Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London 1009215310, 9781009215312

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Advance Praise To think about the geographies of the Round Table Conference is to appreciate that what occurred ‘behind the scenes’ was absolutely consequential to 20th century global imperial history. Legg shows how critical a variety of infrastructures – from palaces, flats and tearooms to gavels, coat racks and washstands  – were to both official and subaltern diplomacy during this watershed interwar event. If London was the great unacknowledged delegate to the conference, its most public and most intimate spaces are key to understanding the role of cultural relations in the history of India’s pathway to full political sovereignty. Thanks to Legg’s amazing footwork, we have a whole new understanding of all the rooms where it happened. Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Legg radically reimagines the Round Table Conference (RTC), often relegated to a stodgier sideshow of state-making and nationalism on the ground, by focusing on the politics of representation, labour, infrastructure and space that went into making the RTC. In doing so, he shows how Indian delegates at the RTC innovated new spaces of internationalist politics and challenged Western stereotypes of backwardness. Elegantly crafted, and engagingly written, Legg offers us rich theoretical tools and incisive methods to understand the production of internationalism in the 20th century. Rohit De, Yale University This compelling, beautifully written and detailed account of the Round Table Conference brings together geographies of colonialism and diplomacy to exemplify how colonial democracy was practised. Stephen Legg brings to attention a largely overlooked conference and the deliberations that occurred and extended beyond the meeting venue itself, providing captivating insights into how representation, communication and decision-making unfolded. The book includes evocative details of how the Indian delegates negotiated the simultaneously racist and hospitable landscape of 1930s London and draws on archival material to illuminate their experiences of being lavishly entertained at tea parties, receptions and soirees. Legg offers a distinctly geographical exploration of a unique historical event that highlights how liberalism and imperialism were being played out in the interwar period. In bringing together geo-political debates with the intricacies of practices and encounters, this book both delights and challenges the reader. Uma Kothari, University of Manchester Legg helps us understand the contentious relationship between empire and democratisation through an underappreciated forum – the conference. With forensic and careful argumentation, Legg provides an intimate political geography of power and representation. Robbie Shilliam, Johns Hopkins University

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ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE GEOGRAPHIES Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India’s constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–1960s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India’s future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference’s three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space. Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. He is a specialist on interwar colonial India with a particular interest in the politics of urban space within imperial and international frames. He has analysed these spaces and frames by drawing upon theoretical approaches from memory scholarship, postcolonialism, political theory and governmentality studies. He co-edited, with Deana Heath, South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. He is also the author of Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2007), Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (2014) and editor of Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011).

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ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE GEOGRAPHIES CONSTITUTING COLONIAL INDIA IN INTERWAR LONDON

STEPHEN LEGG

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314 to 321, 3rd Floor, Plot No.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 the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009215312 © Stephen Legg 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. First published 2023 Printed in India A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-009-21531-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press 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.

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CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Note on Conversions, Spellings and Abbreviations 1 Introduction: Squaring Round Tables

ix xi xv 1

Part I  Geographical Imaginations 2 Dominion and Dyarchy: The Absent Presences

37

3 Community: A Nation and a Table Divided

65

Part II  Conference Infrastructures 4 The Conference Method: Between Intention and Desire

101

5 Staffing the Conference: Experts and Subaltern Diplomats

130

6 The Speech Factory: Palace Materials and Communication

Technologies

159 Part III  The Conference City

7 A Hospitable State? Official Socialising

193

8 Social London: Residing and Dining

221

9 At Homes: Political Hostessing and Homemaking

255

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viii Contents Part IV  Representations 10 Petitions and Protests: The Page and the Street

291

11 Failure: Ending and Failing

314

12 Conclusion: Squaring Round Tables

334

Notes References Index

344 369 386

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FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES 1.1 Notable personalities at the Round Table

2

1.2 Indian states delegates

24

1.3 British Indian delegates

25

1.4 Kelen’s depiction of ‘Indian Round Table

Conference 1930–31’

opposite page 64

3.1 The Minorities Committee table

84

3.2 The Federal Structure Committee

85

3.3 Corbett’s proposed ‘New Punjab’

95

4.1 Ramsay, the Sphinx

124

5.1 Preparations at St James’s Palace

143

5.2 Preparing the Round Table

144

5.3 Indian delegates and the police

145

5.4 Portrait of members of the secretariat

156

6.1 St James’s Palace

160

6.2 Ground floor of St James’s Palace

163

6.3 First floor of St James’s Palace

164

6.4 Attendees around the Round Table

167

6.5 ‘King’s Microphone’ and chair at House of Lords

184

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x 

Figures and Tables

7.1 Putting delegates at their ease

196

7.2 When East met West

201

7.3 The hall and stairway at 8 Chesterfield Gardens

207

7.4 The lounge at Chesterfield Gardens

208

7.5 Indian chefs at Chesterfield Gardens

212

7.6 Signatures to the joint letter of appreciation

219

8.1 Map of non-London-based delegate residences at the first

conference session

225

8.2 Map of social engagements across conference sessions

236

8.3 Delegates at the Park Lane Hotel conference banquet

238

8.4 The Maharajadhiraja of Darbhanga’s birthday party

242

8.5 The Maharaja of Alwar’s anniversary banquet

245

8.6 At Shafis!

250

8.7 Veerasawmy’s India Restaurant

252

9.1 Map of at-homes

266

9.2 No. 4 St James’s Square, staircase

270

9.3 Kingsley Hall

276

9.4 Jo Davidson and Mahatma Gandhi

285

9.5 Mahatmaji by Emery Kelen

opposite page 65

TABLES 5.1 Approximate cost of the Round Table Conference

131

5.2 Hours worked per week by staff

149

5.3 Total and average hours by role and gender

151

5.4 Total and average hours by gender

152

6.1 Stationery usage at the third session

170

7.1 Expenditure and receipts

214

7.2 Materials purchased

215

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume is the product of an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant (AH/M008142/1) entitled ‘Conferencing the International: A Cultural and Historical Geography of the Origins of Internationalism (1919–1939)’. I was principal investigator on the project from 2015 to 2020, having put together the proposal with my colleague Mike Heffernan and our then doctoral student Jake Hodder. We had all been exploring different forms of internationalism (liberal, imperial and racial) and realised that much of this work was coordinated at international conferences. We set out to explore how such conference spaces allow us to explore emerging forms of internationalism, how the conferences were influenced by the cities in which they took part, how conference environments were created and how they were experienced. Ben Thorpe joined us in 2018 when Jake was appointed as a lecturer at Nottingham and joined our Advisory Board alongside Ruth Craggs, Jason Dittmer, Daniel Laqua, James Mansell, Fiona McConnell, Robbie Shilliam, Naoko Shimazu, Mrinalini Sinha and Glenda Sluga. This book would not have come about without the support, cajoling and provocations from this exceptional team – thank you to them all for making it impossible for me to distinguish where their ideas stopped and mine began. We organised a number of events which proved pivotal in the formation of the concepts that structure this book. Three workshops held at the University Staff Club, a Nottingham gallery and London’s Methodist Central Hall gave us insights from contemporary practitioners into conferencing in universities, the cultural sector and international organisations. Co-organised conference sessions helped us think thematically and theoretically about our work, notably regarding anti-colonialism and political negotiation at the Royal Geographical

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xii Acknowledgements Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) in London (2017), sensory politics at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) meeting in New Orleans (2018), sea travel and internationalism at the RGS-IBG in Cardiff (2018), the historical geography of international conferences at the International Conference of Historical Geographers in Warsaw (2018), geographies of the interwar at the AAG in Washington (2019), and non-representational historical geographies at the RGS-IBG in London (2019). Perhaps most generative was the exhibition Spaces of Internationalism, which we assembled in collaboration with Christine James and Catherine Souch at the RGS-IBG. Coinciding with the launch of the exhibition in December 2018 was our international conference ‘Conferencing the International: Spaces of Modern Internationalism’, which brought together an exceptional international cast to help us think more expansively about the method and experience of international conferencing (Legg et al. 2021). Especial thanks to Ben Thorpe for his intellectual and logistic input into both of these endeavours, and for somehow tethering together the international for two days. He also put together websites based on the exhibition and on my Round Table Conference materials, conducting supplementary research himself.1 Thanks to Elaine Watts for adapting two of the website maps into those which feature in Chapters 8 and 9. The archival collection phase of the project took place when pre-COVID-19 international travel was still relatively easy and safe, and I am indebted to an international cast of archival assistants, from the National Archives in Washington to the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi; the Ganga Singhji Memorial Trust archive in Bikaner; the British Library, National Archives, Friend’s House archive and Parliamentary Archives in London; the Royal Archives at Windsor; and the Rylands University Library in Manchester. I am especially indebted to William Rhind of the Gandhi Foundation for showing me around Kingsley Hall and Bow. I have called upon many colleagues for support and advice over the years. I cannot do justice to them all here, but I would like to thank Rohit De, Arvind Elangovan, William Gould, Eleanor Newbigin and Ornit Shani for early and ongoing discussions regarding Indian constitutionalism; Katharine Adeney at Nottingham’s Asia Research Institute for hosting a discussion of the book proposal; Valeska Huber at the Freie Universität Berlin and Phil Howell at the University of Cambridge for organising an online discussion of Chapter 4; and Bérénice Guyot-Réchard and Elizabeth Leake for allowing me to present Chapter 2 for discussion with the ‘South Asian Unbound’ forum. I

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Acknowledgements 

xiii

have benefitted from ongoing conversations and collaborations with Sandipto Dasgupta, Amar Farooqui, Deana Heath, Tariq Jazeel, Prashant Kidambi, Janaki Nair, Srila Roy, Jonathan Saha and Vineet Thakur. The following were very generous in commenting on chapter drafts, thanks to David Beckingham, Andy Davies, Jesús Cháirez-Garza, Ruth Craggs, William Gould, Jake Hodder, Rik Jazeel, Mikko Joronen, Martin Mahony, James Mansell, Eleanor Newbigin, Srila Roy, Minnie Sinha, Vineet Thakur, Ben Thorpe and Charles Watkins. Mark Bradley, Justin Jones and Faisal Khalil also offered generous assistance with translation. It has been a pleasure to work with Qudsiya Ahmed, Sohini Ghosh and Priya Das at Cambridge University Press, and I thank them for their enthusiasm for this project. The majority of this book was written in 2020 in various states of lockdown, when the sort of international travel that this book is focused on became impossible. Thank you to my colleagues at Nottingham for their support in helping me survive the transition to online teaching, to my students for being models of resilience and inspiration, and to my friends near and far for their spirit-lifting zoom calls and for our joyous reunions. Special thanks to Charlotte, Giles, Pat and Richard for sanity-saving vacations in the southwest. My (now extended) family is, as ever, my bedrock, thank you for holding it together! A large part of this book focuses on the backstage labour and unacknowledged support which makes things happen. Every word that follows is testament to the love and support that Martin Pope has surrounded us with over the last eight years. Alongside this grant project we got married, bought a house, made a home and hunkered down through a vicious pandemic. Thank you for shielding me, ribbing me and making things better and betterer. Stephen Legg Nottingham, August 2021

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NOTE ON CONVERSIONS, SPELLINGS AND ABBREVIATIONS

So as to give a handle on many of the costings in the chapters that follow, I have used the UK National Archive’s currency convertor to give 2017 purchasing power equivalents for 1930 costs.1 These are marked in [£] next to the historical values. Names are given as included in official conference directories unless in quotation.

ARCHIVAL REFERENCES BIK

Ganga Singhji Memorial Trust archive in Bikaner

BL/IOR

British Library, London, India Office Records

BL/IOR/Eur.Mss. British Library, London, India Office Records European Manuscripts CSAS/Benthall

Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, Papers of E. C. Benthall

NAI

National Archives of India, New Delhi

NLA/Sapru

National Library of Australia, Papers of Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru collected by D. A. Low, National Library of Australia, MS 9823

NMML

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi

NMML/Moonje

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi papers of Dr B. S. Moonje

UKNA

The National Archives, London

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xvi 

Note on Conversions, Spellings and Abbreviations

UM/RMD

University of Manchester, John Rylands Library, Ramsay MacDonald papers

UO/Sankey

University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Hist., Sankey Papers

ABBREVIATIONS BBC

British Broadcasting Corporation

CID

Criminal Investigation Department

FSC

Federal Structure Committee

INC

Indian National Congress

IPI

Indian Political Intelligence

LAI

League against Imperialism

MP

member of parliament

NWFP

Northwest Frontier Province

RTC

Round Table Conference

YMCA

Young Men’s Christian Association

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1 INTRODUCTION SQUARING ROUND TABLES

On 12 November 1930 King-Emperor George V inaugurated the Round Table Conference (RTC) in the Royal Gallery of the Palace of Westminster. The Illustrated Weekly of India noted his awareness that the British Commonwealth itself depended on the constitutional debates over India’s future that would take place in the imperial capital.1 The article also carried a special cartoon by Mrs E. King featuring some notable personalities at the conference (see Figure 1.1). From the turbaned Maharaja of Bikaner, a prominent ruler of the hereditary Indian (or ‘princely’) states, at the top left, the reader’s gaze was directed clockwise around the table. Here awaited caricatures including the leading liberal Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, the Muslim politician M. A. Jinnah, the ex-viceroy Lord Reading, the Maharaja of Patiala, the former law member for the Government of India Sir Muhammed Shafi, the wealthy leader of the Ismaili sect of the Shia Muslim community and chairman of the non-princely, British Indian delegates, the Aga Khan, and Governor of the United Provinces and conference advisor Sir Malcolm Hailey. Most remarkable are the depictions above and within the circle of conference attendees. Floating above the table are the ghosts at the feast: in from the left waft M. K. Gandhi and V. J. Patel, and from the right Pandits Jawaharlal and Motilal Nehru. These leaders of the Indian National Congress (‘Congress’) had not only refused to come to London but also launched the civil disobedience movement in response to Britain’s failure to confirm the conference’s purpose as that of granting India ‘Dominion status’ (Moore 1974, 97–99). Viceroy Irwin had insisted this was because it was to be a free conference with no set agenda or outcomes. In this belated

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ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE GEOGRAPHIES

FIGURE 1.1  Notable personalities at the Round Table Source: Illustrated Weekly of India, 30 November 1930, © British Library Board (OP 1346).

commitment to liberal free speech, Congress saw yet more dilatory tactics from a colonial government desperately trying to stem the advance of anticolonial nationalism. The absence of Congress haunted the preparations for the conference and cast a pall over the opening ceremony. When the plenary sessions began five days later in St James’s Palace, however, something remarkable happened. In the opening addresses, first Sapru and then Bikaner came out in favour of an all-India federation, uniting the separate sovereign patchworks of princely and British India. Successive delegates professed their support for federalism, the product of frenetic networking of delegates during the journey to Europe and in the cafés, restaurants, hotel suites and clubs of London since their arrival. Not only would the conference be the first such gathering of the leaders of British and princely states, and the first incorporation of Indian leaders into formal British debates on India’s future, but it would also be the first to devise a system of government that would incorporate the whole subcontinent. The resulting Government of India Act (1935) established putative autonomy for provincial governments, allowing Congress to sweep to ascendency in the

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Introduction 

3

1937 elections, and laid the foundations for a future federation combining princely and British India. When representing this subcontinent, the British cartographic impulse was to depict its divisions (Edney 1997). Official gazetteers mapped a jigsaw of provinces, presidencies and states, the princes in yellow and the British in imperial pink. The Weekly’s cartoon, however, portrayed a very different geography, the India encircled by the caricatured attendees exceeding that of trigonometrical surveys and political partitions. Sumathi Ramaswamy (2010, vii) has reminded us of Rabindranath Tagore’s aphorism: ‘The Geography of a country is not the whole truth. No one gave up his life for a map.’ One response had been Mother India, a geo-body which nationalists could mobilise around and relate to. What we see here is something entirely different. If this India has bodies, they are conference bodies, formally attired and resolutely male. But the territory is recognisable from many of the Mother India depictions, a caricatured India, out of which something national might emerge (Ramaswamy 2010, 42). To the north we see the Himalayas and, beneath them, religious buildings, possibly the Taj Mahal mausoleum at Agra and the Purana Qila tower at Delhi. Across the land are environmental markers of India’s tropical otherness: the baking sun, palm trees and a cameleer. But this was not an anti-modern India, whether orientalist or Gandhian, absent of connections with the modern world. Rather, a railway traverses the south; a traditional boat off the western coast rocks in the wake of ocean liners, steaming to Karachi, Bombay or Calcutta; and, swooping perilously close to the Indian sun, passes an airplane, promising new and faster connections to the wider world. Laid out on the round table was a vision of India in motion and in transit, from the old to the new, at conference. The RTC of 89 delegates was opened on 12 November 1930 and suspended on 19 January 1931.2 A second session was summoned later in the year, opening on 7 September. Gandhi attended this second session as the sole Congress representative, 1 of 112 delegates who conferred for nearly three months before suspending their work on 1 December. A smaller third session of 46 delegates was opened on 17 November 1932 in a committee room of the House of Lords, and the conference concluded barely a month later, on Christmas Eve. Across these three sessions, the conference sat for 193 days in total, bringing together 128 delegates as well as dozens of staff, expert advisors, journalists, photographers and a global

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ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE GEOGRAPHIES

audience rapt by the agonistic debates between Britain and its largest and most prized colony. The conference as a whole, however, proved a disappointment to delegates of every persuasion, and the round table itself proved painfully pliable as a metaphor of disenchantment. For Sir Malcolm Hailey, the first session talks had been tortuously slow without getting to the nub of difficult questions, such as which form of federation would be worked towards. By the end of 1930, he suggested, no plans had been laid regarding how the executive would be responsible to a bicameral, two-chamber legislature, while both the princes and British Indian delegates were pushing for legislative chambers in which they would have the upper hand. Writing to Viceroy Irwin on 29 December, Hailey lamented that ‘though we have discussed Federation till we are all dizzy (someone has said that the object of having a Round Table was that we might talk in circles) we have never cleared our minds as to the most appropriate of the numerous alternative forms of structure’.3 On 19 January 1931, after over two months of deliberation, the Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald suspended the conference, pronouncing that it would have to reconvene after further investigation and debate in India. He could, however, proudly announce the agreement that responsibility for the future Government of India should rest on Indian legislatures, though with reservations and safeguards to protect minority religious communities and ultimate British control. After scares over the communal question and slow progress on federation, most commentators found the first conference session to have been a success, but others saw in it the seeds of intractable problems that would hamper future debates. A recurring trope was the mismatch between the idealised rhetoric of conference talk and the lived realities of life in India, a criticism levelled at interwar liberalism more broadly (Carr [1939] 1993). For the Observer editor J. L. Garvin, writing on the eve of MacDonald’s announcement, the conference had been one of ‘Round Tables and Square Facts’, for which two months had not been enough time to reconcile Hindu and Muslim demands, or ‘ideals and realities’.4 For the Morning Post, the conference’s attempt at ‘Squaring the Round Table’ had hit a much deeper conundrum relating to the reconciling of colonialism and democracy that responsibility with safeguards suggested. An editorial on the day of MacDonald’s speech argued that the democratic system of the west was alien to India, no matter how much ‘theorists’ tried to

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Introduction 

5

force it upon the country.5 Unlike the supposedly united electorate of Britain (no mention was made of Ireland), successive Indian religious minorities had demanded separate representation but failed to agree on ‘weightage’ and distribution. The British government settling the communal question would signal both an act of coercion and the failure of this experiment with the conference method. In 1932, both came to pass. The round-table metaphor was also used by those on both sides of Indian opinion regarding the utility or not of the conference. For the barrister and scholar Abdulla Yusuf Ali, the disconnect between Gandhi’s non-violent rhetoric and the chaos of civil disobedience exposed the hypocrisy of the Congress campaign. Claiming to speak for right-wing Indian opinion, he suggested that ‘Squaring the Circle’ of Indian politics, citing Garvin’s metaphor, would require patient plodding and cooperative teamwork, not contempt for the law or the sectional rule of the majority.6 In contrast, the inaugural edition of the Indian and Colonial Journal, founded in London to express the demand of India and other colonies for independence, condemned the conference delegates for being selected by the British and not elected to represent India.7 Two days before MacDonald’s concluding address, the Journal published a satirical recap of the RTC, bending the metaphor into merciless geometric skewers, each with an anti-colonial edge.8 As a geometric ‘first principle’ the table had been round because Columbus had proved the world to be round when ‘he had discovered “America” (Spanish for “end of the world”)’. As a geometric ‘axiom’ all delegates were equal to each other but also equal to anything or nothing. As geometric ‘definitions’ the angles of British delegates were ‘acute’ and those of British Indian delegates were ‘obtuse’, while ‘parallel communal lines are such that, even if not straight, they do not meet at the Round Table Conference however far they might be extended in either direction’.9 If these commentaries took the Round Table to its abstract extremes, other more literal readings were surprisingly absent. It was not until the conclusion of the conference in its third session in December 1932 that official mention was made of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. That an ancient fable concerning the tempering of sovereign rights by both a companionship and principles of honour and chivalry was left out of the imperial narrative is perhaps no surprise. More surprising was the absence of direct connections made between the conference and the Round Table movement. This movement had campaigned for imperial federation

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ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE GEOGRAPHIES

through the early twentieth century and successfully influenced the 1919 Government of India Act through Lionel Curtis’s ‘dyarchy’ scheme (Bosco and May 1997). The fracturing of the empire into national colonial policies after the war had stymied the movement (Sinha 2013), although former Round Table journal editor Philip Kerr, as Lord Lothian, was a key player in the conference’s second session in the autumn of 1931. By then a National Government had been forged to tackle the economic crisis of the early 1930s. MacDonald remained as prime minister with a largely Conservative cabinet following the Independent Labour Party’s catastrophic defeat in the elections of October 1931. Lothian served as Liberal undersecretary of state for India in the National Government, supporting Gandhi’s attendance and hosting him in London with his close friend, Viscountess (Nancy) Astor. Gandhi’s arrival transformed the conference, his celebrity dazzling the world’s media. He was, however, quickly frustrated by the ‘unreality’ of the conference and felt that the structure of the meeting and its objectives were incompatible with the desires and needs of the Indian people. Gandhi confessed his inability to reconcile the communal demands of the delegates, and the second session ended in a palpable atmosphere of failure. Though for most commentators the round-table metaphor had run its course by then, Gandhi’s frustration at the mismatch between the structure and motives of the conference and the demands of the Indian people cut to the quick of the problem. That is, how could a colonial government unwilling to grant full self-government use a free conference to set its policy? It could either surreptitiously limit the capacities of the conference for free speech or select delegates who would speak freely only in certain ways. These attempts to square the circle were certainly geometrically complex, as the Indian and Colonial Journal had lampooned to great effect. At its most abstract, the square was colonial autocracy, imposing a bureaucratic iron cage on Indian life. The circle was liberalism, a dynamo driven by freedom, questioning and agency. Squaring the circle was the challenge of the conference, but also the broader challenge of twentiethcentury colonial Indian politics. This challenge has been studied from various disciplinary perspectives. One historical approach is to consider the paradoxes of colonial democracy, linked to but outside of western experiences of democratisation, where rights-bearing citizens emerged not in the public domain of the state and civil society but through social relationships of mobilisation, activism

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Introduction 

7

and tutorship (Chatterjee 1993, 2004). A political philosophical approach considers the ways in which the liberal tradition accommodated and justified the existence of empire through grappling with colonial difference (Mehta 1999). A further sociological framing presents the lens of sequentiality, considering how a stadial view of development was used to defer progress in ‘Eastern’ societies until they achieved the impossible feat of meeting the preconditions supposedly reached by societies in the ‘West’ (Kaviraj 2005). This placed them, as Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, 8) put it, in the ‘waiting room of history’. Drawing upon these disciplinary approaches, this book proposes a historical geographical reading that puts the spaces of the conference front and centre of the analysis in four ways. First, it explores the way the conference imagined new political geographies of India, experimenting not only with federation but also with dominion, dyarchy and community. Second, it considers how the conference was made to happen through infrastructures of political method, people and place. Third, it considers London as the unnamed but dominant delegate at the round table, expanding the conference remit beyond its palace locations to the official, social and domestic geographies of the capital. And, finally, the book concludes by considering the spatiality of the conference as a representational event. It was contested as unrepresentative through written petitions and protests in the street, and was ultimately represented as a failure, because of its diminished third session and through the consensus of most involved that the conference had failed. This was despite its results leading directly to the 1935 Government of India Act. This book, therefore, revisits earlier explanations of squaring the circle not from a geometrical but from a geographical perspective. Colonial democracy is explored here not through debates on legislature configuration or Lothian’s Franchise Committee but through seeing how representation, speech and decision-making operated in the London meeting itself – that is, through viewing the conference as a space in which colonial democracy was practised, not a space in which it was devised. Liberalism and empire are also depicted here through the conference method, which was lifted from a post-war liberal internationalist tradition and put to work for imperial aims. Again, while liberty and freedom were invoked often enough in the plenary discussions, the conference itself is posed as an exemplar of interwar imperialism in a liberal vein. Finally, sequentiality pulsed through the conference organisation, postponing certain advances (such as Dominion

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status) while insisting that other stages had to be arrived at (including a communal settlement) before a federal structure could be settled upon. The British organisers, behind the flimsy façade of an open agenda, governed the conference through procedure and committee, enforcing temporal sequencing through the technologies of the minute, the circular and the chit. This power worked, in part, to achieve traditional divide and rule. Selecting delegates who could not and would not agree a communal settlement, and weighing provincial and commercial interests against each other, fated the conference to a degree of failure. But as a conference in liberal form, the mechanisms of division were also more subtle and complex than divide et impera alone. Conference organisers were, and were seen to be, desperate to fulfil every whim of the delegates. London was turned out to dazzle the delegates and furnish them with every gustatory pleasure. In part this was a self-consciously geographical ploy of depoliticisation. How many tea parties, receptions, exhibitions, lectures and soirees could one attend and remain antagonistically nationalist? But the tactic was also one of structuring speech. Imperialism operated here not through the violent policing of what was said and recorded (Ogborn 2019) but rather it granted the liberal freedom to speak at length in a conference structured so as to have relatively few conclusions open to it. The broader research on conferences and colonial geographies that have influenced the writing of this book is outlined below. This is followed by showing how the RTC has been studied in political and constitutional histories, introducing its pre-eminent personalities and exploring how federalism functioned as its dominant aim.

CONFERENCES AND GEOGRAPHIES Though the most significant conference in the history of India up to that point, the RTC is entirely absent from the broader literature on political conferences. India had been represented by its secretary of state at Britain’s nineteenth-century Colonial Conferences and its twentiethcentury Imperial Conferences, until it achieved self-representation at the 1917 Imperial War Conference (Sundaram 1930). Being a meeting solely between the British state and Indian representatives, however, the RTC does not feature in accounts of these conferences (Ollivier 1954). Similarly, the RTC does not feature in the tallies of international conferences in the

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interwar years, which proliferated under the direct patronage and indirect inspiration of the League of Nations (Grandjean and Van Leeuwen 2019). Too colonial to be imperial, too imperial to be international, the Round Table Conference is categorised as a national political event only. The ultimate success of the nationalist cause allows us to retrospectively place the RTC not so much as a latecomer to the tradition of British Colonial and Imperial Conferences but as a forerunner of the conferences which facilitated imperial decolonisation. This involves placing it in an historical and international lineage that includes but exceeds India and placing it in an intellectual linage that includes but exceeds South Asian studies. The RTC is explored in this book first and foremost as a conference. The interwar period witnessed an explosion of international conferences, covering a new and expansive range of topics and agendas. These new spaces of internationalism had their origins in two historical forms of international meeting (Mazower 2012). An older tradition of diplomatic congresses had emerged to settle territorial disputes, while newer forms of periodic meeting had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century through scientific, technical and commercial conferences (Heffernan et al. 2021). The Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920) combined these traditions, bringing together scientific experts, diplomats and politicians (Dunn 1929; Hill 1929; Nicolson 1939). The art of modern conferencing was transformed and became an object of self-conscious study, as pioneered by another product of the resulting Treaty of Versailles. The League of Nations functioned as a nearpermanent conference, establishing models of good, liberal, international conference practice and inspiring others to emulate its methods, regardless of their political bent (Legg 2020a). The ‘conference method’ (Dunn 1929, v) came to dominate international relations and the method was liberal, in its prioritising transparency over secrecy, participation over exclusion and cooperation over competition. This conference method proved pliable, which was the key to its profusion and its turning to non-liberal ends (on this as a trait of internationalism more broadly, see Sluga and Clavin [2016]). The RTC was an example of the conference method being adapted as an imperial tool, even if this was the liberal face of an empire in the process of brutally suppressing civil disobedience in India at the time. But anti-colonialists had also adapted the conference method successfully to their ends. The Pan-African Congress (Hodder 2021) and the League against Imperialism (Louro 2018), for instance, all turned the conference form to their

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requirements in the interwar years. After the war, international conferences provided the means for networking together African and Asian campaigns for decolonisation and post-colonial non-alignment with Cold War politics (Hodder 2015; Pham and Shilliam 2016; Stolte 2019). This helps us see how the RTC was part of an imperial conference lineage that adopted the liberal conference method but whose cosmopolitan Indian participants anticipated later anti- and post-colonial forms of conferencing. The study of these conferences has helped create a new diplomatic history of both conferencing and internationalism (Dittmer and McConnell 2015; Legg et al. 2021; Scott-Smith and Weisbrode 2019). Pivotal meetings in the genealogy sketched above have been revisited and reappraised. In such a vein the Congress of Vienna (1815) has been explored through the salon politics of both the men and women of the city, the artefacts it left in its wake and the way it conjured the geographies of Europe and the Mediterranean for deliberation (Vick 2014). The geography of conferences is vital here not only in terms of geopolitical location but also through the sense of place that the organisers draw upon and created (Shimazu 2014; Leow 2019). Recent literature has opened the study of international conferences to a broader range of actors and regions and encouraged an openness of approach that mirrors the experimentation and innovation put to work by Asian and African delegates in the late colonial and early post-colonial periods (AfroAsian Networks Research Collective 2018; Burton 2010; Lewis and Stolte 2019). The methodology adopted in this book is indebted to such works and also draws lessons from studies of the geographies of conferencing more broadly, which direct us to attend to the production of knowledge, performance and protest at such events (Craggs and Mahony 2014). It also adapts many of the lessons emerging from studies of internationalism, which explore unexpected spaces and sites, which connect abstract concepts and embodied performances and which highlight hybridisations of different forms of internationalism (Hodder, Legg and Heffernan 2015; Raza, Roy and Zachariah 2015). The international relations scholar Fred Halliday (1988) categorised forms of internationalism into a triad, and the Round Table Conference can be considered to have hybridised all three of these forms. In its adaptation of the conference method, the RTC hybridised a ‘liberal’ international tradition with the ‘hegemonic’ or ‘imperial’ internationalism of the British Empire (Jerónimo and Monteiro 2017). In welcoming anti-colonial

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nationalists to the conference, it also allowed for at least the possibility of hybridising the liberal tradition with ‘radical’ internationalism, although the delegates were by design mostly non- or anti-radical. And in its commitment to working towards consensual constitutional recommendations, the RTC promised to hybridise imperial and anti-colonial claims (Legg 2020a). The much-diminished state of the third conference session indicated to many how incomplete and one-sided this consensus had become. The chapters that follow explore these conceptual comings together through appealing to recent conference studies but also to two long-standing traditions in South Asian and colonial historiography. The first attends to the governmentalities of late colonialism in a liberal frame (Chatterjee 2004; Legg and Heath 2018). Such approaches connect epistemic concepts (such as empire, dominion, dyarchy or community) to the conduct of populations through targeting ways of seeing, conceptualisations of the subject and the technologies of everyday life. The RTC was an example of these governmentalities in action as much as it was a space in which the governing of India was devised. Taking place in the heart of the British state, these governmentalities were encumbered with liberal restraints. They still operated imperially, but through subtler arts such as compelling, not censuring speech and facilitating, not forbidding nationalist networking. The second tradition emerged from the Subaltern Studies Collective (Chaturvedi 2000; Guha and Spivak 1988). This self-reflexive and evolving body of work has encouraged us to seek out and question sources which attend to non-elite sections of Indian society, to acknowledge those subjects who cannot be represented and to reflect on what the attempt to study subalternity does to the researcher. There are, at least, four interpretations of these imperatives that have influenced the analysis of subaltern geographies (Jazeel and Legg 2019) which follow. The first, though least present, concerns India’s non-elites. The conference was undoubtedly elitist, although some petitions from local organisations did make it through to London and protests led by Indians living in London hit the streets of the capital. The second engages the concept of ‘subaltern geopolitics’ (Cheong 2019; Sharp 2011), which builds on the suggestion that the colonial Indian middle classes, or middle-class Indian women specifically, might represent the ‘subalternity of an elite’ (Chatterjee 1992, 42). In this case, no matter how wealthy a maharaja or influential a lawyer, once the delegates passed through the Suez Canal, they became, in the eyes of many, subaltern to and in Europe. This manifested

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itself in patronising commentaries and satirical depictions, but also through open racism in the streets and hotels of the capital. A third sense draws upon research into ‘subaltern diplomacy’ (Herren 2017). While Herren’s broader project hints at non-European activists and the move towards decolonisation, the subaltern here are the unacknowledged workers of diplomacy, including stenographers, translators, typists, consultants and office workers. Some Indian staff were brought to London, but the majority of conference subaltern, in this vein, were English. Many were women and special attention is paid to the record of these female supporters of conference work, both within the offices of state and in the private homes where informal conference work continued out of hours. These spaces hint at the final and most widespread subaltern interpretation at play here. This is the commitment throughout the book to use subaltern theory to question implicit spatial frames in our methodologies and to rethink which alternate spaces might figure in our histories and geographies (Jazeel 2014). These include the spaces inhabited by the subaltern subjects outlined above. But this endeavour also includes a commitment to jettisoning our assumptions regarding where, in this case, politics took place. Beyond the formal spaces of St James’s Palace, this expanded geography directs us to the saloons, parlours and cafés of informal conferencing, the tools and material objects that facilitated conference work and play, Indian restaurants and homes in London, and the petitions and protests that swirled around the conference palaces  – that is, to an expansive conception of ‘diplomatic material’ (Dittmer 2017) and of the people who made the conference work in the way it did. Before expanding on the method adopted in later chapters and their arguments, the existing literature on the RTC and the interwar constitutional context will be set. Federation, as the dominant political imaginary of the conference, will be explored before some of the leading conference figures are introduced.

INTERWAR INDIAN CONSTITUTIONALISM In most histories of twentieth-century colonial India the RTC is both everywhere and nowhere. It is usually mentioned as a side show to civil disobedience and a failed attempt to find consensus across divides between

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Britain and India, British and princely India, Hindus and Muslims, and religious majorities and minorities. Three works, however, provide us with exemplary political histories of the RTC and its contexts. First, R. J. Moore’s (1974) study of interwar crisis and unity in India interthreaded accounts of constitutionalism and nationalist agitation with the RTC at their heart. Carl Bridge’s (1986) study complemented Moore’s work with a focus on the 1935 Government of India Act. He positioned the RTC explicitly as a liberal front for British Conservative efforts to retain imperial control over the empire’s most prized possession. Finally, Ian Copland’s (1997) study of late colonial princely politics also positioned the RTC as a pivotal moment in the fraught negotiation by India’s hereditary leaders of their dual concerns with British paramountcy and nationalist ascendency. These works were never far from my side during this research, and this book does not seek to supplant them. It hopes, rather, to be a geographical supplement to their political histories. They are drawn upon below to contextualise the conference and introduce the constitutional quandaries that it was called to resolve. India’s constitutional history had always been focused on London. This was not because Indians had been part of discussions in the capital but because India’s ‘constitution’ was the product of acts of the British Parliament. The Government of India Acts of 1858 and 1919 constituted British India, building on a disparate genealogy of royal charters and East India Company reforms and legislation (De 2016). Both acts followed military catastrophes for the British which became founding moments in the emergence of Indian nationalism. The uprising of 1857, dubbed by the British a Sepoy Mutiny and by some Indians as a First War of Independence, led to the disbandment of the East India Company and the direct incorporation of its territorial possessions into British imperial control. Those areas not administered by the Company would retain their quasi-sovereignty under assurance from Queen Victoria herself. Henceforth the British representative in India would have two bodies. As viceroy he represented the British monarch’s authority to the princes, as governorgeneral he represented parliament to the provinces. In 1914, on behalf of the princes and the provinces, the viceroy (as both simultaneous bodies were referred to) pronounced India to be at war. As the enormity of India’s contribution to the war effort became clear (over 1 million men), nationalist parties made increasingly strident demands for political reward. Congress and the Muslim League signed the Lucknow

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Pact in 1916, reaching joint agreement on separate Muslim electorates and guaranteed Muslim seats in councils (issues which would still animate the RTC in the early 1930s). In response to this mounting pressure for reform, the Round Table movement acolyte Lionel Curtis toured India promoting his scheme of dyarchy, which was taken up by Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu and Viceroy Chelmsford in their joint-authored 1918 report (Curtis 1920; Robb 1976). The resulting Government of India Act (1919) devolved powers to the provinces and then transferred some of these governmental functions to be administered by elected Indian ministers (Legg 2016a). Dyarchy displeased governors, for its convoluted bureaucracy, and nationalists, for its paternalism and severely limited progress towards Montagu’s stated aim of Indian responsible government (Danzig 1968). In the face of mounting displeasure, the decadal review provisioned in the 1919 act was brought forward and announced in the autumn of 1927. Also announced was the Sir Harcourt Butler inquiry into Britain’s relationship of paramountcy to the princely states (Copland 1997, 64). The Indian Statutory Commission was headed by the British Liberal member of parliament (MP) Sir John Simon and comprised members selected directly by the British government. It was catastrophically all-white and, during its tour of India from October 1928 to April 1929, was boycotted by Congress, liberals and some Muslim Leaguers, led by Jinnah (Bridge 1986, 22). But Jinnah had also refused to support the (Motilal) Nehru Report issued in the summer of 1928 by a coalition of politicians across communal and political divides. It was a response to British taunts, including that of the secretary of state for India Lord Birkenhead in 1925, that while critical of the 1919 reforms, Indian nationalists had no constitutional proposals of their own. The report set Dominion status as the goal for India, which would mean full provincial self-government and responsible government at a centre that would inherit the Crown’s suzerain rights over the princely states. The Central Legislative Assembly would be directly elected on a universal adult franchise, and Muslims would receive reserved seats in joint electorates, but not separate electorates, in provinces where they were a minority (Bridge 1986, 23). The Muslim League had, however, been pushing for a federation with powers residing in the provinces, not a (Congress-dominated) centre, separate electorates and a third of central legislature seats reserved for Muslims. By the winter of 1928 it was clear that the Muslim League was going to support neither the Nehru nor the Simon Report, which was due to be published the following summer.

