. Responding to commentators who insisted that he had not done sufficient justice to the Marxist critique of parliamentarism in his 1959 pamphlet, JP aligned himself with the positions taken by M. N. Roy and the Radical Democratic Party in the mid-1940s. He acknowledged “the significant and seminal contribution of the late Mr. M. N. Roy to the body of thought with which I am dealing.”25 Indeed, there were clear parallels between Roy’s 1944 federalist proposal, rooting “the sovereign power of the people” in “People’s Committees” (as examined in Chapter 4), and JP’s ideas about empowering citizens’ “General Assemblies.” By his own admission, JP had long been intimately familiar with the writings of

22

23

24

25

Adi H. Doctor, “A Critique of JP’s Polity,” Indian Journal of Political Science, vol. 22, no. 3 (1961), 260–69, at 269. See Lydia Walker, “Jayaprakash Narayan and the Politics of Reconciliation for the Postcolonial State and Its Imperial Fragments,” Indian Economic & Social History Review, vol. 56, no. 2 (2019), 147–69. Jayaprakash Narayan, “Swaraj for the People,” in Socialism, Sarvodaya, and Democracy, ed. Bimal Prasad (New Delhi, 1965), 239–74. Ibid., 240.

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M. N. Roy, though he did not cite the Communist thinker at any point in A Plea for Reconstruction. “Swaraj for the People” was also more directly a reflection on the trajectories of postcolonial Indian politics. Whereas A Plea for Reconstruction spoke in abstract terms about the structural limits of all modern states, the 1961 swaraj essay drew upon JP’s experience observing two general elections in India in 1952 and 1957, both of which had resulted in clear victories for Nehru. He conceded that universal adult suffrage had been a boon for the peasantry and the working class. But he insisted that a formal right to vote did not translate into the ability to make law. Due to representation through party nomination, he recounted, in both elections “only the very thin layer of the educated middle classes, and even of them only those directly engaged in political activity” had been active political agents.26 He criticized the electoral process for having maintained the passive nature of colonial subjecthood for the “common people”: The most striking fact that has emerged from the working of ten years of our Constitution is that the people of the country, that is to say, the twenty crores of voters, have felt rather left out of it all. They have no doubt had the opportunity of participating in two General Elections, but beyond that transient contact with the workings of democracy, they have had nothing further to do with it. It is very common to hear the remark made by common people even in the countryside that though Swaraj came, it had not come to them. They complain that they are ruled much in the same manner and by the same kind of people as during British rule.27

The “truth” of Indian democracy in the 1950s, JP stated, was that “the people have not been able to experience the sensation of swaraj.”28 The exclusion of much of the Indian population from public office after two successive national elections revealed that the electoral system enshrined in the country’s 1950 constitution was a top-down affair, a “swaraj from above” resembling “an inverted pyramid that stands on its head.”29 JP’s use of the pyramid metaphor here was deliberate. It was a reference to M. K. Gandhi’s much publicized interview with a journalist on July 28, 1946. Gandhi had expressed apprehensions about the Indian National Congress’ plans for independent India, arguing that the party’s commitment to a centralized 26

Ibid., 242.

27

Ibid., 241–42.

28

Ibid., 242.

29

Ibid.

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state would make society into a “pyramid” with all power concentrated within a single apex.30 JP redeployed Gandhi’s metaphor eleven years later against electoral representation. The “pyramidical” structure of representation in the 1952 and 1957 elections was further illustrated by the lack of control that ordinary voters had over their elected legislators. If a legislator did not satisfy a constituency, “they might not elect him again.”31 But the threat of voting an MP or MLA out of office could be made real only once every five years, rendering it “a very remote and ineffective kind of control.”32 In his proposal for an alternate constitutional system, JP advocated “direct democracy,” which at some points in the 1961 essay he referred to as “organic democracy.” It is not entirely clear why JP suddenly resorted to a language of organicism to describe active political participation. One influence may have been the work of John Dewey, and especially Dewey’s reading of British neo-Hegelians such as T. H. Green, which he had encountered during his time in the United States in the 1920s.33 In any case, direct democracy or “organic democracy” entailed a thoroughgoing decentralization of political authority. It meant rule through local assemblies, brought together in a tiered federal structure. JP included a provision specifically designed to emphasize the mandate that popular assemblies held over delegates elected for higher levels of government. The point was crucial to his desire to guarantee that “the representatives at the higher level are under the constant gaze of the bodies at the lower levels, and thus subject to the control of the latter.”34 W. H. Morris-Jones, the great postwar authority on the constitutions of the British Commonwealth, read a copy of “Swaraj for the People” in the early months of 1964 and found its guiding philosophy to be a kind of “anti-Nehruvianism,” simultaneously “an attack on the Western type of democracy which India is attempting to operate” and an amalgamation of “Marx, Rousseau, and Gandhi.”35 The 30

31 33

34 35

M. K. Gandhi, “Independence (July 28, 1946),” in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), vol. 91 (New Delhi, 1999), 325–27. 32 Narayan, “Swaraj for the People,” 265. Ibid. On the term “organic democracy,” see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991), 33–58. Narayan, “Swaraj for the People,” 266. W. H. Morris-Jones, The Government and Politics of India (London, 1964), 215.

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‘counter-Nehruvian’ or ‘anti-Nehruvian’ label was apt. Jayaprakash Narayan intended for his essay to be a criticism of the democratic arrangement which the Congress leadership had supported during the Constituent Assembly debates, and which had sustained the party’s power through the 1950s. From Jayaprakash Narayan’s perspective, the failed promises of Indian independence resulted from the rise of a class of legislators disconnected from the multitude.36 In the context of South Asian intellectual history, his 1961 essay, like the earlier 1959 pamphlet, was the product of a political theory that had developed from the 1920s onward, through the writings of Radhakamal Mukerjee, Beni Prasad, Gandhi, and M. N. Roy. Radical democratic thought went from being presented as an alternative to anti-colonial nationalism to being used as a rejoinder to postcolonial governance.

6.3 Total Revolution In the early 1970s, Jayaprakash Narayan was suddenly thrust back into the national spotlight. The events of these years gave him an unexpected but welcome opportunity to translate his thought of the 1950s and 1960s into concrete political action. Between 1971 and 1975, there was a rapid disintegration of what the political scientist Rajni Kothari, writing in 1964, had called the “Congress system” – the distinctive power-sharing mechanism that allowed the INC to maintain national-level electoral dominance through strategic alliances with regional elites in different states.37 Dissatisfaction with Congress rule was more pronounced after 1971 than at any previous point in Indian history. On one hand, there was an acute economic crisis related to two failed harvests, food-grain shortage, the oil shock of the 1973 OPEC embargo, and climbing inflation combined with stagnant wages and deepening youth unemployment (what economists in the mid-1970s began to refer to as “stagflation”). Food riots directed at government ration stores broke out in cities like Nagpur in April 1973. The railway sector, one of the country’s largest employers, witnessed large-scale 36

37

Ranabir Samaddar, “Jayaprakash Narayan and the Problem of Representative Democracy,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 31 (2008), 49–58. Rajni Kothari, “The Congress ‘System’ in India,” Asian Survey, vol. 4, no. 12 (1964), 1161–73. Also see Pradeep K. Chhibber, Democracy without Associations: Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India (Ann Arbor, 1999), 51–78.