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In December of 1928, faced with this dilemma and midway through Simon’s tour, Viceroy Irwin devised a bold solution to the fact that while Indian nationalists had not agreed on their own constitutional proposals, they were committed to rejecting those of the Statutory Commission. Irwin suggested to Simon that his proposals for British India be considered alongside those of the Butler Report for princely India at a conference in London, to which the prime minister would invite the leading social and political figures of India (Moore 1974, 44). Simon was livid, feeling that his report’s recommendations would be undermined, while Hailey immediately counselled that the conference conclusions could be advisory but not authoritative. Meanwhile, Congress had devised an alternative plan to resolve the deadlock. On 31 December 1928 they issued the British with an ultimatum – either award India Dominion status within a year or face a campaign of civil disobedience. Irwin spent the spring trying, first, to convince Simon to propose the conference in his report, allowing some saving of face; second, to convince Congress to attend the conference; and third, to extract from the Government of India’s Reforms Department a definition of what Dominion status actually meant (see Chapter 2). In July Irwin travelled to Britain to discuss his plans with the new Labour government, where he found MacDonald as prime minister and William Wedgwood Benn as secretary of state for India supportive of both a ‘free’ conference and India’s quest for Dominion status. Despite vociferous opposition from leading Conservatives and Liberals, Irwin was authorised to issue a declaration to this effect after his return to India. On 31 October 1929 the viceroy announced that the London conference would take place towards the end of 1930 and that the logical conclusion of Montagu’s 1917 commitment to responsible government was India’s attainment of Dominion status (Singh 1977). During November meetings with leading nationalists, Irwin insisted on the sincerity of the declaration but also emphasised that the free conference method (see Chapter 4) meant that Dominion status could not be set as the aim of the meeting (Moore 1974, 99). As such, at Lahore on 31 December, Congress declared that the conference would not satisfy their demands, that they would boycott it and that they would launch a campaign of civil disobedience in the new year. This was the complex context out of which the RTC emerged. The etymology of its name represents this complexity. There is no founding moment when the conference was christened; rather, the name had been

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solidifying through the 1920s as the preferred medium through which to reconcile India’s divergent political parts. In April 1921 the Maharaja of Bikaner had suggested an RTC to Viceroy Reading to explain the princes’ feelings to him (Copland 1997, 48), while in the same year Sapru had also suggested an RTC between Reading, Gandhi and leading nationalists (Low 2008), but the British Cabinet refused (Bridge 1986, 11). Three years later, in response to Hailey’s attempt to delimit what Dominion status might mean for India, the Swaraj nationalist party replied with a demand for an RTC with the power to devise a new constitution (Moore 1974, 56). In September 1925, Congress also managed to get a motion put to the Legislative Assembly articulating a ‘national demand’ for an RTC to united British officials and Indian political representatives (Coatman 1932a, 82). Though the name would stick, Congress envisaged the conference as a constituent assembly, not an advisory mechanism (Coatman 1932a, 258). The latter was Irwin’s conception, which he had had in mind since the Simon Commission was announced in 1926 (Bridge 1986, 20). As a compromise, the Nehru Report of 1928 suggested an RTC to discuss how to implement Dominion status (Macnamara 2015, 85). Irwin and Benn, however, would insist on the broader diplomatic interpretation of a ‘round table conference’ (Nicolson 1939, 155) which insisted upon open discussion and agendas. The British government eventually adopted the title of Round Table Conference in August 1930, having noted that it had entered popular usage already.10 After Irwin’s announcement and the Lahore Congress, in early 1930 the princes entered into a period of frenetic planning for the London debates, hiring some of the leading lawyers of the day to advise on their rights and relationship to the British Crown. In July, Irwin held a conference with leading princes at the winter capital of Simla and raised the question of an allIndian federation. The prospect was quashed by both the states represented through the Chamber of Princes and those large states, including Hyderabad and Mysore, outside of it (Copland 1997, 82). Key princely advisors, however, had been investigating the prospect of federation and weighing up the balance of risk between two futures (Haksar and Panikkar 1930). In one they would remain external to a British India poised for reforms that would allow greater Congress influence, which was generally critical of the heredity, anti-democratic princely states. In the second they would surrender sovereignty by positioning themselves beneath a federal centre as well under the British Crown but would be able to influence the structure so as to defend their quasi-sovereignty (R. Mantena 2018). The latter won

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out and transformed the nature of the conference entirely, even if federation was not born until after independence.

FEDERATION Just as federation was an absent presence in colonial India after the conference, so it is both everywhere and nowhere in this book. The main reason for this is that the debates over federation at the RTC have been meticulously mapped by the existing works that this volume hopes to supplement. These include recent works and the classic conference texts mentioned above, but also many texts from the time. Once the RTC recommendations had fed into the parliamentary joint committee and then into the Government of India Act (1935), works were published shortly after detailing the emergence and realisation of the plans for federation. For instance, Nagendranath Gangulee’s (1936) The Making of Federal India detailed the development of the three main features of the 1935 act – namely, unity through federation, responsibility with safeguards and provincial autonomy. The emergence of the federal plans through each conference stage was summarised, with the British Liberals eventually agreeing the way for a federal executive responsible to the legislature, despite Tory resistance. MacDonald could then announce at the end of the first session, in January 1931, how the federation was envisaged. The Indian government would be responsible to provincial and central legislatures; powers would be reserved to protect minorities; a bicameral central government would incorporate British and princely states; federal powers within the states would have to be conceded by the princes; defence and external affairs would be reserved for the governor-general, who would also reserve emergency powers to maintain tranquillity; financial responsibility would rest with the federal government as long as the financial stability and credit of India was maintained; and full provincial autonomy would be realised (Gangulee 1936, 133). Arthur Berridale Keith’s (1936) constitutional history of India was also published in 1936 and revised the following year. Its second half comprised chapters on the RTC, federalism and the 1935 act in operation. Keith’s pro-Simon, anti-Congress account praised the Indian government’s repressive measures against civil disobedience and identified a compact between the British and the princes in India to create a conservative federal centre that could act as a check on future Congress power in the provinces (Keith 1937, 296).

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Keith’s dual concerns, with the political and constitutional history of the conference, anticipated the interests of the core reference texts on the RTC. Moore (1974, 132–164) has detailed the rival schemes for federation that played out in London. The princes had long been contemplating how best to preserve their ‘quasi-sovereignty’ in the face of assertions of British paramountcy (Benton 2010, 222). In the 1920s the influential British Resident at Hyderabad Lieutenant-Colonel Terence Keyes had persuaded leading minister Sir Akbar Hydari of the case for federation. He also persuaded Sir Mirza Ismail of the benefits to Mysore of federation, as had Colonel Haksar, a relative of Sapru who published a pro-princely federation text on the eve of the conference with the persuasive polymath K. M. Panikkar (Haksar and Panikkar 1930). Moore has shown how federation dominated all discussions at the conference, where tortuous debates detailed how the British Indian centre might be replaced by a bicameral federal legislature. At the second session Muslim delegates refused to engage with debates on federal structure before communal safeguards were approved, a task which proved impossible (Moore 1974, 218). While Bridge (1986) covered much similar ground to Moore, he emphasised the coordinated policies of Conservative delegates to craft a federation that would protect British interests. Hoare pushed relentlessly for quicker progress, even if this might mean two separate bills, one for provincial autonomy for British India and a second for its federation with the princely states. While this move was defeated by Sapru, the configuration of the 1935 act meant that provincial autonomy before federation was exactly what happened. Both Moore and Bridge acknowledged the pivotal role of the princes, as explored in fuller depth by Copland (1997). He argued that colonial Indian federation very nearly came into being before the Second World War, and that the RTC should not be retrospectively read through the lens of failure. On the contrary, it was the high-water mark of princely influence. Federation, for the princes, arrived as a contingency reaction in a particular moment in early 1930, when tensions between Hyderabad and the Chamber of Princes, and with a viceroy concerned at the prince’s attempts to challenge paramountcy, necessitated a political innovation (Copland 1997, 80). Keyes, Haksar, Panikkar and Hydari coincided sufficiently such that by the time delegates arrived in London the British and princely plans for federation were aligning. In the pause between the first and second sessions, however, the broader princely community in India expressed doubts regarding the

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ability of federation to serve their interests (Ramusack 2004, 259). Patiala led the campaign of the doubters, who found the federal structure proposed at the second session to threaten a stronger centre with fewer princely seats in the legislatures. In 1932 Patiala proposed a rival confederation scheme, which would see the princely states form a self-coordinated bloc within a federation with a weak centre. Ultimately, however, a compromise was reached, which ensured a limited federal government, safeguards and the princely right to secede (Copland 1997, 110). Since these works of constitutional and political history, federalism has been reappraised in the political sciences and in political theory more broadly. In terms of the former, regarding pre-independence India Katharine Adeney (2007, 34) has distinguished federalism, as the commitment to self-government through the division of sovereignty between territorially defined levels of government, and federation, a political system resulting from this commitment, in pre-independence India. Indian federalism, in this lens, can be traced through Mughal and East India Company governance, where effective provincial autonomy was a concession made to conserve central power in a complex interplay between expanding British provinces and surviving hereditary states (Datla 2015; Sen 2002). For the British, emphasising the incompatibility of India’s constituting geographies and communities justified their rule. While periodic empires had risen and fallen over the millennia, India had always reverted to regional governance (Rudolph and Hoeber Rudolph 2010). As such, Montagu had proposed a federal government for India in 1917 (Bridge 1986, 6) while the Simon Report also suggested federation as a distant aim. Congress was also committed but ambivalent towards federation. For Jawaharlal Nehru’s brand of Indian nationalism, India was a unity and needed a strong federal state that could express and govern it (Adeney 2007, 25). Congress had rejected dyarchy because it was an incapacitated form of federalism, but it accepted India would need a federal form of government. The Nehru Report of 1928 proposed a centrist federation, and Congress committed again to the form in the Gandhi–Irwin Pact of 1931 (Adeney 2007, 36), but it would reject a colonial model of federation which used the princes as a conservative foil. While there was not a clear and consistent Muslim League line, in general they pushed for a less centrist federation such that Muslim-majority provinces might operate with as much autonomy as possible from a Congress-dominated centre.

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In terms of political theory, federation is currently being reread. From this reading emerges a ‘global federal moment from the 1930s to the 1960s’ (Fejzula 2021, 499), with the RTC marking one of the earliest negotiations of colonial multinational state experimentation. Jean L. Cohen (2018) has convincingly argued that federalism has to be retrieved not only as a forgotten political geographical imagination of late colonialism but also as a longer forgotten alternative to the sovereign state. This forgetting was a result of the political victory of the state-form over earlier, viable alternatives, following which histories have been constructed which retrospectively read the past through the lens of triumphant statism. Federations were historical alternatives to absolutist states, although most have evolved into federally sovereign states through the imposition of legal hierarchies and centralised rule (Smolenski 2016). Empires were also historical alternatives to centralised states, connecting together states over larger scales than federations (Beaud 2018). In the twentieth century, federal imaginations expanded in scope, however, to encompass regions, empires and even the world itself (Bell 2016, 196). Tracing these imaginations into decolonisation, Frederick Cooper (2014) has explored federation in French West Africa between 1945 and 1960 as a way of bridging colonialism and post-colonialism, despite the eventual triumph of the nation-state form (for comparable moves in the French Caribbean, see Wilder [2015]). Similarly, Michael Collins (2013, 24) has shown how federation transitioned for the British from an imperial endeavour to link London and its colonies and dominions to an attempt to reconfigure collaboration in colonies so as to prolong British influence (also see Getachew [2019]). These insights have been drawn upon in recent works which have reinvigorated studies of interwar Indian federalism through positioning it as one of the most prominent political projects that sought to give substance to imaginaries of what post-colonies might look like (Mantena and Mantena 2018). Unlike Cooper’s case of federation uniting anti-colonial leaders in West Africa, Rama Mantena (2018) has reminded us that debates over federation saw Congress turn against the princes, with Nehru pronouncing the proposed union of imperialism, feudalism and democracy as impossible. Such a union would, however, see the princes surrender sovereignty while the British Indian provinces would gain it. These tensions were negotiated on a state-by-state basis, with Hyderabad being Mantena’s example. Sunil Purushotham (2020a, 2020b) has also explored the federal question from

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the perspective of Hyderabad with great acuity. Federation emerges here as an ultimately violent attempt to codify the fragmented sovereign landscape of the Raj. But it emerged from jostling futures in the interwar years, each of which had to comprehend the territorial fragmentation, legal plurality and layered sovereignty of the Indian Empire. The RTC features briefly here, before its consequences are etched out in fine detail in Hyderabad’s fractious attempts to defend its sovereignty at the end of empire. These recent works have drawn on all three phases of federal writing outlined above: the post-RTC constitutional analyses; constitution histories of interwar India; and recent re-thinkings of federalism within the political sciences and political theory. They are richly attuned to geographical questions, of the slinking of federalism from an international to a national scale and the fragmented sovereign landscapes into which it fitted. This forms part of a broader attempt to ‘search for sovereignty’ (Benton 2010) in the legal and physical geographies of the princely states. However, Benton did not extend her legal geographical reading to the European cities in which the laws and constitutions of empire were devised, and from which their progress across the globe was charted and, when necessary, conveniently forgotten. This volume contributes to the search for interwar Indian sovereignty in the places and people of the RTC.

DELEGATIONS The conference delegates were divided into those from Britain, from British India and from the Indian, or princely, states. This tripartite division applied across all three sessions and each delegation had its own subdivisions, although this could have played out otherwise. The Tories and Liberals were keen that there be one government delegation and one shared line, although Benn pushed back strongly against this (see Chapter 4). Likewise, in the frantic horse-trading in London before the conference began, the British Indian delegates’ hopes for a joint set of demands to put before the conference were dashed at the last hour  – the proposed joint electorates with reserved seats proving unacceptable for the Muslim delegates (see Chapter 3). As such, each delegation entered the conference divided. Many of these divisions grew to the extent of nearly rending the conference asunder, whether through British disagreements over the conference method, British Indian communal discord or the fracturing of princely support between rival federal and confederal schemes.

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Each delegate was selected by the British and Indian governments to provide a supposedly fair representation of Indian and, to a lesser extent, British political life. The amount of work done by delegates in committees and behind the scenes varied, and the leading figures have been efficiently summarised by Moore (1974, 117–128). The British delegation numbered sixteen, the eight Labour MPs being counterweighted by four Tories and four Liberals. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald chaired the conference, during the tumultuous fallout from the Wall Street Crash which led to the collapse of his Labour government and the formation of the cross-party National Government in August 1931. MacDonald had a long-standing interest in India, having visited twice and published his views on Indian reform. Though critical of imperial policy and attuned to the power of Indian nationalism, he was no anti-colonialist and fitted into a long tradition of uneasy Indian liberal imperialism (Gopal 2019, 198–204). William Wedgwood Benn was appointed secretary of state for India in 1929 and was the driving force, in consultation with Viceroy Irwin, behind the design of the conference. He refused to join the National Government in 1931 and was defeated in the October elections, although MacDonald allowed him to stay on as a delegate representing the Labour Party. The third most influential Labour delegate was Lord Sankey, the lord chancellor. While Benn planned the conference and MacDonald presided over the plenaries, and chaired the Minorities Committee, Sankey was the most consistently influential British politician, chairing the Federal Structure Committee, around which all other committees aligned themselves. A diligent but anxious lawyer, Sankey had practically no knowledge of Indian affairs before the conference but was widely praised for his commitment and brokerage. The Conservative Party was riven over the Indian question, with ‘Die Hard’ opinion, championed by Winston Churchill and the Daily Mail press baron Lord Rothermere, resisting any substantial move towards selfgovernment (St John 2006). Their conference delegation was, however, less die hard than feared by the government. Ex-secretary of state for India Lord Peel and the ex-governor of Bengal the Marquis of Zetland were expected to lead proceedings but it was Samuel Hoare who was most active, leading to his appointment as MacDonald’s secretary of state for India in the National Government. Hoare was committed to the reforms but fought to have, and partially succeeded in having, the conference method dropped for the final session in 1932. The Liberal delegation did not include Simon but did count

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in its ranks the Round Table movement stalwart Lothian and the ex-viceroy Lord Reading, who was a core opponent of the government until his Damascene conversion to federalism during the first session. The Indian states had sixteen delegates at the first session, who were a mix of ministers and princes themselves (see Figure 1.2). Sir Akbar Hydari represented the wealthy and influential Muslim-led state of Hyderabad and had his own model of federation that was proposed alongside those of Sapru and Panikkar. Sir Mirza Ismail represented the other influential southern states of Mysore, Travancore, Cochin and Pudakottai. Eight members were nominated by the Chamber of Princes, which itself represented princely concerns in the legislature in New Delhi. Here the two dominant personalities were the then chancellor of the chamber Bhupinder Singh, the Maharaja of Patiala, and the ex-chancellor Sir Ganga Singh, the Maharaja of Bikaner. To the former’s chagrin, Bikaner dominated the scene. He built upon his connections and reputation in Europe, having signed the Treaty of Versailles on India’s behalf, his close relationship with the king-emperor and his experience of representing India at the League of Nations and Imperial Conferences (Purcell 2010). Bikaner won national acclaim for coming out in favour of federation at the opening plenary, but as the consequences of federating became clear over the following year the princes splintered in their support (Copland 1997, 107). Ultimately, the princes were reconciled before the final session in 1932, which was attended almost solely by their representatives. They managed to secure a commitment that federation would only be triggered with the accession of ‘rulers entitled to fill not less than half the 104 seats of the Council of State and having as subjects not less 39,490,956 persons’ (Keith 1936, 327), the British not being able to federate them independently. This did not happen before 1947, so colonial federation did not materialise. The British Indian delegation numbered fifty-eight at the first session and was subdivided into mostly religious sub-groups, although the Indian Liberals refused communal affiliation (see Figure 1.3). Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru had served as law member in the Viceroy’s Executive Council and was widely considered India’s premier constitutional expert. He had played a key role in drafting the Nehru Report, acted as go-between for Congress and the Indian government, and was the chief advocate of federalism and the conference method (Low 1968). He was supported at the first session by prominent Liberals Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar and Sir Srinivasa Sastri (on the latter’s ‘liberal internationalism’, see Thakur [2021]).

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FIGURE 1.2  Indian states delegates Source: ‘Representing India’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 12 October 1930, © British Library Board (OP 1346).

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Source: ‘Representing India’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 12 October 1930, © British Library Board (OP 1346).

FIGURE 1.3  British Indian delegates

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The Muslim delegates were led by Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III, who was also chairman of the British Indian delegation (AgaKhan 1954; on the politics behind the selection of Muslim delegates and the tensions between those with central and provincial foci, see Page [1982]). A famous and influential internationalist, the Aga Khan had helped found the Muslim League in 1906 and, though relatively moderate, instilled firm discipline across the Muslim delegates who mostly held to an agreed line, especially on weightage in the proposed legislative chambers. Sir Muhammad Shafi was a seasoned lawyer from the Punjab who had nearly fifteen years’ experience of advising the Indian government and viceroy on legal matters and had represented India at the 1930 Imperial Conference which immediately preceded the RTC. More provocative was the seasoned Pan-Islamist Maulana Muhammad Ali, who died in London during the first session and was replaced by his brother Maulana Shaukat Ali at the second session. Provocative but less radical was Mahomed Ali Jinnah, a lawyer who had worked for Hindu–Muslim unity within Congress until 1920, after which he devoted himself to Muslim politics. He was flexible on the question of separate electorates and was an early champion of a federal British India. In March 1929 he issued his ‘fourteen points’ as an alternative to the Nehru Report, to unify Indian Muslims across party lines. Though much debated at the conference, the points were not as influential as hoped (Moore 1974, 39), and it was only in the mid-1930s that Jinnah rose to prominence within the Muslim League, eventually becoming the first governor-general of independent Pakistan. The Hindu delegates were dominated by the combative and divisive figure of Dr B. S. Moonje, who was president of the Hindu Mahasabha (1927– 35) and a ‘responsive cooperator’ with the dyarchy system in the 1920s. Moonje was an extreme communalist who viewed his role at the conference as being the sole, in his eyes, block against the unified and powerful Muslim delegates. He gradually alienated fellow Hindu responsivist delegates M. R. Jayakar and S. B. Tambe, and was the bane of Sapru’s conference life, repeatedly blocking efforts at conciliation and compromise. Various ‘minorities’ were granted a voice at the conference, many of which swayed the course of the conference deliberations more broadly. Dr B. R. Ambedkar represented the depressed classes, previously known as untouchables, and refused Gandhi’s claim to speak for them, pushing instead for separate electorates where they would appoint their own representatives. These were granted in the communal award of 1932,

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against which Gandhi launched a fast to the death, forcing a reversal of policy (B. Chakrabarty 2016). The Sikhs had separate representatives, including Sardar Ujjal Singh whose defiance over representation in the Punjab led to an early communal crisis during the first session. The AngloIndian community was represented by Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Gidney, while Indian women had two representatives at the first session, selected from the two main communal groups, although both spoke for all women (Mukherjee 2018). The Hindu, Madras-based social reformer Radhabai Subbarayan had been active in the governance of Madras University and in women’s organisations in the region. Muhammad Shafi’s daughter, referred to as the Begum Shah Nawaz, was widely considered to be a convenient and cheap solution to female representation, already being in London as her father’s assistant at the Imperial Conference (Shahnawaz 1971). Shah Nawaz was, however, a star turn at the conference and attended all three sessions. European commerce and European non-officials in India, Indian Christians and the trade unions were also represented. At the second session Gandhi attended as the sole Congress delegate, though he was assisted by Sarojini Naidu as a women’s delegate and Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya as a Hindu delegate. Though he sat on both of the two functioning committees at the second conference, Gandhi’s contribution to formal conference proceedings was relatively slight. The challenges of treating the Mahatma as only one of over 100 delegates will be addressed below.

ARCHIVES AND FRAMINGS The geographical reading presented here uses many of the same archives that have informed previous political and constitutional histories of the RTC. The India Office Records at the British Library in London house the government’s accounts of organising the conference, British delegates’ private papers, secret intelligence reports on Indian activism in Britain and memoirs packed with conference gossip. The National Archives at Kew and the Parliamentary Archives at Westminster detail the, at times, begrudging efforts of the British state to host an Indian conference and testify to the overwhelming correspondence that Ramsay MacDonald received as prime minister, conference president and later chairman of the Minorities Committee. The Royal Archives at Windsor Castle also detail the role of the

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monarch in hosting the delegates, especially his fellow royal princes. Other delegates deposited their papers at the University libraries of Manchester, Oxford and Cambridge. In Delhi a similar split occurs between state papers at the National Archives of India and private papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML). The Maharaja Ganga Singhji Trust Archives in Bikaner sat somewhere between the two, housing the private and state papers of a hereditary monarch and committed internationalist (see Hodder, Heffernan and Legg [2021]; on the difficulties of researching the history of Indian federalism in princely archives, see Pillai [2021]). David Low assiduously collected and re-organised the papers of Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru by date, incorporating numerous other sources, and deposited them at the National Library of Australia. Who deposited personal collections in archives, and what they chose to deposit, was unpredictable. Some private paper collections were unexpectedly rich in intimate insights, such as those of Conservative Delegation Secretary R.  J. Stopford, European commercial delegate E.  C. Benthall or the staunch Hindu communalist Dr B. S. Moonje. The latter features heavily throughout this book for two reasons. First, he was the most militant of the Hindu delegates and viewed his role at the conference, explicitly, as that of blocking the machinations of the Muslim bloc, which was presumed to be better disciplined. Because of the regular conflagrations that Moonje instigated, he appears in most other private collections. The second reason that he appears throughout, however, is down to the nature of his private papers, deposited at the NMML. Moonje collected conference materials, including circulars, social announcements, committee minutes, receipts and telegrams, which give us a sense of the quotidian diplomatic functioning of the conference. In addition, he was an assiduous diarist, recording the minutiae of conference life each day, often recounting committee discussions in detail, on the basis of his notes. The diaries often struck a confessional and agonised tone and give us rich insights into the conference viewed through communal eyes. But the logging of where Moonje ate, socialised and entertained himself also gives us rich information, beyond his religious viewpoints, on the sort of London inhabited by an influential delegate but one on a medium to low income. The intent throughout this book has been to get beyond the formal spaces and subjects of traditional political and diplomatic history and thus to write a new historical and cultural geography of the conference. This has been accomplished, in part, through reading the official archive against

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its grain, with an eye to minor locations, hints of illiberal practices within the conference method that the organisers sought to keep off the written page and traces of subaltern agency. The point is returned to that the elitist histories of the conference are themselves dependent on subaltern labour – the minutes, proceedings and speeches which inform these histories being the product of subaltern diplomatic graft of typewriting, note-taking and chit-carrying. Attending to this labour and the places in which it took place must be a quantitative as well as a qualitative task. Through working with evidence that taken individually would be mundane, analysis is presented of the accumulative work which strung together the subaltern spaces and subjects of the conference by logging the hours worked by subaltern diplomatic staff (Chapter 5), detailing the materiality of this labour through scouring the accounting records for clerical goods used (Chapter 6), charting the quotidian social diary of Dr Moonje (Chapter 8) and accumulating the traces left to us of the near-constant conference labour of women working beyond the official spaces of the conference (Chapter 9). In doing so, use has also been made of unofficial sources, many of which sought scoops and gossip within and without official conference spaces. The press clamoured for these stories. While broadsheets like The Times, Times of India, Daily Telegraph and Manchester Guardian covered the main political debates, with occasional informal asides, the tabloids went crazy for the glamour and spectacle of the visitors from the supposedly exotic east. The Daily Mail, Daily Sketch and Evening Standard were constantly on the lookout for conference mishaps or witticisms  – finding oneself in the latter’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ anonymous gossip column being a source of especial pride.11 The conference was also a rich visual feast for photojournalists and caricaturists. The tabloids were filled with photos of the conference delegates, as were image-focused journals like the Illustrated Weekly of India and, especially, The Graphic, with its ‘Candid Camera’ specials featuring the pioneering informal society photos of Erich Salomon. The older art of political caricatures was still alive and kicking, with tabloid cartoonists like David Low (see Figure 7.1) competing with internationally renowned artists who came to London to cover the conference. Emery Kelen was the most famous of these, returning to the capital for the first two sessions, due to ‘half the ready cash in the British Empire flying around’ (Kelen 1964, 247) the conference’s social spaces. His caricatures were sold in galleries, auctioned for charity and reprinted in magazines

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and journals in Britain and India (see Figure 1.4). At the second session, for Kelen as for most commentators, the biggest draw was Gandhi. We return in Chapter 9 to Kelen’s memoir, where he describes sketching Gandhi at his Knightsbridge house (see Figure 9.5). A profound cynic, even Kelen could not resist the spiritual appeal of Gandhi’s ashram-cum-office. He entitled his chapter on the RTC using his favourite quote from Gandhi: ‘I must reduce myself to zero’ (Kelen 1964, 239–276). For Gandhi, this meant putting himself last, marking the farthest limit of humility (Gandhi [1927] 2007, 616). For Kelen, I think it also captured Gandhi’s ambiguity, and the impossibility of rendering him in oil, ink or clay (as other artists, detailed in Chapter 9, also found). Gandhi was, and remains, an enigma, and this book makes no attempt to crack or solve his riddle. On the contrary, the struggle here has been to not focus on Gandhi too much. He was one of over 100 delegates; he did not attend two of three sessions; and while in London, he had less of an impact than expected on the conference and then announced his failure to solve the communal impasse. As such, Gandhi is a second absent presence in this book. He features, as does federation. But, like that great constitutional surprise of the conference, Gandhi’s adventures in London and Lancashire have been covered in detail (Hunt [1993] 2012; Ramachandra Guha 2018). The attention he drew towards himself has a distortive effect on the space–time continuum of the archive. The undoubted star of the conference, but perhaps also its black hole, he drew in commentaries, memoirs, photographs, sketches, memoranda and papers around his humble zero. Like federation, Gandhi features in most chapters that follow, although he is only the focus of Chapter 3, in the informal conferencing spaces where the minorities questions were debated, and of Chapter 9, where his homes in Bow and Knightsbridge are explored. In these cases, as elsewhere, the gaze is not on Gandhi directly but on the people and places to which the attention that he garnered cast light. Here, as elsewhere, the focus lies on subaltern subjects but also the subaltern spaces which would otherwise not have entered the archive. These form parts, larger or smaller, of the four conference geographies that this book lays out.

FOUR GEOGRAPHIES OF THE RTC The composition of the book has a temporal tilt: the earlier chapters focusing on the opening stages of the conference, the latter focusing on the second

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and third conference sessions. There is also a spatial tilt, the first section having abstract geographies as its focus, and the second and third moving in to smaller-scale spaces. Yet scale is, here as always, deceptive (Legg 2014b). International and national scale concepts are explored through the debates within St James’s Palace, while the homes of Chapter 9 are explored as the places where the fate of communities and of nations was being decided. Each chapter includes a different balance between conference governmentalities and subalternities, whether in terms of subjects, geopolitics, diplomacy or subaltern spaces more broadly. The first section considers the negotiation of ‘geographical imaginations’ (Daniels 2011, 183) at the conference, those overarching, spatial modes of comprehension and experience that frame both known and possible worlds. The focus here is on those imaginations which predated and faded in the face of the ascent of federation and those which helped determine its fate. Chapter 2 explores the operation at the conference of two colonial governmentalities of deferral. Dominion status had been promised but denied to India, passing the point of Congress’s patience. Despite much anxious preparation on all sides regarding Dominion status, the commitment to federation supplanted it as the imagination of India’s future at the conference. Dyarchy had been instituted in 1919 to defer Indian self-government by trialling it in the provinces. While the RTC formally ended dyarchy, the division of powers which the Federal Structure Committee devised looked uncomfortably dyarchical to some commentators. While federation did not materialise before independence, provincial autonomy, from 1937, could be interpreted as state-level dyarchy, while the constitutional mechanism by which India exited the British Empire was that of Dominion, not federation (De 2019). Chapter 3 turns to religious community as the Indian specificity which federation would have to confront. But it was also the driver of Round Table informal conferencing. The British preference was that the ‘minorities’ question be settled outside of formal conference proceedings. The chapter tracks the geographies of these debates. While they took place in elite locations, in Mayfair and the prime minister’s country retreat at Chequers, these were also subaltern geographies of an unprecedented diplomatic situation. Gandhi was tasked with coordinated informal attempts to solve the minorities question at the second session through interminable meetings in flats, rooms, committee chambers and restaurants, in which the atmosphere soured as the incompatibility of the selected delegates’ demands became clear.

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The second section considers conference infrastructures, drawing upon two bodies of literature. The first considers infrastructures as political and material assemblages of practices and institutions which enable forms of government (Ramesh and Raveendranathan 2020). The second, more expansive, body of work explores infrastructures as objects of knowledge and exclusion, which are managed and experimented with, and exist through people’s lives (Graham and McFarlane 2014). The chapters focus on infrastructures of conference bureaucracy, of people and of place. Chapter 4 explores how the conference method was structured, creating the bureaucratic infrastructure for formal work. Drawing upon liberal internationalist traditions of conferencing, a ‘free, equal and effective’ method was sought, to the dismay of India Office officials. Both the British and Indian governments found ways to influence and sway conference proceedings, however, while the free method as practised was attacked from every angle, surviving only in mutilated form for the third session in 1932. Chapter 5 explores those non-delegates who peopled the conference and made it work. Some provided expertise, whether as agents of the state in London more generally or because they were conference experts, serving as secretaries or advisors. Supporting these men (they were all men) were subaltern diplomats providing the hard labour of keeping the conference machinery turning. The archive is replete with evidence of this work, which prepared the Palace, policed the venues, took and typed up notes and operated the duplicating machines. Most of this latter work was done by women, the services of whom were regularly acknowledged even if rarely narrated. Chapter 6 explores the materials and technologies that were used to make the conference happen and to connect it to the outside world. St James’s Palace had to be kitted out for the first two conference sessions. This included the material manifestation of squaring the circle, the table itself, which was oval, not round. The materials used to transfer the conference to the House of Lords in 1932 attest to the micro-subaltern geographies that kept diplomacy at work when dislocated. A vast communications infrastructure was used to pump out texts, images and film into an imperial public relations network that spanned the globe and transformed the daily rituals of conference life. The third section explores the role of London as a conference city. If the second section emphasised the infrastructures which constituted

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the conference, though always in connection to the city and the outside world, the emphasis in this section is on the significance of the placing of diplomacy. Cities presented vital resources to conferences, providing the stages for their theatrics (Shimazu 2014), the leisure and residential facilities for delegates (Craggs 2014), their urban audiences (Fisher, Lahiri and Thandi 2007; Matera 2015) and the spaces in which official but informal hospitality might sway out-of-hours debates and lobbying (Vick 2014). Chapter 7 explores government hospitality in the city. Though the capital offered glamorous resources for these efforts, the potential for faux pas or exposure to explicit racism in the city was high. Air shows and formal receptions were used to welcome the delegates but the main resource for the RTC’s social secretaries was the Indian Social Centre in Mayfair, where delegates could reside and host guests. The centre was felt to be a key plank in the government’s efforts to create an atmosphere of good will and cooperation. As with the direct conference infrastructure, accounting documents allow us to list the objects and subjects who helped sustain this place of subaltern diplomacy. The social secretaries also organised exhaustive lists of engagements or functions whereby delegates might enjoy the best hospitality the city could offer. Chapter 8 explores how delegates further enjoyed non-official London. Delegates used an allowance to find accommodation for themselves, which mapped out the vast differences in wealth in the hotel geography of the city. While richer delegates could afford suites in which they could pursue their conference aims through hosting and socialising, others found themselves struggling to find accommodation in a city not always welcoming of Indian guests. Similar patterns were played out in the gentleman’s clubs, societies and restaurants of the city. The conference was, especially, a festival of food. Delegates met for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. There were elite banquets and dinners at London’s best restaurants, funded especially by the princes, but there was also a subaltern geography of dining in London’s growing Indian restaurant scene, where competition to attract the delegates was fierce. Chapter 9 shows that a similar blurring between elite and subaltern socialising also played out in the domestic spaces of the capital. Women feature throughout this book, participating in minorities debates, staffing the conference and organising dinners. The domestic was a space to which women still found their politics confined, but this chapter shows how women used home spaces as pivotal places through which the work of the

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conference was transformed. Women functioned as elite hostesses, such as the prime minister’s daughter Ishbel MacDonald, especially through ‘at-home’ events. But women also crafted homeplaces of conferencing in the city, as explored through Nancy Astor’s vast home in St James’s Square, Muriel Lester’s home for Gandhi in East London and Gandhi’s working home in Knightsbridge, organised by Sarojini Naidu, Rena Datta and others. The final section focuses on the conference as a representational event in two senses. The first concerns the representational politics of an event which claimed to be representing India to the British in London. This was, however, through a non-democratic process of nomination, not representation, echoing the limitations of colonial democracy more broadly (K. Mantena 2016). The second sense explored here is of how the conference was re-presented to the wider public, in pitted battles between those working with or against the conference method that blur false representational binaries of text and materiality (Jazeel 2019). Chapter 10 shows how the representational agenda of the conference was directly resisted, marking the proceedings with traces of subaltern, if mediated, agency. Petitions were sent to Delhi and London directly, consistently protesting at the un-representative nature of the delegates. On the streets and journal pages of London the conference was also vociferously resisted by both pro- and anti-Congress organisations, the latter being led by the charismatic communist Shapurji Saklatvala. Chapter 11 explores how the conference came to be widely represented as a failure. This can be seen in the operation and coverage of the final session, taking place in small rooms in the House of Lords, regarding which even the positive coverage recognised the absence of Congress and the work yet to be done. Finally, the constant portrayal of the conference, throughout its operation, as being at the brink of failure is explored. The chapter ends by asking why it was that almost all delegates benefitted by having the conference deemed a failure, and who the sacrifice of the conference served.

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I GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

2 DOMINION AND DYARCHY THE ABSENT PRESENCES

The First World War not only reconfigured the British Empire’s economy, politics and demographics, but it also disrupted its sense of time and space. Imperial weldings of history and geography had previously placed Europe in a present-future to which the rest of the past-present world might aspire (Fabian 1983). This aspiration was viewed sequentially, with peoples and nations passing through a series of stages in order to reach a (permanently deferred) shared status of modernity and democracy (Kaviraj 2005). During and after the war this geography was challenged by people of the empire who looked across its global scope and wanted what other (whiter, richer, more independent) people had, immediately (Matera and Kent 2017). The result was an attempt to configure a ‘third’ British Empire. The first such empire had been focused on settler colonies in the western hemisphere with a pretence at cultural unity (Darwin 1999). The second, post–American Revolution empire encompassed societies in Africa and Asia that required local collaborators and a geographical differentiation between the informal empire, settler colonies and a ‘dependent’ empire that included India. The turbulent decade after the war saw radical change produce a third empire, with new mandated territories in the Middle East, democratic reforms in the United Kingdom and British India, and the formalisation of the older white settler colonies of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, as well as the Irish Free State, into dominions. The latter would be the cornerstones of the development of the modern commonwealth, after the  jettisoning of imperial federationist attempts to unify the empire at the Imperial Conference of 1917 (Darwin 1999, 68).

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Mrinalini Sinha (2013, 171) has shown that the Commonwealth envisaged the empire configured like the League of Nations, as a hierarchy of current or potential nation-states. Her reading retains an emphasis on the dominions, but as drivers of imperial reform, not merely as models for the Commonwealth. The third empire hierarchy was racial, with white-dominated dominions and the British government propagating inequality between the Crown’s colonial subjects in terms of mobility, law and institutional recognition (Banerjee 2010; Mawani 2018). It was this geographical imagination of a nation-state empire rather than an imperial empire that marked out the interwar world and informed both colonial and anti-colonial projects (Sinha 2013). In response to increasing Indian nationalist demands for recognition of its contributions to the war, in 1917 Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu declared in parliament that the government’s policy towards India was that of the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire. (Quoted in Danzig 1968, 19)

This statement framed Indian politics in the 1920s and the Round Table Conference (RTC) was a further reverberation in its wake. The ‘selfgoverning institutions’ and ‘responsible government’ of the announcement have been, rightly, the focus of much study (Moore 1974; Robb 1976). But the statement was also packed in with both the temporal politics of deferral, promising reforms that would be ‘gradual’ and ‘progressive’, and the spatial politics of deferral, retaining India as an integral part of the empire (for different scales of the politics of such waiting, see Joronen [2017]). These politics of scale played out through two geographical imaginations for interwar India: dyarchy and Dominion status. The Government of India Act, 1919, instituted what Lionel Curtis (1920) had named Dyarchy, a twofold division of the powers of government. This was between, first, central and provincial governments and, second, between provincial subjects reserved for administration by the governor and his council and those transferred for administration by elected Indian ministers. Dyarchy was not temporally deferred; if anything, it came too quickly. But it was temporally limited. It had been designed to be immediate but temporary, a staging post before India progressed to fuller

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and more responsible self-government. Well before Simon’s decadal review of the working of the 1919 act, dyarchy was near universally agreed to have failed: it was periodically boycotted by nationalist parties; its division of administrative subjects had been painfully difficult to administer; and the viceroy’s emergency powers of intervention were a constant reminder of the imperial autocracy at the heart of this colonial democratic experiment (Sapru et al. 1925). Dyarchy was explicitly structured as a spatial experiment in scale (Legg 2016a). The progressive realisation of responsible government was spatially delimited to the scale of the province, configured as regional waiting rooms of history (D. Chakrabarty 2000, 8); the RTC was explicitly tasked with devising dyarchy’s successor but the colonial version of federation that the RTC devised retained many of the features of dyarchy. If the 1919 reforms had a long afterlife, their geographies also produced specific and often unanticipated temporal effects. The transference of some subjects at the provincial level to the administration of Indian ministers had facilitated a speeding up of nation-building activities (its ‘accelerating’ effect on the provinces will be explored below). This led people to clamour for social reform, as K. M. Panikkar had argued in 1928 (Legg 2016a, 61). Refusing the deferral of responsible government to the scale of the province, it was increasingly being demanded at the scale of the nation-state. For the British and Indian governments, the RTC had to design a further constitutional deferral of this demand, and federation became its unanticipated form. If dyarchy was temporally immediate and spatially internal to India, the spatial focus of Dominion status was international and its temporality was that of deferral, achieved through a constant play on definitions and terminology. In the 1920s ‘Dominion status’ became a popular Indian nationalist demand, bolstered through India’s recognition by internationalist institutions (Legg 2014a; McQuade 2020). The Balfour declaration of 1926 defined the self-governing dominions as autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as Members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.1

This definition was formalised in the weeks before the RTC opened at the Imperial Conference of 1930 and the resulting Westminster Statute of

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1931 was passed in the middle of the second RTC session. While federation has come to dominate our memory of the RTC, up until its opening plenaries we should remember that most delegates, politicians and commentators expected Dominion status to be the main conference object. The following section will show how Dominion status was both claimed and denied by British and Indian administrators and politicians. Indians claimed they were already ready for such international recognition; the British insisted they were early. As such, the battle over Dominion status (and whether such a status even existed) was an example of Edelstein, Geroulomos and Wheatly’s (2020, 32) ‘chronocenosis’, the competitive coexistence of different temporal regimes. If dyarchy saw this play out at the provincialnational scale, Dominion status saw it play out at the national-imperial international scale. As Rohit De (2019) has suggested, the dominion debate played out temporally, situating India as constitutionally juvenile, slowing it down by linking it to parliamentary assent and associating it with a temporal break which was, for the British, untenable in the 1930s (although it would be resurrected in 1947 as the means by which India exited the empire). The dominion debate encapsulated the way in which debates about the past and present were used to constitutionally figure the future geographies of India at the RTC. Here we can agree that power operates by arranging, managing, and scaling temporal regimes and conflicts. At the same time, these fault lines function as seams of structural weakness and possibility: power is often undone in the cut and thrust of temporal antagonisms. (Edelstein, Geroulanos and Wheatley 2020, 4)

DOMINION: THE TEMPORALITY OF DEFERRED EQUALITY When the cabinet used the expression ‘ultimate self-government’ they probably contemplated an intervening period of 500 years. – Lord Curzon, 14 August 1917, quoted in Richard Danzig, ‘The Announcement of August 20th, 1917’ Of course, we assign no limits to the future potential development of our Indian fellow subjects. We enlist their co-operation – have

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we not been doing so continuously  – in every branch of Indian administration and of Indian life. It all depends on time and on facts. My submission to the House to-night is that the time for this extension is premature, and that the facts are adverse. – Winston Churchill, 26 January 19312 Within the opening days of the RTC, one geographical imagination of India’s future faded away, while another blazed into being. Dominion status, which had been a lodestar of 1920s Indian politics, found itself eclipsed, although it remained as a distant aspiration. The unanticipated star of the conference was to be federation. It brought with it the tantalising potential of the new. It allowed delegates to rid themselves of the increasingly complicated and ambivalent commitments that had previously been made to Dominion status. It raised the prospect of an India which united British and princely states. And, unlike the location of Dominion status (a temporally distant prospect, permanently but unreachably on the horizon, for both Curzon contemplating the 1919 reforms and Churchill contemplating the round table), federation’s location was the here and the now. The dominion debate is, however, key to understanding how the conference came about, how its aims were configured and how the ultimate object of federation was imagined. The near disappearance of ‘Dominion’ from the language and demands of the conference also speaks to the impossibility of a political campaign based on an imperial invention that was, at the exact moment of the RTC, being re-imagined. In Britain and India debates over interpretations of Dominion status raged (De 2019). These geographical differences were fundamentally about time. The demand for Dominion status was a demand for equality (with white settler colonies, not with Britain); its refusal was an insistence upon deferral and upon more time in the waiting room of history. The term was valued for its very ‘plasticity’ (Darwin 1999, 69) but was an unlikely anticolonial rallying call: ‘Dominion’ is a classic case. Its original use signified subordination, from dominus, master, lord, and dominium, property, ownership, authority, sovereignty, lands of a feudal lord, territory subject to a king or ruler…. How did a style signifying subordination take on the meaning of complete self-rule? (McIntyre 1999, 193–194)

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Dominion was an ambiguous amalgam of double meaning and calculated deferral. It took a biblical concept (a space over which authority was exercised) and used it to mark racial distinction (differentiating white settler colonies from British dependencies) and constitutional development (marking a stage between colony and independence). This ambiguity was also analysed and wilfully deployed (as with Viceroy Irwin below) at the time. The dominions took up seats at the Paris Peace Conference and then at the League of Nations using a status that ‘defied exact analysis by both international and constitutional lawyers’ (F. Scott 1944, 34). For the Canadian constitutional expert Frank Scott (1944, 35), ‘Dominions were colonies in the stage of growing up – colonies in their ’teens, so to speak.’ As attendees Colonel Haksar and K. M. Panikkar (1930, v) put it on the eve of the conference, while the British wanted to retain Indians in statu pupillari (tutelage), Indians increasingly called for emancipation. India has been excluded from the dominion club since the 1870s due, in part, to its lack of racial, religious and linguistic links and its lack of self-government. But the other reason was that India already supported the empire, by force, in the way it was hoped that dominions would do by choice: India had already been shaped nearer to the heart’s desire. She paid for defence and maintained a large British army, which could, in emergency, be employed for imperial purposes abroad. She was a free-trade country and took roughly three-fourths of her imports from Great Britain. India left little more to be desired from the [imperial] federationists’ point of view and was therefore neglected by them. (Mehrotra 1961, 30)

Indian nationalists had long noted the gaping disjuncture between India’s growing status internationally and its lack of responsible government internally. As early as 1905, in reaction to the administrative partition of the province of Bengal, Congress had called for a system of self-governance internationally comparable to that enjoyed by the dominions. The government did not concede, but in 1911, when reversing Curzon’s partition, it proposed devolving powers to create administrations ‘autonomous in all provincial spheres’ (cited in Singh 1977, 460). This call was taken up in modified form by Lord Hardinge during the war, but these reforms inscribed self-government to the scale of the provincial, not of the international dominion scale (as dyarchy would soon formalise).

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Under the dyarchy reforms, the Swarajist (self-rule) Party found new platforms in legislative assemblies for coalitions and publicity, and in October 1923 they issued a demand for immediate Dominion status and full responsible government (Cell 1992, 103). Sir Malcolm Hailey responded the following year by insisting that responsible government need not mean Dominion status (interpreted as an unrestrained legislature). It was in response to Hailey’s claim, as well as to the challenge laid down by the Earl of Birkenhead, secretary of state for India, to nationalists to draft their own constitution, that the Nehru Report of 1928 was produced. It positioned Dominion status, as re-imagined by the 1926 Balfour Declaration but not as yet detailed by the 1930 conference, as its chief demand. This prompted Irwin to press the British government to give greater assurances that Montagu’s 1917 pledge would be honoured, now in the form of Dominion status. It became apparent on the run up to the RTC, however, that Dominion status still meant very different things between and within the Government of India, the British government and the Indian delegates. Some of these differences will be explored below, before showing how dominion failed to materialise as a geographical imagination at the conference itself.

ANTICIPATING DOMINION STATUS The Government of India had long vacillated over the definition, and even the existence, of Dominion status. Hailey’s 1924 distinction between responsible government and Dominion status was invoked in the summer of 1929, after Simon’s visit to India but before the announcement of the RTC. Reflecting on the impasse between nationalists in India and the British government, Mahomed Ali Jinnah wrote to MacDonald on 19 June 1929 with his appraisal of the situation.3 People in India had lost faith in Britain’s word, partly due to Hailey’s attempt to dissociate the declaration of 1917 and the 1919 act from the ambition to award India full Dominion status. Jinnah quoted Hailey’s 1924 statement, which rearticulated the British policy of imperial deferral: It may be that full Dominion self-government is the logical outcome of responsible Government, nay, it may be the inevitable and historical development of responsible Government, but it is a further and a final step.4

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Continued vacillation in the 1920s over the commitment to Dominion status had led, Jinnah suggested, to growing support for demands for independence. Irwin met Jinnah in June and so was aware of his views but had also received a commissioned report from the Indian Home Department. This reinforced Hailey’s 1924 statement by making a geographical distinction between responsible government (a system within a country) and Dominion status (an international and intraimperial relationship) (Moore 1974, 57–58). It was conceded, however, that full responsible government would likely lead to Dominion status, although it would have to apply to all of India (including the princely states). Ahead of his forthcoming declaration on government policy, Irwin penned a private note that highlighted the way in which the meaning of ‘Dominion Status’ in 1929 depended both on political position and geographical location. Dated 4 October, the note dwelled explicitly on dominion terminology and the political implications of its use. Irwin suggested that his statement aimed to distinguish between ‘… Purpose and Method or Policy’ (he returned to the distinction in his biography; see Halifax 1957, 119).5 The viceroy insisted that he only referred to Dominion status as purpose, to which the objections could be that this statement of purpose led people to believe that the achievement of Dominion status as practical policy was both less difficult (a question of fact) and less remote (a question of time) than it was likely to be. The main question for Irwin was whether nationalist and anti-government pressure would be directed towards development within the empire or independence outside of it; he felt that his declaration would strengthen those fighting for the former. Irwin’s declaration of 31 October 1929 made public Simon’s suggestion (prompted by Irwin himself) that a conference be called to consider his report alongside proposals for the future relationship between British and princely India.6 The British government, Irwin suggested, felt that addressing this issue was central to fulfilling their purpose in India, as expressed by Montagu in 1917 and since officially clarified as meaning that India would take its place among the king-emperor’s dominions. A second private note, written by Irwin in the month after the declaration, focused ‘on “Dominion Status” as understood in Great Britain and India’.7 The note reflected on geographical differences in misunderstandings, as Irwin saw them, in public discussions regarding the terminology associated with Dominion status. Irwin felt that Dominion

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status in England was understood in a more literal sense, especially since the 1926 Imperial Conference, to be ‘an achieved constitutional position of complete freedom and immunity from interference by His Majesty’s Government in London’.8 Irwin doubted whether ‘Dominion status’ had previously existed as a stage pre-dating a dominion’s freedom from direct British interference in its affairs. Regardless, ‘however dynamic and fluid a term Dominion Status may be’, in England Dominion status now meant freedom within the empire from any supervisory interference from Britain. In India, however, Irwin felt that Dominion status meant not an immediate constitutional state but the assurance of the deferred achievement of this state in time: What is to the Englishman an accomplished process, is to the Indian rather a declaration of right, from which future and complete enjoyment of Dominion privilege will spring. Thus to the Englishman it is a contradiction in terms to speak, as Indians habitually do, of Dominion status with reservations, but to the Indian for whom the phrase ‘Dominion Status’ is rather the hall-mark of constitutional direction or constitutional quality, the ‘status’ is not necessarily unreal because it has not as yet attained full completeness.9

Ironically, Irwin’s declaration had the effect of undoing this supposed distinction; the cross-party nationalist Delhi Manifesto of November 1929 insisted that Dominion status and its immediate realisation be the focus of the conference. Further ire was caused in May 1930 when the Simon Report was published, absent of any discussion of Dominion status. This angered even moderate Indian opinion. In a lecture responding to the report, delivered in London on 22 July 1930, Sir Srinivasa Sastri pointed out that Simon’s proposals would block Dominion status indefinitely (and thus contradict Irwin’s declaration of 1929). Lord Chelmsford, the ex-viceroy and co-architect of the 1919 reforms, submitted a written reply to Sastri’s pre-circulated paper. Chelmsford suggested that if dominions now had the right to secession from the empire, then the 1917 declaration supporting responsible government in India need not lead naturally to Dominion status, as Montagu’s declaration also explicitly stated that this responsible government was to be ‘as an integral part of the Empire’ (Sastri 1930, 666). Chelmsford also indicated two further points that had been laid

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down by parliament and assented to by all parties, enshrining the politics of deferral: 2. Progress can only be achieved by stages. 3. The time and manner for each advance can be determined only by Parliament.

In response to Simon’s omission, Irwin reiterated his government’s commitment to Dominion status in May and July 1930. On 4 July Stanley Baldwin, the leader of the Conservative Party, was permitted by MacDonald to telegram Irwin, outlining his party’s displeasure with the Conservative viceroy’s approach.10 Baldwin strongly objected to the use of the phrase Dominion status due to the way it would be interpreted in India. Even worse, the decision that the RTC should have no set agenda would allow plans to immediately realise Dominion status to be discussed, instead of Simon’s calculated deferral of prioritising autonomy of provincial government rather than central responsibility: In other words future Indian constitution must be a natural growth as in Dominions and United States and cannot be creation of a single Act of Parliament or be reached till many existing difficulties have been overcome.11

In Irwin’s reply to Baldwin on 6 July he expressed his surprise that Simon should have failed to mention either Dominion status or Irwin’s October 1929 declaration. But he also emphasised that he himself did not feel that full Dominion status was practicable in the near future. The realisation of policy would be gradual and deferred, but Irwin’s declaration of purpose could not be modified. This was the line Irwin held until the Government of India’s despatch outlining their stance on constitutional reform, published on the eve of the RTC. The despatch was reported as committing the government to working, through the RTC, to placing the ‘first but definite impress of Dominion status’ upon India.12 While the despatch would soon be overshadowed by the joint commitment from British and princely Indian representatives to a federal future, it too faced criticism from conservative (‘die hard’) opinion in the British press. Irwin’s finance member in New Delhi, George Schuster, was convinced that it was this backlash to the viceroy’s relatively modest commitments

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that persuaded even moderate Indians that they would not win substantial reforms from the British without a fight (Schuster 1979, 100; St John 2006). He later recalled how anxiously key Tory members experienced the terminology and the temporality of Dominion status. Just after Irwin’s declaration Schuster had attended a London dinner at which Lord Birkenhead, secretary of state for India from 1924 to 1928, lambasted Irwin’s approach to the dominion question. Schuster asked Birkenhead to reconcile this criticism with his public speeches while in office in favour of future Indian responsibility for their own government. He replied, echoing Curzon and anticipating Churchill, ruefully: I did say that, but you have left out the most important words of my speech. I said ‘in the fullness of time’ and for me the fullness of time meant a 100 years or 500 years, and anyhow it was the most damned stupid speech that I ever made.… (Quoted in Schuster 1979, 100)

In terms of the British government, Benn spent the summer of 1930 preparing for the conference, which included considering India’s position relative to the other dominions. He wrote to Irwin, on 20 June 1930, sketching out the origins of the RTC, as he perceived them, and the changing times. Since the 1919 introduction of dyarchy, the world had seen not only the emergence of new forms of nationalism in Turkey and China but also the ‘growing assertion of a right to freedom among our own Dominions’ culminating in the declaration of 1926 granting them ‘the position of independent sovereign States with a common allegiance’.13 Benn suggested that Indians would not look at this and be content with the position of ‘wards’ into which the 1919 act had placed them. An editorial in The Graphic preceding the opening of the RTC bemoaned that ‘Dominion Status’, as it was being redefined at the Imperial Conference, now included an inherent right to secession, making it indistinguishable from independence: ‘The grant of such an all-out Dominion Status to British India, through its present delegates, would – twist the term how we may  – be Abdication, sans phrases [sic].’14 To negotiate this changing terrain, a series of secret briefing documents had been prepared for the RTC British delegates and cabinet members. One of these, dated 14 November 1930, had been written by Benn to identify the line to be taken should Dominion status be raised at the conference, re-working much of his correspondence with Irwin.15 Benn explained

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that in India the term had been used to distinguish fully responsible and autonomous parts of the empire from the partial, limited and qualified responsible government and autonomy India had experienced since 1919 – that is, to distinguish dominion from dyarchy. Few Indians expected immediate Dominion status to be awarded, hence the talk of Dominion status with safeguards or reservations. While nationalists had persistently used the term Dominion status, ‘the conditions which the expression has been assumed to denote have not been standing still’.16 Yet Benn believed that most British Indian delegates at the RTC would be pushing for Dominion status with qualifications. The challenge for Benn was to honour Irwin’s declaration at the conference without committing to the full definition of Dominion status, which Baldwin and others had so vociferously opposed. In a briefing document from November 1930 outlining the cabinet’s position before the conference, Dominion status was described as having ‘strong sentimental value’ but fundamentally implied internal self-government.17 When Dominion status was raised again in a follow-on discussion on federation, its sentimental value was, again, emphasised, such that ‘possibly some face-saving formula might be devised. That is important.’18 This formula presented itself to Benn in the form of the all-India federation plan coup. He wrote to Irwin on 14 November 1930, the week before the RTC opened, having been appraised of the prince’s decision to come out in favour of federation, suggesting that this ‘new idea is much greater than the old and would make it easier to develop in all branches that Dominionhood which India already possesses in her representation at the League of Nations and at the Imperial Conference’.19 Benn’s opinion was widely known and ridiculed by the nationalist press in India. The previous week the United Provinces Oudh Akhbar newspaper had picked up on an alleged insult to RTC delegates in relation to Imperial Conference Dominion delegates at a Croydon airshow (see Chapter 7). The incident was said to belie Benn’s ‘oft-repeated assertion that India enjoys Dominion Status’.20 Turning finally to the Indian delegates, while many of the princes would be won over to the federal cause in the run up to the RTC, there were still those making the case for Dominion status, although with an explicit emphasis on internal reservations to preserve their own authority. The Maharaja of Alwar, for instance, published an article in January 1930 insisting that Dominion status was the logical end point of the 1917

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declaration.21 He did, however, also side with those who accepted that immediate Dominion status was not possible: … the difficulties appear when the question of time is considered as to when this Dominion status goal might be reached. My simple answer to the proposition is: When, by mutual consent between the Government of British India and ourselves.…22

This view was supported by the political commentator A. P. Nicholson, who published a scathing review of dyarchy in 1930. His book also pointed out that all previous discussion of Dominion status had only referred to British India. With the RTC orchestrating British and princely India, the only conceivable route to Dominion status would be via federation (Nicholson 1930, 34). The Dewan of Mysore also cut to the quick of the issue at a pre-RTC Bangalore conference held on 19 August 1930. His opening speech was later published and sent to MacDonald.23 In it, Mysore castigated the British government for being reluctant to use the phrases ‘Dominion Status’, ‘SelfGovernment’ or ‘Self-determination’. While they were merely catchphrases denoting abstract ideals, their use would have gratified India. Congress, on the other hand, was berated for using these expressions while neglecting to reflect on the substance behind them. Self-government had to be the object, and whether the constitution that could provide it was called Dominion status did not matter much at all. Among the delegates from British India, there was also growing ambivalence about the utility of Dominion status as a demand at the RTC. In an interview with Conservative delegation secretary Stopford on 4 November, Jinnah made it clear that he avoided use of the term Dominion status due to its meaning different things to different people.24 The British merchant delegate E. C. Benthall wrote to his colleague in Calcutta on 5 November that the constitutional historian Arthur Berridale Keith was being consulted.25 It was proposed to use his definition of dominion status to agree a position with the three political parties, for use in case the issue was raised in the open sessions of the conference. The day after the conference opened, the leading moderate Tej Bahadur Sapru wrote to his daughter suggesting that while India wanted Dominion status, it did not yet have ‘a Dominion Status mind’ due to its failures on communal matters (Hooja 1999, 154). While he felt the Muslim delegates

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were coming around to alternative proposals, he was at a loss regarding Hindu nationalist members like Moonje who refused to relinquish demands for Dominion status. Sir A. P. Patro suggested, in an interview with Stopford ahead of the conference, that Hindu (responsivist) delegates would seek to pass an early declaration of intention regarding Dominion status, perhaps along the lines of the preamble to the 1919 act but without safeguards.26 Moonje was, indeed, confident that the demand for Dominion status would be met at the conference. He had arrived in London on 18 October but had been arguing the Dominion status case at sea with fellow Indians since departing Bombay on 4 October (Legg 2020c). The delegate from the Madras Chamber Association, Charles Wood, had raised doubts regarding the control of the military and finance under Dominion status. Moonje recorded in his diary his reply: ‘I told him this is no time for higglehaggle! You must find a way to surmount all obstacles. You can’t afford to be indifferent now. India will not be content with anything less than Dominion Status.’27 In London, at a dinner with Sapru and other Hindu delegates at the Savoy Hotel on 21 October, Moonje insisted that he would only negotiate with Jinnah if Dominion status was granted and the British agreed to enforce the new constitution. Ironically, it was Moonje himself who was the biggest block to a united demand for Dominion status, which delegates agreed would need a communal settlement first (Moore 1974, 120).

THE GHOST AT THE ROUND TABLE The RTC opened with plenary sessions at which delegates were able to make free speeches outlining their position. On 27 November Hailey reported to Irwin that most people had been impressed by Indian demands for a status that would raise them from that of a subject race, but which also accepted that Dominion status would require safeguards and restrictions.28 Sapru’s plenary address displayed a mastery of the ambiguity that had built up around the concept of Dominion status. He suggested that when using what he called the ‘forbidden phrase’ of Dominion status, British statesmen regularly asked him, ‘What does it mean?’ (India Office 1931a, 23). Sapru asked whether the same question had been asked of the processes under way for Canada in 1865, Australia in 1900 or South Africa in 1909. All India wanted was equality in the Commonwealth and a government responsible to its legislature. This could not come from Simon’s proposed provincial

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autonomy without a responsible central government. This very quickly led to the question of whether the future constitution should be federal. Sapru felt it should be and invited the princes to join this federation, which offered a different temporality to the debates over Dominionhood of the 1920s: The Government of India in their Despatch vaguely speaks of a far-off distant Federation. With us it is a real live issue now. If we can come to some solution of that, I frankly think that nothing better can be achieved at this Conference. (India Office 1931a, 25)

The Maharaja of Bikaner’s speech in reply, proffering his support for the federal idea, marked a definitive switch from dominion to federation at the conference. The following day the Maharaja of Alwar reiterated his earlier published commitment to a United States of India, the federal form of which he suggested was ‘the shortest and quickest way to Dominion status’ (India Office 1931a, 43). A further breakthrough came on 20 November when Lord Reading spoke for the Liberals, many of whom had been aligned with those Tories who found ‘Dominion status’ talk intolerable. Reading addressed the terminological ambiguity of Dominion status head on and showed that it must, for India in 1930, mean yet more deferral. The term was vague, and had meant various things in the past, but now was agreed to mean a status equal to the other dominions in the empire: That is the true meaning of it. It has never been defined; no lawyer has ever attempted to put it into definition, but I do not suppose anyone will doubt that that is what in truth is meant by it. Keep that meaning clear in your minds, because if you do, I think you must see that there are very many questions to be considered and discussed before you can get quite to the ultimate goal you naturally strive to attain. (India Office 1931a, 114)

Whether the cause was the army or foreign affairs, Reading repeated that ‘it is idle to assert that at this moment there could be anything like equality of status – that is constitutional status – in India with the Dominions’ (India Office 1931a, 115). In contrast, following on from the speeches of Bikaner and Alwar, the great merit of the RTC would be remembered as the joint declaration and working for a federation of all India.

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The turn to federation was swift, and the Federal Structure Committee (FSC) came to be the driving force of the conference. Moonje’s efforts to keep Dominion status on the agenda ended in failure; his attempt to introduce an amendment to a resolution, backing Dominion status, on 17 November found no support, nor did a further attempt on 28 November.29 On 17 December Alwar gave a banquet address at which he acknowledged that Dominion status as a term had become ‘anathema’ at the conference, despite it meaning nothing more (to him) than self-governance within the empire.30 In early January 1931 the FSC turned to the question of the central Indian legislature, which resurrected the idea of dominion, but only as a product of federal government.31 A week before the conclusion of the conference session, Sankey suggested in the FSC that the best route to responsible government in India was to follow the precedent of dominion constitutions, but with a transitional period of deferral in which certain powers would be reserved and powers of intervention retained.32 MacDonald similarly gestured towards Dominion status as the ultimate goal in his closing address on 19 January 1931. The proposed federal reforms would award India the only thing she lacked to give her the status of dominion among the British Commonwealth: ‘The responsibilities and the cares, the burdens and the difficulties, but the pride and the honour of responsible self-government’ (India Office 1931a, 509). It was MacDonald’s belief that India was already almost a dominion which, ironically, kept the Dominion status question from taking a bolder place in the closing plenary debates. Sir Muhammad Shafi, who had also represented India at the preceding Imperial Conference, had written to MacDonald informing him of his intention to move a resolution at the conference recommending the British government recognise India as a dominion. MacDonald replied on 12 January 1931, warning him of the consequences of such a resolution.33 He suggested that ‘a Dominion status’ was not recognised by the British government and that any attempt to create a new dominion would trigger claims by current dominions to both approve this decision and have a say on the ongoing debates about the future constitution of India. MacDonald continued: The fact of the matter is that India, in everything except its self government, is recognised as a Dominion and, until we can come to an agreement about the new Constitution, India had better not bother

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about declarations as to its Dominion status, because if it lets things alone and just goes ahead no one will challenge it, whereas if it asks for Resolutions the consequences will be as I have indicated above. You are represented at the League of Nations and the Dominion Conference, and all that is required is that your representation should be settled by yourselves and not by an administrative Government. That done, your position is completely satisfactory.34

For most Indians, of course, the position was not satisfactory, nor did Dominion status mean representation at the scale of international conferences. K. M. Pannikar had served as the secretary to the prince’s delegation at the RTC and was a key figure behind the princes’ turn to federation. He later reflected back on the value of Dominion status to the Indian people, in part re-articulating his earlier criticisms of the dyarchy reforms, which had emphasised state reform and dry constitutionalism over attending to the ‘vague moods and unvocal feelings’ of the people (published as Putra [1928, 8]; see Legg [2016a, 61]). In response to British and Indian appeals to Dominion status, Panikkar (1934, 3) insisted: Dominion status is only a constitutional relationship. It does not touch the vital aspects of policy with which both Britain and India are most deeply concerned. The status of a Dominion India undoubtedly desires and is entitled to; but that only shifts the solution of the problem to a different plane. The questions of political association of the British and Indian communities in India, of their economic collaboration in the development of India, and the bases of permanent social and cultural relationships are left untouched.

These comments came well after the RTC had concluded, long after the storm of publicity and controversy surrounding Gandhi’s visit had died down. While Congress had officially abandoned its interest in Dominion status in January 1930, Gandhi remained a little more ambivalent. The British press reported in August 1930 that conversations with Gandhi in prison had confirmed that he was still pressing for Dominion status to be discussed at the RTC in his absence, despite the strength of Tory and Liberal opposition.35 After the Gandhi–Irwin Pact was agreed in March 1931, Gandhi gave an interview to the journalist Patrick Lacey. Speaking on 1 April, Gandhi was asked about recent changes in his views regarding

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India’s equality of international partnership.36 Until recently, he replied, he had considered that a relationship similar to that between Britain and Australia (that is, a dominion relationship) might be possible. He had come to believe, however, that the dominion relationship was based on bonds of British race, institutions, ideas and culture that India did not share. India did not aspire to these bonds but could envisage a reciprocal relationship with Britain. Even if the conference laid out a Dominion status that appealed to Gandhi, it would be outside of Gandhi’s Congress-approved mandate, and thus impossible to accept. As such, when Gandhi spoke at the RTC, he spoke of aspiring to be a citizen not of the empire but of the Commonwealth, through a partnership with Britain that was not superimposed and which could be severed by either party.37 This was also the advice given by C. F. Andrews, Gandhi’s advisor and coordinator for parts of his visit. As with Benn, Andrews felt that India already did, in many ways, function as a dominion. Andrews wrote to Lord Sankey, the chair of the FSC, one month into the second session of the RTC giving hints on how to understand and approach Gandhi.38 His suggestion was that Sankey assume that India already had the status of Canada (that is, a dominion) in every respect but had certain internal difficulties left to overcome. Federation, and its ability to find a way out of dyarchy’s scalar experiments, would determine the pace of India’s progression towards Dominionhood.

DYARCHY: THE SPATIALITY OF DEFERRED EQUALITY Federation was proposed as a radical re-making of India’s constitutional and political geography that would hasten a responsible future into the now. When it came, however, to debating the nature of any future Indian federation at the RTC, it became clear that there were both British and Indian voices arguing that India required some more time in the waiting room. Federation would require colonial safeguards, which for critics simply meant a re-scaling of dyarchy. The way in which dyarchy was invoked and condemned at the RTC will be explored below, after outlining how official histories retrospectively positioned it within histories of responsible government in India. Irwin had expended much political capital emphasising that the RTC would honour Montagu’s 1917 declaration in terms of Dominion status,

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but it also had to demonstrate real progress in terms of democratic reform. The solution was to drop the terminology of dyarchy, accept that it would be abolished at one scale (the province) and return to the idea which dyarchy had been originally created to enable, namely ‘responsible government’. New Delhi’s Reforms Office produced a detailed note, dated 12 June 1930, outlining the genealogy of ‘responsible government’ (much as Irwin would do four months later regarding the meaning of ‘Dominion status’). Official opinion was noted to have advanced since the Government of India’s assertion to the Secretary of State for India, in March 1907, that ‘representative government’ in India would be a ‘Western importation uncongenial to Eastern tastes’.39 In 1911 Viceroy Hardinge had committed the government to working towards eventual provincial autonomy, a move spurred by the war, during which the Government of India accepted ‘self-government’ in a form suited to India. Montagu’s 1917 declaration had substituted ‘responsible government’ for ‘self-government’, the former being a term previously unheard of in Indian policy discussions (Danzig 1968). Responsibility was taken to mean members of the executive being responsible to their constituents and being responsible to the assembly. It was also taken to include the passing of more work to Indian administrators who would be answerable to Indian electors. On 12 June W. H. Lewis of the Reforms Department added a comment to his office note insisting on the geography of the terms in question, suggesting, as Irwin has done for Dominion status, that in Britain the term had a much more fixed meaning – namely, a parliamentary executive. Despite neither the British nor Indian governments being willing to commit to a full parliamentary executive in New Delhi, ahead of the RTC extracts were published recounting ‘Official Reaffirmations of the Declaration of 20 August 1917’: Montagu himself had argued in 1919 that ‘the  only acceptable meaning of Empire and Democracy’ was that nations flying the imperial flag control their destinies; the king-emperor had suggested in 1921 that India had the beginnings of Swaraj within the empire, when the viceroy had also suggested that the path leading to selfgovernment within the empire had been laid; in 1924 the secretary of state had committed to replacing the transitional dyarchy arrangements with responsible Indian Dominion government; while in 1927 Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had anticipated India joining equal partnership with the dominions, ‘in the fullness of time’.40

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Baldwin had shown, in his tussle with Viceroy Irwin in 1929, how far off he felt Dominion status to be. It was also clear that for the MacDonald government the total abolition of the idea of dyarchy as the next step of enhanced responsible government was not anticipated any time soon. In a briefing document on the eve of the conference in MacDonald’s private papers, full responsible government in the provinces was accepted as the likely outcome of the RTC, but dyarchy would live on in central government: In discussing how far power can be transferred to Indians in each section the terminology of Dyarchy is unavoidable. This is inherent in the case, for, even if formal Dyarchy is avoided, there must be a dualism in the Government of India if the British parliament is to retain any responsibility at all, and even the most extreme Indians accept the necessity for retention of British responsibility in regard to some subjects (e.g. Defence).41

Deploying the terminology of dyarchy, the briefing insisted that defence and foreign (external) affairs had in some way to be ‘reserved’, while education, agriculture, irrigation and similar subjects could be ‘transferred’. This was also the view shared, privately, by some moderate RTC delegates. For instance, Sir A. P. Patro had confided to Conservative Delegation Secretary Stopford that he felt it was not illogical to keep dyarchy at the centre of the state while abandoning it in the provinces, where it had served its purpose.42 This question of how to balance responsible government in India with the continued control of the British Parliament would be returned to throughout the RTC, where dyarchy was denounced as a form of government but where its impact on Indian society and its functioning as a mode of government continued to be debated. These debates approached dyarchy as both a manufactured acceleration of Indian society and a mode of government.