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industrial action, with a nationwide strike in May 1974 led by union leader George Fernandes, soon to become a major anti-Congress figure. Politically, the somewhat fissiparous tendencies of the 1960s Congress began to change, as more power came to be concentrated in the hands of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her immediate circle, including her secretary P. N. Haksar and son Sanjay Gandhi. The press and popular media were soon filled with scandalous stories of blackmarket corruption funneling money into the hands of a small coterie of Congress Party leaders. The simmering discontent came to a head when protests broke out in the western state of Gujarat in December 1973 and January 1974. Demonstrating against police brutality as well as the state government’s mishandling of the food-grain shortage, a loose alliance of student, teacher, and public employee unions took to the streets to demand the dissolution of the Congress-dominated state legislative assembly. The movement gained the moniker Navnirman Andolan (“Struggle for Reform”) and soon paralyzed the entire state of Gujarat. The protests did not relent until Indira Gandhi was forced to call for the resignation of Gujarat Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel in March 1974.38 On February 11, Jayaprakash Narayan was invited to the city of Ahmedabad by Navnirman Andolan leaders to address the protesting crowds. In his speech, JP praised the protestors for targeting a corrupt ruling establishment and urged them to be as ambitious as possible in their political demands.39 When the spark lit by the Navnirman Andolan reached JP’s home state of Bihar in the final weeks of March 1974, he became the public face of a new round of protests. (As Gyan Prakash has argued, the domino-like effect of the Gujarat protests in 1974 was bolstered by the increased popularity of contentious, violent extra-parliamentary politics from the late 1960s on, whether carried out by Maoist cadres in

38

39

See Ghanshyam Shah, Protest Movements in Two Indian States: A Study of the Gujarat and Bihar Movements (New Delhi, 1977); Dawn E. Jones and Rodney W. Jones, “Urban Upheaval in India: The 1974 Nav Nirman Riots in Gujarat,” Asian Survey, vol. 16, no. 11 (1976), 1012–33; and Bipan Chandra, In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (New Delhi, 2003), 34–38. Jayaprakash Narayan, “The Outrage in Bihar (March 30, 1974),” in Towards Total Revolution, vol. 3, ed. Brahmanand (Bombay, 1978), 46–51, at 48–49.

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West Bengal or by nativist street gangs in Bombay).40 According to Jayaprakash Narayan, the goal of the Bihar andolan was sampurna kranti, or “total revolution.” The term “total revolution,” which JP introduced into Indian political discourse in April 1974, entailed a complete rejection and transformation of constitutional democracy. Jayaprakash Narayan insisted that he wanted to establish a new janata sarkar (“people’s government”). He posited “total revolution” as a reaction to the flawed democracy put into place by the 1950 constitution: In our Constitution and the democratic institutions and processes established thereunder, there is no provision to ensure the accountability of the people’s representatives to their constituencies. In the absence of any such safeguard, especially in a backward society that is woefully lacking in the infrastructure of a developed democracy, the representatives of the people behave as they please in complete disregard of the people’s feelings, interests, and wishes. Such a state of affairs leads to the present kind of unprincipled politics. [Total revolution means] trying to educate and organize the people so that they might by their own action change and better their condition of life.41

The move away from a language of constitutional fidelity involved in this way of imagining democratic reform was framed as a moment of liberation, an attack on the unquestioned hegemony of parliamentary politics since independence. Such antiestablishment discourse in March 1974 was also characteristic of a shared global moment of political discontent among a disparate range of leftist and New Left formations in the early 1970s, from the United States and Western Europe to Latin America and Southeast Asia. The philosopher Claude Lefort described the first half of the 1970s as a period of intellectual “disenchantment” with concepts of revolution grounded in state bureaucracy.42 The constructive aspect of Jayaprakash Narayan’s 1974 Bihar protests entailed a new constitutional order. The final goal – the “herculean task” – of “total revolution,” for Jayaprakash Narayan, was the creation of “permanent organs of people’s power” in lieu of indirect 40

41

42

Gyan Prakash, Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton, 2019), 78–92. Jayaprakash Narayan, “A Manifesto for Bihar (May 11, 1975),” in Towards Total Revolution, vol. 3, 164–78, at 168. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, 1986).

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electoral government.43 He proposed the organization of janata samiti (“people’s committees”) in every constituency of the state. Janata samiti were large assemblies open to all adults. The committees dealt individually with legislation and selected executive officers and a judicial subcommittee through either lot or election. They also chose delegates to send to a District Council. Each District Council represented about 100 committees; the District Councils were then coordinated by an elected assembly at the state level. The “people’s committees” at the base of the tiered structure held rights of recall, referendum, and initiation. The entire program was based on JP’s writings of the 1950s and 1960s. The emphasis on decentralization, direct legislation, and control of officeholders also reached back to the writings of Gandhians such as S. N. Agarwal and Joseph Kumarappa and to the 1944 program of the Radical Democratic Party. “Without permanent non-party people’s organization,” JP stated in a manifesto drafted on May 25, 1974, “our present party system of democracy cannot guarantee proper running of democracy according to the people’s will.”44 The constructive, more ambitious side of Jayaprakash Narayan’s sampurna kranti mostly remained a set of aspirations on paper. The Gandhian activist Vasant Sadashiv Nargolkar reported in May 1975 that, after one year of grassroots organizing, movement volunteers were able to establish only twenty janata samiti.45 Without full lawmaking powers recognized by the state government and without sufficient funding and resources at their disposal, even these “parallel governments” (for that is what they were for a year) soon fell into neglect. By the middle months of 1975, the Bihar mass movement abandoned the project of radical popular democracy. Protestors began to make a narrower electoral demand for the dissolution of the state legislative assembly ruled by the Congress Party. On the national political stage, JP himself changed his tenor from late May and early June 1975. At the end of May, he clarified in an interview that he had moved away from the revolutionary ideal of a federalist “partyless democracy” and instead aimed for a check on the authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi’s government along with reforms of campaign 43

44 45

Jayaprakash Narayan, “Role of People’s Movement (May 25, 1974),” in Towards Total Revolution, vol. 3, 66–70, at 69. Ibid. Vasant Nargolkar, JP’s Crusade for Revolution (New Delhi, 1975), 141.

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finance and intra-party decision-making.46 He now called for amendments, through Parliament, to the 1951 Representation of the People Act, which dealt with the registration of political parties and qualifications for election to the Lok Sabha. As if to demonstrate his newly moderated views, in early June JP coauthored a pamphlet with Krishna Kant, G. S. Bhargava, Sugata Dasgupta, and A. G. Noorani titled Towards Free and Fair Elections (1975).47 The pamphlet was a far cry from the militant anti-parliamentarism of sampurna kranti. JP’s coauthors were, for the most part, liberal constitutional lawyers and journalists. The text criticized “democratic centralism” and the growing political influence of lobby groups. It proposed the creation of a new public officer (lokpal), at the central and state level, to monitor electoral corruption caused by legislators accepting private donations. There was no mention of the janata samiti. Any hopes JP may have privately harbored for a fundamental transformation of the Indian political system were dashed on June 25 and 26, 1975, when President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed was asked by Indira Gandhi to declare a national State of Emergency under Article 352 (1) of the constitution. Following the terminology of Article 352, the putative reason given for the Emergency was a breakdown in the domestic law-and-order situation and the rise of imminent threats to national security.48 Once the declaration was passed, the central government was authorized to suspend Article 19 of the constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech, assembly, movement, and residence. Predictably, the suspension of Article 19 unleashed a torrent of press censorship, police violence, political arrests, and the concentration of unchecked, arbitrary power within the innermost circle of the Congress Party. In many ways, the Emergency made real radical democrats’ worst fears about the hierarchical nature of the postcolonial Indian state and the oligarchic tendencies hidden behind its democratic façade. Jayaprakash Narayan, then seventy-two, was arrested for 46

47

48

Jayaprakash Narayan, “The Revolt against the System (May 1975),” in Towards Total Revolution, vol. 3, 121–32. Jayaprakash Narayan, Krishna Kant, G. S. Bhargava, Sugata Dasgupta, and A. G. Noorani, Towards Free and Fair Elections (New Delhi, 1975). On the politics of the 1975 Emergency declaration, see Chandra, In the Name of Democracy, 156–92; Prakash, Emergency Chronicles, 162–204; and Sudipta Kaviraj, “Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 21, nos. 38/39 (1986), 1697–708; and Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil, India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975–1977 (London, 2020).