DYARCHY APPRAISED IN LONDON In October 1930 Edwin Montagu’s widow decided to publish his Indian Diaries. In her preface, Venetia Montagu explained that during the secretary of state’s 1917–1918 Indian tour, he had become a convert to Curtis’s dyarchy plan. She suggested that, given ‘that India is looming so largely in the public eye’ (Montagu 1930, v), it was apposite to revisit her husband’s passion for

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the country. Viceroy Irwin, having felt publication to be a mistake, wrote to his father on 23 November 1930 that while he liked Edwin Montagu, the diaries revealed him to be impulsive and highly nerve-strung, concluding in a letter on 29 November that it had been a mistake to publish the diary.43 The Times had serialised the diaries in September and printed a review when they were published on 27 October. It mourned the loss of Montagu (who died in 1924) but enjoyed the rich detailing of how India’s constitutional advance had been decided upon twelve years before.44 The review brought dyarchy fresh to mind for its readers (both public and political) and was published alongside detailed speculation about what the RTC would entail when it opened in a fortnight’s time. At the conclusion of the first session, the ex-governor of Bengal (1907–1913) Lord Sydenham described his despair in a Daily Mail article of 18 January 1931.45 The best judges in India, Sydenham wrote, clearly believed that dyarchy had accelerated change and had been an unsettling failure and that no more risks ought to be taken. Montagu was cited as believing that dyarchy would bring disaster (chaos, revolution and bloodshed resulting in an ultimately more vigorous country), his diaries referenced as evidence of the radical instability of dyarchy as a whole (see Montagu [1930, 136] for the way in which he had rhetorically used these terms). Other commentators were more accepting of the temporal instability which dyarchy’s acceleration had at its heart – a ten-year experiment, with a legislated statutory review at its conclusion. For the secretary to the Liberal delegation to the RTC John Coatman, dyarchy had worked most vigorously at the level of the citizen regarding the moral and material welfare of the people. Here its greatest attribute was its constantly accelerating pace: Even the face of the once placid waters of rural India is now stirred and the movements and events at the centre, with which we are to be chiefly concerned, begin in the strong, eager currents of thought and feeling, bubbling up from the life of the provinces, are fed by their original force, and are but transformed into the technique of a more sophisticated and concentrated agitation by men as skilled in handling these dangerous commodities as an electrician is in handling electrical energy. Wherever we look in India we see this stir of new life in the provinces, and through the swiftly moving and changing screen of events and developments at the centre, we see the primum mobile [chief source of motion] of the provinces and their life and their movements. (Coatman 1932a, 73)

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Coatman had served as the Government of India’s director of public information in 1926 and at the time of the conference he was professor of imperial economic relations at the University of London. He combined an eye-catching turn of phrase with a social-scientific interest in political behaviour and a colonial-geographical view of placid India reacting to the stimulus of governmental institutions (for the similarities to Curtis’s analysis and rhetoric, see Legg [2016a, 50]). Unlike Sydenham, and in line with Curtis and Montagu’s hopes for constitutional reform, for Coatman dyarchy’s value was in its disruptiveness. But that disruption, at the provincial level at least, was and had to be temporary. This was the advice offered from Hailey to Sankey in the summer between the first and second RTC session. He wrote, on 18 July 1931, that while the time was not yet ripe for India to transition to full independence, there is hardly any one who does not wish to see the stage of provincial autonomy accelerated. The scheme of dyarchy was a transitional arrangement; we have got all the good we could out it, and the sooner we can now get on a stage of more complete responsibility the better for all of us.46

A similar sentiment was expressed by the retired colonial administrator Sir John Thompson to the House of Commons India Committee on 12 December 1932, as the final session of the RTC was in action. His focus was on how he, as a Conservative, advocated change in India, along the lines accelerated by Montagu. This was just one of a series of accelerations of reform in India since the 1860s which had now become unstoppable. Any British government that attempted to stay still would soon be overcome by a local and then a global struggle: The tides of national feeling ebb and flow. New parties, new personalities come into power. The country gets tired and craves for change, and you can no more prevent the succession of parties and the fluctuations of policy than you can delay the oncoming of winter once the summer is gone.47

While some commentators felt that dyarchy had operated too fast and too wide, most accepted that some form of political concession and change

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had been made necessary by India’s contribution to the 1914–1918 war and by Montagu’s declaration. As a functioning mode of government, dyarchy did have some defenders at the RTC, though they were in a minority. Some delegates looked at the history of dyarchy and valued the vision of its architects. The Liberal RTC delegate Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyar had given a lecture in 1928 extolling the precedents for dyarchy, in ancient Greece, Rome and India, and in various federal experiments in the modern world (Aiyar 1948, 42). He flattered Chelmsford and Montagu with laying the basis for all the current passions of the day (provincial autonomy, linguistic reorganisation and a future federation) while tactfully declining comment on the value of the particular scheme that they developed. While other positive cases would be made for dyarchy, they had strong qualifications. In the opening plenary sessions Sir A. P. Patro spoke of the experiences of Madras, where as a member of the Legislative Chamber he had worked hard to make a success of dyarchy (India Office 1931a, 86). Depressed castes had been uplifted in rural areas, the finances of the presidency scrutinised and bureaucrats trained in the art of government. The Times of India suggested this had ‘struck a new note at the conference’, but it was a rare note.48 At the beginning of the year, on 30 January 1930 Viscount Goschen had presented a paper to the East India Association at London’s Caxton Hall, which also reviewed the working of dyarchy in Madras, the presidency in which dyarchy was generally agreed to have worked best. Goschen (1930), during his period as governor of the province (1924–1929), felt that dyarchy had taught the people irresponsibility, not responsibility. The government was often paralysed by fear that elected Indian members might withdraw cooperation, although this was the fault of the system and its distribution of powers rather than of Indian ministers per se. This anticipated the generally critical appraisal of dyarchy at the conference, although in each case it was acknowledged that safeguards and reservations would in some way need to be retained in the future constitution. Irwin had written to MacDonald on 23 July 1930 that the problem with the Simon Report proposals was that they would further weaken the central government, which under the dyarchy system had operated with an official ‘bloc’ in the central legislature of forty nominated members, but which under Simon’s scheme would be reduced to about seventeen.49 Irwin cited the views of the provincial governors, with whom he had been in discussion that week at a special conference in preparation for the RTC, all of whom were united against the Simon scheme. On 19 July

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Lewis had circulated the viceroy’s agenda for the conference, the first item for discussion being ‘the abolition of dyarchy and the transfer of law and order’.50 The general agreement had been that dyarchy in the provinces be abolished, although the question of the ‘protection’ of law and order services (the contentious heart of dyarchy for many critics) if they were transferred remained unanswered. This informed the Government of India’s despatch of 20 September, which was released on 14 November, outlining their position ahead of the RTC.51 It backed provincial autonomy (the abolition of provincial dyarchy). Dyarchy at the centre was acknowledged to be a direct block to responsibility, yet the difficulties of transferring central responsibility for finance, law and order were outlined. The compromise was a central government containing an official (nominated) element that was not responsible to the Indian legislature but which would include a substantial popular element. Non-official opinion condemned dyarchy for being simultaneously too radical and too conservative. In terms of the former, Lord Sydenham had a letter to the Daily Telegraph published on 17 January 1931, repeating his attack on dyarchy, which had introduced sentimental democracy to ‘native races’ who were unfit for it: ‘Democracy will never be brought to realise that in the East nothing but strength in government counts, and that to show fear, as we have done in India, is to court disaster.’52 In contrast, an anonymous RTC delegate outlined the ‘Inadequacy of Dyarchy’ in an article four days later. Dyarchy was unworkable in the provinces, while in the centre the viceroy’s power to ‘certify’ (pass) any legislation which was blocked by elected Indian members in the Legislative Assembly made a mockery of the whole system, consigning the democratically elected members to the waiting room of responsibility (in statu pupillari): ‘Assuming that Assembly to be but a political kindergarten in which Indian toddler statesmen are looked after and trained by expert official nurses.…’53

DYARCHY PRINCIPLES AT THE RTC The acceptance of federation as the desired outcome of the RTC after the inaugural plenaries deflected attention from both Dominion status and dyarchy as targets (positive and negative) of the conference. However, dyarchy can be traced through both the working of the conference and criticisms of it.

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At the meeting of the FSC on 1 December 1930, Sankey’s first task was that of deciding what a federal subject would be. The basis of this discussion would be those central subjects as defined by the 1919 Government of India Act, which would then be divided into Crown, federal and central (of common concern to the provinces but not the Indian states) subjects. In addition, but beyond the FSC’s terms of reference, would be provincial subjects and ‘the emergency and overriding powers to be reserved to Provincial Governors’.54 Although this allowed for the abolition of the dyarchical division of provincial subjects, it did retain the powers of provincial overrule, while the central division of subjects remained, with the added complexity of the British/Indian states division. On 10 December Benthall reported that the Provincial Sub-Committee had decided that ‘dyarchy is to go’ in the provinces, along with the official bloc in the legislatures, but that nominated members were to be retained to ‘protect special interests and minorities’.55 Sir John Simon had been excluded from the RTC, but he had been liaising with the Conservative Shadow Cabinet over plans for safeguards in the federal constitution. Conservative Delegation Secretary Stopford had been asked on 15 December by Samuel Hoare to meet with Simon, which he duly did, but later recollected: ‘I found Simon in a much more difficult mood than Hoare had led me to believe. He said that he considered Federation with Safeguards as camouflaged dyarchy, to which he was opposed and that, therefore, he could not suggest safeguards.’56 While Stopford felt that Simon moderated his line, regarding safeguards under a strong federal legislation to be safer than under British Indian rule alone, the parallels between federation and dyarchy were soon attracting wider comment. In early January 1931 official communiqués and unofficial press briefings led to debate in the press on the vision for a new India that was emerging from the FSC. Much play was made on the ‘reservation’ of defence and foreign affairs, countered by ‘responsibility’ at the centre. The latter had emerged as a key demand of Indian delegates, so much so that for the Manchester Guardian, writing on 5 January 1931, the conference was becoming dissociable from it: It is of the nature of conferences to evolve a slogan around which the forces of the conference play. A Naval Conference evolves ‘yard-stick’; the Indian Conference has evolved ‘responsibility at the centre’. One

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may dislike such slogans; feel them to be false simplifications. But there they are – all powerful and not to be avoided.57

To feel free and to be regarded in the world as free was what India wanted, and that could not be achieved so long as the central executive in Delhi was controlled from Westminster. But the article also insisted that immediate government in India by an Indian cabinet, on the British model, was impossible, and that checks and reservations were still vital. Hailey wrote to Irwin on 6 January, feeling that Liberal and Conservative opinion had been brought around on the issue such that they were committed to responsibility at the centre ‘whether in a dyarchical or some other form’.58 Hailey was impressed by Lord Reading’s vision of acceptable safeguards: ‘Indians approve and don’t seem to mind that it includes dyarchy at the centre, though I think they would prefer that we should not talk of dyarchy but only of responsibility.’59 Just as the emergent language of federation allowed the RTC to avoid clearing up the ambiguity over whether it was possible to have Dominion status with reservations, responsibility with safeguards seemed to allow the continuation of dyarchy at the centre, as a concept but not a word. The second FSC report was presented to conference on 12 January and opened by stating that, subject to certain safeguards, the responsibility for the federal government would rest on Indians themselves. The best way to effect this, following the example of the dominions, was to have executive authority resting with the Crown’s representative in India, as advised by a Council of Ministers. These ministers would be those commanding the confidence of the legislature and, using the convention of the Commonwealth, the governor-general in council would invite one of these ministers to form a government (India Office 1931a, 212). India was not, however, out of the waiting room of history yet: ‘There was general agreement in the sub-Committee that the assumption by India of all the powers and responsibility which have hitherto rested on Parliament cannot be made at one step’ (India Office 1931a, 213). As such, during a period of transition safeguards would be applied regarding defence, external relations and certain situations (protecting tranquillity, avoiding prejudice to any section of the population, guaranteeing the rights of the public services or ensuring India’s financial stability) in which the governorgeneral would be at liberty to act on his own responsibility. At the level of the central state, this would feel much like dyarchy.

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Both left- and right-wing commentators were outraged. On 8 January the communist Daily Worker outlined the ‘dictatorial powers’ that were to be retained by the viceroy in an article entitled ‘For the British Bloodsucker Only’.60 These included control of the army, defence, foreign relations, existing obligations and the finance relating to these matters, the retention of the power to veto bills, dismiss a ministry, dissolve the assembly and issue ordinances in the place of laws. The following day the Daily Herald could report Lord Peel’s speech at the conference as ‘Against Dyarchy’, voicing Conservative doubts that the introduction of responsibility at the centre could not but hamper the effective functioning of the colonial government, regardless of reservations.61 For the Daily Mail, MacDonald’s closing plenary (see below), backing central responsibility with reservations amounted to ‘vague talk in Cloudland’ and a ‘mad experiment’.62 Writing on 20 January, the paper was unable to imagine a set of reservations that would not prevent the introduction of democracy in India triggering an immense disaster: ‘To transplant from this country to a tropical country of Asia a form of government which even here is breaking down, and is entirely alien to Asiatic tradition, seems one of the maddest experiments that history records.’63 For the Observer this experiment unambiguously marked ‘dyarchy at the Centre’.64 For others, the plan for an all-India federation heralded an older geographical imagination of India’s future. These plans were reported in the press as both ‘Responsible Ministries on Dominion Lines’ and ‘How Dominion Should Be Built’.65 But any sense of Dominion status was still temporally deferred, and responsible government was still spatially delimited to the provinces. While federation was heralded, dominion was denied, and dyarchy was ignored, but not removed. Ironically, federation was the last of these three imaginary geographies to be made real. Provincial autonomy from 1937 retained many of the checks and reservations of dyarchy; India became a dominion in 1947 as a constitutional means of leaving the British Empire (De 2019); while federation only came into being in 1950. In his 19 January concluding address to the first session of the RTC, the prime minister had emphasised that continued reservations would only be for an (unspecified) period of transition. He reiterated the commitment to Indian responsibility for government, that conference delegates would continue to be involved in drafting the constitution and that the central government would be a federal government. Anticipating the two themes

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that would dominate the second session of the conference later that year, he also stated that Indian religious communities would need to reach an agreement among themselves and that Congress members would be invited to participate should they suspend civil disobedience. The prime minister concluded his speech by focusing not on the content of the first session of the RTC but on its form. It was the convivial nature of the event that had shaped the vision of federation that had emerged. It would, however, be the collapse of this conviviality that would scupper the second session, at which the geographical imagination of religious community would supersede that of dyarchy, dominion or federation. This had already been hinted at in the first session, but MacDonald, for one, felt that the conference method held out hope: One of the secrets of our success thus far – in fact, I am not at all sure it is not the main secret – is the personal contacts that we have been able to establish and to keep going. I have had a good deal of experience of these Conferences. One week of a Conference produces more good than six months of diplomatic correspondence. Let us get down to facts face to face; let us sit round the table; let each of us state our claims, state our hopes, state our fears, state our expectations; let each of us be candid one to another, and, face to face there is an enormously better chance of an understanding and an agreement than under any other circumstances. I wish to continue that condition. (India Office 1931a, 505)

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3 COMMUNITY A NATION AND A TABLE DIVIDED

If federation was the breakout star of the Round Table Conference (RTC), then the ‘minorities’ question was pitched as its melancholic twin. In India this question most regularly went under the title of communalism, explicitly tethering animosity between Hindus and Muslims (as the groupings were misleadingly generalised) to geographical imaginations of living communities in villages, towns and cities across the country. In Britain the question of these differences became both more abstract and more inclusive. Religious groups would be predominantly imagined as voting bodies that selected representatives across provincial and central legislative geographies. Community tensions here focused on abstract majorities and minorities in these chambers, not on lived differences in the galis, mohallas and bazars of everyday, everywhere India. This abstraction also gave prominence to a broader range of minorities than communal politics in India commonly admitted. The debates of Hindu and Muslim leaders regarding their weightage in the assemblies of Bengal, the Punjab and New Delhi would still be centre stage. But AngloIndians, Indian Christians, Sikhs, Europeans and the ‘depressed classes’ all jostled for constitutional protection. When Gandhi launched his fast to the death against the communal award of August 1932, his ire was bent not on Hindu–Muslim politics but on Dr Ambedkar’s successful argument that depressed class minorities secure separate electorates to those of Hindus. While the story of communalism and the fractures of majority–minority politics in London is usually told through a melancholic lens, for those minorities who secured protections in the communal award, the RTC was a joyous success.

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Such successes are eclipsed, however, in the standard narrative of the conference, which is that of failure. The communal question is commonly cited as the chief explanation for this failed conference. What this chapter will argue, however, is that the communal question did not just fracture the outcomes of the conference. Rather, it fractured the conference itself. The RTC was supposed to be an open conference, in the post-war spirit of transparency (see Chapter 4). But this conference method was thwarted, repeatedly, by the minority question. For fear of further provoking communal discord in India, solutions to the minority question were sought in private. When, belatedly, a Minorities Committee was formed in December 1930, the preference was for informal discussions, outside of the conference, that would inform reports to the committee. This was a model followed at the second session of the conference, when Gandhi ultimately reported his failure to solve the minorities conundrum in private, something which he blamed on the conference method, as manipulated by the British and Indian governments. As such, tracing the minorities question at the RTC involves moving beyond formal committee minutes and the confines of St James’s Palace. Anticipating the material in the following chapters, we have to trace out corridor conversations and evening meetings in cafés, restaurants and flats, and weekend vacations outside of London. The focal points are less the formal resolutions of the conference and more a series of unsuccessfully resolved crises. For the first session these included the failure to agree a joint Hindu–Muslim delegate position before the conference opened, as thrashed out in hotel rooms and, in particular, at the Maharaja of Bhopal’s London abode in Mayfair’s Upper Brook Street. After a month of failed private negotiations, MacDonald summoned leading Hindus and Muslims to the prime minister’s country retreat, but not even the bucolic atmosphere of Chequers could help broker an agreement. MacDonald therefore agreed to chair a Minorities Committee, the failures of which nearly derailed the whole conference. For the second conference session, only the Federal Structure and Minorities Committees resumed. The public record of the latter is slight, marking adjournment, delay and then admission of failure. The private record of minorities debates presents a much richer story, gleaned from letters, diaries and the occasional newspaper scoop. Beneath the seeming inactivity regarding the minority question was a near constant, frenetic networking together of London into an informal conference. This shadow

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conference failed to answer the communal question, ultimately resulting in the Communal Award of 1932. That the prime minister had to unilaterally declare a communal settlement marked the failure of the conference method itself.

‘… THIS MELANCHOLY STATE’ Communalism emerged as a shared geographical imagination of India between both colonial officials and nationalist campaigners in the early twentieth century and articulated how religion and nationalism were felt to have become inseparable in Indian society (Pandey 1990). In the 1920s the temporary nature of the dyarchy reforms and the regular provincial elections it introduced catalysed rapid changes in formal communal politics (Gould 2012). The RTC marks one of the most significant events though which communalism continued its unsteady evolution, refracted through the lens of abstract and inclusive minority–majority rhetoric. The tactics of Muslim conference delegates, and their connections to allIndia Muslim organisations, have been expertly detailed by David Page (1982). In London the divergent political tactics of Muslim organisations and Congress in India were played out. While the former had cooperated in the reformed constitutional system of the 1920s, the latter had focused on non-constitutional mobilisation and agitation. While the British and Indian governments desired Congress backing for constitutional reforms, they also needed to maintain Muslim support. The latter would depend upon maintaining separate Muslim electorates, securing legislative representation in Muslim-majority provinces and avoiding a strong and responsible central government, which could establish a Congress Raj over Muslim India. While communal debates around the RTC mostly took place within the British Indian delegation, and with the British delegates, these developments were informed and framed by the colonial governmentalities of the Indian state. The New Delhi Reforms Office was the engine of constitutional advice in official India, and in 1929 it produced a forty-seven-page guide to ‘communal disorders’.1 As a confidential document, it articulates more freely than government public texts the official mindset regarding the communal question on the eve of the conference, in a document designed to be read by precisely those staff from within and beyond the Reforms Office who headed to London in the autumn of 1930. The consistent message was

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that of despair: ‘Few would deny that never within recent memory have relations between the peoples of the two great communities of India, the Hindus and the Muslims, been more acutely strained than at the present time.’ The aim of the document was to survey recent history to indicate how ‘this melancholy state of affairs has come about’. As would be the focus of the minorities debates in London, the document opened with statistics on the population geography of India, a country of 320 million people, with 217 million enumerated as Hindu and 69 million as Muslim. Muslims predominated in Bengal, by 25 million to 20 million Hindus, and in the Punjab by 11 million to 6 million Hindus (they also were majorities in the North-West Frontier Province [NWFP] and Sind, both of which would secure the status of full provinces at the RTC itself). A brief history of this geography was then offered, deeply steeped in the tropes of colonial communalism. The roots of this geography lay in the first ‘Muslim conqueror’ of India, not in Muslim migration or trade. The result was that two ‘alien’ cultures and civilisations had been brought into innumerable points of contact, each of which was a potential point of conflict between religiously sanctioned communities living in states of ‘mutual repugnance’. With the introduction by the British of political reforms, including separate constituencies for Muslims from 1906, these religious tensions had now assumed secular form (Gallagher, Johnson and Seal 1973; and for the suggestion that this Cambridge School did not escape these assumptions, see Ranajit Guha [1982]): ‘The nature of the religious and social differences which divide them makes impossible the fusion of the two elements; while fears born of the new political conditions in the country have served to drive them further apart.’2 The rest of the document charted the presumed incompatibility of postwar communal relations, despite the temporary collaboration between Congress and the Muslim League via the Lucknow Pact of 1916 and the cooperation during the anti-Rowlatt, Khilafat and non-cooperation movements of 1919–1920. Emphasis was given to the rise of the Hindu Mahasabha as a Hindu reformist organisation that helped forge a sense of a broader, cohesive Hindu community and which encouraged Congress links. The wedding of communalism to nationalism had unleashed popular anxieties about future community protection that were taken to explain the communal riots of the 1920s. While these took place on the streets, debates took place about constitutional reform, especially the question of the retention of separate electorates, rather than joint electorates with reserved

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seats for communities on the basis of population ratios. The note abruptly ended by listing other minority tensions, from anti-Parsi riots in Bombay to tensions over Brahmin influence in the south. While summarising the essentialising tone of official communalism and highlighting how communalism was being set up as the direct route to the conference’s failure by New Delhi officials, it gave little sense of the motivating issues that would be debated at the conference itself. Much RTC debate focused around the impact of constitutional proposals on communal politics. The 1928 Nehru report, though cross-party and cross-community, had ignored several key Muslim League demands, so in March 1929 Jinnah put together ‘fourteen points’ that he would press for in London. They included demands for a federal constitution incorporating provincial autonomy, minority representation in legislatures, one-third Muslim seats in the central legislature, separate communal electorates and various Muslim protections. While, as shown below, delegates were willing to be flexible on many issues in the early stages of the conference, by December 1930 pressure from associations in India led to hardening of influential Muslim lines on the following issues: the retention of separate electorates, population-ratio linked majorities in the legislatures of Bengal and the Punjab, seats weightage in excess of population percentage being given in provinces where Muslims were minorities and Sind becoming a separate province and the NWFP being reformed.3 It was in the face of this relatively coordinated set of demands that some Hindu delegates, notably Moonje, set their task as that of thwarting Muslim delegates, to the intense frustration of Hindu Liberals and many of the princes. Gandhi would set Congress’s task at the second session as that of reconciling the communal parties but concluded that the conference had been rigged to make such compromise impossible. Nehru would later conclude of the British at the conference that ‘their trump card was, of course, the communal issue and they played it for all it was worth. It dominated the Conference’ (Nehru [1936] 2004, 305). He also felt the RTC to be a ‘gilded and crowded hall’ of imperialist, feudal, financial, industrialist, religious and communal vested interests, and that it was fitting that the British Indian delegation be led by the Aga Khan, ‘who in his own person happened to combine all these interests in some degree’ (Nehru [1936] 2004, 306). In 1954 the Aga Khan published his memoirs, including a section relating his experiences at the RTC, as both head of the British Indian delegation and

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leader of the Muslim delegates. If the Reform Office document represented the British view of incompatible communities, the Aga Khan here read the conference as always doomed to fail. The much later logics of partition and two nations were retrospectively read around a divided round table: Always the argument returned to certain basic points of difference: Was India a nation or two nations? … The Congress attitude seemed to us doctrinaire and unrealistic. They held stubbornly to their one-nation theory, which we knew to be historically insupportable. We maintained that before the coming of the British Raj the various regions of the Indian subcontinent had never been one country, that the Raj had created an artificial and transient unity, and that when the Raj went, that unity could not be preserved and the diverse peoples, with their profound racial and religious differences, could not remain fellow-sleepers for all time but they would awake and go their separate ways. However close therefore we might come to agreement on points of detail, this ultimate disagreement on principle could not be bridged. (Aga Khan 1954, 228)

THE RELUCTANT COMMITTEE: MINORITY INTERESTS AT THE FIRST SESSION PRE-CONFERENCES: MAYFAIR AND ST JAMES’S The harmonised declarations between British and princely India in favour of federation made at the opening of the first RTC session caused a media sensation. Alongside the preceding campaign for federation, however, had been a simultaneous but unsuccessful campaign to forge a unified British Indian front between Hindu and Muslim delegates. These talks had begun before the delegates started arriving in London from 18 October. They took place en route from India, in the packed liners carrying the delegates from Bombay to Marseilles (Legg 2020c). In London the delegates began a series of informal meetings, between themselves but also with leading British politicians like Benn, who encouraged an agreement between Hindus and Muslims (Moore 1974, 125). These pre-conference meetings between delegates took place in their lodgings around London (see Figure 8.1). On 26 October the Maharaja of Bikaner hosted one of the earliest meetings at his apartment in the Carlton

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Hotel with his prime minister Manubhai Mehta, Moonje, Sapru, Jayakar and British Indian delegation Joint Secretary Bajpai. Jinnah’s fourteen points were discussed, with Sapru, G. S. Bajpai and Mehta arguing in their favour, while Moonje and Jayakar argued against.4 On 2 November a selection of non-Muslim Indian delegates met at Sir Cowasji Jehangir’s Stanmore Court House, 29 St James’s Street, during which Moonje and Jayakar again felt that they were having to apply ‘continuous brakes’ to the concessions of Liberals like Sapru and Sir Chimanlal Setalvad.5 The non-Muslim delegates reconvened at 29 St James’s Street the following morning, where Moonje felt that Sapru slapped Jayakar down, before all British Indian delegates met at St James’s Palace that afternoon.6 The Aga Khan chaired the meeting, at which Sapru railed against articles in the British press which he felt were stoking up tensions between Hindu and Muslim delegates. On 4 November the non-Muslim delegates met again at Cowasji’s, where concessions to Muslim demands were discussed, while Ambedkar insisted that all minorities should receive equal treatment.7 A further meeting there on the seventh saw a small group of non-Muslim delegates (Sapru, Ambedkar, Ujjal Singh, the Indian Catholic delegate Pannir Selvam, Jayakar and Moonje) selected to liaise with Muslim delegates (including the Aga Khan, Jinnah and Shafi).8 These liaisons, in the final days before the conference plenary statements outlining delegate’s positions, desperately attempted to produce a shared line by the British Indian delegation. The meetings took place at the Maharaja of Bhopal’s Mayfair house at 25 Upper Brook Street from 8 November. On 11 November Ambedkar agreed to Jinnah’s demand for one-third of seats in the central legislature, only to be blocked by Moonje, who insisted on electoral representation proportional to the strength of the community.9 On 12 November, after the ceremonial opening of the RTC by King George V, the Hindu and Muslim representatives headed back to Upper Brook Street, where Sapru accused Moonje and the Hindu Mahasabha of smearing him as a Muslim sympathiser and advocate.10 He wrote to his friend Iswar Saran on the same day: Our real difficulty is that while we use the language of nationalism in actual practice we are very far from nationalism. We have been sitting in committee here for the last 10 days to solve the Hindu Mahommedan question. I have done my best to influence Mahommedan influence, and I think I have, on the most vital point, the communal representation, succeeded in convincing their leaders. I find absolutely no response from

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Jayakar and Moonje, who are not prepared to yield on any substantial point. The one thing I am most anxious to avoid is that we should not wash our dirty linen in the streets or at the Conference. At the present moment on this issue I cannot write to you hopefully.11

The meetings accelerated pace before the opening plenaries, with two gatherings at Bhopal’s on the fourteenth, at which Moonje felt too much was being conceded to Jinnah by his fellow co-religionists, of whom he despaired: ‘These Hindu Leaders are theorists, philosophers, metaphysicists and moralists. They are not fit for executive duties and have no executive mentality.’12 Sapru’s mood was also worsening, and he lamented on 14 November that without a united front crossing communal lines there could be no federal agreement and that private meetings were bringing no conclusion.13 This tone was picked up by the British press, with the Telegraph reporting that ‘quarrels over the conference’ meant that it was unlikely the British delegates would face a ‘united and defiant’ British Indian delegation.14 At the latest possible hour, after a meeting from 6 p.m. to midnight on Sunday, 16 November, Moonje finally signed up to a compromise proposal by the selected Hindu and Muslim representative delegates.15 Muslim delegates would accept joint (not separate) electorates in the provinces and the centre, with reservations of seats linked to population strength; Sind and the NWFP would become full provinces; social legislation would be community sensitive; and Muslims would have 30 per cent of central seats (Moore 1974, 126–127). The surrender of separate electorates was, however, rejected by the broader Muslim delegates, killing off the unified British Indian front on the eve of conference work proper. The Government of India advisor Harry Haig filed daily reports back to Delhi on the conference plenary sessions. On the second day of the plenary sessions, 18 November, he reported, ‘The Hindu–Muslim conversations are believed to have reached something like a deadlock when question of electorates came up. A new approach to subject by some different agency may have to be made.’16 That different agency would not be settled for another month when a crisis at Chequers rather than Upper Brook Street forced a major shift in conference method regarding the minorities question. But it is likely that the failure of the Bhopal agreement also had a lasting effect on the conference method itself. The very first item for discussion at the RTC, on 17 November, was whether the press would be allowed access

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to conference and committee sessions. Haig telegrammed back to Delhi that ‘owing to nature of Conference which would seek agreement by intimate discussion and compromise, success was more likely to be achieved if Press were excluded altogether’ (also see India Office [1931a, 4]).17 While this cannot be solely attributed to the failure of the British Indian delegates to forge a united front, it would guarantee that if any dirty linen was washed at the conference, it would not be aired in the streets of St James’s.

THE DEAD END OF OUTSIDE HAPPENINGS: CHEQUERS If the conference opened in a burst of optimism for all-India cooperation in planning a federation, the reality of unresolved communal tensions quickly became apparent. Attempts at resolution did, however, patchily continue beyond the formal spaces of the conference. They make the task of comprehending the nature of conference work difficult. This was also the case for journalists, who had been excluded from conference plenaries and committee work, and depended for news on an information committee, composed of Benn, the princely states advisor L. F. Rushbrook-Williams and the British Indian Liberal and newspaper editor C. Y. Chintamani (see Chapter 6). There were also three RTC publicity officers, one of whom was forced to address this issue of the distended geography of the conference by just the third day of post-plenary work. On 26 November Hugh McGregor circulated a letter to Sapru, the Aga Khan, Sastri and the Indian princes on behalf of journalists attempting to cover the conference: Outside the conference there are from time to time various negotiations and meetings. To secure news of these journalists have to visit various parties and places, sometimes to the great inconvenience of all. Such information as they secure in this fortuitous procedure may be unauthorised and in certain circumstances prejudicial to the interests of the Conference.18

While this was beyond McGregor’s formal duties, his staff offered to work as a ‘clearing-house’ for reports from delegates at these ‘outside happenings’. Immediate news from these meetings was not promising, with Muslim delegates making it clear that separate electorates would not be compromised upon.19 On 3 December Benn hosted a dinner with Sapru, Jinnah, Sastri, Setalvad and Shafi in an attempt to encourage a

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breakthrough. He reported to Irwin that evening that while he had been encouraging British delegates to accept some movement on responsibility in the federal centre in the proposed new constitution, Indian members had to find their way out of a ‘dead end’ regarding the Hindu–Muslim question.20 Benn had heard from both broader Muslim delegates and Moonje that a strong chairman for a possible minorities committee could provide a way out, while Benn thought a communal breakthrough could swing British opinion in favour of the conference and carry its resolutions past Tory opposition. There was, indeed, a sense that communal wrangling was dragging down the whole conference. Sankey, chair of the Federal Structure SubCommittee, was widely praised for his courteousness and impartiality in public. In his private diary, however, he was less courteous and more partial. On 1 December he recorded a very difficult day: ‘The Hindus are very insistent and unreasonable. They are children. I much prefer the Mohammedans who are much more reliable.’21 A week later he noted, on 8 October, ‘Making good progress but the Hindus very tiresome.’ This was because the communal question and the whole working of the conference were intertwined; the Muslim delegates refused to accept any transfer of responsibility to a federal centre until the question of communal safeguards was settled. Benn had turned his attention to the communal question, and on 5 December he met both Moonje and the Aga Khan. The latter confirmed that pressure from Indian Muslims now meant that concessions on separate electorates were nigh impossible, and he pressed for a strong chairman to tackle the question in committee.22 Moonje went further and insisted that the chairman should have the power to act as arbitrator of an ultimate settlement, in the last resort. The conference organisers were as keen as Sapru to keep communal discussions on an informal basis, however. This was perhaps because, as Benn had admitted to Moonje in their talk on 5 December, Tory opponents of the conference were making much of the communal discord.23 As such, on 9 December the prime minister himself convened a private meeting of Muslim, Hindu and British figures at St James’s Palace, including the Aga Khan, Shafi, Ghaznavi and Jinnah; Sastri, Sapru, Setalvad, Ramaswami Aiyar, Jayakar and Moonje; Benn and the attorney general.24 MacDonald emphasised the need to take an agreement back to India. Moonje pressed for the League of Nations to arbitrate (Legg 2020a). The Hindu Liberals

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and Muslims supposedly laughed this suggestion down, but not Jayakar’s proposal that MacDonald chair and arbitrate the matter. Moonje recalled in his diary Jayakar’s emotional pitch: ‘Friendships have been broken and bitterness has taken its place. The position, he said, is so excruciating that he feels a relief at having expressed his readiness to accept arbitration. I was all along afraid that perhaps tears will come to his eyes.’25 Seven Hindu and Muslim delegates were summoned to Downing Street the following day, where the various competing positions were laid out, regarding the need both for unity and for the protection of minorities.26 The Muslim delegates were willing to surrender separate electorates if seats were reserved on a population basis in the Bengal and Punjab, upon which Moonje suggested that Jinnah’s fourteen points could be accepted.27 On Thursday, 11 December, the delegates met MacDonald again at his room at the House of Commons where he proposed inviting some thirty delegates that weekend to Chequers, the prime ministerial country retreat in Buckinghamshire (Hooja 1999, 165). Jinnah and the Hindu delegates were to put forward their conditions relating to the questions of joint or separate electorates, seats reserved on a population basis or not at all, and Jinnah’s fourteen points.28 Haig had wired back to Delhi on 10 December that MacDonald had resumed negotiations and that it was desirable that great care be exercised regarding comments in the Indian press, such that the generally high hopes for the retreat not be derailed. The Chequers meeting on the thirteenth was, however, a disaster. In Malcolm Hailey’s view, expressed in a letter to Irwin on 15 December, Muslim delegates had given in to pressure from India and been turned, again, away from joint electorates (on the content of petitions from India, see Chapter 10).29 On the Hindu side, during the drive down Moonje had decided to put forward his case without compromise, refusing Jinnah’s points as the basis for discussion of accepting joint electorates. After a lengthy debate MacDonald became disgusted and delivered a minilecture to the delegates on the difference between political and religious nationalism (Veer 1994), paraphrased by Moonje in his diary: You want to evolve India as a Nation; for which you can never run Elections on these lines. In politics you must never think that you are a Hindu or a Muslim. You should be good Hindus and good Moslems in your own homes and temples and mosques but in the public life you must be an Indian neither Hindu nor Muslim. You cannot begin to

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evolve a new India on these sectarian lines; but I know also that you cannot immediately forget the past. Therefore make a beginning of a New Order in India.30

MacDonald suggested a compromise of joint electorates with 20 per cent reserved, which Moonje and Jayakar eventually accepted but Jinnah could not. Hailey continued in his letter to Irwin on the fifteenth that ‘Sapru, who had been for the most part silent, at length broke into a fierce attack on Moonje, saying that it was clear that there was in India no spirit of nationalism and to talk of it was a farce’.31 Moonje completed the record of the outburst in his diary, with Sapru suggesting that it was the government that would have to settle the communal question, though it was not ‘logical or reasonable or democratic or nationalist’.32 Reflecting back on the Chequers weekend, in a letter on 19 December, Sapru admitted that Muslim delegates had become ‘extremely stiff and unreasonable’ (Hooja 1999, 166). Yet he squarely laid the blame at the feet of Moonje and Jayakar, who Sastri referred to in a letter of 15 December as Sapru’s ‘pet abominations’ (Jagadisan 1963, 203), and declared the position to be hopeless. The Chequers collapse led to an eventual acceptance of the conference method, which had been guiding the work of the other seven subcommittees to date. Haig reported to New Delhi on 15 December that the ‘informal Hindu-Muslim conversations’ had failed and that now a ‘formal Minorities Committee’ would be established but with little hope of an agreement.33 On 17 December the Daily Telegraph branded this as the abandonment of negotiations, despite the fact that a committee would now work on this issue specifically.34 For Benthall it was a result of the British government applying undue pressure on Muslim delegates to accept joint electorates and the failure of a geographical tactic. On 17 December he wrote to his colleague in Calcutta, Sir George Godfrey: On Saturday the whole party trouped off to Chequers to meet the Prime Minister. I suppose he hoped that a different environment would work the trick, but nothing of the sort happened, and the Moslems stood firm. In consequence the whole thing was apparently broken off finally, and it was decided to proceed with the formation of the Minorities SubCommittee to tackle the question there.35

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On 17 December Benn’s Business Committee established the Minorities Committee, accepting all delegates who wanted to attend.36 Thirty-seven delegates, over half of the British Indian delegation (princely states delegates did not participate, nor did Sapru, Jayakar or Jinnah), formed the committee, which would now include the voices of all minorities. MacDonald agreed to chair the committee but made it clear that he had no intention of arbitrating and insisted that claims for responsibility at the centre could not be made without a communal settlement. This precondition would be disputed by Gandhi at the second session and enabled the British to deflect attention on the many other failings of the conference by constant reference to the communal deadlock. Though informal conferencing had supposedly concluded, in the pause between the committee being established and it beginning its work after the Christmas break, Sapru led attempts to get the Bhopal House agreement, which collapsed before the opening plenary, used as a new basis for informal discussions.37 Benn confirmed in his official conference diary on 19 December, however, that the weight of telegrams that Muslims were receiving from India insisting on separate electorates left him with little hope of any breakthrough.38 Moonje was also despondent and did not react well when MacDonald summoned him to 10 Downing Street on 19 December and insisted, in a ‘very formal and cold’ manner, that without a Hindu–Muslim agreement the House of Commons would not transfer any further powers to India. Moonje replied, according to his diary, that surrendering to Muslim communalism would set a bad precedent and that British diplomats would give everything to Muslims and ‘just a shadow of fake swaraj to us’.39

‘SOME DIFFERENT AGENCY’: THE MINORITIES COMMITTEE While the Minorities Committee did not start its work until after Christmas, it convened on 23 December. MacDonald used his opening address to urge more of what the committee had been created to replace. Over the break he urged Hindu–Muslim conversations so as to break the impasse.40 Haig telegrammed New Delhi later in the day, suggesting that such conversations were ongoing but without conclusion and that Muslim opinion had hardened against joint electorates.41 His only note of hope was that neither Muslim nor Hindu Liberal delegates had spoken in committee, raising the

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prospect that there may be a chance of private accommodation between them. Any such private conversations were, however, being conducted under the pressure of the ongoing torrents of telegrams arriving from communities in India. On 26 December Benn wrote to Irwin that MacDonald had not been able to produce a breakthrough and that the constant telegrams from India (see Chapter 10) were forcing the chance of an agreement to recede far into the background.42 The Times also reported on New Year’s Eve that Muslim legislators in the New Delhi Legislative Assembly had collectively telegrammed London delegates insisting that separate electorates could not be abandoned.43 Accordingly, Haig reported that at the committee’s 10 a.m. meeting on 1 January 1931 Shafi insisted on separate electorates, a majority of Muslim seats in Bengal and the Punjab, and a British declaration on self-government including minority safeguards.44 Ambedkar also insisted upon a ‘complete partition’ between depressed classes and Hindus, whether through joint electorates with adult franchise and reserved seats, or separate electorates, which were also demanded by Europeans, Anglo-Indians and Indian Christians of Madras. These discussions went on so long that MacDonald decided to convene the committee again at 10 p.m. in St James’s Palace, intending to sit through the night until an agreement was reached. On Friday, 2 January, Benn reported to Irwin that increasing numbers of Hindus, led by Setalvad, were willing to grant Muslim concessions on separate electorates in the hope of a generous concession on responsibility by the British.45 MacDonald eventually adjourned the committee until the following Tuesday, pleading with delegates to continue with informal negotiations and adjust their claims. He added that British intervention in Indian communal affairs had ‘a little bit of humiliation in it’ and that they should be settled by Indian delegates alone, not by an imposed British settlement.46 Lewis, the Indian Reforms Office adviser in London, wrote back to his colleagues in Delhi on 5 January that the conference atmosphere was depressing, with the communal question being worst of all.47 MacDonald had extended the adjournment of the committee in the hope of provoking a breakthrough of negotiations and giving time for the Aga Khan to return from Paris, where he was being treated for a chest infection.48 He felt, however, that Muslim opinion was convinced of British protection in any constitution and so lacked the same anxiety for a deal as the Hindu Liberals.

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No agreement was forthcoming at the Minorities Committee meeting on Tuesday the sixth, and on 12 January Benn had to report to Irwin that there was still deadlock. There was a growing broader sense of conference optimism after Reading had come out in favour of central responsible government with safeguards in the Federal Structure Committee on 5 January, with a dinner on 13 January laid on by the British Indian delegation for 300 delegates and members of London society noted for its sense of goodwill on all sides.49 The Minorities Committee, however, had one final dramatic twist in store in the final week of the conference. For Benthall, writing to Godfrey in Calcutta on 14 January, this was part of a selfconscious policy on behalf of the Muslim delegates, who felt that Labour was ‘Hinduised and hostile to them’.50 He recalled an incident from the ‘big dinner’ the night before when ‘Old Fuz’ (presumably A. K. Fazl-ul-Huq) was greeting guests at the door with a ‘seraphic smile’. Asked if he was looking pleased because he had made peace with the Hindus, he supposedly replied ‘no better than that: war’. For Benthall, the Muslim delegates understood that the Labour government only responded to rows. The ‘bombshell’ of the Muslim delegates took the form of an ultimatum delivered by the Aga Khan, Shafi and Jinnah to MacDonald on the thirteenth that unless the government declaration contained adequate safeguards for the Muslim community, they would dissociate themselves from any further conference proceedings.51 Benn wrote to Irwin on the fourteenth, detailing the drama of the Minorities Committee that day, when the committee report should have been drafted.52 The committee had met at 3 p.m., adjourned to the palace’s Tapestry Room (see Figure 5.1) for a smaller private discussion, then reconvened and debated until 7:40 p.m. The conclusion was that Muslim delegates were willing to take 50 per cent of seats in the Punjab, which the Sikh delegate rejected, despite multiple entreaties: ‘Everybody appealed to Ujjal Singh to agree; Mrs Shah Nawaz begged him, Mrs Subbarayan implored him, Sastri adjured him, but he would not budge and at last we had to give it up; whereupon the Muhammadan’s went back again to their fourteen points.’53 This put the entire conference at risk, with Muslims threatening to insist upon protections being inserted in the reports of other committees. This would result, the Morning Post insisted on the fourteenth, in Sankey’s previously popular Federal Structure Committee report being ‘stillborn’.54 On the fifteenth Sankey presented the report to a plenary session of the conference, at which Fazl-ul-Huq insisted that without safeguards, Muslims

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had no use for central responsibility, although Benn suggested to Irwin that minorities would be catered for.55 Lewis reported back to his Reforms Office colleagues in Delhi that the delegates’ nerves were on edge and that ‘the communal deadlock has had a generally depressing effect’.56 On 16 January the Minorities Committee had its final meeting, in which Benn recorded a gentlemanly consensus to disagree, and a committee report was sent to the plenary conference meeting that afternoon. As chair of the committee MacDonald opened by apologising to the conference for the lack of a printed report to discuss, due to the committee working on the report until 11:30 a.m. that morning (India Office 1931a, 320). The four-page report diplomatically outlined the fractured discussions and disagreements of the group. An opening and open discussion had confirmed that for responsible government ‘it was particularly desirable that some agreement should be come to between the major communities in order to facilitate the consideration of the whole question. Although this was very nearly accomplished, it has not yet succeeded, but the negotiations are to be continued both here and in India’ (India Office 1931a, 316). The report noted the interest in a declaration of fundamental rights safeguarding cultural and religious life, but the majority of the report addressed the abstractions of minority–majority electoral politics. While joint electorates were ‘in the abstract the most consistent with democratic principles as generally understood’, the unequal distribution of minorities in India made that system inadequate for communal security (India Office 1931a, 316). It was, therefore, accepted that separate electorates would be the basis of the new constitution, with all the problems of distribution of seats and retaining seats for independent political opinion that this raised. These would continue to be discussed in negotiations between the first and second conference sessions. In general, the failures of the Minorities Committee did not stymie the buoyant tone of the concluding plenary session on 19 January. MacDonald suggested that due to public and private discussion the gap between the communities was narrower than ever before, that any safeguard for communities would need to be of Indian design, but should agreement not be reached a British deal would be imposed (India Office 1931a, 478–479). For many Indian commentators this was a familiar tactic. As Muhammad Ali had put it to the British in his opening plenary address on 19 November: ‘The fact is that the Hindu–Muslim difficulty … is of your own creation. But not altogether. It is the old maxim of “divide and rule”. But there is a division

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of labour here. We divide and you rule’ (India Office 1931a, 95; original emphasis). As Benn had suggested, many conservative commentators and delegates were keen to seize on communal discord as a means to delay the granting of responsible government. Hailey had written to Irwin on 15 December that the Chequers breakdown had advantages, making members of the British delegation see how difficult the Indian situation really was, and that it was not solely the product of British presence.57 Benn himself was not above this line of thought. Regarding the continuing deadlock, he wrote to Irwin four days later, on 19 December, that we are on velvet so far as international opinion is concerned, because the world can see that we are waiting to do the right thing, hindered by Indian difficulties. All these considerations are in favour of letting the Hindu–Moslem question hold the field for the time being.58

‘DEEP SORROW AND DEEPER HUMILIATION’: MINORITY INTERESTS AT THE SECOND SESSION Despite the widely held desire to maintain conference work between the two sessions in 1931, the direct connection between British and Indian delegates was largely lost. Indian politics was dominated by the suspension of Congress’s civil disobedience movement, Gandhi’s release from jail and his decision to attend the RTC in London, which remained uncertain until he left Bombay aboard the SS Rajputana on 29 August. British politics, meanwhile, was dominated by the unravelling authority of the Labour government in the face of the mounting economic crisis. In an India Office note from late April 1931, Benn confirmed that the Hindu–Muslim question was still the greatest problem facing the conference, with tensions between the communities increasing.59 As with the Reforms Office note of 1929, this tension was unambiguously related to concerns over the implications of any RTC settlement and the safeguards, or lack thereof, for the Moslem community. Presuming no settlement in India, the question was how the RTC might concoct a solution, which for Benn was a question of whether the government was willing to decide on a solution itself. Benn seemingly did not contemplate Gandhi successfully mediating Hindu and Muslim concerns (nor did Gandhi, according to Page [1982, 235]).

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To those who had worked in detail on the first conference session in London, and would spend the summer preparing for its resumption, this was a depressing prospect. Hugh McGregor, of the publicity department, wrote on 8 June to Almá Latifi in India, who had been a joint secretary to the British India delegation at the first conference session. He saw little hope but still felt that convening the delegates in London might allow a breakthrough: The Communal problem is our despair. Are the communities to persist in acting as members of factions or will they yet act as Indians? Their failure to come together in the interests of India, with Cawnpore and Benares [riots] as a background, is gravely affecting British opinion regarding full self-government. If the two Communities but recognised how greatly they are jeopardising, or at least postponing Indian opportunities they would come to an agreement on the spot.… Failing [settlement in India] let us hope that the less hectic atmosphere of London will bring a settlement in the very earliest days of the meeting. Otherwise good-bye to some of the more glorious colours in the dream which has been ours.60

Latifi replied on 23 June that he hoped to re-join McGregor in London but that the prospects of a settlement in India were non-existent: ‘The Gordian knot will have to be cut in London. But things can & will be set right given adequate knowledge & experience & skilful handling.’ This perhaps underestimated the enormity of the challenge. The Muslim educationalist delegate Shafa’at Ahmad at the opening of the Federal Structure Committee made it clear how rigid the Muslim position had become (Moore 1974, 218–219). In addition to separate electorates, demands now included Muslim majorities in the Punjab and Bengal, and the complete autonomy of provinces from a (Hindu majority) federal centre. Two days later, on 16 September, the RTC Cabinet Committee of the National Government, in place since 24 August, discussed the communal question.61 It was said to be further from a solution than at the last conference, and MacDonald envisaged a definite failure of the two communities to settle, following an application to him to arbitrate and arrive at a settlement. MacDonald neither wanted to act as arbiter nor be blamed for causing the collapse of the conference by refusing to arbitrate. Rather than devise a new method to avoid either of these eventualities, the conference proceeded

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on the same model as before, attempting to outsource delicate communal diplomacy to informal negotiations beyond St James’s Palace. Again, two conferences took place, with two very different geographies. The palace conference will be traced first, then we will track the informal networking before and after Gandhi’s dramatic and public acknowledgement to the Minorities Committee on 8 October 1931 of the abject failure of the informal negotiations he had been leading.

A TABLE DIVIDED: THE MINORITIES COMMITTEE On 28 September the Minorities Committee of the second conference session met for the first time. As with all formal meetings the seating had been carefully planned in advance and acted as a microcosm of the official communal sociology of India. Seating clearly had deep representational value. It signified power, and friendships. Following Gandhi’s later arrest after his return to India, he wrote to Lord Sankey on 2 May 1932 of his disappointment that he should have sanctioned his arrest, ‘Seeing that at the Federal Structure Committee I was put in a chair immediately to your left and that I was ever accessible to you’ (see Figure 3.2).62 Of the Minorities Committee meeting on 28 September Moonje noted in his diary that at the previous meetings he had been seated closed to the prime minister, whereas this time that seat had been given to Sarojini Naidu, and then came Gandhi, Malaviya and the wealthy industrialist and Congress supporter G.  D.  Birla before himself: ‘This indicates that MacDonald thinks that Gandhi and Malaviya alone count and he can now safely ignore me and bring them round to some sort of agreement favourable to Moslems.’63 Given the likelihood of Gandhi playing a prominent role, it was perhaps not surprising that he would be seated close to the committee chairman, but the organisation of the table must have also structured the debates that took place in the committee. A table plan, using photographic portraits collated for India Office guides to conference delegates, has been preserved in the archives of MacDonald’s special assistant for the second RTC session, J. G. Laithwaite (Figure 3.1).64 Blocs of delegates are clearly identifiable, moving clockwise from MacDonald, the chairman at the bottom. First came Gandhi and his colleagues, then a large block of Hindu and Sikh delegates, with the Liberal members at the left of the table. Ranged across the top were members of other minority interests,

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009215329.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Source: BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F138/13, © British Library Board (IOR/Eur.Mss/F138/13).

FIGURE 3.1  The Minorities Committee table

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FIGURE 3.2  The Federal Structure Committee, September 1931 Source: © British Library Board (Photo 13/(1)).

including ‘untouchables’, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, European commerce. After the two women delegates sat the Muslim bloc, after which came a phalanx of British delegates to MacDonald’s right. Hindus and Muslims kept apart by British politicians and a conference table; the symbolism would have been lost on no one. MacDonald opened the meeting on Monday the twenty-eighth by appealing to the great history of Indian philosophies which saw the world as composed of harmonised differences (India Office 1932b, 1334). This was the challenge that lay before the conference and his committee especially. The minority issue had ‘baffled’ the previous seven sittings of the committee, and MacDonald had concluded that the issue should be settled by Indians and pleaded not to be cast in the role of arbiter: We are face to face with the question: how can the various majorities, minorities, how can the various communities  … all together devise means by which we will share in the power of that Government and use that power not in the interests of a sect or a community or a class, but in the interests of the whole of the masses of the people which compose the

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Indian population? That is our problem, that is your problem. Set about it and solve it. (India Office 1932b, 1335)

Malaviya suggested that the committee adjourn, so that informal negotiations might take place. During this time MacDonald suggested that other minorities might prepare their cases. Ambedkar insisted that any negotiations between Hindus and Muslims regarding weightage must be completely separate to the question of minority protections: ‘I do want to say most emphatically that whoever claims weightage and whoever is willing to give that weightage he most not give it – he cannot give it – out of my share. I want that to be absolutely plain’ (India Office 1932b, 1335). MacDonald reassured the minorities that the committee was the only place a settlement could be agreed, but that if there were ‘minorities or communities’ that had been in conflict but wanted to overcome their difficulties elsewhere, that would be welcome. Ambedkar suggested a small committee should oversee the informal negotiations and report back, which MacDonald agreed to but put the matter entirely in the delegates’ hands. So, again, the conference method of free and open discussion was suspended as the committee dispersed to conduct its business elsewhere, in private. The committee adjourned for four days and met again on Thursday, 1 October. Gandhi requested that the adjournment be extended by week, on the basis of ‘anxious conversations’ he had been having with the Aga Khan and other delegates (India Office 1932b, 1340). He also announced that he had been selected to coordinate these informal consultations. Ambedkar felt that he would ‘not be doing violence to etiquette’ by revealing that in private discussions Gandhi had repeated his stance, openly made in the Federal Structures Committee, that no political community other than Sikhs or Muslims should get special representation (India Office 1932b, 1341). This went against the recommendations of the committee at the first session of the conference. Gidney and Pannir Selvam supported this point, speaking for Anglo-Indians and Indian Christians. Gandhi reassured the delegates that he would not enforce his views on any informal discussion, so an adjournment of a further week was agreed. Moonje was dismayed, confiding to his diary that Gandhi had made a sorry exhibit of Hindu weakness to the world, proceeding incautiously and without consulting his fellow Hindus.65 The following day Gandhi’s assistant was instructed to send conference news back to Jawaharlal Nehru. Mahadev

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Desai wrote, on 2 October, of Gandhi’s despondency at the attitude of delegates towards cooperation and the sordid conference discussions: He has no heart in the work of the Minorities Committee, where Macdonald [sic] is as supercilious and patronising as ever. Inspite of this he has agreed to the Muslim request that he should call together representatives of the various groups in order to discuss the whole communal question.… Bapu has decided to give one week to these discussions after which he is going to have nothing to do with the question. If the discussions fail, as he fears they will, he intends to make a statement next week in the Minorities Committee giving a bit of his mind to the Government. He feels that the communal question is being brought deliberately to the forefront and magnified by the Government because they do not intend to part with power. He has in private conversation, already made that clear to Government spokesman. He told the Premier that there was no meaning in bringing Dr. Ambedkar here unless it was to create difficulties.…66

After a week of what MacDonald had called the ‘informal and unofficial’ consultations (see below), on 8 October Gandhi reported the result to the committee. It was with deep sorrow and deeper humiliation that I have to announce utter failure on my part to secure an agreed solution of the communal question through informal conversations among and with the representatives of different groups.… But to say that the conversations have to our utter shame failed is not to say the whole truth. Causes of failure were inherent in the composition of the Indian Delegation. We are almost all not elected representatives of the parties or groups whom we are presumed to represent; we are here by nomination of the Government. Further, you will allow me to say that this was hardly the time to summon the Minorities Committee. It lacks the sense of reality in that we do not know what it is that we are going to get. If we knew in a definite manner that we were going to get the thing we want, we should hesitate fifty times before we threw it away in a sinful wrangle…. (India Office 1932b, 1345–1346)

For the Muslim delegates, however, this was precisely the time for the Minorities Committee to meet. In reply, Shafi made it clear that Muslims

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would refuse to countenance any federal plan for central responsibility until they had been assured of their safeguards, a point reiterated by Ambedkar (India Office 1932b, 1352, 1357). Gandhi suggested the committee adjourn indefinitely while the act of constitution building progressed, and informal discussions continued to work at the communal problem. MacDonald refused to adjourn indefinitely but promised to call the committee together after some time to discuss any informal progress. MacDonald next called the committee over five weeks later on 13 November so that a report could be composed to offer to the conference plenary session ahead of a concluding statement at the end of the month. He expressed his regret that the delegates had been unable to propose a solution, but announced that a deputation to his office at the House of Commons the previous evening had presented a plan. It represented Muslim, depressed classes, some Indian Christian, Anglo-Indian and the British in India community, which could be taken to cover 46 per cent of the population. The Aga Khan presented it to the committee, after which followed a substantial rebuttal by Gandhi and a restatement of Congress’s claims to represent all of India, while Setalvad suggested MacDonald should not feel any hesitation in deciding the communal problem. MacDonald promised to file the minority agreement as an official part of the committee proceedings, and report to the plenary session that no agreement had been reached. The newspaper headlines were scathing: ‘India’s Future: Failure of the Round Table’; ‘Premier to Settle Vexed India Problem’; and ‘Policy of “Divide and Rule” Wins Again at Round Table Conference’.67 The second Minorities Committee report, submitted by MacDonald to the conference on 18 November, was barely two pages long. A summary of the failure to solve the communal conundrum was given. MacDonald committed to arbitrating a settlement if every member of the committee would be willing to sign a request that he do so. In his concluding address on 1 December he reiterated that his government would prepare a transitory scheme of constitutional protections but begged that a scheme might be devised in the interim by Indians themselves. Gandhi offered up thanks on behalf of the delegates to MacDonald and declared that the conference could well mark the parting of their ways, which was interpreted by many to mark an intent to restart civil disobedience on return to India. Sir Abdul Qaiyum spoke next, suggesting a whisper had come to him that he should second Gandhi’s vote of thanks, upon which an Urdu couplet had come to mind, which he recited. A delegate shouted out that he should

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translate it. After suggesting that the task should fall to Sarojini Naidu, the ‘Nightingale of India’, he provided his best translation (India Office 1932a, 422). The members of the Minorities Committee would have agreed more than most: Asmán bar-i-amánat natawanist kashid Qurai fál ba námi man i diwána Zadand. The burden of responsibility which could not be borne even by heaven has fallen on the shoulders of this half-lunatic or full lunatic.68

‘… THEY RETIRE BEHIND THE PARDAH TO ADJUST THEIR DIFFERENCES’ These talks do take place, at nights and between meetings, among themselves, in the hotels where they live, till the atmosphere as you go in to any of them is full of depression, suspicion and poison.69

This description was penned by Agatha Harrison, of the Indian Conciliation Group, to her colleagues C. F. Andrews and Horace Alexander in the late summer of 1932, referring to the situation in London before the start of the RTC’s third session that November. But this pscyho-geography of informal conferences in the city very much applied to the atmosphere outside of St  James’s Palace around the workings of the Minority Committee in late 1931 (also see Coatman [1932a, 324, 354]). To one commentator, with whom this section concludes, these meetings took place behind a ‘pardah [purdah]’, or veil, where delegates were forced to take their differences and adjust them, ultimately unsuccessfully. These informal meetings were made part of formal proceedings when the adjournment was requested on 28 September, but private negotiations had been taking place in London since the beginning of the month when delegates started to arrive. With Gandhi arriving five days after the conference work had started, informal meetings were used to bring him up to speed and to introduce him to key delegates. On Sunday, 13 September, Sapru and Jayakar hosted a private dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, at which Gandhi was able to discuss matters with Bhopal, Bikaner, Haksar, Aiyar and Sankey, with MacDonald himself putting in a late appearance and enjoying a 30-minute private meeting with the Mahatma (B. G. Paul & Co 1932, 43). The tabloid Daily Sketch reported that diners had rushed to catch a glimpse

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of Gandhi while a large crowd gathered outside (‘Some booed while others cheered’).70 While Jayakar had sided with Moonje at the first session in aggressively making the Hindu case, at the second session he was much closer to Sapru. This division was marked out in the social events around the conference as much as within. Moonje was not invited to the Dorchester on the thirteenth and on the eighteenth, when he produced a letter he had drafted to Gandhi protesting at his ‘blank cheque’ attitude to Muslim demands, Jayakar was apparently ‘cold and indifferent’.71 Moonje refused to attend Jayakar’s party that evening because he had not received a formal invite. He was, however, invited to a meeting hosted by Malaviya at Arya Bhavan (see Chapter 9) in Belsize Park on 20 and 27 September, where he argued over various proposals with Jayakar and others.72 Though also listed as a Hindu delegate, Malaviya played a moderating role between Moonje and the broader British Indian delegation, and a key role in the informal meetings that followed. Gandhi’s rounds did little to fill him with hope ahead of the Minority Committee’s first meeting. On 25 September Desai had written an earlier letter to Nehru, describing Gandhi’s disappointing interviews with Shaukat Ali and the Aga Khan (‘The latter’s insincerity was even patent to Shaukat Ali’).73 On the twenty-eighth the Minority Committee adjourned and the formally sanctioned round of informal meetings began. That evening another meeting was hosted by Malaviya at Arya Bhavan, with Sastri, Jayakar, Raja Narendra Nath, Moonje and Ujjal Singh, while on the twentyninth Gandhi met the entire Muslim delegation at the Aga Khan’s apartment at the Ritz Hotel (B. G. Paul & Co 1932, 83). On 30 September Gandhi hosted a meeting at his recently acquired office space at 88 Knightsbridge with delegates representing the depressed classes, Anglo-Indians, labour and Indian Christians. They were eager to see whether the minority demands could be coordinated into a single demand which could be harmonised with the needs of the larger communities.74 After the further adjournment of the Minorities Committee on 1 October, Sarojini Naidu invited selected delegates to an ‘informal conference’ to meet in the Tapestry Room at St James’s Palace the following day.75 Those in attendance included Gandhi, the Aga Khan, Jinnah, Sastri, Shaukat Ali, Ambedkar, Gidney, Pannir Selvam, Naidu, Sapru, the labour activist Shiva Rao, Central Provinces Home Member S. B. Tambe, Birla, Malaviya and Moonje. In a summary of the meeting, Datta recorded Gandhi as suggesting two routes, the first being a plan separate to but acceptable by Congress

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and the second being the Congress plan.76 In his diary Moonje had Gandhi suggest that this first option could include his preferred ‘blank cheque’ option of ‘complete surrender’ to Muslim demands.77 Desai’s account of the informal conference was significantly different, as recounted in his letter to Nehru of 2 October. He had Gandhi only proposing the Congress plan, telling the delegates that the untouchables needed no representative other than Congress and that no groups other that Muslims or Sikhs should be awarded separate electorates: ‘These views were intensely unpopular with most of the delegates.’78 Ambedkar received the backing of many delegates and put his case, as Datta had put it, truculently. From Desai’s record: Dr. Ambedkar himself is extremely rude in Committee meetings as well as in private conversation. He has the fullest backing of the Government. The informal committee will sit tomorrow with Bapu [Gandhi] as Chairman, although he is very unhappy in that position and feels that he has been deliberately saddled with the responsibility with a view to discrediting him when the whole thing ultimately fails, as it is bound to do.79

Desai felt that Moonje was waiting to shoot down any possible Congress–Muslim agreement. In contrast, Muslim delegates had been hosted that day at a meeting of both Houses of Parliament, where Lord Brentford (a defender of General Dyer after the 1919 Amritsar massacre) and his ‘ilk’ were present: Private meetings with these great open enemies of India are known to be taking place. That is the depth to which Indian patriotism of the Round Table variety has sunk! One does not know whether to weep or laugh! Bapu feels the humiliation very keenly indeed, but in his usual way finds solace in faith and prayer. Before this reaches you the news of the deadlock or the breakdown, which Bapu expects, will have already reached India.80

A further informal committee meeting was held on Saturday the third. Sir Hubert Carr, representing non-official Europeans in India, put forward the case for their special representation because of their past contribution to Indian society, while Gidney put forward the opposite argument for

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Anglo-Indians, that they were poor and needed protection.81 Pannir Selvam made the case for protection for Christians, though Datta objected on the grounds that Christians should not be divided off from their Indian neighbours. On Monday the fifth the Federal Structure Committee agreed to postpone its meetings to help with the informal work of the Minorities Committee, which met in the afternoon. A substantial majority decided that separate electorates were a necessity and each minority put in their bids for seats.82 Jinnah demanded a third of seats in each house of the central legislature and weightage by population in Bengal and the Punjab. Ujjal Singh wanted 30 per cent of seats for Sikhs in the latter, over their 13 per cent of the population. Moonje recorded Gandhi’s reaction in his diary: Mahatma – I have got the whole picture. (with sighs) It may be unreal as Dr [sic] Sapru says but I must take it at its face value. Mine is a different position of reaction to what I have seen of this picture. (more and deeper sighs) I representing the Congress am wholly out of the thing. I can’t go out of my beat in view of the limited powers with which I have come. [The Congress] Working Committee has sent me fresh cables.83

He could not see how he could accept separate electorates and proclaimed his fundamental position was to surrender to the committee. At the meeting on the sixth the case for separate electorates was made again and the meeting ended with, in the opinion of Datta, nothing accomplished.84 Unnerved, Datta wrote to Malcolm MacDonald, the prime minister’s son who worked with him at 10 Downing Street. With just two days before the next committee meeting, Datta asked if he would be available on the seventh to assist in any last-minute campaigning. Datta also wrote to Lothian on the sixth, seeking support for his plan to get Gandhi and some Muslim delegates out of London for inspiration, which would require a further adjournment. This Chequers plan, of sorts, failed to materialise and a final informal meeting on seventh achieved no breakthrough. In Moonje’s view, ‘Mahatmaji utterly failed on the occasion to lead the Conference properly both as a statesman and as a tactician and allowed Mr Jinha [sic] to put him into a hole out of which he will not be able to extricate himself with honour.’85 The following day Gandhi admitted his shame and sorrow to the Minorities Committee. One week later, on 16 October, Nehru wrote to Gandhi regarding a Congress-approved move in Allahabad to advise the withholding of rents. He concluded: ‘I do not know how this will affect your

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work in London. So far as I can see the Round Table Conference is as dead as a door nail and it does not matter much what effect is produced on it.’86 For the next seven weeks the formal work of the conference focused almost entirely on the Federal Structure Committee. MacDonald had, however, requested the continuation of informal attempts to reach a communal settlement, and these continued apace. They attracted little pubic or official comment, but private archives, notably the diaries of Moonje and Jayakar, contain traces of the ongoing turmoil over communal representation and majority–minority accommodations. In these private spaces Moonje, especially, felt himself to be blamed for the breakdown in the informal committee work. On the evening of Gandhi’s capitulation, 8 October, he had gone to Malaviya’s flat where he had been blamed by Jayakar for the collapse, while Edward Thompson later arrived and suggested that the Hindus had invited blame upon themselves: ‘They were all in a way disgusted with me. Professor Thompson was positively annoyed with me.’87 At 3:30 p.m. on Friday, 9 October, Moonje was called to Malaviya’s home to discuss a proposal for arbitration that had been tabled by Shafi, which Moonje felt laid all the blame on the Hindus. On the following day Jayakar invited Moonje to lunch at the Dorchester and recorded his frustrations in his diary. He had tried to induce Moonje to accept an arbitration committee of RTC members, yet ‘he gets vexed on small points & is not prepared to make any concessions’ although eventually he agreed.88 This was despite Moonje’s rage, as he recorded in his diary of the same lunch meeting, on hearing that Malaviya had been planning private meetings with the Aga Khan.89 On Sunday the eleventh, Moonje, Jayakar and Narendra Nath met with Malaviya at Arya Bhavan and agreed to an arbitration committee if it became necessary. On Monday the twelfth, Moonje, Jayakar, Malaviya and Nath met at the St James’s Court flat of Ujjal Singh to draft a letter of complaint to The Times, protesting against an article blaming the breakdown of the Minorities Committee on the Hindus. The following day Moonje and Jayakar met at the offices which Malaviya had recently hired at 11 King Street, a few minutes from St James’s Palace. Gandhi, Sastri and Ujjal Singh were also there, and an argument ensued about whether the Aga Khan should be invited to accept arbitration, with Moonje recording in his diary ‘I said this is like licking the feet that kicked us’ and how sad it was to see Hindus fighting.90 Moonje was convinced that the Muslim delegates were much better organised and that much British sentiment was secretly behind them.

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While Moonje was certainly paranoid about an anti-Hindu conspiracy there is evidence to suggest that divisions between nominally Hindu delegates were being played to advantage by other delegates. On 15 October Benthall wrote a gossipy letter to P. M. Browne, president of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, covering the previous week’s private negotiations regarding a communal settlement. In his opinion, Muslim delegates ‘having become tired of Gandhi’s duplicity, decided to have a little game with him on their own’.91 He felt that they had led Gandhi to believe they would support him in his demand for complete and immediate independence and would jettison the claims of the smaller minorities, while the Muslim delegates simultaneously promised the British government and Benthall’s British commerce interests in India that they would not let them down. In consequence, Gandhi privately moved towards agreeing to separate electorates and promising Muslims a statutory majority in Bengal and the Punjab and 33⅓ per cent in the central legislature. Having secured this agreement, Muslim delegates then ‘sat back to allow the Sikhs and [Hindu] Mahasabha to break the Conference as they knew all along that the Sikhs and Hindus would on no account agree to a statutory majority in the Punjab’.92 Benthall admitted that the policy of himself and Carr had been that of backing Muslims without appearing to do so while displaying an earnest desire to assist in a settlement. This tactic had developed after it became clear that Malaviya, Moonje, Birla and Congress would refuse separate electorates to the smaller minorities. Benthall was confident, with over six weeks of the conference left to go, that this tactic would ensure the minorities their separate electorates. Other negotiations regarding the communal block outside of official committee work did eventually find their way into the official record. On 15 October The Times had reported on a memorandum put forward on 12 October by Sir Geoffrey Corbett, one of the secretaries of the British Indian delegation, regarding the Punjab.93 Corbett had outlined the problem of weightage in the province for each community (the memorandum was eventually published as an appendix to the second Minority Committee report, India Office [1932b, 1431–1434]). For Muslims, while they were a majority, they feared that the wealth and influence of non-Muslims would put their majority in the legislature at risk. Sikhs would demand separate electorates if Muslims had them; and Hindus desired joint electorates but could accept reserved seats as long as they gave no automatic majority

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and that minorities had seats on a population basis. These claims seemed incompatible, so Corbett suggested readjusting the boundaries of the Punjab, removing Ambala district so as to raise the proportion of Muslims and Sikhs and decrease that of Hindus. This would create ‘territorial constituencies’ that would not require the reservation of seats, as illustrated by a memorandum map showing the western concentration of Muslim districts and the eastern concentration of Hindu and Sikh districts (see Figure 3.3 and the concluding chapter on its anticipation of the demographic geographies used to demarcate India and Pakistan 16 years later). On 16 October Gandhi offered the Corbett plan to Muslim delegates, as an alternative to a referendum on joint electorates or arbitration by a panel of conference members (Moore 1974, 221). The Corbett scheme was, however, rejected by Sikh members on 19 October. In a memorandum submitted on 12 November Ujjal Singh and Sardar Sampuran Singh demanded 30 per cent

FIGURE 3.3  Corbett’s proposed ‘New Punjab’ Source: ‘A New Punjab: Meeting Communal Claims’, The Times, 15 October 1931, © British Library Board (IOR/I/2/28).

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representation in the provincial legislature and damned Corbett’s proposed ‘partition of the Punjab’ (India Office 1932b, 1400) as open to economic and racial objections. They in turn proposed that the Muslim majority districts of Rawalpindi and Multan be removed from the Punjab, leaving no community in numerical majority, forcing conciliation across groups. Rajendra Nath, in turn, submitted a note on the thirteenth protesting against both plans on behalf of Punjabi Hindus: ‘On the whole I think that partition of Punjab will afford no solution of the Communal problem. All partition schemes should in my opinion be shelved’ (India Office 1932b, 1435). On 16 October Samuel Hoare, the secretary of state for India, wrote to Viceroy Willingdon that work in the Federal Structure Committee was ‘dull’ because the conference was focused on conversations ‘outside’, since the Minority Committee had failed to reach a deal.94 Despite this, he reported lots of action ‘behind the scenes’, with Gandhi meeting lots of Muslim delegates but having no contact with Sikhs or untouchables: ‘… in Ambedkar he faces someone as rigid as himself.’95 That afternoon Moonje had attended a meeting at Malaviya’s, where Gandhi’s plan to grant a majority of 51 per cent to Muslims in the Punjab and Bengal was discussed.96 He had received telegrams from Congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose and the Hindu Mahasabha financer Jugal Kishore Birla encouraging him to support Gandhi. Pressure mounted the following night when G. D. Birla invited him to dinner at Grosvenor House, where Sir P. Thakurdas also joined them. Both pressured Moonje to accept Gandhi’s plan, commenting on the widespread coverage which was blaming Hindus for the collapse of the conference. Moonje replied by asking what good would independence be if it left Muslims in a position of advantage. In his diary, he bemoaned: ‘Oh! These backboneless Hindus, I hate them. They are a contemptable lot. Often times I feel ashamed having been born a Hindu. They have not the Capacity, if not of fighting for justice and equality themselves, even to appreciate the fight the Hindu Mahasabha is putting up in the Cause of true Nationalism.’97 Moonje despaired further on Monday the twentieth, having heard Gandhi give a lecture to the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in St James’s Square, where he referred to untouchability as the curse of Hinduism.98 The end of the month was taken up with the British election, the massive victory for the National Government being announced on 27 October. On the thirtieth, Stopford produced a summary of the conference situation that

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the new government faced.99 The communal question still dominated, three weeks after the committee had suspended its formal activities. Muslims claimed they would work with Congress but that the Hindu Mahasabha and Sikhs would block any deal (which fitted with Benthall’s tactical appraisal). Hindus were edging towards arbitration while the smaller minorities were clarifying their demands. In the Federal Structure Committee Muslims were refusing to discuss central responsibility until safeguards had been set; the conference was at deadlock. On 31 October Gandhi participated in a Quaker organised question and answer session at Friends House in Euston. The Indian Conciliation Group had prepared the questions and produced notes (non-verbatim and nonexhaustive) taken from his answers.100 Asked what he was proposing for a Hindu–Muslim settlement, he proposed the Congress scheme or a judicial tribunal but not a government settlement. He objected to the idea that the conference work could not proceed without a communal settlement: ‘To-day, everybody is wound up and thinks nothing can be done without a settlement. It is a trap into which they have put themselves in order to kill the conference. I accuse them of a grave error of judgment. What has this to do with Finance, or Independence?’101 Had Congress considered separate electorates to be good for the country, they would have recommended them, but they could not: ‘Dr Ambedkar does not really represent the Untouchables. He is suffering from anger and inferiority complex. He is full of anger and can not see clearly. Separate electorates would mean suicide for them.’102 With no solution to the Punjab problem presenting itself and Gandhi’s views on the smaller minorities only hardening, different solutions started to be considered. Moonje was alarmed to hear Gandhi speaking in meetings at Malaviya’s office on 4 and 6 November about accepting provincial autonomy before central responsibility and on the government offering a communal settlement.103 Outside of these negotiations, however, the smaller minorities had been coordinating with the Muslim delegates to put together a proposal that would see them unite against the Hindu and Sikh delegates. This was the proposal that MacDonald had received the night before the final Minorities Committee meeting on 13 November (India Office 1932b, 1394–1399). It proposed a series of governmental mechanisms to protect minority rights, the expansion of separate electorates, and concluded with special claims for each group. This directly went against anything Gandhi could agree to. The result was MacDonald’s

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‘Communal Award’, issued in 1932 (and discussed in Chapter 10). The conference method had failed. This chapter has traced the arc of this failure, through opening informal conferencing to the formation of the committee. This formal body failed at the first and second sessions to produce concord, after which informal conferencing continued to work away at a compromise that many felt the conference had been designed to prevent. Informal meetings were a part of the broader conference throughout, as later examples of the delegates’ social centre (Chapter 7), dining and residing (Chapter 8), and domestic entertainments (Chapter 9) will illustrate. But the minorities question was the one most directed to informal politicking and with the least successful results. The account above has privileged the records of Moonje, due to his significance and his diligent diarising. This risks presenting a view of an over-communalised Indian delegation. But for a conference premised on discussion and concord, influential and intransigent delegates could and did cause major disruption. As such, the minorities question split the method, spaces and people of the conference. This had been predicted by many of those at the conference, but also by many beyond it. On 21 October 1931 Sapru’s Liberal Federation colleague D. G. Dalvi wrote to him from Bombay, capturing the despondency of the second session, but also the darting between formal and informal spaces: The communities meet, discuss a little in the open meeting, sharp differences manifest themselves and then, they retire behind the pardah to adjust their differences. No question of importance is treated as finally solved. One aspect is handled, dropped awhile and another is taken in hand.104

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II CONFERENCE INFRASTRUCTURES

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4 THE CONFERENCE METHOD BETWEEN INTENTION AND DESIRE

For the time being, it probably would be better not to be too definite, in order that we may evoke from possible participants in the Conference an expression of their views and see if we can hit upon the happy mean which will achieve a successful attendance without committing us more fully than we desire or intend. – Benn to Irwin, 1 May 19301 On 1 May 1930, Secretary of State for India Benn wrote a private latter to Viceroy Irwin, six months after the latter had announced that Indian representatives would be invited to a Round Table Conference (RTC) in London. In it he suggested that having set the conference date and the method of selection of personnel, it was time to turn to the difficult question of what the functions of the conference were supposed to be. As the quote above suggests, from the outset the conference promised to be a phantasmagorical technology, one that would successfully attract Indian delegates via the most limited of British commitments. It would be a machine whose design would protect the British from extending beyond both their desires and intentions. Benn suggested that his ‘happy mean’ would exist between two extremes visions of how the conference would function. At one pole was a virtual RTC that would merely examine and comment upon the Simon Report. An opposite virtual conference would be that of the Gandhi’s veteran supporter C. F. Andrews, whom Benn had met the day before, who suggested that the role of the British was simply to record the agreement reached by Indian delegates in London and to

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then pass these agreements through parliament. Benn suggested that the task for himself and Irwin was to pursue a conference ‘line’ between these poles, which would entice both Indian and British political opponents to the round table.2 After a month’s work, Benn wrote to Irwin on 29 May regarding the conference’s terms of reference, suggesting that ‘I have no doubt at all that, fundamentally, this is the key of the situation, and if I had had any doubt, it would have been removed by the torrents of advice which I have been receiving on this point’.3 Irwin had repeatedly argued against setting such terms, which could be seen as restricting the conference’s remit, suggesting that his declaration of 31 October 1929 was sufficient indication of the conference’s function and that the rest would be settled by the conference itself.4 Benn remained convinced, however, that with more known about how the conference would work, Indian critics would be convinced of its validity. In addition, a justifying case would be presented to the eyes of the world, which were fully focused on the civil disobedience movement that had flourished in India for the last two months. What this Benn–Irwin correspondence highlights is that the conference method was anything but the product of dry, bureaucratic, technical debates. True, much of the debate concerned the governmental rationalities behind the meeting: the intentions of the British and Indian governments; the referenced terms of engagement and debate; and the protocols of conduct. But at the heart of the conference machine were also governmental more-than-rationalities, desires that political exigencies demanded be kept hidden, making for its most famous delegate the ‘Indian Conference “Unreal’’’.5 These desires were those of Indian delegates, demanding an end to dyarchy, the beginning of immediate Dominion status or, as very quickly became the dominant desire, a communally configured all-India federation. But these desires were also British. For some, the conference presented a radically new opportunity to create an open space for agreement and consent; for others, the conference would be a performative space in which to express their partially suppressed desire for an everlasting empire; for others still, the conference was an unruly space of possibility upon which order, sequentiality and method had to be imposed. This chapter will explore how a conference method was established that would meet the many contradictory intentions and desires that assembled around the round table. There was no one person, nor one corporate personhood, who masterminded the conference. Rather, it was

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an apparatus coordinated by the British government, which itself was riven by tensions between the governing party (Labour, then National Government) and the civil service (mostly the India Office). The initial stage of conference preparation had to determine the conference aims and functions, its technical composition and how the conference would continue to function when the delegates dispersed from London. The conference was, however, also constructed through constitutive relationships with its various political outsides. The Conservative and Liberal political parties had to be consulted and reconciled by the Labour government (although the National Government could be less conciliatory). The Government of India, having instituted the idea of the RTC, found itself largely excluded from the conference method and had to devise other, less formal means of influencing the debate. The ‘conference method’ had been pioneered by the League of Nations as the diplomatic manifestation of liberal internationalism (Dunn 1929; Hill 1929). The RTC showed how the British could turn a liberal form to the ends of imperialism (Legg 2020a). But this conference method was criticised in the public sphere as a sham, as unrepresentative of the people it claimed to represent and as an exercise in divide and rule. Finally, at the third conference session in 1932, the method of free debate was very nearly abandoned by the Tory secretary of state for India, Sir Samuel Hoare. While it survived, the conference method was muted and curtailed. The following section outlines the principles and process adopted by the conference organisers, before showing how the supposedly free conference was influenced in very direct ways by British and Indian official figures. The chapter concludes by showing how the method was attacked, both from beyond and within the government.