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sedition in June and kept in detention in Chandigarh for four months. His movement was more or less completely suppressed by 1976. To better understand the stakes of Jayaprakash Narayan’s approach to democratic politics in the 1970s, it is important to recognize one easily overlooked feature of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. This is the fact that the Emergency, however antidemocratic it was in practice, was initially justified through the discourse of representative democracy. Whatever may have been its actual underlying motivations – and there were many, not all of them particularly principled – the declaration of June 1975 was presented to the public as an urgent measure needed to safeguard the sanctity of constitutional processes from anti-constitutional popular street politics – to save democracy from itself, as it were. Indira Gandhi repeatedly drew attention to the rejection of parliamentary procedures in Jayaprakash Narayan’s writings and public pronouncements.49 At his most radical moments, as already discussed, JP did indeed advocate turning away from Indian democracy altogether and recovering older political models that predated the founding of the Indian republic. His movement’s criticisms of the 1950 constitution made it easy for the Gandhi administration to paint him and his followers as subversive antistate forces, strategically referring to the power of the people in order to upend actually existing democratic structures. JP was aware of the accusation and made some effort to distance himself from it. His more tempered rhetoric in 1975 was an attempt at managing his public image. In an interview weeks before his arrest, JP “repudiated all charges” that he was “out to destroy Parliamentary Democracy.”50 However, in the eyes of the state, this was all too little, too late, too unconvincing. The nature of JP’s ideology and the history of his movement opened a space for the state to frame its authoritarian crackdown on “total revolution” as a defense of representative, parliamentary institutions, as guardianship of the only authorized sites of the people’s authority.

6.4 End of an Era The Emergency was the most serious constitutional crisis and the most egregious instance of democratic erosion in the first quarter century of 49 50

Chandra, In the Name of Democracy, 60. Narayan, “The Revolt against the System,” 121.

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Indian independence. Article 19 remained suspended until 1977, when Indira Gandhi promised a new round of elections for the Lok Sabha. The 1977 elections proved to be her undoing, as the opposition Janata Party led by Morarji Desai was elected in March to form the first nonCongress central government. Jayaprakash Narayan spent a considerable portion of the first year of Emergency under arrest. His Prison Diary (1975), written in Hindi and English in sporadic bursts during incarceration between July and November 1975, was a somber reflection on the state of Indian democracy. The diary itself, it is worth noting parenthetically, was not allowed to be printed or circulated in India during the course of the Emergency. Sections of it were smuggled and printed secretly at night, to be distributed by hand among JP’s supporters. The civil rights activist Amritlal B. Shah got hold of the full manuscript in 1976 and managed to have an edited, bilingual version published in both India and North America the following year, once the press restrictions of the Emergency were lifted.51 In two entries in his Prison Diary from August 7 and August 14, 1975, JP wrote in dejected, defeated tones that his push for a “total revolution” in politics had been blocked by a “total counter-revolution” (sampurna pratikranti).52 The aspiration for a truly popular swaraj seemed to be a “dream” (swapna) from a past age: The fight for swaraj was never simply about national independence. Some of us have long held that independent India needed to also contain a true people’s government . . .. What remains of that idea of democracy today? How unreal, how much of a dream it is! Today the president and the prime minister are repeatedly giving assurances that the Emergency is only a temporary measure, that it is necessary to preserve the unity and constitutional democracy of India, and so on.53

While JP eventually felt vindicated by Indira Gandhi’s electoral loss in March 1977, it was also clear to him that, as far as practical politics were concerned, the curtain had fallen on radical democracy. As this chapter has argued, one way to understand Jayaprakash Narayan’s thoughts on popular sovereignty after 1950 is to locate them within the federalist tradition of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. JP’s debt to the two Mukherjee brothers – Beni Prasad, the Gandhian 51

52

A. B. Shah, “Introduction to the Second Edition (April 15, 1977),” in Jayaprakash Narayan, Prison Diary, 2nd ed., ed. A. B. Shah (Seattle, 1977), vii. 53 Narayan, Prison Diary, 129. Ibid., 130. My own translation from Hindi.

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tradition, and M. N. Roy’s Radical Democracy movement – was considerable. Like them, he viewed the nexus of parliamentarism, political parties, and statist government as leading to little more than an elected oligarchy. And like them, he promoted the equalization of legislative power among citizens’ assemblies. But unlike any of the other authors examined here, Jayaprakash Narayan wrote in the aftermath of formal decolonization, amid what David Scott has called the “tragic” temporality of the postcolonial present, surrounded by the wreckage of dashed hopes and abandoned revolutionary promises.54 Jayaprakash Narayan’s goal was to use older models of popular political participation to challenge what democracy came to mean after 1950. As a body of political thought, then, the real contribution of “total revolution” was to keep the flame of an anti-colonial democratic tradition still burning after independence, as a language of protest. With the demise of the movement in the 1970s, an entire way of thinking about democracy came to an end. Jayaprakash Narayan’s name and legacy continued to be invoked by anti-corruption, environmentalist, and grassroots popular movements in subsequent decades. As the political scientist D. L. Sheth observed in 2005, however, later peoples’ movements, unlike those of the 1960s and 1970s, did not necessarily have as their target the framework of the 1950 constitution, but rather the imbrication of state institutions and transnational corporate power that emerged as a key site of sovereignty in India after the 1980s, under the guise of globalization and development.55 Jayaprakash Narayan’s thoroughgoing challenge to electoral representation, the product of a different moment of democratic disillusion, effectively became an episode of intellectual history. 54

55

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC, 2004). D. L. Sheth, “Micro-Movements in India: Toward a New Politics of Participatory Democracy,” in Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (London, 2005), 3–37.

|

7

Conclusion The Challenge of Representative Democracy

When the history of Indian democracy is written in terms other than those of a progressive, liberal nationalist teleology, the parliamentary system of government that has dominated the country’s postindependence politics comes to seem less inevitable and more contingent. The principle of popular self-rule or swaraj provided the ideological underpinning for a range of institutional experiments between approximately 1920 and 1970, some briefly realized in practice and some limited to pamphlets and books, which were very different from the legal architecture of the 1950 Constitution of India. The irruption of anti-colonial protest and mass political action in the first two decades of the twentieth century produced currents of political thought critical of the liberal constitutional imagination of the first generation of Indian nationalists. The appeal of an anti-statist, robustly participatory form of republicanism was further amplified through the emergence of Gandhianism in the 1910s and of socialism in the 1930s and 1940s. In both these movements, self-government was understood as requiring direct access of citizens to the process of lawmaking, control over the actions of lawmakers and public officials, and a collectivist transformation of wealth and private property relations. The consolidation of a statist, electoral democracy in the 1950s, however, compelled the interwar tradition of radical democracy to linger on only as a language of protest. By the middle of the 1970s, the tradition’s antiparliamentarism no longer seemed to offer a viable template of postcolonial freedom. Radical democracy, with its legislative federalism, citizen assemblies, and socialist economics, was no longer a presence in the intellectual landscape of South Asia. Successful efforts at participatory local resource management introduced by the Communist government in Kerala from the 1960s on have sometimes earned the moniker of “radical democracy”; but the efforts in Kerala were not theorized as

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alternatives to electoral parliamentarism or to party politics and fell a bit outside of the Gandhian-socialist tradition examined in this book.1 When the history of Indian democracy is attentive to how relatively recently parliamentarism has come to constitute the horizon of politics, we begin to appreciate the range of contending postcolonial futures that were formulated over the course of the twentieth century. These were powerful pluralist, Gandhian, and socialist visions that remained appealing for decades despite (and often because of ) their hostility to modern liberalism. Swaraj began its public life in 1906 with Dadabhai Naoroji’s demand for electoral government, a demand notable for the fidelity it professed to John Stuart Mill and nineteenth-century liberal thinking on political rights and representation. By the time Jayaprakash Narayan’s “Swaraj for the People” was published in 1961, fifty-five years later, swaraj had been refashioned into an antiliberal principle. The career of swaraj, the governing concept of Indian democratic practice, is indicative of the changing fortunes and the dueling understandings of representative government in modern Indian history. It illustrates the pitfalls of approaching India’s independence movement through diffusionist paradigms, of reducing it to a tacit acceptance of the forms of government ascendant in nineteenth and twentieth-century Western Europe. The full story of Indian democracy is not a triumphalist story about the globalization of political liberalism. To unsettle the 1950 constitutional settlement is also to follow the thinkers examined in this book and turn a critical eye towards electoral democracy. From 1952 to 2019, India has held a total of seventeen national-level elections to the Lok Sabha through universal adult franchise, alongside many more elections to state legislatures. Several clear instances of democratic erosion notwithstanding, the actual process of voting and election has largely gone smoothly at the central and state levels (though one cannot say how long this will remain the case). The stability of parliament, the existence of robust multiparty competition, high levels of voter turnout, and largely peaceful transfers of power have all contributed to the country being touted again and again as “the world’s largest democracy.” India has almost entirely escaped the 1

On the Kerala case, see Manali Desai, State Formation and Radical Democracy in India (London, 2007); and Richard Sandbrook, Marc Edelman, Patrick Heller, and Judith Teichman, Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects (Cambridge, 2007), 65–92.