FREE, EQUAL AND EFFECTIVE? SETTING THE CONFERENCE METHOD The Viceroy’s mind seems to me to move in a sphere somewhat divorced from reality. The idea of 60 or 70 men of different races, religions, languages and politics, of whom at least 90% will be Indians, sitting down to talk about nothing in particular and drawing up their own procedure and agenda, is surely wholly ludicrous. I say advisedly ‘about nothing in particular’, because [it is] the only theme which the Viceroy

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has suggested in his declaration, and that declaration – as no one knows better than we do here – either meant nothing in particular, or meant one or more of a number of possible things, but nobody knows what.6

This excoriating confidential note from 3 February 1930 is one early example of the ‘torrent’ of advice that Benn had received urging the specification of a conference method. Irwin’s response had been to refer to his declaration of October 1929. While the declaration had been warmly received by many Indian Liberals, for practised British imperialists it lacked the cold, empirical basis upon which a major international conference could be based. For Sir Arthur Hirtzel, permanent undersecretary of state for India, Irwin lacked ‘reality’ and, continuing the above, he suggested that the conference planning required ‘hard facts’, which could not be avoided by any measure of ‘phrase-making’.7 This dismissal of liberal thought as being divorced from reality, too airy and too distanced from grounded practicalities was a common critique launched by thinkers and politicians of the right (Carr [1939] 1993; Legg 2011). In the previous round of constitutional advance in India, Montagu’s dyarchy reforms had been riddled by provincial governors on similar grounds. As Sir Michael O’Dwyer put it on behalf of the Punjab administration in November 1918, ‘… the air of unreality in which the matter is discussed in the Government of India letter, which in its admirable lucidity and academic detachment, reminds me of an abstract dissertation by Montesquieu.’8 In response to Irwin’s lofty declaration, Hirtzel posed two grounded questions: what function did the government want the conference to perform; and what was the policy of the government? Expanding on the first point, he asked of the conference whether it was to be a machine of desire, enabling some sort of hydraulic release, or of rational intention: Is it to be merely an occasion for free discussion and exchange of ideas about what the Viceroy loosely calls ‘the whole problem’ – a sort of safety valve by which Indian politicians can discharge their consciences? Or is it to be a strictly business affair culminating in the drawing up in outline of a definite scheme of government or propounding the principles on which a definite scheme can be based?9

Expanding on the second point, if the conference was to be driven by rational intentions, what was the desired outcome of the British government?

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Do they wish to see Dominion Status ‘in a few months’, as I think the Prime Minister said before he took office? Or do they wish to see the best practicable working constitution which can be devised to suit existing conditions and lead on by further steps to the ‘goal’?10

For Hirtzel the second outcome was the only practicable option, and the Simon Report the obvious route to it. He clearly grouped the Tory viceroy and the Labour prime minister in the same impractical category. While Benn would classify Hirtzel’s position as one of the extreme poles between which he sought his happy conference line, he took seriously the call to start etching out a conference method, but one which would remain faithful to Irwin’s commitment to a meeting that would set its own agenda. A month after asserting his desire for some conference terms of reference, Benn updated Irwin on his progress, in anticipation of a public statement by the viceroy regarding the conference (Moore 1974, 108–113). Writing on 20 June 1930, he emphasised that the conference was part of a ‘constructive agenda’ in the face of ongoing civil disobedience in India.11 The scope of the conference, with less than five months remaining before its inauguration, had still not been set. For Benn, the all-white Simon Commission had produced reports lacking the ‘colour and imagination’ which could correlate with the growth of Indian ‘national feeling’. The RTC would insert Indian views into the constitutional debate, adding the ‘human facts’ of India to the statistical appendices of the Simon reports. For Benn, this dialogue had to work through agreement of delegates, who could represent millions of ordinary Indians, and the government had to commit to incorporating the conference conclusions into its constitutional proposals. Benn returned to his earlier point about both the global and national audience for this conference method: ‘We put ourselves in a strong moral position with the world if we are able to say that we have attempted to meet the case by an offer of conference which is genuine and not merely a simulacrum. The same appeal one might hope would be effective in India.’12 Writing a week later, on 27 June, Benn reiterated why the link between the RTC and policy was so important: ‘Any Conference to be successful must satisfy three tests. It must be free, equal and effective.’13 To satisfy the last condition Benn knew that the conference conclusions would have to inform government policy. This had offended members of the opposition, such as Austen Chamberlain and Lloyd George, who wanted the conference

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to either focus solely on the Simon Report or have it as the basis of the conference agenda. But it was also why Congress’s conditional insistence that the conference focus on granting immediate Dominion status had also been rejected. The conference had to be both free and effective. Benn’s policy was, in harmony with the Irwin declaration, that of setting out the government policy at a ‘free conference’ and inviting solutions to the problem considered. Irwin’s 9 July 1930 address re-emphasised the government’s commitment towards Dominion status being the goal for India and asked what fairer method there could be for this than one by which all the various points of view can be sifted in discussion, and where not by majority voting but by influence of mind on mind, a sustained attempt can be made to discover once for all a mere excellent way in which Great Britain and India walk together.14

The question of a free and fair method would be revisited as the opening of the conference drew nearer. Before then the technicalities of the conference machinery had to be settled.

CONFERENCE MACHINERY While Benn and Irwin debated the functions of the conference, India Office officials set about operationalising Hirtzel’s concern with conference practicalities. An office note by Sir Louis Kershaw of 26 April 1930 insisted that five months is all too short to prepare for the Conference. Delegates, British and Indian, have to be selected; the Secretariat has to be appointed; a building for the Conference obtained, and hospitality arrangements made  – this last matter involving, probably, protracted discussions with the Treasury regarding the incidence of cost.15

Like Hirtzel, Kershaw thought little would come of a conference that opened with three days of general discussion, whose ‘most striking feature will be vague generalities and the avoidance of practical difficulties’.16 Four months later, however, the India Office produced a confidential outline of the proposed RTC procedure and organisation that contained

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much of what Kershaw had feared and Benn desired. The note of 29 August 1930 divided the conference procedure into the following stages:17 A . Brief public plenary of non-controversial set speeches. B. Plenary session of the whole conference to discuss the whole field, lasting three days: a Business Committee to be established to consider these proposals regarding procedure and propose them to the plenary session for approval. C. Committee consisting of all British Indian delegates to consider provincial constitutions. Sub-committees to be appointed for specific duties, their results being discussed by the committee as a whole. D. Joint committee of the British Indian and Indian States delegates. E . Committee of the whole conference to consider the constitution of the central government, including the possibility of an All-India Federation. Sub-committees to investigate detailed specified topics. F. Plenary session of the whole conference to receive the reports of C, D and E and to frame the conference report. G. Public final plenary to adopt the report.

Plans were also put in place for an information officer to liaise with the press, for committees to have rapporteurs (on the model of the League of Nations) and for each of the three delegations (British, British-Indian and Indian States) to have their own secretariats, separate to the conference secretariat, which would serve all parties (again, on the League of Nations model). So as to prevent the conference mechanism, as well as the agenda or goals, appearing to be set solely by the British in advance, Benn invited members of the British India delegation who were in London ahead of the opening of the conference to join him in a ‘committee of seven’ (Carr, Jayakar, Jinnah, Sapru, Sastri, Ujjal Singh and Shafi) to discuss agenda and procedure.18 Although a larger committee further interrogated the proposals after the opening session, the conference ran largely on the lines of A–G listed above. The sub-committees, each of which had a government minister as chairman, considered federal structure, the provinces, minorities, franchise, defence, (Indian Civil) services, the question of granting the status of full provinces to the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Sind, and the question of the separation of Burma from India.

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The procedure and organisation of the conference had, therefore, been set in advance. While the committees were appointed by the plenary, all of them, apart from the federal structure and defence sub-committees, had been anticipated in the 29 August India Office note. That this went against the free ethos of the conference was acknowledged two months later by the RTC Secretary-General R. H. A. Carter. He had been receiving queries as to the official conference procedure by British Indian delegates who had arrived in London. He wrote to the British Government delegation secretary Mr V. Dawson and the new permanent undersecretary of state for India Sir Findlater Stewart on 27 October, suggesting that the secretariat should issue a note on procedure while also acknowledging the sensitivities involved. Stopford and Coatman, the Tory and Liberal RTC secretaries, respectively, had been given a copy of the draft note on procedure, as discussed above. Carter noted: They were warned to treat it as very confidential, in view of the fact that it was likely that the attitude to be taken by the Government would be that these things were for the Conference itself to determine and, in particular, for the proposed bureau; and that accordingly it was most undesirable that the present documents should leak out with a risk of the Indian delegates saying that they were being confronted with a cut and dried scheme by the Government.19

The freedom of the conference had also been compromised in other ways by Benn and his staff. Benn wrote to Irwin on 31 October that he had been meeting delegates who had arrived in London, which had seemingly given him second thoughts on the total openness of the conference: ‘At first, I was rather inclined to a scheme of perfect autonomy for the Conference; but, apart from its difficulties, I find there is a fairly general feeling that the Government must take some initiative.’20 The reason for this was that it seemed that delegates were divided between wanting to discuss central government reform first and those who wanted to begin with provincial reorganisation. In consultation with the seven delegates mentioned above, a government programme was devised, proposed and accepted by the conference. On the eve of the RTC Benn produced a private India Office note reflecting on the conference purpose and scope.21 Dated 14 November, the note emphasised that the conference would host free discussions and would

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craft proposals to submit to parliament, being the only body who could enact a constitution for India. As such, refusing to commit the conference to a particular conclusion was not so much a commitment to open and democratic debate as an acknowledgement that it was impossible to ‘short circuit’ the decision which must rest with parliament. While the ‘desire of His Majesty’s Government’ was to assist India in gaining Dominion status, this had to be consistent with parliament retaining responsibility for certain matters. Deciding these matters would be for the conference. Much as with the limited experiments with colonial democracy in India, RTC freedom would thus be heavily proscribed. Having worked from ideals to practice, Benn’s vision seemed to coincide more with his India Office officials. He concluded his note with a curt but ambivalent warning against dictating the outcome of the conference, whether on imperialist or nationalist lines: ‘The Conference has a practical purpose: it has to endeavour to construct an edifice. Let us not debate about the nature and description of it before it is built.’22 Before looking at how the conference method was responded to, its adaption to a multi-session format will briefly be explored below. This was achieved through touring committees of India and a consultative committee sitting in New Delhi. It had been anticipated by some participants that the conference would have to pause and re-convene after further investigations in India had been conducted.23 As such, in January 1931 the RTC did not conclude but adjourned so that its work could continue in London and Delhi. Lewis explained in a Delhi Reforms Office note to the private secretary to Viceroy Willingdon on 24 April 1933: During the period of the Round Table Conferences the centre of gravity in Reforms work was continually shirting from Whitehall to India and vice versa. While each R.T.C. was in session, London was the arena. In the intervals between each Conference the centre of gravity was back again in India with successive investigations of particular problems by ad hoc committees, and exploration, scrutiny and review by the Government of India or each aspect of the Federal scheme as it has developed.24

Following the conclusion of the first session in January 1931, there had been hopes expressed in the British press that the conference itself would convene in India, under the leadership of Lord Sankey.25 The Conservatives

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vociferously opposed the idea, fearing the exposure of delegates to pressure in India for more rapid reform (Moore 1974, 209). After Gandhi’s release from prison a ‘conference’, of sorts, was held in New Delhi on 21 March 1931. Irwin invited RTC attendees who were in Delhi at the time, as well as Gandhi and Malaviya, to Viceroy’s House.26 With Lord Sankey ruled out of joining a British delegation, Irwin recommended against any travelling committees coming to India. Gandhi, on the other hand, suggested that such a visit would have a transformative effect on the Indian atmosphere and would enable Congress to contribute to the discussion it had missed out on during the first session. Irwin concluded that obstacles to such a visit might prove insurmountable, to which Gandhi responded that the Federal Structure Committee should not meet without Congress present. The British delegation did not visit, so work in India over the summer consisted of preparatory research by Congress and some committee work organised under the auspices of the Government of India, considering army reform and the NWFP. The Federal Structure Committee convened in London three weeks before the only other committee in operation, being the Minorities Committee. After the second session it was agreed that detailed investigation would be required in India. The conference form mobilised itself in 1932 in two ways. The first was that three touring committees were established, on the model proposed the previous summer by Lord Sankey. The committees were also headed by British ministers and visited India on fact-finding missions over the summer. The Marquess of Lothian chaired the franchise committee, which toured India for two months from 29 January 1932, during which time it visited every province except Assam and the Central Provinces, before publishing its report on 6 May. The Federal Finance Committee was chaired by Lord Eustace Percy, MP, and included the aforementioned Sir Louis Kershaw on its board. It assembled in Delhi on 1 February, where it held forty-five meetings ahead of the tour, before publishing its report on 2 June. The Indian States Enquiry Committee was chaired by J. C. C. Davidson, MP, and toured eighty-eight of the princely states from 29 January, producing its report on 28 July. These reports provided the basis for much of the discussion at the concluding session of the RTC in December 1932. The second method by which the RTC operated in India was via a conference consultative committee convened under the chairmanship of the viceroy in New Delhi, deputising for the prime minister, to oversee

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work in India by the civil service and RTC delegates. An India Office note composed a week after the second session explained the rationale behind the consultative committee. The note, from 8 December 1931, explained that the committee would enable the conference to ‘remain in being’ and to both keep in touch with and influence the course of subsequent progress and investigation.27 It would also enable the secretary of state and the viceroy to remain aware of how Indian opinion reacted to the ongoing conference work. The committee convened on 28 January 1932, being composed of eighteen RTC delegates. It met thirteen times between 28 January and 5 March, returning repeatedly to topics such as the communal question, fundamental rights and federal subjects. Reflecting, no doubt, on the criticism of overlong speeches that the first two RTC sessions had elicited, and anticipating the streamlined method of the final conference session, the viceroy made it plain in his opening address how the RTC would function in its Delhi-based consultative configuration: We are, as I have said, a working committee charged with what the Prime Minister has described as ‘detailed word’ by a method of intimate, practical and pointed exchange of views, I do not think that any of us expects that there will be scope for long and prepared and considered speeches. We shall probably proceed best by a more informal and conversational method but it will perhaps be useful if I make a short business statement, which will bring our procedure and our objects immediately under your discussion.28

The final RTC session operated at an unhappy line somewhere between this consultative committee and the first two sessions. It represented the RTC in a denuded form, operating under a British government desperate to progress to legislation, at the behest of an Indian government voraciously stamping out the remnants of the second stage of civil disobedience. But the free conference method had been under attack since its inception. Benn had retracted some of his radical openness as the conference heaved itself into practical reality. The following section will show how British opposition parties and the Government of India have sought to skew the open playing field of the conference. Before the end of the second session in December 1931, The Times had commented that ‘the Round Table itself will be kept in existence in the form of a smaller working body. The method of conference goes on’.29 It had also noted, however, that while the prime minister had

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not mentioned the emergency measures recently passed in India to ‘put down anarchism with an inflexible hand’ in Bengal, they should have been welcomed by those Indians who look forward to proving their own capacity for civilised administration: ‘There is assuredly nothing inconsistent between the method of conference and the suppression of murder.’30

UNFREE, UNEQUAL BUT EFFECTIVE? TIPPING THE CONFERENCE METHOD The colonial situation was characterized by a false fraternité, the denial of égalité (in the sense of advancement through merit) …, and the absence of liberté.… – Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment While the delegations at the RTC would have their own staff and secretariats, there were no united delegation policies. The British Indian delegates would prove to be irreconcilably divided on communal lines, while the Indian States delegation split spectacularly over the federation-confederation debacle. The British delegation was composed solely of members of British political parties, each of whom had divergent views on the Indian question. For Benn, the nature of the free conference dictated that each party, and even each delegate, operate freely. In anticipation of the conference Benn had composed an India Office note on ‘Three Party co-operation and its limits’, considering the issue in terms of machinery and policy.31 In terms of the former, the constitutional committees of 1919 (Montagu) and 1928–1930 (Simon) had been cross party. In terms of the latter, a convention had arisen concerning important India announcements that the opposition would be consulted, but solely in advisory capacity. This practice had helped maintain a united, public British front on Indian policy. The question was how much this practice could be adapted to an open conference. Benn suggested that the views of opposition party delegates, like those of Indian delegates, should be open to government criticism. Were the British delegates to present a united front, blocking the agreement upon which the conference would rest, would its purpose not automatically be undone? For Benn, the only solution was for there to be a public denouncement of any three-party

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front, to the extent that any proposals put to parliament could ignore the protesting arguments of opposition members. As such, on 20 October the government members of the British delegation met at 10 Downing Street to discuss conference format and procedure.32 The prime minister confirmed that there would be no unified British line and that government members would speak with authority and that their positions would differ from those of other parties. This policy had been devised in full knowledge that it ran contrary to the wishes of leading opposition politicians. On 27 August Sir Samuel Hoare, then treasurer of the Conservative Party, had written to the Tory leader Stanley Baldwin, sharing his thoughts about the forthcoming conference: ‘It seems to me that the delegates of the three parties ought at once to be placed in possession of the principal documents about the Conference. Otherwise, there is a grave risk of our being faced with some pre-arranged plan, the background of which we shall not have seen.’33 On 10 September Hoare wrote to Benn, in less blunt terms than to Baldwin, asking for information on the Indian situation and information on the prime minister’s plans. This followed a meeting of Tory and Liberal delegates that morning at which Benn’s predilection against a united British front had been noted and a meeting of British delegates before the RTC had been requested.34 The notes of this meeting were compiled by Stopford, secretary of the Tory delegation, who later recounted the concern with Benn’s policy in his unpublished memoirs.35 Fearing that the Labour delegates would give too much away, the Tory and Liberal delegates had agreed to form a common front against the government. They were adamant that Benn was not passing on the necessary materials and that they had no luck in requesting such materials from 10 Downing Street directly. These frictions lasted until the day the conference itself was inaugurated, which was followed by an evening reception at Lancaster House. As Stopford later recounted: Meanwhile, I went on worrying and that evening at an official party at Lancaster House, I spoke about it to 2 or 3 Ministers whom I knew. One of them, Vernon Hartshorn, who was Lord Privy Seal, said ‘Don’t worry, boy. Wedgy Benn was ticked off about it by the PM in Cabinet this morning.’! So I once again thought what fun it was to be independent and to stick one’s fingers in the wheels and see whether they were cut off or the rhythm of the wheels slightly altered.36

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While MacDonald had agreed that the machinery of the conference should support divergent political views, the tradition of policy consultation was maintained. The Times noted that MacDonald had shared his opening speech with the members of the opposition, meaning that he would speak on behalf of the entire British parliament, not just of the present government.37 As such, the Tory–Liberal attempt to force a united British front had failed, as had their attempts to secure parity of information ahead of the conference. They would take full opportunity to use the free conference to express their concerns, to the extent that it was Reading’s final acceptance of federation on behalf of the Liberals that was perceived by many to be the defining contribution of the British delegation to the first conference session (Moore 1974, 151). Hoare, as secretary of state for India in the National Government, would realise the wish for a unified British delegation in the final conference session, though the conference method and participants were much altered.

ADVISING AND INFLUENCING THE CONFERENCE MACHINERY Having instigated the call for a Round Table Conference, the Government of India found itself excluded from the list of delegates. The delegations represented British, British Indian and Indian States interests, but not those of the Indian government. This was a matter of the architecture of the conference machinery, but also one of feelings and histories. As Benn would later note, the first RTC session was felt to have been a success because of the friendly and respectful relations established between British and Indian delegates. This was felt to be impossible with Government of India representatives: ‘The difficulty of Governors and officials in maintaining the sort of friendly negotiating touch is very great. Their first responsibility is for maintenance of order. Further, they have no authority in the matter of legislative changes and their position is therefore very difficult.’38 The Indian government did, however, influence the conference at every stage. Irwin had instigated the call for a conference and, as mentioned above, he remained in dialogue with Benn throughout. As it became clear that Benn was coming around to the idea of directly influencing the conference agenda, Irwin had written on 16 August 1930: I have no doubt, as you say, that the wise course will be to let the Conference settle this very much for itself, giving them all assistance

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by way of lead, which I should anticipate they would be quite willing to take. Let me know if you want any suggestions from this end. The whole subject of course falls into pretty well defined blocks, and I think I should have been inclined to start with the Provinces as being least controversial, subject always to the eternal communal problem. But controversy over this field is mainly between Indians and not between Indians and H.M.G.39

The direct means through which the Government of India influenced the RTC was through the role of advisors. While the conference organisers could draw on the India Office and the vast ranks of retired India civil servants in Britain, they also wanted to draw upon the expertise of current New Delhi staff. How to incorporate this expertise was a fraught question. On 24 August Carter pressed Benn to clarify his position on which of two options he would prefer. The first would have Indian officials of the highest rank sit as delegates at the round table. The second option would have them attend as official advisors, not attending plenaries but sitting in on relevant committees, being subject to the orders of the British government and being expected to carry through any line upon which the government had decided: ‘On this theory their main part would be played behind the scenes.’40 Technical or expert advisors would also be required, but these would be of a subordinate nature and would be available to assist the whole conference. The second option won out, although Indian advisors did not sit in on committees, and as such a number of secretaries and advisors were despatched to London, alongside the Indian delegates (see conference Chapter 5). These included Lewis from the Reforms Office, functioning in the conference secretariat, and the British India delegation secretaries B. S. Bajpai and Latifi. The latter would perform a range of social and administrative duties for the visiting delegates, but also provided a conduit for official influence. In the same letter of 27 October in which Carter expressed his concerns about any leakage of the government plans for the RTC procedure, he also passed on a report from Latifi that members of his delegation had been asking how the conference committee procedure would work. Latifi preferred that his advice coincided with the official government view and so had asked Carter to advise him on a suitable response.41 The more senior roles were taken by ‘officials attending in a consultative capacity’, including at the first session Sir Charles Innes, Sir

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A. C. McWatters, Mr H(arry) Haig, Mr L. W. Reynolds and Sir (William) Malcolm Hailey. The latter was especially significant, having held key positions in India, including being the first chief commissioner of Delhi (1918–1924), home member of the Viceroy’s Council (1919–1924), governor of the Punjab (1924–1928) and governor of the United Provinces (1928– 1934), being granted leave from the latter position to attend the RTC (Cell 1992). In the debates over advisors outlined above, Hailey’s was the recurrent name mentioned in all arguments as to the need to have senior advisors from India present. On arrival in London, Hailey was given a room in the India Office so that he would be available whenever the secretary of state might need him. On 5 November 1930 Benn had a two-hour interview with Hailey and wrote to Irwin suggesting that they would get on famously and that he had a very brilliant mind.42 Once the conference discussion had decided upon a policy, Benn wrote that he would turn to Hailey for advice on how to implement it. While the Indian advisors in London worked tirelessly for the delegates in London, they also served as vital sources of information for their colleagues in Delhi. Hailey was close to Irwin and sent him regular updates on conference work, developments and gossip. These letters give a rich insight into the ways in which the RTC, technically a meeting between Indian leaders and the British government, was deeply influenced and penetrated by the advice and influence of the Government of India. On arriving in London, Innes and Hailey had met with Hirtzel’s replacement as permanent undersecretary of state for India, Sir Findlater Stewart, to discuss their position as advisors. It had been agreed that they would make no controversial speeches; would not embarrass the British or Indian governments in the press; were free to speak to the British government; and their private discussions would express personal opinions only.43 Despite these precautions, Hailey’s first letter to Irwin, on 14 November 1930, suggested that the advisors had experienced trouble already, just two days after the conference had opened: ‘Indeed, there was at one time some disposition on the part of Indian Delegates to resent our trespassing here, and they approached the Secretary of State on the subject.’44 Hailey had emphasised that advice was being given only to Benn and the government, not to the British delegations, though he also admitted he had been seeing a considerable number of people privately. While Benn had been impressed by Hailey’s brilliant mind, Hailey felt that the

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Labour cabinet was far behind the Tory and Liberal delegates in terms of preparation regarding the Indian question. As the conference work accelerated over the next few weeks, Hailey explained how he had found his way into the extra-conference spaces in which a great deal of the work was being done. On 4 December he wrote to Irwin that he and other advisors had started attending 10 a.m. meetings at 10 Downing Street. Hailey had pressed for this, fearing that some of MacDonald’s colleagues were still ‘in the realm of generalities’.45 Just as Hirtzel had felt the need to drag Benn to questions of practicality, so Hailey felt the same need with the Labour Cabinet. He suggested that the purpose of the Downing Street meetings was that he might draw out certain basic facts which ‘would have to be recognised in drawing up any scheme of federation and which could not be altered by any discussion at conference’.46 This was said to have involved significant work, exploring issues from the ‘practical point of view’ and pointing out whether alternate federal schemes would break down in the face of tests regarding practical working. It seems that these meetings made an impression. The master of Corpus Christi College at Oxford Will Spens wrote to Hailey on 7 December, ‘hungry’ to see him.47 Sankey had been admitted as high steward of the college the day before and had apparently described Hailey as a godsend: ‘Comes to me at 10 and tells me what I’m to say and what positions I ought to ask!’48 On 9 December Hailey explained how and where the rest of his average day was spent. After the morning meeting at Downing Street, he, Haig and Dawson would prepare memoranda on various forms of federation and their implications: ‘The task seems to have fallen on us in order that the somewhat vague generalities floating about might be brought down to earth, and possible alternatives considered with a view to knocking out at once those which do not seem feasible.’49 In addition, there were ‘private conferences’ with committee chairs, such as Sankey. The committees were where the real work of the conference got done, and Hailey had not found a way into the rooms of St James’s where they met. While Sankey was proving a pliable means of influencing the Federal Structure Committee, on 10 December Hailey wrote to Irwin that Arthur Henderson, the minister for Foreign Affairs and chair of the Provincial Constitution Sub-Committee, showed ‘complete ignorance’ of the questions at hand, a disinclination to accept advice from anyone, and ‘in the Committee itself preserves the impassivity of a cod-fish on a fish-monger’s slab’.50 Hailey was trying to use ‘outside influence’ to get scrutiny of the

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committee draft report before it was issued as he felt it did not represent the committee views and ‘might be embarrassing’. On the twelfth he could report to Irwin that he had pressed his changes on to the draft report and had won, but felt let down by the Chair: If only we had been allowed to get at Mr. Henderson behind the scenes as we have been allowed by the Lord Chancellor [Sankey] himself, this difficulty would not have arisen, but I am thankful to say that in part at all events we have been saved by the Prime Minister.51

Hailey was dismayed to report on 18 December that Henderson had been appointed chair of the NWFP Committee, which he felt to be dangerous. He instituted steps to have this committee more ‘carefully watched’ than the Provincial Committee, where Hailey had been forced to intervene at a ‘dangerously late stage’. A private letter written by Lewis to his senior J. M. Dunnett in New Delhi on 6 January 1931 made the mechanisms of Hailey’s influence a little clearer. As part of his technical and secretarial work in London, Lewis had been deputed to Henderson and described having been ‘put in the impossible situation of “advising” Mr Henderson regarding suggestions made by Sir Malcolm Hailey. On the NWFP business my position was made much easier because Mr Henderson had agreed to meet Sir Denys Bray to whom on each occasion I took my drafts’.52 Brays, who had been foreign secretary in Delhi in the 1920s and was a member of the India Office Council, was clearly being briefed by the New Delhi advisors and was Hailey’s means of ‘watching’ Henderson, which saved Lewis the job of doing Hailey’s bidding. Before a brief Christmas break Hailey reflected on how his advisory work had played out. Writing to Irwin on 24 December, he felt that memorandum writing had been useful, prompting the prime minister to address questions upon which the government required a decision ‘but, as you may well imagine, the horse continues to shy and baulk at each fence in a most disconcerting way and has to be continually driven back on to the course’.53 Despite his reassurances on arriving in London, Hailey had been sending his briefing papers to all members of the British delegation (not just the British government and India Office) but not to Indian delegates. These memoranda had specific use as interventions, but for the Government of India they had a much more valuable function in terms of tilting the conference method:

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… their preparation has given us some definite position with Government which ensures that we shall at all events be consulted before decisions are taken. There seems, indeed, to be no other way of getting into the centre of affairs than by making ourselves so generally useful in the preparation of material that Government could not well afford to neglect us in considering its decisions. Had we not set to work in this way, I think that we should have found that our only approach to the councils of Government would have been limited to an occasional cup of tea with the Secretary of State and so much of the company of the Prime Minister as we could secure in the course of a crowded reception. I have no doubt that if anyone were to see these memoranda they would say that they were somewhat colourless and showed a curious absence of such definite opinion as those who had been concerned in the administration of India might be expected to exhibit. That, as I have explained, is inevitable but they have served their purpose in another direction.54

These anodyne documents, which pepper the archive, are but a faint trace of the real networking that took place between officials, the spaces for which were opened up by these formal memoranda. Yet while Hailey seemed to relish his work behind the scenes, he was dismayed by the results of the conference proper. On 12 January 1931, he wrote to Irwin in a depression regarding the direction of the conference, blaming his own lack of imagination for failing to foresee the course of events. He had anticipated a careful discussion of general principles, with errors checked by the British delegates, and detailed work carried out by committee: But really this has, in some respects, hardly been a conference at all, except perhaps in so far as it has afforded a very valuable meeting ground for discussion of Federation between the States and British India. Judged at all events from the somewhat prejudiced view of one who has taken a pride in the British connection with India, it has simply afforded a lamentable spectacle of constant and onesided attacks on the British rule. When there have been gross misstatements of fact, it has been no-one’s duty to answer them. The jackals have been left to scream perpetually, without a single bark from the watchdog.55

Hailey underwent a medical operation shortly after the conference concluded, upon which his letters cease. Other delegates, however, were

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under no doubt that, regardless of Hailey’s views regarding the public attacks on the British, he had held the conference in the palm of his hand. During his return journey to India, after a tour of Europe, Benthall reflected on Hailey’s impact. Writing in his diary on 10 April 1931, Benthall suggested that Hailey had been extremely interesting, having logical answers to every aspect of a situation of which he was a complete master. He continued: ‘[Hailey] says that Sankey went into the Conference with a complete scheme in his pocket, unknown even to his colleagues (or many of them) and that that scheme had been proposed by Hailey + the other advisors. His handling of the Conference throughout was masterly.…’56 While the advisors worked in London, staff in New Delhi were left waiting for information or commands. Dunnett of the Reforms Office in New Delhi read the regular updates that Haig sent to the viceroy, passing them on to provincial governors and to members of the Viceroy’s Council, also poring over verbatim reports of conference proceedings, which were sent to Delhi weekly. On 10 November Dunnett suggested in a note on file that if as full a sense of proceedings was garnered in Delhi as possible, it might be possible for the staff there ‘to intervene’.57 These chances were limited, however, and Government of India staff clearly felt slighted at being shaded out of conference proceedings. Having returned to Delhi after the first session, Lewis responded to a query from the Bombay provincial government on 26 March 1931.58 They protested that they had not been asked for their views on the proposed federal scheme, but Lewis pointed out that the government itself had not yet been asked for its opinion either. Over the summer of 1931 Dunnett pressed the case for a more direct role for the Indian government in the second conference session. In a note from 1 May in the New Delhi Reforms Office, he suggested that the work being undertaken while the conference was adjourned was an ideal opportunity for ‘bringing the Government of India in’ rather than it being treated merely as a means of inter-secretariat consultation.59 Dunnett wanted the Indian government to be represented at the RTC in a way which allowed it to express its views or influence British government policy directly, although what he proposed was very close to what the advisors had actually been doing in London. The home member Sir James Crerar, however, noted on 5 May that it would be impossible for the government to be directly represented at the second session, with the proposal having been rejected for the first session. Although unsatisfactory in many respects, the system of advisors would remain the means of Government of India

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influence, though without the masterful manipulations of Sir Malcolm Hailey.

THE CONFERENCE METHOD UNDER ATTACK The purpose of the RTC had been under attack since the day it was announced (see Chapter 10). But the conference method itself was also attacked. The ‘free, equal and fair’ method was felt to be a cover-up, by commentators from both ends of the political spectrum. From the left, the communist Daily Worker had pilloried the RTC throughout, as directed by Shapurji Saklatvala, the third Indian to sit as a British MP (1924–1929) and the first to represent the Communist Party of Great Britain (Gopal 2019, 209–244; Squires 2011; Visram 2002). On 3 January 1931, as the first conference session approached its last few weeks of work, a Daily Worker headline ran ‘Near the End of Round Table Farce: Its Real Purpose Is Clearly Revealed: Franchise Sham’.60 The conference method was said to have been designed to create not unity but dissent in India and to perpetuate Indian slavery to imperialism. Sankey’s report to the Federal Structure Committee had exposed, beneath ‘a wealth of soft phrases’, that the British would not relinquish key military and financial powers. In the same paper edition, C. P. Dutt, Saklatvala’s collaborator in work on the Indian question within the British Communist Party, denounced the RTC as ‘A Cover for the Bayonet in India’. The conference method was, again, labelled a distraction, consisting of an expensive stage-play or elaborate pageantry and loud flourish of trumpets: It is not only the emptiness of proceedings that has shown it up. More than anything, it is the enormous disparity between this meeting of gilded puppets and bourgeois sycophants and the realities of the situation in India. The conference sits, plans constitutions, squabbles and intrigues as if it had unlimited time and as if India did not exist.61

With the staging a farce and the outcome a fiasco, it was clear that the conference had not been called for policy reasons but for strategic reasons: to bind loyalists and to split nationalists. The only British politician that Dutt felt was telling the truth was ‘die hard’ cheerleader Winston Churchill. A speech of his from December

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1930 was cited where he insisted that the British would not relinquish India and that the RTC was not binding: ‘Churchill pricked the diplomatic bubble of promise and illusion.’ On the final day of the first session, the Churchill-supporting conservative Daily Mail launched a barrage against the RTC and any concessions to Indian nationalists that might be made in MacDonald’s closing speech (on the Churchill–Rothermere pact, see St John [2006]). The conference ought never to have been called ‘in its present form’, suggested an editorial, which introduced a reprint of an article by Lord Rothermere, published the day before in the Sunday Dispatch.62 Rothermere had used his newspapers, including the Mail, to damn the policies of both Labour and Baldwin’s Conservatives regarding India. He denounced plans for a ‘great betrayal’ of India at the hands of Liberal and socialist delegates, and in the face of a collapse of Tory authority (apart from that of Churchill), suggesting that the British nation was suffering ‘a nervous breakdown’. For Rothermere, as for Dutt, the conference had been an artifice and, as for Hirtzel and Kershaw, the need was for empirical realism: Let us wipe away the froth of sentiment and get down to the hard rock of fact. India is not and has never been a nation. She only has the appearance of being a united whole because British rule has kept her so for a hundred and fifty years. The Round Table Conference is a sham, and should never have been called. It does not represent the people of India.… When authority weakens in the East, the law of the jungle takes is place.63

Rothermere’s repetition of the great imperialist trope regarding Indian inherent anarchy was especially, and calculatedly, offensive, building on fears of both revolutionary and communal breakdown without British autocratic control. Concern regarding the effects of the conference on violence in India was also apparent across the political spectrum. The antiwar socialist Labour MP Fenner Brockway had denounced the RTC from before its opening as a sham and a farce, its ‘blaring trumpets and brilliant footlights’ not disguising its failure to represent the ‘vital realities’ of India. Without Congress delegates, most of whom were in prison, the conference could meet, but its proceedings would have no moral authority: ‘It will just be wasted words, wasted ink, wasted thought, wasted emotion, and incidentally, wasted money, of which the poverty-stricken population

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of India will, ironically, have to pay half.’64 Two months later, Brockway’s fears had been realised. Writing in the Daily Worker he reported that failure to detail and design the proposed constitution was going to be blamed on communal discord. Because full self-government had not been up for discussion at the conference, no incentive to reach a radical communal breakthrough had been offered.65 The conference method, through not enabling discussion of full self-government and through not including Congress, had abnegated its own conclusions. Congress had been leading criticism of the conference method from India up to the second session. While criticism in India abated after Gandhi decided to attend the second session of the conference, he himself became quickly deluded with the conference method while in the capital. The London-based, pro-Congress periodical United India had anticipated many of Gandhi’s criticisms in an article from August 1930: Nor can much real comfort come from a contention that the gates of heaven will be flung open to India, directly the Indian delegates enter the ‘free’ conference. The licence to talk, long and loud, cannot make a conference ‘free’ when the majority of its delegates will be the nominees of the Viceroy. Or when they are selected by the mushroom of ‘associations’ and ‘federations’ set up overnight at the instance of the Government in order to combat the Congress activities.66

Within a few weeks of the conference opening on 7 September 1931, Gandhi was expressing his doubts within committee meetings. Coatman, the Liberal delegation secretary, noted that during a Federal Structure Committee meeting on 17 September: Mr Gandhi said that since last Monday a feeling of oppression had been growing on him because the delegates were the chosen ones of the Government and not of those people they were representing. He was also oppressed by a sense of unreality in the debates which seemed to lead nowhere. He also had a complaint against His Majesty’s Ministers for not revealing their minds. If they would disclose their minds then some result, whether satisfactory or not, might be reached.67

Gandhi’s dual criticisms of unrepresentativeness of delegates and British recalcitrance were reported in the Daily Express as an outburst, which

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accused delegates of serving the government and not the people of India, creating a sense of ‘unreality’.68 What Benn had originally planned as the judicious hosting of free debate by the government was read by Gandhi as obstructive indecipherability. The News Chronicle reported him suggesting that the government is like a sphinx. It is so cautious in its utterances that it is impossible to know where it stands.… I have spoken gently this week, but I do not know how long I shall be able to bear this hopeless uncertainty, for which I can see no just reason. The Government cannot for ever sit on the fence.69

(See Figure 4.1 for the Daily Sketch’s later use of the metaphor.) The secretary of state in the National Government was now Sir Samuel Hoare, who laid out his planned response during a RTC Cabinet Committee meeting on 21 September 1931. He felt that Gandhi had misunderstood the purpose of the conference, which was not to present an ultimatum to the delegation but to have the government listen to Indian opinion and to craft principles at the conference session conclusion.70 While Gandhi appreciated Hoare’s seeming directness, he continued to lose faith in the conference method. On 4 October Benthall had a conversation with the merchant

FIGURE 4.1  Ramsay, the Sphinx Source: ‘Ramsay, The Spinx’, Daily Sketch, 1 October 1931, © British Library Board (MFM. MLD19).

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delegate and Congress financer G. D. Birla.71 The latter suggested that Gandhi did not take the British expression of their concerns seriously, that the conference meetings were designed to waste time, while discussions of responsibility and safeguards were being shelved. As with Brockway, Gandhi felt that if the degree of responsibility for the future government was settled, then the minorities question would resolve itself. On 8 October Gandhi announced his failure to break the communal deadlock to the Minorities Committee, but he emphatically blamed the conference method. He attacked the composition of the conference, which lacked elected representatives and produced a sense of un-reality because there was no real sense of the India that would result (India Office 1932b, 1346). The conference method continued in the Federal Structure Committee until Christmas. But after the conclusion of the second session, this very method of conferencing would be thrown into doubt for the third and final session.

A ‘COMPLETE ABANDONMENT OF THE CONFERENCE METHOD’? In the spring of 1932, the three travelling committees of the RTC conducted their investigations in India. Simultaneously, thoughts were turning to how the concluding session of the conference would function. While the committees were raising vital questions regarding franchise and federation, there was also considerable fatigue regarding the conference method. On 14 March 1932 Birla had written to Hoare regarding his conversation with Lothian, who was in India with the franchise committee.72 He had suggested that it would be a waste of time discussing financial safeguards with those who did not understand the subject and that the best solution was for experienced businessmen to agree a solution themselves. Two days later an editorial in the loyalist Times of India suggested that the ‘speedy fruition’ of the conference was desired by non-official members of both the central and provincial legislative assemblies.73 Given that the detailed constitution drafting would be done at the bill stage in parliament, a swift conclusion of the conference procedure was recommended. These proposals were very much in synch with Hoare’s vision for the final conference session. He wrote to MacDonald on 12 May 1932 relaying discussions of the Cabinet India Committee, which the prime minister had missed due to ill health.74 The committee, and Simon in particular, had argued against reconstituting the conference during the autumn

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(Bridge 1986, 83). They felt the time had come for action and decision and that subsequent discussion should take place in private between a limited number of Indians on a limited number of points. Formal collaboration with broader opinion could take place at the joint committee stage of legislation. Hoare had sent these thoughts to Viceroy Willingdon for consultation, emphasising their tentative nature. Willingdon consulted with staff and with members of the RTC consultative committee, talk of which reached the newspapers in June. One story suggested that the report of the consultative committee in India, alongside those reports by the touring committees, would be used to compose a bill in London.75 It admitted the need for progress, but also that MacDonald had committed to the conference method in his concluding address to the second session. Within a week, on 27 June 1932, Hoare announced to parliament that the proposed third RTC session was to be scrapped in favour of moving straight to a joint committee phase. While there was little response in Britain, Indian Liberals reacted with fury. Members of the RTC consultative committee led the high-level responses, but organisations across India also lodged their protests with the central government. From the north, on 7 July, the United Provinces Liberal Association sent a printed statement to the Reforms Office in New Delhi, condemning the British breach of engagement with the Indian people by abandoning the RTC. This was said to mark a reversion to the politics of the Simon Commission whereby Indians were fit only for consultation: ‘What has since happened to justify an unmistakable departure from the Conference method and a reversion to the abandoned procedure adumbrated in connection with a Commission which was so unpopular with Indian reformers?’76 The large size of the delegations represented the size of India and the length of debate represented the complexity of federation. Echoing Gandhi’s complaint, any delays could be attributed to the failure of the British government to explain its position, just as their delaying of a statement on responsibility had made resolution of the communal question impossible. Expedition, not substitution, of the conference method was the answer. These points were echoed in a telegram from 5 July sent from the ‘Decan Sabha’ society in south India and forwarded to the Reforms Office. It condemned Hoare’s ‘complete abandonment of the conference method’ which contradicted MacDonald’s commitment to this method ‘to the end’.77 A Times of India article a fortnight later argued for a more focused

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final session but conceded that it had to be a continuation of the procedure adopted twice already in London: ‘Any proposal at this stage to drop the conference method, which has proved so successful, and to substitute a plan which does not meet with Indian approval can only be regarded as a very grave mistake.’78 Protests continued to arrive in New Delhi. On 17 August the Buyers and Chippers Chamber of Karachi in northwest India wrote to the home secretary, protesting that the RTC had been adjourned and not dissolved, and that Indians should be consulted in the final stage, not merely called upon to provide evidence before a committee: ‘The plea for expedition does not and cannot hold inasmuch as rights and respect cannot be sacrificed for more speed. The acute controversy that raged at the time of the appointment and work of the Simon Commission ought to teach the British Government at least this much.’79 The consultative committee had also protested in the strongest terms and launched individual campaigns to get the decision overturned. N. M. Joshi wrote to Agatha Harrison of the Indian Conciliation Group on 11 July stating that, following the example of Sastri and Jayakar, he had resigned from the consultative committee and would withhold cooperation until the RTC method was reinstated.80 He later wrote to the India campaigning MP Eleanor Rathbone, on 13 August, insisting that the speed, cooperation and respect for parliament’s supremacy that Hoare was demanding could and had been met by the ‘Round Table Method’.81 Under this mounting pressure from Indian liberal opinion, Hoare relented, and on 5 September 1932 the viceroy made a statement announcing that the third RTC session would take place in London. On 20 September Hoare anxiously enquired how the news had been received in India.82 Liberals and moderates were said to be pleased, though Congress continued to reject the negotiations amid the ongoing crackdown on civil disobedience. Questions were being raised, however, about the new interpretation of the conference method. Unlike the previous method of a supposedly open agenda, the agenda for the final session was to be fixed. The Council of the National Liberal Federation had met in Bombay on 24 September and had insisted that delegates be able to raise their own points at the conference, but the Reforms Office suggested that a compromise would be a fixed agenda agreed by the delegates on arrival in London. Over the following month the vision of the final session became clearer. On 24 October Hoare informed the House of Commons that the agenda would not be published in advance, that the conference would function

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like a business committee and that the majority of work would take place in private, though not in secret.83 This followed a communique issued on 22 October, which had listed the princes who had been invited, all but one of whom had decided to send ministers in their place, and the invitees from British India.84 The government insisted that the status of delegates was unchanged, but that the less formal method and fixed agenda would most effectively secure the objectives of the conference. MacDonald performed an informal opening of the RTC’s final session on 17 November. The reduced size of the conference meant that it was hosted in a committee room of the House of Lords rather than in the former palatial setting in St James’s (see Chapter 11). MacDonald suggested that a business-like approach would see all questions settled by Christmas, even if he would not be able to attend much in person.85 Unlike at the first conference session, the question of devising a united party front was made unnecessary by the Labour Party’s decision to boycott the conference session, due to the lack of Congress participation and the changed conference aims (Barns 1937, 113). This was clearly to Hoare’s liking, having campaigned two years previously for a unified British line. But even with the conference designed to his liking, the method was still subverted. On 9 December 1932 he wrote to Viceroy Willingdon ‘very confidentially’ that the British had been acting like a single delegation, with Reading and Lothian being supplied with all the relevant cabinet papers and then left to form their own opinions, which had aligned with Hoare’s: ‘We meet every morning before the session of the Conference and so far have arranged not unsatisfactorily for the general conduct of the debate. I only hope that it will go on like this until the end.’86 The conference method survived until the conclusion of the RTC in December 1932, but only just. It had been appraised and used by delegates of all political hues. What these negotiations had shown was that procedure and method were not matters of clinical governmentalities. Nor was it the case that the government approached them with clear intentions while delegates poured in with their desires. Rather, desires and intentions warped and shifted throughout the conference. Procedural desires were often frustrated, but sometimes, as for Hoare, they could eventually be met. For Indian liberals, a transparent and open conference was desired as an affirmation of their brand of nationalism and was powerfully defended when it was attacked. For Government of India advisors, their desire was that the conference method provide them with a means to influence

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proceedings. For political commentators from both the left and the right, the conference method was a sham that had to be exposed. This chapter has shown how the lofty ideals of conference procedure had to be put into place, by individuals with their own desires, intentions and capacities. The following chapter will explore those who put the conference method into practice.

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5 STAFFING THE CONFERENCE EXPERTS AND SUBALTERN DIPLOMATS

Once the conference method had taken shape, the Indian and British governments collaborated on making it manifest in the people and places of the meeting itself. The first conference session cost £79,646 [£3,646,624] in total, expenditure being covered by the British and Indian governments.1 Although Table 5.1 suggests the Government of India contributed 46 per cent more than the British, these figures do not cover many of the official and social events organised by the British government (see Chapter 8). The ‘Chief’s Fund’ refers to the princes’ fund to support members of the Indian states, while the Social Club refers to the accommodation and facilities provided for Indian delegates in Mayfair (see Chapter 7). The ‘actual conference’ costs concerned the diplomatic materials and infrastructure within and around St James’s Palace (see Chapter 6). Totalling £6,404, these costs amounted to only 8 per cent of the formally accounted expenditure, the vast majority being spent on assembling the delegates and staff in London. This acts to remind us that while buildings, tables, texts, cameras and microphones form one type of infrastructure, people themselves also form vital infrastructures (Graham and McFarlane 2014). The majority of funding went to the delegates, keeping them well housed, paid and dressed (non-British delegates visiting Britain for the first time received a £100 [£4,578] clothing ‘outfit allowance’ to ensure they were not sartorially disadvantaged).2 The accounting categories in Table 5.1 also embed within the archive the distinctions made between those who made this diplomatic event happen. The first category regarded the British Indian delegates, who evidence Thakur’s (2021, 13) assertion that Indian diplomacy pre-dated independence. Though the question of whether there were international

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TABLE 5.1  Approximate cost of the Round Table Conference and division between Indian and Imperial revenues

British Treasury (£) 1 Delegates from British India

Outfit allowance

487

Passages

7,261/908

Voyage allowance Maintenance in London

Indian Government (£)

5,784 17,080

Subsistence allowance

6,257

Council Members deputation pay

3,298

2 Chief ’s fund

4,790

3 Government delegates/advisors

Passages

4 Secretariat

Pay, etc.

12

Allowances

1,388 2,220

11,411

1,806

1,806

Passages 5

Welfare officers, social club

6

Secretary of state semi-private hospitality

7 Cost of actual conference (£6,404 in total)

Office of works

1,222 118 3,500

Reporting

1,011

Stationery office and printing

962

Telephone service

556

Electric lighting and heating

283

Miscellaneous

92

Miscellaneous Total

5,770

1,082 32,418

47,228

Source: BL/IOR/L/PJ/9/57.

relations within the British Empire was hotly debated at this time (Gorman 2012), the delegates engaged in Nicolson’s (1939, 17) broader definition of diplomacy as ‘the ordered conduct of relations between one group of human beings and another group alien to themselves’. The third and fourth categories took in those who supported diplomacy, as government advisors and members of the bureaucratic secretariat. These actors are increasingly considered to be part of ‘diplomacy’, as defined by ScottSmith and Weidesbrode (2019, 3) as ‘any action, setting, or phenomenon

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that represents the interests, status, actions, or behavior of a polity vis-à-vis another. Its agents may be individuals; groups; or official, quasi-official, and unofficial actors.’ This expanded range of diplomatic actors is considered as conference experts below. Table 5.1 fails, however, to recognise the low-ranked secretarial staff who were drawn from with the Westminster machinery and were accounted for separately. Such workers have been referred to as ‘subaltern diplomats’ (Herren [2017], as explored below). Elite and subaltern conference staff had, at best, what the Subaltern Studies Collective referred to as ‘relative autonomy’ (Chatterjee 1983, 316). These were relational categories, with conference officials dependent upon the labour and expertise of their support staff, while the opportunities offered by major political events promoted the importance of policing, secretarial and clerical staff. Although the categories blurred, to some extent, there was still an identifiable cadre of officials who were distinct in terms of pay, training, mobility and role at the conference. These ranged from experts who were consulted at the conference to those whose expertise in the ‘techno-politics’ of modern governmentalities (T. Mitchell 2002) mark them out as conference experts.

CONFERENCE EXPERTS London was packed full of experts on most imaginable topics who could be drawn upon by higher status delegates, further stacking the conference in their favour. In terms of conference method, it has been shown that the Government of India had sent men like Hailey and Haig to advise the delegates. It has also been shown that these men were constantly moving around Whitehall, consulting with staff in the India Office and beyond. The expertise the latter offered was vital and was acknowledged by Hoare after the conclusion of the second conference session. On 3 December 1931 he wrote to Sir Maurice Gwyer, solicitor to the Treasury, thanking him for his assistance in legal and constitutional questions, without which ‘we should have got into a most terrible muddle and have ended it all with the kind of embarrassing commitments that have usually been the legacy of recent conferences’.3 To Sir Claud Schuster at the Lord Chancellor’s office, he sent his thanks on the same day for his constitutional advice and memoranda, which prevented the conference drifting into a ‘quagmire of confusion’ and embarrassing commitments. There were various other personal expertise

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networks that British delegates could draw upon, such as MacDonald’s specially attached India Office staff for each conference session. Stuart Brown, joint secretary with the War Office, assisted the prime minister for the first session, and John Laithwaite for the second, after which he served in Lothian’s Franchise Committee before acting as the viceroy’s principal private secretary from 1936 to 1943. Other staff found their Indian careers boosted through conference participation. R. A. H. (‘Rab’) Butler, for instance, was Hoare’s private secretary in the 1920s, assisting him at the second Round Table Conference (RTC) session, before being chosen to join Lothian’s touring Franchise Committee, after which he became undersecretary of state for India. Beyond these experts, drawn upon for conference needs, were those officials who were, or who quickly became, conference experts. While often having technical and very precise roles, there was also a tacit acknowledgement that these men (unlike subaltern diplomats, they were almost entirely men for the RTC) also had an additional, informal role to fulfil at the conference. This role was anticipated by British Indian delegation Joint Secretary Bajpai in the case he made for improved pay to Secretary Sir Geoffrey Corbett, before the first session began. In his note of 8 November 1930 he had explained that delegation secretaries needed to be able to live near delegates so they could work with them night and day. He further elaborated that the most important part of our work will probably be to smooth over difficulties by informal personal conversations for which we shall have to incur expenditure on entertainments and on conveyance in addition to the cost of maintaining ourselves in the expensive neighbourhood of St. James’s Palace where the British Indian leaders are living.4

STAFFING THE SECRETARIATS In reflecting back on the work done by the British Indian Secretariat at the first conference session, a New Delhi Reforms Office note of 4 May 1931 summarised their informally defined functions. These exceeded standard secretarial duties such as keeping minutes and supplying papers to include advising members on constitutional matters and maintaining liaisons between the delegations. These latter functions ‘were much the most important part of their work, because, as happens in most conferences,

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differences that actually arose or threatened to mar the satisfactory progress of discussions in Conference or Committees were adjusted by informal conversations outside formal meetings’.5 Returning delegates such as Sapru, Sastri and Jayakar had praised the ‘unostentatious but most helpful’ role played by Corbett and Bajpai. They had been chosen by Irwin himself due to their participation in Imperial and other international conferences, meaning they were known to the British government and British Indian delegates. These personal relationships were, unambiguously, recognised as the ‘soft power’ (Tharoor 2011) of the imperial international (Halliday 1988). Any change of the secretariat staff at the second conference session had to be avoided, as such a change would involve loss of power, because new men would lack in advantage of personal touch with the delegates, whether Indian or British, and of personal experience of the last Conference and its Committees in all their stages. Moreover the personal factors which made the Secretariat so helpful on the last occasion would be even more in demand in the next stage of the work of the Conference.…6

For the final conference session, with a much-reduced secretariat staff, the absence of this liaison work was keenly felt. In the late summer of 1932, Agatha Harrison reflected back on the first two conference sessions, when ‘there would have been a hitch over and over again, but for some men who behind the scenes sensed the situation and brought people together. That is being left out now.’7 These men included the British Liberal delegation Secretary Coatman, who ‘in the other conferences was very active in this “sensing” work’. Corbett, Bajpai and Coatman were part of a substantial and complex system of advisers and secretaries which had been planned and debated at great length in advance. In an undated India Office note from the summer of 1930 a picture of the ‘whole machinery of the Conference’ was sketched out.8 The staffing would comprise four parts, including the external experts mentioned above and Government of India advisors. The other two components would be the staff attached to the British, British Indian and Indian states delegations and the staff of the secretariat-general, serving the whole conference. The Indian states had the highest ratio of staff to delegates (16 delegates:15 advisors and secretariat staff) at the first conference session,

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because many princes had their own advisors in addition to those servicing the Chamber of Princes delegates. Due to the well-remunerated princely work, the positions were highly sought after but also required the necessary tact to negotiate the desires of hereditary rulers and secretaries of state. Sir Grimwood Mears, chief justice at Ahmedabad, had hoped to represent the princes in London but Benn felt he thought too much of himself, believing that without him the princes might turn away from the conference, so his appointment was blocked.9 The first session participants included four advisors to the Hyderabad delegates, one for delegates from the south Indian states and one for the Orissa states, one for the Gaekwar of Baroda, four advisors nominated by the Chamber of Princes and a secretariat of three staff. Individual delegates also had their own private staff. The Hyderabad delegation was noted to be travelling with twenty assistants on the journey to London in September 1930 (Legg 2020c). For the second session the Maharaja of Bikaner travelled with thirteen staff, including his chief of staff and comptroller of the household, military secretary, acting private secretary, surgeon, head stenographer and three personal attendants.10 In addition to Bikaner his prime minister, Sir Manubhai Mehta, was also a delegate, who stood in for the maharaja when he had to leave the second session early on grounds of ill health. Bikaner also had the services of Rushbrook-Williams, as advisor to the Chamber of Princes, who worked the press assiduously ahead of Gandhi’s arrival in September 1931 (see Chapter 6), and K. M. Panikkar, as one of the three secretariat staff, who had co-authored the very influential Federal India (Haksar and Panikkar 1930). Faced with this vast body of expertise, the British government sought assistance from India. On 11 July 1930 Benn telegraphed New Delhi, highlighting his anxieties that the princely delegates might reopen the question of the paramountcy of the Government of India and requesting an advisor be sent to the conference, due to the intricacies of the questions involved and the lack of ‘local knowledge’ in London.11 Irwin replied on the seventeenth that he had received assurances that the paramountcy question would not be raised and agreed to send K. S. Fitze to serve as a secretary to the British delegation. Fitze’s rank had to be raised to that of joint secretary so that there would be no question of him being less favourably treated than the other Government of India secretaries sent to assist the British government. This was Lewis, who assisted on matters relating to British India.

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The sixteen British delegates were officially assisted by six staff, who were divided, as with the princes, into those advising the whole and those attached to specific denominations. Each opposition party had their own secretary, and their role was to bring detailed knowledge of the Indian context to their British political employers. For the British Liberals this was Coatman, who had served in the Indian police force from 1911 to 1926 before acting as director of public information and then as a member of the Legislative Assembly in Delhi. Irwin personally recommended Coatman to Benn on 19 March 1930: He knows as much about the situation as anyone, is intelligent, and I have talked with him freely. It occurs to me also, and I should like you to bear this in mind, that Coatman would probably I think be of very great value if he could have the entrée in some form to the Conference when it meets. The Moslems, Sapru and others would all be glad if he was there, as he can help them all, and he would probably be of great value to you in helping you assess their different personalities. He could sit behind your chair, along with our people, if, as I hope, you allow us to send one or two.12

Like Rushbrook-Williams, Coatman was already experienced with the British press, having fed stories in the past to the Manchester Guardian. He would go on to publish two books after the conference dwelling on Indian affairs (Coatman 1932a, 1932b). Coinciding with the princes’ chilling against the federal idea towards the end of the conference, RushbrookWilliams penned a review article of the two books, criticising Coatman’s biased approach as an ‘Apostle of Federalism’.13 Stopford, the Conservative Party secretary, did not publish on Indian affairs but donated his detailed correspondence and unpublished memoir to the British Library. In the latter he outlined working for Sir John Simon on his touring commission in India in 1928, the job having been set up by the Irish historian and nationalist Alice Stopford Green, who was the aunt of both Stopford and Simon’s deceased wife (A. Mitchell 2019). In India Stopford got to witness the birth of the RTC idea through the testy and often acrimonious correspondence between Simon and Irwin.14 Unemployed after the commission concluded its work in September 1930, Stopford reluctantly accepted the Tory role, being a Labour voter, having been assured by Hoare that they needed Indian knowledge, not a party hack.

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He found the Tories to be less ‘die hard’ than anticipated, but his memoir recounts many moments of discomfort. In a private meeting at the second session with Hoare the Tory leader Stanley Baldwin reportedly exclaimed: ‘There you are. Never trust a Jew. They’ll always let you down at the critical moment!’15 Stopford did not elaborate, but this likely refers to Rufus Isaacs, Lord Reading, the leading Liberal delegate and first Jewish lord chief justice or viceroy, who had switched to back federation with safeguards at the first conference session. Stopford’s archive attests to the diligent work he had been doing ahead of and during the conference sessions. It is telling that he was given office space at the recently established Conservative Research Department at Old Queen’s Street, not at the party’s central office. He interviewed many of the leading delegates, secretaries and advisors, providing outlines of the changing factions and alliances for Tory delegates. This investigative work was carried out in and around St James’s Palace, but also at the numerous lunches and dinners where the unofficial work of the conference continued (see Chapter 8). The government delegates did not have secretaries as they included, at the first session, Benn and Earl Russell from the India Office, as well as Brown in his attachment to the prime minister. They also had access to the three secretaries to the British delegation. These were V. Dawson from the India Office, Fitze from the Political Department in Delhi, advising on the Indian states, and Lewis, from the Reforms Office, advising on British India and constitutional matters more broadly. When the New Delhi Reforms Office was reopened in 1930, having been created to implement the 1919 Government of India Act, Lewis was appointed as joint secretary, serving under Secretary J. M. Dunnett, and dealt in detail with the practicalities of constitutional reform. He wrote weekly to Dunnett, giving a sense of how the building and staffing infrastructures intersected after he arrived in London three weeks before the first session opened. On 31 October Lewis described having reported to the India Office where he was told there was nothing for him to do for the first week, nor was there office space available. When Carter moved into his office at St James’s Palace, Lewis took the vacated room and was tasked with preparing a précis of the Government of India’s despatch on reforms for the press. Working with Haig, the précis was drafted in response to private conversations which the two of them had already started having with delegates in London.16 Lewis had been surprised to find himself listed, alongside Dawson and Fitze,

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as secretary to all the British delegates, not just the government. Dawson had indicated, however, that when government delegates met alone, only he would join them, suggesting he would be acting as secretary for Labour ministers as Coatman and Stopford did for the Liberals and Conservatives. Due to their work in India, Lewis knew Coatman and Stopford, and they had been keeping him abreast of developments. From mid-November Haig took the lead in keeping Delhi up to speed on conference developments, so Lewis sent fewer updates. He reported on 5 December joining the Provincial Constitutions Sub-Committee as government secretary, where provincial autonomy was quickly ceded by Tory delegates, to general surprise. On 6 January 1931, with two weeks of the conference left to run, Lewis wrote a non-official letter to Dunnett, giving him a fuller account of his experiences working with the NorthWest Frontier Province (NWFP) and Minorities Committees, but also highlighting the work of three lower-ranking Delhi staff who had joined Lewis in London but did not feature on listings of secretaries and advisors. These office assistants shared ‘a little room’ at the India Office and carried out ‘odd jobs’ for Lewis, Haig or other advisors to the conference who had come over from Delhi. R. S. V. P. Menon had accompanied Lewis to some committees and had also written to Dunnett on 5 December describing how Indian delegates distrusted the Delhi staff as government stooges, while the India Office staff were ‘rather jealously guarding their right to advise the Secy of State’.17 E. C. Gaynor made up weekly bundles of papers to send to Delhi and also assisted the secretariat staff, while Mohd Siddiq worked as a stenographer and was kept busy on various tasks, including transcribing the death bed statement that Muhammed Ali issued to Corbett the night before he passed away. As for the coordination of the secretaries to the British delegation, they had worked separately, Dawson attending government meetings and Fitze working with L. W. Reynolds, who was advising on issues relating to the princely states. Similarly, Lewis seems to have been appropriated by Hailey, being used by him to influence Henderson as chair of the NWFP Committee and also joining the 10 a.m. daily meetings at 10 Downing Street. The fifty-seven British Indian delegates were supported by a secretariat of just three staff, a ratio of 1:0.05, compared to that of 1:0.375 for the British delegation and 1:0.93 for the princes. This meant that the Indian states staff had between one and two delegates to serve each, British staff had between two and three, while the three British Indian delegation staff had nineteen

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delegates each. These three staff were Corbett, Bajpai and Latifi. As already mentioned, Corbett had extensive international conference experience, serving at the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922) and representing India in Cape Town (1926), the International Labour Conference in Geneva (1929) and the Imperial Conference (1930), after thirty years with the Indian Civil Service. As anticipated in the unsuccessful bid for higher secretarial pay, much of Corbett’s work was social, from taking delegates out for drives in the country, to briefing breakfasts ahead of important committee meetings, lunches with delegates and influential politicians, to responding to Gandhi’s request for advice on how to satisfy British public opinion.18 But he also went significantly beyond these informal duties, having put forward a proposed solution to the vexed question of communal representation in the Punjab to the Minorities Committee. While it was unsuccessful, it caught the eye of Gandhi, who recommended its further consideration to the committee. Bajpai’s outstanding career made him for some perhaps the Indian Civil Service’s ‘most brilliant Indian member in the inter-war years’ (Caroe and Nanda 2004). After an Oxford scholarship and early entry to the Indian Civil Service, Bajpai made his name in India’s expanding international sphere, serving with Corbett at the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922) and the Cape Town RTC (1926; see Thakur [2021b]). He was also Secretary for India at the Imperial Conference (1921) and advisor to the Indian delegation at the Imperial Conference (1926) and the League of Nations assemblies of 1929 and 1930. Like Corbett, he was a keen socialiser in London, often passing on information regarding anticipated problems picked up on the grapevine in London, while also being available for consultation in Delhi as conference work continued between the London sessions. The second joint secretary was Almá Latifi, who graduated from Cambridge in 1900 and trained in law before entering the Indian Civil Service.19 His career had been less striking than Bajpai’s, although he had represented India at the International Law Conference at the Hague in 1930, had been with Corbett at Geneva in June of 1930 and attended the Inter-Parliamentary Conference in London of July 1930. His work at the conference seemed less critical than his colleagues. It may have been that his appointment was, in part, communal. His retention for the second session was argued for because both he (as a Muslim) and Bajpai (as a Hindu) were said, in the same note of 4 May 1931 regarding the importance of the informal liaison work of the secretaries, to have a ‘moderating influence over their

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respective coreligionists on communal questions’.20 Similarly, when Bajpai could not be spared for the third session and Viceroy Willingdon felt it was only the Hindu secretary B. Rama Rao who was needed, having also served at the second session, he explained to Hoare on 21 September 1932 that there would be Muslim pressure for Latifi to attend if a Hindu secretary was appointed.21

THE SECRETARIAT-GENERAL The secretariat-general was the fourth component of the general staffing machinery, after experts, advisors and delegation staff. The secretariat was concerned with the day-to-day running of the conference and for ensuring that the conference method was evenly put into practice. Its staff rarely entered the official archives, wrote memoirs or deposited their papers. The epitome of this elusiveness was the mercurial figure of (Richard Henry) Archibald Carter, the secretary-general of the conference. In this sense he was the consummate diplomat, slinking out of view. His career had been focused but relatively unadventurous, joining the India Office after Eton and Cambridge, acting as private secretary to the secretary of state for India (1924–1927) and then as assistant secretary to the Simon Commission. In numerous letters, as mentioned above, he suggests meeting in person for un-archived discussions, or answers queries or complaints in deferential but politically neutralising techno-bureaucratic speak. This belied the huge influence that Carter held over all elements of conference design, as acknowledged in his 27 October 1930 memo admitting that the India Office was making detailed plans for the running of the conference while insisting in public that it was an open conference with an un-set agenda. Carter was assisted by six secretaries, four of whom had been sent over from New Delhi. One of the secretaries at the second session did later publish a memoir, recounting his daily work of summarising the day’s deliberations from his own notes within meetings, providing ten-page precis before lunch and dinner, and of editing the proceedings for printing (Deshmukh 1974, 82–83). Publicity Officers (see Chapter 6) served under Carter, being H. MacGregor, A. H. Joyce and G. F. Steward, the latter loaned from the News Department of the Foreign Office on MacGregor’s recommendation: ‘Mr. Steward has a greater knowledge and experience of Press arrangements connected with State and International Conferences than any other man,

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and is persona grata to London journalists, both home and foreign.’22 Steward had worked as a journalist from 1900 but was employed by the Ministry of Information during the war, after which he liaised with the press for the British Embassy in Brussels and then the Foreign Office in London. During this time, he represented Britain in conferences at the Hague, Geneva, Brussels, Locarno, Madrid and Lausanne, and at the League of Nations throughout the 1920s. The three joint social secretaries were also coordinated by Carter, in their general attention to the social life of delegates and in the running of the Social Club at Chesterfield Gardens (see Chapter 7). Perhaps the biggest logistical challenge was orchestrating the large number of clerical staff necessary to run the ‘speech factory’ (see Chapter 6). The formal listings note the roles of chief clerk, superintendent of messages and supervisor of women staff. This is the point at which official recognition ends and we enter the largely undocumented ranks of the ‘diplomatic subaltern’. The distinction between conference experts and those that follow is apparent in a graded effacement in the conference record. For instance, the published minutes of the Minorities Committee only lists committee delegates as a guide to who attended committee meetings (India Office 1932b, 1333). The stenographer’s notes from the meeting of 28 September 1931, however, list all the conference experts also present. For the British these included MacDonald’s assistant Laithwaite, delegation Secretaries Dawson and Lewis, Tory and Liberal Secretaries Stopford and Coatman, W. D. Croft and H. Rumbold of the India Office, and R. A. Butler, Hoare’s parliamentary private secretary. For the British Indian delegation there were Corbett, Bajpai and Latifi, and for the secretariatgeneral were Carter, Secretaries Deshmukh, J. M. Sladen and K. Anderson, and Publicity Officers MacGregor, Steward and Joyce. That is, to the thirtyseven delegates of the committee were eighteen staff. Nowhere mentioned, of course, were the names of those stenographers who took the notes. While this is not surprising, it is to this second level of official effacement that we turn below.

SUBALTERN DIPLOMATS The ‘subaltern diplomacy 1930–1960’ project, coordinated by Madeleine Herren at the University of Heidelberg, aimed to give ‘a voice to those

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hitherto not considered in the history of international relations: stenographers and translators, exchange students, typists, temporary collaborators, consultants from all over the world, activists from nonEuropean states, or young people involved in transnational movements’.23 Herren (2017) acknowledged, in her study of such low-ranking diplomatic staff in Geneva, that her subjects were mostly white and also relatively privileged. This is mostly, although not totally, the case below. While building upon Herren’s work, this analysis draws more directly from spatial readings of the Subaltern Studies Collective (Legg 2016b). One teaching is that the subaltern are the majority and that finding them is not hard; the quantitative, empirical evidence of their labour is everywhere (Ranajit Guha 1982). However, traces of subaltern lives and experience appear fleetingly in the archive and immediately raise analytical questions of representation and of gender (Spivak, Landry and McLean 1996). Three newspaper stories regarding St James’s Palace illustrate this well.