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problems of declining participation and voter apathy that have beset the United States and Western Europe through the postwar decades. It has also not experienced any extended periods of military rule at the national level, unlike many other states with otherwise similar postcolonial histories. Democratic stability is not, however, the same thing as democratic performance. On indices measuring political accountability, legislative transparency, and institutional responsiveness to public pressure, neither India’s union parliament nor its state assemblies perform very well.2 A large-scale multisite survey conducted in 2003 found very low levels of trust in the capacity of electoral institutions to effectively deliver public goods and to accurately reflect public concerns, especially amongst those around or below the poverty line.3 Citizens vote in large numbers, but do not necessarily feel that the electoral system allows for adequate popular oversight over public policy in between elections. Many of the sources of India’s accountability crisis lie within the design of the political system itself, particularly in the degree of power and autonomy given to political parties, MPs, and MLAs in setting legislative agendas. In 1990, the political scientist Atul Kohli diagnosed a growing “crisis of governability” within India’s otherwise stable multi-party democracy, deriving from “tremendous concentration of power in the hands of a few leaders.”4 The problem has, if anything, only worsened in the thirty years since. Parliamentary politics has been beset with the growing disciplinary control of party leadership over legislators and the lack of any sustained attention to popular legislative initiation, consultation processes, or the recall of lawmakers. The size and scale of electoral constituencies means that there is little direct interaction between Indian parliamentarians and their constituents outside of campaigning and election. The most recent Report on Electoral Reforms produced by the 255th Law Commission of India in March 2015 rejected proposals for a Right to Recall (RTR) 2

3

4

See Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Indian Parliament as an Institution of Accountability (Geneva, 2006). Neera Chandhoke, “Revisiting the Crisis of Representation Thesis: The Indian Context,” Democratization, vol. 12, no. 3 (2005), 308–30. More recently, see the discussion in Yogendra Yadav, “Democratic Paradox: Political Representation in Contemporary India,” in Making Sense of Indian Democracy (New Delhi, 2020), 166–92. Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge, 1990), 390.

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in state and central assemblies.5 A gulf continues to separate the making of law in the halls of parliament and the aspirations and frustrations of the street. That the parliamentary government of the 1950 constitution has had substantial successes certainly cannot be denied. In a country with some of the world’s deepest ethno-cultural diversity, legislative assemblies, often modified through legal instruments of descriptive representation, have enabled the electoral participation of a disparate set of group identities. The electoral arena has created a space for the mobilization of populations previously excluded from governance, especially at the state level following the disintegration of Congress hegemony in the 1980s.6 But transforming the social composition of legislatures is just one aspect of democratic deepening. There is also an underlying question about the nature of the relationship between electors and the elected. When differences in religion, gender, and caste map closely onto glaring, violent disparities in basic social freedoms, as is very much the case in India today, a mere “politics of presence,” without institutional safeguards of popular accountability, cannot on its own secure the self-government of the most disadvantaged.7 To paraphrase the question K. T. Shah put forcefully to the Constituent Assembly in the late 1940s: How do we ensure that the public officials elected by the poor are in fact kept under their control, especially in the periods between elections? How can we give real political power and a share in control over economic resources to those who do not or cannot stand for election? How do we allow for common citizens, and not just members of a political class, to access the goods of social democracy? How do we bring about a genuinely equitable distribution of the capacity for self-rule? For all its achievements, parliamentary liberalism has not given us satisfactory answers to these questions. Its minimalist configuration of representation excludes voters themselves from the working of government. The collapse of popular rule into electoral representation makes it difficult to establish what Pierre Rosanvallon calls a “permanent democracy”

5

6

7

Law Commission of India, Report No. 255: Electoral Reforms (New Delhi, 2015), 195–200. See Christophe Jaffrelot and Sanjay Kumar, eds., Rise of the Plebeians? The Changing Face of Indian Legislative Assemblies (London, 2009). Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence (Oxford, 1995).

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for those who lack any political voice beyond an electoral vote every few years.8 As Niraja Jayal has argued, “to treat representation as the sine qua non of democracy, its desired end-state, is to be insufficiently demanding of democracy: for there is danger in presuming that the tasks of democracy are complete once proper representation has been achieved.”9 Revisiting the defeated democratic visions of earlier decades forces us to reckon with the inherent limitations of addressing social inequality through electoral representation. Radical democracy becomes, then, not a lost, hopelessly utopian way of thinking, but a tangible republican model from the past with lessons for our beleaguered present. When we return to such a counter-discourse of popular self-rule, we are also pushed to reevaluate our understanding of the intellectual coordinates of anti-colonial nationalism. It is important to maintain a distinction between two phenomena that political philosophers as much as social scientists have been apt to conflate or confuse: the political thought of anti-colonial protest on one hand, and the political thought of postcolonial governance – the ruling ideologies of the nation-states that emerged from the ruins of empire – on the other. The relationship between the two was characterized by tension and displacement. During the period of anti-colonial struggle, strands of democratic thought prioritized the empowerment of common citizens. These intellectual traditions valued organic acts of collective selfassertion by the people, not the building of powerful new states or governance by professional politicians. Indian socialists’ engagements with the problem of political representation during the independence movement resonated, for instance, with critiques of elite rule in other anti-colonial contexts, such as with Frantz Fanon’s censorious analysis of revolutionary political parties and postcolonial leadership in chapter 3 of The Wretched of the Earth (1961),10 or with C. L. R. James’ enthusiastic proposals for direct democracy and legislative sortition in his important (and unfortunately neglected) essay “Every Cook Can

8

9

10

Pierre Rosanvallon, Good Government: Democracy beyond Elections, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA, 2018). Niraja Gopal Jayal, “The Limits of Representative Democracy,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 32, no. 3 (2009), 326–37, at 337. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London, 2001), 119–65.

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Govern” (1956).11 The recurrence of parallel ideas in Beni Prasad’s Allahabad, Narendra Deva’s Delhi, Fanon’s West Africa, and James’ Caribbean brings to light a shared, border-crossing moment of critical democratic thought, situated at the margins of dominant nationalist movements. Only once the republican, participatory chapter of anti-colonialism had lost the day could nationalism be seen by observers as narrowly preoccupied with state sovereignty and elite representation. The end of empire could then be equated with the victory of statist representative institutions. The complete erasure of radical democracy as a driving concern of decolonization has been striking, notably (though not only) among Western commentators. John Plamenatz in 1960 maintained that leaders in Asia and Africa were relying on pedagogical rule by a Westernized elite and the “force” of state institutions to “create the social conditions which eventually make democracy possible.”12 In a lecture on political freedom delivered in 1966–67, Hannah Arendt remarked that “the end of imperialism under the pressure of nationalism” had resulted in the global dissemination of a “Jacobin” ideal of political order, with new states striving to lift their people out of poverty through the “enlightened despotism” of the few.13 And in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Samuel Huntington looked back on the end of colonial rule and saw it as briefly opening a window of opportunity for the introduction of procedural electoral democracy to the non-European world.14 The revolutionary demand for selfdetermination was not seen as enacting a break with what political life had come to mean within mid-twentieth-century Western modernity. It was, if anything, seen as its fulfillment. Such interpretations do more than just flatten out the politics of decolonization. At a deeper level, they mute our critical faculties and foreclose the possibility of excavating from anti-colonialism’s tortuous history subjugated vocabularies of transformative politics, of 11

12 13

14

C. L. R. James, “Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece and Its Meaning for Today (1956),” in The Future in the Present: Selected Writings (London, 1977), 160–74. John Plamenatz, On Alien Rule and Self-Government (London, 1960), 115. Hannah Arendt, “‘The Freedom to Be Free’: The Conditions and Meaning of Revolution,” in Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2018), 368–86. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK, 1991), 19–21.

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democratic resistance to liberal exclusions. But the history of a movement always remains available to be told in another way and to be reclaimed for another politics, its forgotten aspects invoked for another end. The task of excavation can still be carried out, with an eye trained towards a more just and a more egalitarian future for citizens of the Global South. And through this work of marshaling history, anticolonial democratic thought becomes ever more relevant for the twenty-first century, a moment when the value of democracy itself is being called into question.

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Index

absolutism, 49, 57 Agarwal, Shriman Narayan, 29, 94, 119, 152, 160 Gandhian Constitution for Free India, 108–19 Age of Revolutions, 17–19 agrarian redistribution, 119 Ahmed, Fakhruddin Ali, 161 Aiyangar, K. V. Rangaswami, 73, 75 All-India Panchayat, 111 Altekar, A. S., 152 Ambedkar, B. R., 134 Andhra Patrika, 56, 58 anti-colonialism, 1, 5–6, 17–20, 24, 26, 99, 118, 121–23, 146–47, 164–65, 170. See also nationalism, anticolonial Asian, 15 culturally revivalist, 68 and the Indian constitution, 143 Laski on, 21 liberal (“Moderate”), 68 and nationalism, 169 revolutionary (“Extremist”), 68 and self-determination, 12 Soviet, 16 and statism, 22 twentieth-century movements, 17 Western, 16 anti-imperialism, 8, 12, 16, 118, 148 anti-parliamentarism, 4, 29, 120, 124, 137, 165 anti-statism, 94 Archaeological Survey of India, 72, 78 Arendt, Hannah, 170 Arthasastra, 71–72, 77 Asoka (Buddhist emperor), 60

assemblies. See citizen assemblies, General Assemblies, local assemblies, local councils, primary assemblies, provincial assemblies, provincial councils, territorial assemblies Aundh constitution, 99–100, 109, 114 Austin, Granville, 122–23 autocracy, 1, 127, 132 Bacon, Francis, 45 Bakunin, Mikhail, 10, 12 Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian Peoples, 24 Banerjea, Pramathanath, 73 Banerjee, Albion Rajkumar, 42, 48, 52, 56–57 Banerjee, Gurudas, 74 Banerjee, Surendranath, 64, 67–68 Barnett, Lionel, 88 Bengal National College, 74–75 Bentinck, William, 33 Berlin, Isaiah, 20 Berriedale Keith, Arthur, 88 Bevin, Ernest, 20 Bhargava, G. S., 161 Bhave, Vinoba, 29, 94, 107, 110, 119, 142, 148 biography of, 108 Bhoodan Yajna, 148 Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar, 22 Bolsheviks, 8, 10–12, 15, 17, 132 Bombay Presidency Association, 63 Bonnerji, W. C., 64 Bose, Rash Behari, 91 Bowring, Lewin Bentham, 35 Brahmo Samaj, 43 British Empire, 26, 42, 94, 134 and the princely states, 31

193

194 British Labor Party, 5 Bull, Hedley, 23 capitalism, 2, 4, 8–9, 11, 29, 102, 107, 119, 132 acquisitive, 108 vs. collectivism, 106 vs. communal economics, 104 criticism of, 96, 109, 113 democracy and, 109 global, 30 indigenous, 138 industrial, 95, 109 opposition to, 120 state-led, 109 twentieth-century, 107 Carvaka school, 45 caucus system, 149, 151 censorship, 2, 161 Central Committee for Promoting Local Self-Government in Gujarat, 63 centralism, 151, 161 centralization, 151 Chatham House think tank, 17 checks-and-balances, 143 Chelmsford, Lord (Frederic Thesiger), 70 Chola Empire, 80, 82, 85–86 Chola, Parantaka I, 80 Christian Socialism, 109, 112–13 Christianity, Unitarian, 43 citizen assemblies, 27, 34, 82, 116, 124, 133, 135, 138, 152, 164–65 citizenship, 9, 45, 71, 147 active, 105, 141 common, 86 democratic, 145 social rights of, 25 civil disobedience, 47, 146 civil rights, 130, 163 Clemenceau, Georges, 14 Cobban, Alfred, 17–18, 21 Cole, G. D. H., 5, 95 collectivism, 95, 105, 107, 110, 115, 119, 149 cooperative, 110 economic, 106, 117, 120 rural, 105 colonial studies, 147 Comintern (Communist International), 10, 12, 116

Index common good, 48 communes, 110 Communism, 1, 106 in Kerala, 165 in northern India, 139 “Oriental”, 118, 120 village, 120 Communist Party of India (CPI), 116, 125, 142 Congress of the Peoples of the East, 10–12 Congress Party, 158, 160–61 Congress Socialist Party, 137, 148 Constituent Assembly, 29, 93, 118, 168 dissent over the constitution, 124–36 elections for, 139 redistricting powers of, 126–27 socialist boycott of, 136 and the voters’ right of recall, 127, 129 Constitution of Free India (Roy), 117 constitutionalism, 47 British, 51 English, 13 modern Indian, 34 parliamentary, 148 republican, 145 Cooch Behar College, 43, 46 cooperative societies, 112 councils. See local councils, provincial councils Crewe, Robert, 75 Crown Territories, 62 cumulative voting (CV), 115–16 Curtis, Lionel, 20 Dange, S. A., 106, 110 Dasgupta, Sugata, 161 decentralization, 67, 160 federalist, 28, 54 political, 156 decolonization, 164 political, 25 politics of, 170 scholarship on, 26 Democracies of the East (Mukerjee), 82–90, 104 democracy accountable, 103 alternate methods of, 102

Index in ancient and medieval India, 85 capitalism and, 29, 109 capitalist, 104 colonial subject and, 4 common people and, 155 constitutional, 94, 113, 159 controlled, 147 council-based, 95, 103, 107–8, 114, 119 cultural, 105 decentralized, 95, 103 Deva’s view of, 137, 140–41 differing views of, 127 direct, 26–29, 79–80, 86–87, 90–92, 106, 110, 113–14, 116, 120, 124, 141, 152, 156, 169 economic ethics and, 107 egalitarian, 95 egalitarian power promised by, 107 electoral, 4, 30, 102, 104, 109, 122, 129, 134, 137, 141, 144, 154, 165–66, 170 elite governance and, 30 erosion of, 166 federal, 133 federalist, 87, 94–95, 114, 160 flawed version of, 98 formal, 105, 107 functional, 104 Gandhian, 29, 92, 94–96, 102, 106, 119 history of, 60–62, 84 ideals of, 132, 138 in India, 60, 147 Indian, 155, 162–63, 165–66 liberal, 19–20, 109 liberal representative, 1, 24, 30 local, 90, 152 low-intensity, 30 mass, 90, 124, 131, 142 middle class and, 68 modern, 60–61, 119, 122, 133 monistic states and, 84–85 moral order of, 119–20 multiparty, 167 Mysore constitution and, 34 Narayan’s view of, 108, 148, 160, 164 nationalism and, 21 nationalist, 122

195 Nehru Report and, 89 non-electoral, 35 organic, 156 parliamentary, 27, 94, 101, 107, 122–23, 128–29, 135, 149–51 participatory, 29, 90, 96, 103, 107, 119 party-based, 134, 141 partyless, 149, 160 permanent, 168 pluralist, 92 political, 30, 102, 107, 113 political order and, 13 political parties and, 149 popular, 103, 136, 141, 160 post-WWII, 3 primary, 90 procedural, 142, 170 racialized construction of, 97 radical, 93, 135, 149, 160, 163, 165, 169–70 representation and, 169 representative, 1, 4–5, 14, 30, 55, 61–62, 76, 84, 88, 90, 94, 104, 106–7, 109, 114, 137–38, 151, 162 republican, 15 Rousseau’s ideal of, 90 Seal Plan and, 58 Shah’s views of, 129, 132–33 social, 168 statist, 165 “true”, 138 twentieth-century, 151 twenty-first century and, 171 Western, 4, 149, 156 Western European, 85, 122 will of the people and, 61 Wilson’s thinking on, 14–15 democratization, 52, 57, 137, 154 Desai, Morarji, 163 Deshmukh, Panjabrao, 134–35 despotism, 19, 170 Deva, Acharya Narendra, 136–42, 145, 170 Dewey, John, 156 dictatorships, 5, 109 of the proletariat, 9 statist, 107 direct action, 15, 54–55, 87

196 Directive Principles of State Policy, 118 Doctor, Adi Hormusji, 154 Du Bois, W. E. B., 4 Dufferin, Lord (Frederick HamiltonTemple-Blackwood), 65 Dundas, Lawrence (Earl of Ronaldshay), 58 Dutch Empire, 26 Duverger, Maurice, 150 East India Association, 63 East India Company, 31, 33 economic development, 147 economics. See also moral economy collectivist, 119 communal, 104–5 moral, 29 egalitarianism, 113 Elliot, Robert Henry, 39–40 Emerson, Rupert, 21–22 Engels, Friedrich, 7 ethics economic, 29, 96, 107 Islamic, 32 executive committee, 110, 153 Fabian Society, 112 Fanon, Frantz, 169 farmers’ movements, 134, 137 fascism, 138 federalism, 10, 28, 53, 58, 61, 79, 81, 87, 91, 114, 152, 163 in ancient India, 89 anti-colonial, 27 assembly-based, 54 democracy and, 94 in India, 79 interwar, 30 legislative, 165 and popular sovereignty, 28 representative vision of, 27 republican, 86 in South Asia, 26 Fernandes, George, 158 foreign trade, 112 Franchise Law Amendment Bill, 97 French Empire, 25 French Revolution, 17, 19, 21 Friedrich, Carl, 22

Index Gandhi and Marx (Mashruwala), 106 Gandhi vs. Lenin (Dange), 106 Gandhi, Indira, 158, 160, 162–63 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 2, 27, 29, 92, 118, 147–48, 155–56. See also Hind Swaraj (Gandhi) and the Aundh reforms, 99–100, 103, 114 on democracy, 94–96 “Draft Constitution of Congress”, 100 on parliamentary democracy, 101 and representative government, 96–101 Gandhi, Sanjay, 158 Gandhian Constitution for Free India (Agarwal), 108–19, 152 Gandhianism, 103, 106, 110, 119, 142, 163, 165 at Wardha, 101–8 Ganguly, Nagendranath, 59 General Assemblies, 20, 58, 77, 153–54 of the United Nations, 24 Ghose, Rabindra Narayan, 83 Ghoshal, Upendranath, 72 Gierke, Otto von, 22 Gledhill, Alan, 122–23 globalization, 164, 166 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, 67–70, 75 Government of India Act, 62, 65, 94, 125, 132–33, 136, 139 Government Oriental Library of Mysore State, 71 Green, T. H., 156 Guizot, François, 5 Haksar, P. N., 158 Harris, George Robert, 40 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 44, 47, 54, 156 Hind Swaraj (Gandhi), 2, 27, 29, 92, 95, 97–99, 101–2, 109, 119 Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (Hindi Literary Conference), 78 Hinduism Brahmo Samaj sect, 43 politics and, 92 social reform and, 32 Hobbes, Thomas, 144 Hobhouse, Charles Edward, 67, 69

Index Hobhouse, Leonard T., 6–7 Hobson, John, 1 home-rule. See self-rule Hume, A. O., 64 Hungarian Soviet Republic, 11 Huntington, Samuel, 170 Husain, Tajamul, 128 imperialism, 5, 19, 102, 170 opposition to, 10 Independent Labor Party, 134 Indian Association, 63 Indian constitution, 29, 118, 165 drafting of, 124–36 the people and, 142–45 power to amend, 143 Preamble to, 144 Indian Councils Acts, 62 Indian National Congress (INC), 29 arguments for self-government, 68 breakdown of the “Congress system”, 157 compared to British government, 130 in the Constituent Assembly, 125, 127 constitutional philosophy of, 83 criticism of, 76, 92, 98 establishment of, 63 early concerns of, 64 establishment of, 63 inaugural session of, 64 liberal wing of, 109 movement demanding reform, 61 nationalism of, 90 political representation and, 62–71, 75, 82, 124 on self-rule, 85 Shah’s association with, 131 socialist factions, 119, 136 swaraj and, 81, 86, 88 Working Committee, 93 individualism, 107 International Congress of Orientalists in Rome, 46 International Journal of Comparative Civilization, 47 internationalism, 147 Iran, 6 Islam, 32 Ismail, Mirza Muhammad, 57

197 Iyer, K. Seshadri, 39 Iyer Thyagaraja, V. R., 48 James, C. L. R, 169 Janata Party, 163 Japan, 47 Jayaswal, Kashi Prasad, 78–79, 152 Jennings, Ivor, 122–23 Joshi, M. D., 91 jungle law, 102 Kamath, Hari Vishnu, 127–29, 135 Kant, Krishna, 161 Karnik, Vasant, 117 Kaur, Amrit, 99, 104 Keith, Arthur Berriedale, 34 Keynes, John Maynard, 15 Khan, Mohammed Abbas, 52 Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party, 142 Kohli, Atul, 167 Kothari, Rajni, 157 Kripalani, J.B., 142 Krishnamurti, P. N., 41 Kumarappa, Bharatan, 106 Kumarappa, Joseph Cornelius on anti-colonialism, 16 on capitalism, 102 on communal economics, 103, 105 on democracy, 1, 94, 102, 104–6, 119 after Gandhi’s death, 119 influence of, 107 on self-rule, 3 Shriman Narayan and, 108, 113 on sovereignty, 1 writings of, 2, 29, 94, 109, 114, 120, 160 Kun, Béla, 11 Lahiri, Somnath, 125 Lal, Mukundi, 79 land reform legislation, 143 Land-Gift Movement, 148 Lansing, Robert, 14 Laski, Harold, 21–22, 88 Law, Narendra Nath, 72 Law Commission of India, 167 Lawrence, John, 35 League Against Imperialism (LAI), 12, 24

198 League of Nations, 24 Mandates system, 14, 20 League of Nations Covenant, 14 Lefort, Claude, 159 legislative assemblies, 70, 76, 115, 127, 129, 144, 168 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 7–9, 15–16, 18, 27, 132 Leninism, 10, 12, 16 liberalism, 5–6, 23, 30 alternatives to, 110 Anglo-American, 23 British, 43, 100 economic, 96 modern, 166 opposition to, 119 parliamentary, 168 political, 166 reaction against, 119 reformist imperial, 63 Lloyd George, David, 14 local assemblies, 49–50, 52–53, 81, 87–88, 135, 138, 156 local councils, 57, 66, 110–11, 141 Local Government in Ancient India (Mookerji), 73, 75–78, 81, 83, 85, 88, 92, 111, 152 response to, 81 Lohia, Ram Manohar, 142 Luxemburg, Rosa, 4, 8, 141 Maconochie, Evan, 41 Madras Epigraphy Report, 78 Madras Mahajan Sabha, 63 majority rule, 116, 127 Majumdar, Ramesh Chandra, 82 Malaviya, Madan Mohan, 70, 84 Manor, James, 57 Maratha Empire, 31 Marshall, John, 72 Marx, Karl, 7–8, 10, 107, 156 Marxism, 7, 95, 106–7, 136–42, 148 parliamentarism and, 154 Mashruwala, Kishorlal, 29, 94, 106–8, 110, 113, 119 mass mobilization, 27 Matthan, Kuriyan, 52 Mauryan Empire, 60, 71, 74, 80, 86 Mayer, Arno, 16 Mehta, Asoka, 136, 140–41, 148

Index Mehta, Pherozeshah, 64, 66, 68, 70 militarism, imperial, 7 Mill, John Stuart, 5, 166 Misra, Lokanath, 135 monarchism, 88 monarchy autocratic, 19 conceptual foundations of, 121 defense of, 144 despotic, 89 federal, 55 hereditary, 79 in India, 50, 52–53, 79 in Mysore, 35–43, 49–50, 53, 55–56 pre-modern, 80 Seal’s support for, 58 Wodeyar, 33–34, 51 Montagu, Edwin, 70 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, 42, 58–59 Montesquieu, 19 Mookerji, Radhakumud. See also Local Government in Ancient India (Mookerji) on democracy, 61, 76, 79–80 on federalism, 79, 81, 88 influence of, 163 lectures at Lucknow, 60–61 popular reaction to, 81, 152 on self-rule, 61 socially conservative turn, 91 writings of, 28, 61, 73, 75–78, 81, 111 moral economy, 29, 95, 106, 112–13, 120 agrarian, 96 non-capitalist, 120 moral education, 112, 114 Morgenthau, Hans, 18 Morley-Minto Reforms, 42 Morris-Jones, W. H., 122, 156 Mughal Empire, 31, 74, 88 Mukerjee, Radhakamal Beni Prasad and, 89–90 Democracies of the East, 82–90, 104 on democracy, 83, 90 Gandhi and, 92 influence of, 152, 163 and the swadeshi movement, 73–74 at University of Lucknow, 91 writings of, 28, 61, 157

Index Mukherjee, Satischandra, 73–74, 83 Muslim League, 125 Mysore delegates in the Constituent Assembly, 125 democratic reform in, 28 history of, 50 monarchy and reform in, 35–43 political position of, 41 as princely state, 32 Mysore constitution, 28, 32–34, 40, 42, 48–56, 59, 83, 87, 100 Mysore Constitutional Developments Committee, 48, 54 Mysore Legislative Council, 41, 48, 51, 53, 55–56 Mysore Report, 59 Mysore Representative Assembly, 36–40, 48, 51, 53, 55–57 Nanjundaiah, H. V., 47 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 2, 64–65, 68, 75, 84, 89, 166 Narayan, Jayaprakash, 29, 101, 115, 136, 141–42 background and early years, 147 A Plea for Reconstruction, 148–54 Prison Diary, 163 Swaraj for the People, 154–57, 166 on total revolution, 157–62 Narayan, Nripendra (Maharaja), 43, 46 Narayan, Shriman. See Agarwal, Shriman Narayan Nargolkar, Vasant Sadashiv, 160 National Council of Education, 74 nationalism anti-colonial, 2, 12, 18, 23, 70, 74, 84, 117, 121, 157, 169 anti-imperial, 8, 10 in Bengal, 61 Chinese, 23 and democracy, 21 disagreements within, 24 dominant movements of, 170 Egyptian, 23 German, 118 imperialism and, 170 of the INC, 90 Indian, 3, 23, 27, 58, 62, 68, 74–75, 89, 91, 121–22, 130–31, 140, 144, 165

199 Japanese, 92, 118 Korean, 23 non-European, 7, 23 and state sovereignty, 170 twentieth-century, 81 Navnirman Andolan, 158 negative freedom, 20 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 121–24, 127, 135, 143–44, 146, 154–55 Nehru, Motilal, 89 Nehru Report, 89, 91 New Left, 159 Non-Cooperation Movement, 147 Noorani, A. G., 161 Nyaya school, 45 Objectives Resolution, 121, 135 oligarchy, 4, 89, 109, 151, 161, 163 democratic, 149 Pakistan, 125 Pali canon, 72 pan-Asianism, 86 Pant, Bhavanrao, 99–100 paramountcy, 31 Parekh, Bhikhu, 123 Pargiter, Frederick Eden, 82 Paris Peace Conference, 14–16 Paris Peace Settlement, 11 parliamentarism, 5, 27–29, 85, 97–99, 101–2, 106, 115, 124, 128, 134–35, 145, 163, 166. See also anti-parliamentarism democratic alternatives to, 59 economic dimensions of, 103 electoral, 166 limitations of, 136, 140 Marxist critique of, 154 modern, 144, 149, 151 Nehruvian theory of, 122 twentieth-century, 151 parliamentary government, 2, 28, 113–14 parliamentary supremacy, 29, 51, 114, 122, 143 Patel, Chimanbhai, 158 Pathik, Vijay Singh, 137–39, 142 patriotism, 110 Pavlovich, Mikhail, 12 People’s Committees, 116, 154, 160

200 philosophy European, 45 history of, 43–45 Indian, 45, 47 political, 45, 47 Plamenatz, John Petrov, 18–20, 170 Plea for Reconstruction of Indian Polity, A (Narayan), 148–54 pluralism, 62, 152 European, 61 German, 22 in the 1920s, 90–92 of Radhakamal Mukerjee, 88 of Radhakumud Mookerji, 80 and the pluralist turn, 71–82 political, 61 plutocracy, 104, 109 Poland, 8 Polanyi, Karl, 95 political parties, 101, 104, 110, 133, 145, 149–50, 154, 161, 163 oligarchic structure of, 151 power and autonomy of, 167 revolutionary, 169 Poona Sarvjanik Sabha, 63 popular assemblies, 82, 153, 156. See also local assemblies popular sovereignty. See also sovereignty anti-colonialism and, 21–22 anti-statist theory of, 147 in British constitutional thought, 51 collectivist vision of, 120 common citizen and, 81 defeated tradition of, 30 democracy and, 84, 123, 129, 132 Deva’s view of, 142 diffusionist understanding of, 19 direct, 96 electoral representation and, 56, 62, 70, 85, 124, 129, 135, 145 federalism and, 28 the Government of India Act and, 133 Indian constitution and, 124, 129, 140, 144 Indian theory of, 56 institutionalization of, 23 intellectual histories of, 27 in the Mysore constitution, 34

Index Narayan’s view of, 30, 149, 163 national independence and, 17 Nehru’s vision of, 122 parliamentary sovereignty as, 123 participatory theories of, 29 representation by government institutions, 151 Rousseau’s ideal of, 88 Shah’s theory of, 134 socialist support for, 136 in South Asia, 121, 124 in Tawney’s thought, 113 theories of, 5 “unrepresentable”, 90 as unsuited to the masses, 139 voting as, 135 and the will of the majority, 132 postcolonial studies, 147 Praja Socialist Party, 142 Prasad, Beni, 28, 61, 88–91, 152, 157, 163, 170 Prasad, Rajendra, 125, 127, 130, 144 presentism, 75 primary assemblies, 49–54, 58. See also local assemblies princely states, 26, 28, 31–32, 35, 93, 125 quasi-sovereignty and, 31–35 private property, 107, 112–13, 165 property rights, 15, 119 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 10 provincial assemblies, 111, 115. See also provincial councils provincial councils, 63, 65. See also provincial assemblies Public Administration in Ancient India (Banerjea), 73 Quit India Movement, 148 Radek, Karl, 10–11, 15 Radical Democracy movement, 164 Radical Democratic Party (RDP), 116–17, 154, 160 rajadharma, 32 Ramamurti, Pratapgiri, 88 Rangacharlu, C. V., 35–38, 42, 55 Rangaswami Aiyangar, K. V., 72 Rangienar, C., 39 Rao, B. Shiva, 122, 143–44

Index Rao, M. Shama, 33, 57 Rao, V. P. Madhava, 41 Rapson, E. J., 81 Rau, Benegal Narsing, 94, 114 Ray, Prafulla Chandra, 45 redistricting powers, 126–27 referenda local, 54–57 popular, 54, 135, 138, 141 rights of, 88, 117, 124, 127 Representation of the People Act, 161 representative government, 13–14, 107, 114, 120, 166 challenges to, 5 and economic ethics, 96 Gandhi and, 96–101 and the INC, 85 in India, 97 limitations of, 149 parliamentary, 123 state-based, 23 republicanism, 28, 144 agrarian, 110 anti-statist, 165 Indian, 118 premodern, 152 Resolution on Local Self-Government for India, 63 revolutions. See also total revolution age of, 17–19 anti-colonial, 121 Atlantic, 22, 24 democratic, 7 French and American, 17, 19, 21 in Europe, 7 in the colonies, 7 popular, 135 proletariat and, 9 Russian, 132 Right of Nations to Self-Determination, The (Lenin), 7 Right to Recall (RTR), 167 Ripon, Lord (George Robinson), 63–64 Robertson, Donald, 40 Robinson, John, 96 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 21, 85, 88, 90, 156 Roy, Manabendra Nath (M. N. Roy), 8, 116–17, 119, 124, 154, 157, 163

201 Royal Commission on Decentralization, 67–69 Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), 17 Russian Revolution, 132 sabha, 76, 86–87, 89, 91, 110, 112, 152–53 features of, 77 Jayaswal’s account of, 79 Saksena, Shibban Lal, 118 Santhanam, K., 126–27 Sapru, Tej Bahadur, 89 Sarkar, Benoy Kumar, 45, 83, 91 sarvodaya, 103 Schmitt, Carl, 5 Scott, James, 95 Seal Committee on Constitutional Reforms, 48, 56–58 Seal Committee Report, The, 56–58 Seal, Brajendra Nath (B. N. Seal) Committee on Constitutional Reforms, 48, 56–58 early life and education, 43 on imperial sovereignty, 47 on local referendum, 87 Mysore constitution and, 28, 33, 43, 45, 48–51, 53–56, 59, 87 on political participation, 58 on popular sovereignty, 56, 88 as Radhakamal’s mentor, 83 study of Indian political history, 47 study of philosophy, 43–48 support for monarchy, 52, 58 self-determination, 3, 6, 12, 16–17, 114 anti-colonial, 12, 18 colonial, 15–16, 94 national, 14 popular, 24 revolutionary demand for, 170 Wilsonian, 23, 27 self-government. See also self-rule from above, 75 in Britain and the United States, 19 collective, 16 colonial, 19 direct access to lawmaking and, 165 in India, 67, 75 municipal, 36 in Mysore, 37, 52

202 self-government. (cont.) and popular accountability, 168 post-imperial, 135 “real”, 133, 138 representative, 26 as representative government, 68 republican, 29 right to, 130, 133 Tilak’s definition of, 69 self-rule, 2, 7, 168. See also swaraj collective, 30, 114 of imperial subjects, 27 INC’s understanding of, 75 and the Indian constitution, 123 local, 18 in the Mysore constitution, 34 nationalist demands for, 61 in nationalist politics, 137 parliamentary government and, 123 political, 14 proletarian, 141 promises of, 56 representative government and, 70 as representative government, 14 self-sufficiency, 112 Sen, Kshitish Chandra, 47 separatism, 10 Setlur, Srinivas, 56, 58 Shah, Amritlal B., 163 Shah, Khushal Talaksi (K. T.), 126–27, 129–30, 132–35, 137, 168 on radical reform, 131 Shamasastry, Rudrapatna, 71–72 Sheth, D. L., 164 Sidhwa, Rustom K., 127–29, 144 Sikh Empire, 31 Skachko, Anatoly, 11 social reformism, Hindu, 32 socialism, 4, 106, 108, 114, 119, 142, 145, 148, 165 African, 147 agrarian, 29, 95 Christian, 109, 112–13 decentralized federalist, 12 direct democracy and, 124 economic, 112 economics and, 165 Gandhian, 166 Gandhian democracy and, 119

Index guild, 112 in the INC, 119, 136 Indian, 29, 141–42, 169 in northern India, 139 and self-rule, 124 South Asian, 124 Socialist Party of India (SPI), 115, 136, 140, 142, 147–48 sortition, 111, 114, 152, 169 South Mysore Planters’ Association, 39 sovereignty. See also popular sovereignty in ancient India, 88 anti-colonial, 25 of colonial people, 1, 14 delegated, 1 direct, 151 economic, 24 filtered through representatives, 91 imperial, 32, 47 in India, 42, 46, 50 Indian debates on, 5 Indian theories of, 47 just distribution of, 95 legislative, 39, 105, 110, 122 liberalism and, 23 of local assemblies, 87 in the Mauryan Empire, 60 in Mysore, 49 national, 17–18, 27 in nationalist politics, 137 parliamentary, 121–22, 127, 144 participatory, 62 political, 24 popular, 121 in the princely states, 31–35 of professional politicians, 130 republican, 135, 142 Rousseau’s ideal of, 90 in the Soviet state, 132 state, 28, 99, 170 of state institutions, 164 of the workers’ party, 10 unitary, 49 Soviet Union, 132 soviets, 12 stagflation, 157 Stalin, Joseph, 10 state boundaries, 126–27

Index statism, 18, 21–22, 27, 29–30, 151, 154, 163, 170 parliamentary, 119 Streit, Clarence, 20 suffrage, universal adult, 58, 89, 91, 101, 105, 115, 123, 129, 139, 144, 155, 166 Sultanate, 49 swadeshi movement, 61, 73–75, 82, 86–87, 91 swaraj, 2, 5, 61, 101, 155, 163, 165–66. See also self-rule from above, 155 electoral representation and, 91 as elite representation, 83, 86 and the INC, 81 Malaviya’s understanding of, 70 Mookerji’s understanding of, 76 parliamentary, 92 political representation and, 68 popular sovereignty and, 70 purna (complete), 93 refashioning of, 166 representative government and, 76 Tilak’s understanding of, 69 Swaraj for the People (Narayan), 154–57, 166 Swaraj-shastra (Bhave), 107 Tawney, R. H., 95, 109, 113 Telang, Kashinath Trimbak, 64, 66 territorial assemblies, 76, 86. See also sabha Third Communist International (Comintern), 10, 12 Third Reform (Representation of the People) Act, 63 Thompson, E. P., 95 Thoreau, Henry David, 47 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 68, 70, 75, 84 Tipu Sultan, 33, 50 Tolstoy, Leo, 47 total revolution, 30, 157–64 trade union movement, 5 traditionalism, 119

203 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 22 Tyabji, Badruddin, 64 Union Parliament, 142–43 Unitarian Christianity, 43 United Nations, 19 General Assembly, 24 Universal Races Congress, 46, 54 universal suffrage. See suffrage, universal adult University of Allahabad, 1, 28, 61, 89, 91–92 University of Bombay, 61, 132 University of Calcutta, 61, 74 University of Lucknow, 28, 61, 89, 91–92 University of Madras, 61 University of Mysore, 47–48, 61 urban development, 32 Uthiramerur, 77–80, 152 Vaikuntha Perumal temple, 77 Vaisheshika school, 45 Venkatakrishnaiah, M., 38 Vijaynagara Empire, 49 village councils, 63, 100–1, 112, 118 village republics, 95, 110, 118 Visvesvaraya, M., 41 Wardha Circle, 101, 106–7, 113, 119 Webb, Sidney, 7 welfare state, 153 West Africa, 25 westernization, 19 Why the Village Movement? (Kumarappa), 103, 114 Wilks, Mark, 50 Wilson, Woodrow, 4, 12–16, 18, 23, 27 Wilsonianism, 15, 23, 30 Wodeyar, Chamarajendra, 35 Wodeyar, Krishnaraja IV, 40, 42, 47, 52, 56 Wodeyar family, 33–34, 37, 49, 51, 53 Zimmern, Alfred, 88 Zinoviev, Grigory, 10, 15