PREPARING AND POLICING THE PALACE The week before the second conference session opened, a News Chronicle journalist was granted access to St James’s Palace and described some of the more quotidian features of the conference venue (see Chapter 6). These included a dustbin dated 1735, the 2-ton chandeliers, the greenseated leather chairs in the Queen Anne Room and a brass plate installed on the table explaining that it had it had been used at the first RTC session. Alongside these incidental details were two further observations: ‘Colour Court was a haven of peace. A servant raised a window in one of the residences of Court officials that surround it. The sudden noise smote the ear.’24 See also this later quote and the photographs (see Figures 5.1 and 5.2) that appeared in the Indian press before the first conference session: I went up the noble main stairway  – also designed by Wren. White cloths still protect the velvet covered hand-rails. The ‘housemaids’ carpet’ had not yet been taken from the thick red pile which it shielded. At the top of the stairs was a carpenter’s table, a saw, and other tools.… In the banqueting room, the delegates’ rest room, where is to be seen that bloodthirsty picture of Napier’s 1843 victory at Meanee, a middleaged housemaid was heating her ham and bread luncheon.25

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FIGURE 5.1  Preparations at St James’s Palace Source: ‘The Round Table Conference’, Times of India, 5 November 1930. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

The staff here are marked in various ways, including their noise; the protections between them and the lush conference carpeting; the tools of their trade; their indifference to artistic surroundings while satisfying their appetites; and the women who were arraying the great tables of state, both the Tapestry Room committee table (Figure 5.1) and The Queen Anne’s Room round table itself (Figure 5.2). These were the staff who prepared and maintained the palace infrastructure, rather than those who ran the speech factory itself, though their depictions here share many features with those conferencing subalterns. But there were other lower-ranked staff from outside the conference upon whom delegates relied in a different and more immediate sense. Hosting many of the most important men and women in the British Empire demanded that the conference be heavily policed. Palace staff were

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FIGURE 5.2  Preparing the Round Table Source: ‘Britain Calling’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 16 November 1930, © British Library Board (OP 1346).

supplemented by regular forces who policed the train stations at which delegates arrived, events they attended and their sites of work, both St James’s Palace and the House of Lords for the final session (see Figure 5.3). The police were more used to placing Indians in London under surveillance, whether anarchist revolutionary networks (Ahmed and Mukherjee 2012) or the activities of the London branch of Congress (see Chapter 10). Instead, they found themselves tasked with keeping Indians in London safe. This labour went largely uncommented upon, as they stood watch through the bitter autumn weather of 1930 (Legg 2020b), unless someone forgot their entrance pass to the palace, or had a noteworthy interaction. On 28 October 1930, for instance, after attending the opening of parliament by the king, a policeman helped Moonje find a taxi and helped him in with a ‘here you go sir’, leading him to praise the police in his diary for their attentiveness to the public.26 In addition to the normal protection of delegates at and around the first conference session, the India Office also had to advise the Metropolitan Police on which delegates would require special police protection. This was in the face of anticipated cooperation between London Congress supporters and the British section of the League against Imperialism, ranging from

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FIGURE 5.3  Indian delegates and the police Source: © British Library Board (IOR/Photo 81/(15)).

propaganda to demonstrations and processions.27 The Government of India was consulted but an India Office memo of 13 October 1930 noted that none of the British Indian delegates required protection; that Haig, Hailey and Innes might need special attention; and that the Princely States of Bikaner and Alwar had requested special measures, though only Patiala received them on the grounds of international agitation against his rule (see Chapter 10). No information had been picked up in London to support any of these claims, although Muhammed Ali’s critical approach to civil disobedience had prompted some rumours that the London Congress branch might attempt to cause insult ‘by throwing ink at him or tarring his beard if they can get the opportunity’.28 It was also anticipated that the radical Indian left might target the centrist labour representatives at the conference, N. M. Joshi and Shiva Rao, the latter of whom had had his recent speech at the Trade Union Congress in Nottingham interrupted by an ‘organised uproar in the gallery’. In general, the advice from Sir David Petrie in Delhi’s Intelligence Bureau was followed, which was that it would be easier to watch the limited number of Indians in London who were likely to commit

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an ‘outrage’ than it would be to place even a small number of delegates under special protection. For the second session of the conference, however, Gandhi’s attendance and the anger this provoked in radical circles necessitated round-the-clock special protection. On 3 September 1931 a meeting was held at the India Office between Superintendent Parker of Scotland Yard’s Indian political intelligence agency (see Chapter 10) and Carter, Croft, Monteath and F. A. M. Vincent, who was joint social secretary (see Chapter 8) and had extensive experience with the Indian police. While there was a sense of greater threat compared to the previous year, the policy of minimal interference was maintained.29 It was felt to be impossible to safely police Victoria Station should Gandhi arrive by train, especially if Shaukat Ali arrived at the same time, raising the prospect of clashes between Muslim and Hindu supporters, so Gandhi was asked to drive from Folkestone to London. In return for agreeing to this plan the police committed to protecting Gandhi at his reception in London and seeing him to Kingsley Hall, where they would provide protection for the two cars that had been placed at Gandhi’s service during his stay. Carter and Vincent agreed to share details of Gandhi’s official and unofficial meetings and the India Office policy was that Gandhi be treated as any other delegate, as much as his ‘notoriety’ permitted.30 Sergeants Evans and Rogers were allotted to oversee Gandhi’s daily movements and developed a now-famous rapport with the Mahatma (Lester 1932). On 7 December 1931, en route to India, he sent a handwritten letter to Hoare from Geneva, praising his police protection. While all the detectives who had protected him were said to have shown ‘extreme care and courtesy in the discharge of their duties, sergeants Evans and Rogers who came in daily contact with me became as it were members of my family. They looked after me with brotherly care and affection.’31 Hoare had agreed to have the sergeants accompany Gandhi across Europe to the port of Brindisi in Italy. While keeping him safe, Evans was also keeping Gandhi under close surveillance and submitted a detailed five-page report on 17 December describing Gandhi’s activities and statements since leaving London on 5 December (Legg 2020a).32 Such information fed into the case used to justify Gandhi’s arrest on return to India, following a controversy over statements he made in Italy (Polak 1932). On 2 February 1932 Evans submitted a report informing his superiors that, like Sergeant Rogers, he had received the following gifts from Gandhi: two counterpane

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bedspreads; a tea cloth; five handkerchiefs made of Khadi cloth; and an English silver lever watch inscribed ‘To W.H. Evans from M.K. Gandhi, with love, 1.1.1932’. By this point Gandhi had been imprisoned, but the sergeants jointly requested that an acknowledgement of thanks be communicated to him.

QUANTIFYING CLERICAL LABOUR The majority of lower-rank work associated with the conference was clerical. Most of this was provided in-house but some had to resort to outside staff. These cases mostly concern the British Indian delegates, with such a high ratio to secretarial staff, but conference staff themselves also felt the strain. Fitze made it a condition of his returning for the second session as secretary that he be joined by a clerical assistant familiar with his work, as stenographers could not be found to assist with work outside of normal office hours.33 Other delegates had to employ their own staff, with Moonje tiring of using Jayakar’s typist in October 1931 and so employing his own ‘girl typist’.34 Benthall also employed his own typist, writing home to India on 31 October 1931 that she was the daughter of Vernon Hartshorn, who had visited India as part of the Simon Commission and had been a friend of Benthall until this death that year ‘as she was on the rocks’.35 The situation was much changed at the final session in the winter of 1932, which took place in the House of Lords, with only forty-six delegates. Although full minutes were not taken and distributed as at the first two sessions, delegates still reported having to employ clerical assistants for themselves (Kelkar 1933, iii). Only the last three days were fully minuted (India Office 1933b), for which Reed and Company were employed to send four ‘recorders’, charged at 1 guinea [£40] per man per day on account of the late hours.36 These were in addition, however, to the standard clerical staff who operated on a scaled-down version of the system honed at St James’s Palace. The work was still intense, with the Daily Express reporting the ‘mountains of typescript’ turned out by clerical staff working twelve-tofourteen-hour days.37 The first two sessions, explored below, leave qualitatively richer if still superficial outlines of some of the working lives involved. Because it had to be transplanted from the Palace of St James to that of Westminster, the

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smaller third session of the RTC has left a detailed quantitative trace in the archive of the workers involved. The secretariat staff requirements were laid out in advance of the November 1932 start of the third session, with suggested personal from the India Office identified, along with some hints at the skills required. Eight typists (five shorthand and three copying) were required, with the requested female staff (all ‘Misses’) being ‘nominated because of their previous skill in dictatee work and general adaptability’.38 Eight messengers, all male, were suggested, also due to their experience: ‘The new offices of the Secretariat although in one building will be scattered, and the men working in the offices will be very active.’ Other named candidates, without comment, included two clerks for the distribution and duplicating section each and four reporters should verbatim note taking be required. After the conference had concluded, weekly slips were submitted noting the hours worked, down to the nearest quarter, by all staff (see Table 5.2). This is the only place in which the lower-ranked secretariat staff are named and the numbers of staff in each category enumerated.39 The hours worked reflect the mounting labour after the final session opened on 17 November, peaking in the week before the session ended on 24 December, and the limited work done to process the records after the conference concluded. The gender divide is apparent, with the typing and duplicating tasks being exclusively female and the messenger service exclusively male. In New Delhi the latter were known as ‘peons’, the ubiquitous messengers, flitting with chits, notes and memos and around the city, and being billeted in the lowest-ranked housing, abutting the neighbouring city (Legg 2007, 44). That mobility was unimaginable for women in Delhi, but also seemingly so in London. Women were, instead, used for the careful and supervisable work of typing and reproducing notes, with one woman occupying a senior role. Of the twenty-two listed staff, half were women. The aggregate statistics below show that while the largest numbers of hours at the conference were those of the male messengers, the highest average hours per week were those of the senior supervisory staff, peaking at nearly 82 hours per working week at the conclusion of the conference (see Table 5.3). The higher weighting of hours to messengers and senior staff meant that while women composed half of the secretariat lower-ranked staff, they provided 3,318 of the total 7,446 billed hours (44.6 per cent), while men and women worked 2 hours more and less, respectively, per week than the average 55.8 hours (Table 5.4).

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TABLE 5.2  Hours worked per week by staff

Hours worked to week ending on date Role

Name

Senior Role (m)

F. S. Collins

50

54.5

W. H. Ford

48.5

J. Gordon

49.5

Senior Role (f)

L. S. Taylor

Messengers (m)

E. Chapman

03-Dec

10-Dec

69.25

69.25

67

64.5

69.5

63

64.25

79.5

38.5

427.75

64.5

69

69.75

68.75

83.75

44.25

449.5

48.25

61.25

68.75

63.25

63.5

78.5

36.75

420.25

52

61

63

69

66

76

37

424

R. E. Loftus

50.5

56.5

60.5

59

61

74.5

362

E. Mole

53

55.5

57

50.5

56.5

83

355.5

26-Nov

17-Dec

24-Dec

31-Dec

82.5

45.75

Sum 438.25

S. Tibbutt

54

61

60

55

77.5

307.5

J. McPherson

56

59

60

59

80

314

P. Burrows

Shorthand Typists (f)

19-Nov

54.5

61

59

66

76.5

33

399

W. H. Ives

49

54

59.5

59

62.5

76

33

344

R. Murphy

55

59

54

62

77

Miss Hocking

51.5

57.5

55.25

58.5

72

42.75

337.5

Miss White

49.5

57

58.25

56.34

71.5

36.25

328.84

Miss Lucking

48.5

55

56.75

54

72.5

32.75

319.5

Miss McDougall

50.5

54

52.5

50

62.75

33.25

303

307

(continued)

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TABLE 5.2  (continued )

Hours worked to week ending on date Role

Name

Typists (f)

Miss Knight

Duplicating Operators (f)

26-Nov

03-Dec

10-Dec

17-Dec

24-Dec

31-Dec

Sum

47.75

51.5

54.25

50.5

62.25

29.25

295.5

Miss Bailey

49.5

44.5

55.75

52

67.25

24.5

293.5

Miss Bassett

47

59

52.5

54.5

72.25

29.75

315

Miss A. Leonard

51.25

56.25

57.75

54.5

70.25

26

316

Miss Hawkins

51.5

56

50.75

54

69.75

23.25

305.25

49.75

34

Miss K. Leonard Source: BL/IOR/Q/RTC/62.

19-Nov

83.75

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TABLE 5.3  Total and average hours by role and gender

Total Hours Week Ending

19-Nov

Senior Role (m)

148

Senior Role (f)

48.25

26-Nov

03-Dec

10-Dec

17-Dec

24-Dec

31-Dec

Sum

183.5

207.75

202

200

245.75

128.5

1,315.5

61.25

68.75

63.25

63.5

78.5

36.75

420.25

446.5

480

470.5

488

620.5

103

2,813

Shorthand Typist (f)

200

223.5

222.75

218.84

278.75

145

1,288.84

Typist (f)

144.25

155

162.5

157

201.75

83.5

904

Duplicating Operators (f)

102.75

112.25

108.5

108.5

189.75

83.25

705

10-Dec

17-Dec

24-Dec

31-Dec

Messenger (m)

204.5

Average Hours Week Ending

19-Nov

26-Nov

Senior Role (m)

49.33

61.17

69.25

67.33

66.67

81.92

42.83

62.64

12.53

Senior Role (f)

48.25

61.25

68.75

63.25

63.50

78.50

36.75

60.04

12.01

Messenger (m)

51.13

55.81

60.00

58.81

61.00

77.56

34.33

56.95

11.39

Shorthand Typist (f)

50.00

55.88

55.69

54.71

69.69

36.25

53.70

10.74

Typist (f)

48.08

51.67

54.17

52.33

67.25

27.83

50.22

10.04

Duplicating Operators (f)

51.38

56.13

54.25

54.25

63.25

27.75

51.17

10.23

Source: BL/IOR/Q/RTC/62.

03-Dec

Av. p/w

Av. p/d

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Total hours

7,446.59

Total male hours

4,128.5

Total female hours

3,318.09

Average Hours p/w

55.79

Average Male Hours p/w

59.79

Average Female Hours p/w

53.78

Average Hours p/d

11.157

Average Male Hours p/d

11.96

Average Female Hours p/d

10.76

Source: BL/IOR/Q/RTC/62.

TRACING CLERICAL EXPERIENCE These statistics give us a sense of the people who would have filled the ground floor rooms of St James’s Palace while the delegates parleyed in the rooms above at the first two sessions and who were crammed into the limited space available at the House of Lords for the final session. Adding to the quantitative data above is difficult, not least because of the conditions under which these staff did their work. While these conditions were not formalised, there was a presumption that the committees worked in secret. For instance, on 24 November 1930 the British Indian delegate B. V. Jadhav wrote to Benn asking to be allowed to watch the proceedings of the Federal Relations Committee. He assured Benn that he was not committed to an English or Indian newspaper and that he would ‘be prepared to be bound to secrecy as any member of the committee’.40 This secrecy applied to all members of committee, delegate or not. One incident shows this in action and also that the lower-ranked staff did, very occasionally, enter informal records themselves. It related to the private meetings that Gandhi had been overseeing after the Minority Committee adjourned its work in October 1931. Benthall attended the meetings as an observer and sent back, on 15 October 1931, an account of one meeting to P. H. Brown at the Bengal Chamber of Commerce: The meetings were supposed to be in the strictest confidence but after we had gone along for two days, the meeting decided there had been

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leakage and so all the Secretaries, etc, were thrown out of the room. I went with them, but was called back! One of the Secretaries, in departing, exclaimed it was not the Secretaries but the Delegates who were broadcasting the information. This was quite true, as it transpired that [G. D.] Birla had telegraphed out a full account, including the names of all those who voted on various measures. Most of the others had done the same!41

Secretary here (capitalised) would refer to a delegation secretary rather than a stenographer, but this was still an example of a junior staff member striking back. But what of the ‘etc.’ who were also in these committees, and throughout the conference? Another trace they leave in the archive is the recognition of their labour, some of which add detail to the listings above. On 20 January 1931, the day after the first session concluded, Carter sent a letter of thanks to his staff suggesting that ‘the complete success achieved could only have been produced by the most ungrudging and efficient of services. I have heard from all quarters among the delegates a chorus of praise for the work of the recording, duplicating and distributing staff.’42 The letter was addressed to Mr Collins, Miss Williams, Mr Chapman. Though not present in the listing for the third conference session above, for the first session Miss E. M. Williams was listed as the supervisor of women staff. F. S. Collins was still one of the senior staff at the final session and was described in a later newspaper article praising the secretarial duties at the conference as having long experience in reporting of national and international conferences.43 Mr Chapman was the superintendent of messengers, attending all seven weeks of the third session and clocking the highest number of hours. On 27 January 1931 Benn wrote to Carter thanking him and his staff for their tireless energy and willingness to help, without which the conference could not have carried on. The prime minister had asked for his thanks to be passed on regarding the ‘smooth working of the machine’: From all and sundry I have heard nothing but admiration for the way in which everything was done, and I should be much obliged if you would use any means you may have of conveying our thanks and congratulations to your staff, and especially those who are not in the lime-light but did so much of the heavy work behind the scenes.44

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Such thanks followed on for all three conference sessions. Carter wrote to Williams, Collins and Chapman again on 1 December 1931, the last day of the second conference session, with a hint of the depressed attitude following the failed attempt to answer the minorities question: ‘Whatever may be the final results which may flow from the Conf, you have played your part in it splendidly.’45 While he wished he could grant them a pleasant rest after their ‘heroic labours’, he acknowledged that their work was not done. After the second session the conference staff rolled over straight into the Burma RTC, which ran at St James’s Palace until 12 January 1932, more than four months since the Federal Structure Committee of the Indian RTC had first met on 7 September. Lord Peel, who had chaired the Burma RTC, wrote to all staff once their work had concluded. While the ‘exceptionally long hours’ of the Indian RTC had not been required, the staff had still made a vital contribution: Their part is played behind the scenes; but it is on their unseen labour in keeping the machine working smoothly and rapidly that the success of the Conference largely depends. As Chairman I cannot speak too highly of the rapidity and accuracy with which the immense volume of clerical work has been dealt with and the distribution of documents carried out.46

Likewise, on Christmas Eve 1932, the final day of the third conference session, Carter wrote to all staff, expressing admiration for his secretariat in maintaining the high standards of the last two conference sessions at a difficult time of year: ‘I should more especially like to thank everyone for the cheerful way in which private Christmas arrangements have been subordinated to the needs of the Conference, at what must have been very considerable inconvenience.’47 Beyond thanks the staff were also rewarded, although the rewards carried traces of the subaltern nature of the diplomatic staff. We know of a series of rewards due to the self-archiving of Ruth Hocking, who deposited her conference memorabilia at the British Library.48 She is described as a clerical officer at the India Office (positioned at the top of the senior shorthand typists in Table 5.2) and the collection includes the letters of thanks cited above and one special reward in particular. The Aga Khan wrote to her personally expressing his thanks in October 1934, during the joint committee work which followed the RTC. He informed her that one

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of his staff would be sending on tickets for a box seating six people at a musical review of comedy (not the opera or theatre, to which the delegates themselves were invited by the social secretaries; see Chapter 7). Hocking also archived correspondence regarding meals of thanks which were put on for junior staff. One took place on 30 January 1931, after the end of the first session, at Craig’s Court Restaurant at Whitehall, with toasts made and responded to by figures still prominent at the final session including Ford, Collins and Chapman. The tailored and comedic menu represented the relief that the conference was over, and perhaps the wary apprehension of the future proposed conference session. The dinner courses were labelled from RTC1 (soup) to RTC5 (coffee), with various other round table puns for good measure (RTChoke soup, fruit salad and scream for dessert). Skirting closer to one of the main sticking points of the second session than official staff would have dared, the menu concluded with the following: ‘During the evening entertainment will be provided for and by members of the Depressed Classes. Those of the company who are not depressed before the entertainment will certainly be so afterwards.’ For the second session the conference secretaries, typists and other staff were invited to a Quaker social event at the Westminster Friends Meeting House, at 52 St Martin’s Lane, on 16 October.49 There is no trace of how many workers accepted, but on 30 November Collins received a letter from the British Indian delegation secretarial assistant Mr M. Jan indicating that the British Indian delegates wished to organise a dinner, as the second session of the conference drew to a close, for the clerical, typing and duplicating staff of the secretariat-general. The dinner took place on Monday, 7 December, at Florence Restaurant in Soho’s Rupert Street, a short walk from St James’s Palace (see Figure 9.1). A seating plan was circulated a few days before, as was a request that members arrive ahead of the dining time of 6:30 p.m. so that a photograph could be taken of the assembled company. While this photo is not preserved in the Hocking collection, a separate photo was later submitted by Mr S. J. McNally to the British Library described as a portrait of the RTC Secretariat (Figure 5.4). A note listed most of the sitters, which included all the typist and senior staff from Table 5.2, with an additional thirteen staff, two of which were men from the India Office identifiable from other documents. The list was composed by McNally in 1971 with various of the British staff, and all of the three Indian staff, unidentified (it is likely that two of the three unnamed Indian men are Mr Jan and Mr Kaul, members of the British Indian secretariat who had helped organise the Soho dinner).

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FIGURE 5.4  Portrait of members of the secretariat at the Indian RTC Source: ‘Portrait of Members of the Secretariat at the Indian Round Table Conference’, © British Library Board (Photo/386(1)). Notes: * indicates staff recorded in Table 5.2. Back row (left to right): W. H. Ford*; F. S. Collins*, a member of the Cabinet Office; A.  W.  Dunton; A. H. Joyce; R. Crook; J. Gordon*; J. W. Nicholson; L. S. Taylor*; [un-identified man]; H. N. Taylor; [un-identified man]. Middle row (left to right): Miss M. W. Bailey*; Miss J. L. Lucking*; Miss Webber; [un-identified woman]; Miss R. Hocking*; Miss K. G. Procktor; Miss Staples; Miss M. G. Nunn; [two un-identified women]; Miss Ralph; Miss F. McDougall*. Front row (left to right): Miss E. Winter; Miss Bassett [X]; Miss W. M. White*; [member of Indian Delegation?]; Miss M. S. R. Byrne; [member of Indian Delegation?]; Miss E. M. Williams; [member of Indian Delegation?]; Miss Knight*; [two un-identified women].

Lower-ranked Indian staff were present in London but are harder still to trace in the archive. Many of these were brought over to assist the princes but rarely feature directly. In the aforementioned published list of the Maharaja of Bikaner’s travelling staff, the senior staff were given titles and full names, the two stenographers were given their full names

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(Mr M. U. Menon and Mr P. S. Menon), while three ‘personal attendants’ were simply listed as Asu, Gordhan and Bhanu.50 The flamboyant and controversial Maharaja of Alwar had his extensive retinue of staff commented upon during his return back to India after the first conference (Legg 2020c). This was after he had celebrated the twenty-eighth year of his reign with an elaborate banquet on 17 December 1930 (see Chapter 8). But the newspapers also reported upon the ‘Maharaja’s Servants’ Party’ which had followed: No one was left out. Everyone, from his immediate right hand to the humblest servant with him, was invited to the dinner. The Maharaja himself sat between his tailor boy and his boot boy. After dinner he took them all in a charabanc to a picture theatre, and there, too, he sat among them instead of in a box.51

This was far from Alwar’s tyrannical reputation as a caste-conscious ruler with a mean sadistic streak (see Chapter 8). The staff members do, of course, remain silent. Gandhi himself probably had the most famous and vocal Indian staff. Mahadev Desai was his constant companion and secretary, regularly commented upon in the press and making his thoughts known to correspondents in India (as with his scathing letters to Nehru). But just as Gandhi was criticised for his ineffectiveness at the conference, so were his staff. The Begum Shah Nawaz (1971, 128) later blamed Congress for not sending Gandhi to London with an effective secretariat, including advisors on constitutional law and statecraft. She recounted Sarojini Naidu’s frustration at his use of ambiguous phrases and lofty concepts during detailed constitutional negotiation (see Chapter 9). Naidu had also despaired at the general organisation of his life in London, writing home to her children on 23 September 1931 acknowledging that enthusiasm for Gandhi continued to grow: But on the whole things have not been arranged to get the maximum amount of benefit out of the visit…. I am driven silly by cranks and pseudo-saints and ineffectual angels all of whom try and fail to organise things well on his behalf…. However, the balance will be on the side of good though what the conference is going to achieve I cannot say.… (Paranjape 2010, 248)

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This was a frustration shared by Naidu’s colleague and fellow delegates Dr S. K. Datta who wrote on 6 October 1931 to Lord Lothian that Gandhi was hampered by poor staff who did not understand how to utilise the time of public men in Britain.52 Datta and his wife had to take over the office at 88 Knightsbridge to order the chaos that developed under the pressure of a constant stream of visitors, while Muriel Lester in Bow assigned the role of doorkeeper to a resident miner from Durham in an attempt to protect Kingsley Hall from the constant callers (Lester 1932, 70). This was a role fulfilled by policemen at St James’s but which Lester, Naidu, Desai and others had to organise for Gandhi’s headquarters beyond the palace. What this chapter has shown is that the delegates, who dominated the commentaries at the time and the academic writing ever since, were just one of the many groupings of people who assembled at the Palaces of St James and Westminster to bring the RTC to life. Many of these figures had direct and traceable political impacts, such as Hailey’s manoeuvrings, Stopford’s interviews or Coatman’s press briefings. Less direct but still tangible linkages can clearly be made between the labour of subaltern diplomatic staff and the functioning of the conference. The ability to adapt to disruptions and changes of tack saved the conference method from collapse several times. This attested to the durability of the method, the work of the elite and subaltern staff, but also to the efficiency with which the conference locations were run. We turn to this third element of the conference infrastructure in the following chapter.

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6 THE SPEECH FACTORY PALACE MATERIALS AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

Having gotten to Britain, the delegates, advisors and secretaries set to their conference work. The following chapters will make it clear how much the conference depended upon the spaces and capabilities of London as a national and imperial capital. This chapter will focus on the conference’s direct infrastructure. It opens by considering the formal heart of the conference, St James’s Palace. Rather than take this site for granted, it will be shown to have been a composite of buildings, material infrastructures and objects (tables, but also toilets). As a working space it will be explored as an assemblage of architecture, furniture and office stationery but also of texts that thoroughly connected the palace to London and to the world. The relational construction of the conference palace was further enhanced by the role of communication infrastructures which turned it into a global site of imperial projection via the press, photography, telegrams, radio broadcasts and filming for national and global cinema screens. As such, while one form of conference mobility involved getting people to London and getting their messages out to the world, another facilitated the movement of people, objects and representations into, around and out of a Tudor palace in the district of St James’s (Figure 6.1).

THE PALACE St James’s Palace was constructed in the 1530s for Henry VIII and figured in pivotal moments in British royal history (K. Scott 2010). In 1558 Mary Tudor signed the treaty there that surrendered Calais to the French; in 1588

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FIGURE 6.1  St James’s Palace Source: ‘Where India’s Destiny Will Be Discussed’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 2 November 1930, © British Library Board (OP 1346).

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Elizabeth I set out from St James’s to address her troops at Tilbury in the face of the Spanish Armada; while every monarch used it as a residence between the Palace of Whitehall fire of 1698 and Queen Victoria’s formal move to Buckingham Palace in 1837. From this time on, St James’s was used as an official residence for some royals, including the Prince of Wales. But it was also an increasingly open royal palace, being used for ceremonials and public audiences and having rooms made available for the meetings of charitable organisations in the twentieth century. In 1912 it hosted its first conference, which was organised by the Foreign Office concerning the end of conflict between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Balkan States (K. Scott 2010). The next major diplomatic meeting was the Naval Conference which took place between 21 January and 22 April 1930, which secured international commitments to limit the construction of naval vessels and established a template for some of the workings of the Round Table Conference (RTC). On 25 June 1930 Benn wrote to George Lansbury, first commissioner of works, stressing the need for an RTC venue that was ‘commensurate in dignity to its importance’, as St James’s had proven for the Naval Conference.1 The request was passed on to Buckingham Palace on 30 June by the Earl of Cromer, lord chamberlain of the household, who emphasised that no other such beautiful and dignified location could be conceived for this ‘all-important Conference’, with long rooms able to seat seventy–eighty delegates.2 Cromer added that the king’s sanction would help ease money out of the treasury for the palace’s maintenance and decoration. The lord chamberlain’s office comptroller coordinated works on the palace after the king’s assent was communicated on 5 July. In April 1930 Kershaw had expressed his disbelief that the conference planning had still not started in detail. Similarly, to the annoyance of the superintendent of works and the chief architect, no details of the conference requirements were passed on before the summer recess, pushing any planning back until mid-August. An Office of Works note was filed on 7 August insisting on the need for as much time as possible, especially to install any necessary sanitary fittings in the palace. The director of lands and accommodation noted on 18 August that the overflow of advisors to the delegates into the Guard Rooms would necessitate the construction of a corridor to allow access to the lavatories and to the conference secretaries, in the furniture store, while temporary toilets erected in the Engine Court and the caterers accommodation would be erected.3 Although details

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by early September were described as meagre, the director of lands and accommodation costed preparations at £2,800 [£128,199] from estimates of £500 by the chief architect, £800 by the chief engineer and £1,500 by the Office of Supplies, plus 11 per cent establishment expenses. Through the following month a series of new protocols was established as the palace was fitted out with the modern infrastructures which a major conference (in autumn) demanded. A special electricity supply was provided for electric fires that would keep the palace warm (Legg 2020b). The lord chamberlain’s permission was requested for delegates’ cars to be parked in the stable yard, outside his office. Mr Abani Roy was granted permission to make sketches of the conference rooms in advance of producing a sanctioned artistic depiction of the delegates in action. Conference staff were accommodated on the ground floor, with a separate entrance, in Engine Court, to those for delegates, in Ambassador’s Court, and to the press and general entrance in Friary Court. This doorway led directly to the cloakroom, the rooms for the press and information officers, telephone booths and a post office (see Figure 6.2). These facilities were placed in the Corridor Room where, a later correspondent would note, journalists would be overlooked by various portraits, including that of the funeral of General Gordon at Khartoum, with Lord Kitchener in the foreground.4 Rooms for typists and Roneo mimeograph duplicating machines were set by the staff entrance, with a separate staircase connecting them to the first-floor offices of the RTC secretary-general above. Housed upstairs in the Boudoir, or King’s Retiring Room, the secretary-general had direct access to space set aside for official reporters and the conference secretaries, in the Council Chamber (see Figure 6.3). This led to committee spaces in the Throne Room or Drawing Room, which themselves led to the Queen Anne’s Drawing Room, where the round table itself sat. Off these rooms, between Friary and Engine Courts, was the smaller committee space of the Tapestry Room, the Armoury for press interviews and the Picture Gallery for the Indian states delegates and their secretaries. As with printed guides to the delegates and their seating at public and private events, the three delegate groupings were provided separate spaces.5 Between the Friary and Colour Courts, the British delegation could retire to the Guard Room, close to the clerks’ room in the furniture store. The British Indian delegation had two smaller retiring rooms overlooking Ambassador’s Court, the princes had the large Picture

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FIGURE 6.2  Ground floor of St James’s Palace Source: BIK/pad 373/serial 7647. Reproduced with the permission of the Maharaja Ganga Singhji Trust.

Gallery to themselves, while all delegates had access to refreshments served in the Ambassador’s Banquet Room.6 The spatial configuration of the palace was significant. It had enough smaller rooms to accommodate both the formal and informal work of the conference, to house both the elite and secretarial conference workers, and a room big enough to house the round table itself. But the palace was also chosen for what Benn had called its dignity and importance, referring to its history, its architecture (it had been extended and modified by Sir Christopher Wren in the 1680s) and its interior design (artefacts, artworks and William Morris decorations).

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FIGURE 6.3  First floor of St James’s Palace Source: BIK/pad 373/serial 7647. Reproduced with the permission of the Maharaja Ganga Singhji Trust.

A week before the RTC opened, the Illustrated Weekly of India had been granted a tour of the conference preparations and published a detailed account of the accumulative affect of the 400-year-old palace. The reporter was Harold B. Pereira, later author of an exploration of medieval iconography, The Colour of Chivalry (Pereira 1950), and the illustrator for H. Stanford London’s (1956) iconographic primer Royal Beasts. Pereira had a fine eye for the palace as a multi-sensory space, commenting upon the Morris-decorated, black and gold dado of the Armoury Room (see Figure 6.3), over which were hung an ‘amazing array’ from Britain’s military past: ‘Spears, knives, swords, daggers,

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battle-axes and halberds mingle with breast-plates and morions in well arranged patterns; and all of a shiny brightness that would delight the critical eye of the most exacting Sergeant Major.’ 7 The Armoury Room led into the Tapestry Room, adorned with textiles woven in the time of Charles I, framing the terrace from which the proclamations of the death and ascension of British sovereigns were made. The Queen Anne’s Room brightly lit the round table, overlooked by portraits of Nelson, other military personnel and Sir Peter Lely’s (c. 1663–1665) portrait of Catherine of Braganza. In both the Queen Anne and Throne Rooms the ornamentation, in cream and gold, was of carved oak, not plaster: Papier-mache and anaglypta are so common nowadays that it comes as a shock when one is confronted with the real thing. The really magnificent drops on the two sides of the mantel are high relief carving dating back to Charles I, as do the tables, windows and even to the firebacks.8

The Picture Gallery, for the Indian princes, was composed of modern oak and included a copy of Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII. More relevant to the conference was Val Prinsep’s portrait of the 1877 Delhi Durbar at which the viceroy proclaimed Queen Victoria empress of India. The picture is a heraldic extravaganza, reflecting the ornamentalism (Cannadine 2002) through which the British attempted to reconcile imperial and princely hierarchies, which appealed to Pereira’s art historical interests. But the picture was of especial interest because it depicted one of the conference delegates. The 67-year-old Gaekwar of Baroda had assumed his title two years before the durbar and was depicted as a 13-year-old maharaja at the audience. As a host venue St James’s was an awe-inspiring, if not unproblematic space. For those who had come to argue for increased Indian self-government, even independence, the palace was packed with commemorations of Britain’s bloody military conquests and its cultural subjugation of Indian rulers. Given this, what was most remarkable for Pereira was that the palace achieved an interpersonal affective warmth, or ‘atmosphere’ (Legg 2020b), that would attune the delegates to this foreign clime: There is a genuine atmosphere of ‘home’ about the Palace which ones finds lacking in Windsor or Hampton Court. Perhaps it is the Prince of

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Wales’ residence in the building that makes it more homelike but there certainly is a feeling of cheeriness and comfort and disrestraint that will make the delegates feel quite at home in St. James’s.9

TABLES AND MATERIALS Of all the palace infrastructure there was one piece that attracted more attention, and comment, than all others: the round table itself. Most commentators quickly alighted on the fact that it was oval, not round. The ‘round table’ was usually metaphorical, and in the early days Benn himself did not envisage the actual table being round. Rather, he suggested to Lansbury on 24 June 1930 that the table would be square, on the lines of the layout of the Naval Conference delegates in the Queen Anne’s Room, with seating inside the square should more space be needed.10 Over the summer it became apparent that the large number of delegates would necessitate a flexible design, while the roundness of the table started to become as material as metaphorical. An article from 2 November 1930 (entitled ‘The Oval Table Conference’) had suggested that, given the large nature of the conference, the table could have been done away with ‘as in the manner of the Geneva conferences.… But the words “Round Table” have come to be so closely associated with this conference that the powers that be have had a special table made. Round? No, oval.’11 Such a table must have taxed the ingenuity of those responsible for mere details, the article concluded. A note for the government Works Department from 23 October detailed this new piece of conference furniture (see Figure 6.4).12 The ‘special table’ was of a mahogany ring design with an open centre within which delegates could be seated. In total it was 50 feet (15.24 metres) long by 20 feet (6 metres) wide (the Queen Anne’s Room was roughly 60 by 25 feet). It was ‘modern in design’ and was constructed on a 6-foot (1.8 metres) ‘unit’ basis, composed of eight circular segments and ten rectangular segments. This meant that it could be used for later conferences, congresses and large committees, being adapted into circular, rectangular or horseshoe shapes. Brass fittings connected the units under the table top, and the legs were set back so as to not obstruct delegates when they were seated. Pereira also detailed the circumference of the table (140 feet, or 42.6 metres) and the half-width table with rounded ends for the middle of the oval that would be

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Source: ‘Round Table Conference – 1930’, © British Library Board (OIOC Photo 784/1(83)).

FIGURE 6.4  Attendees around the Round Table

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considered part of the round table.13 Even the number of table legs (seventytwo), across the eighteen sections, was noted.14 Benn was so impressed by the table, and the part it had played in British and Indian history, that he asked Lansbury, on 23 December, whether the Office of Works had plans to dispose of the table sections, as ‘I should very much like to be a bidder for a bit of this interesting furniture’.15 Lansbury wrote the following day to D. T. Monteath in the India Office, noting that the table would technically be the property of the India Office, having paid for the conference, but acknowledging a tacit understanding that the Office of Works would purchase the table, given how useful it could be. It was agreed to let the matter rest until the conference sessions were concluded. After the end of the first sessions, Benn wrote to Lansbury, on 4 February 1931, thanking him and his staff for their cooperation: I can certainly say from personal experience, which I know was shared by all the Delegates, that we were made most comfortable from the very start, while the Table itself, round which our discussions took place, has already found its place in the history of this country and of India.16

The third session of the RTC took place without a round table, lacking the full conference method of the first two sessions and many of its delegates. It also took place in the House of Lords in another palace, that of Westminster. The allocated rooms had to be rigged up to accommodate the needs of modern conferencing as best they could, and the re-location has led to a detailed inventory of the changes required. The extremely quotidian nature of the listings takes us down to the micro-management of the conference spaces and hints at the voluminously banal materiality upon which the RTC depended (Dittmer 2017). As will be covered in detail below for St James’s, this involved connecting communications technologies. Telephone lines were installed, including a direct connection for Carter to the India Office, and between various internal rooms allowing committee meetings to communicate with staff.17 Franking stamps were acquisitioned to allow post to be sent without delay, either via the House of Commons Post Office or that at Leicester Square for all-night facilities. There were also innumerable props upon which the conference work relied but which the House or Lords rooms would be lacking. On 10 October 1932 the RTC Secretariat requested the following:

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Spare tables for the typists to enable collating of documents. 60 pigeonholes for the distribution room. Bells for the Secretary-General’s, distribution and Social Secretary’s room to summon messengers. Clocks on committee tables for Chairmen. Gavels and blocks for Chairmen. Ash trays (around 50). Coat-racks (70). Carpet, from delegates’ entrance to committee rooms. Gas rings in the delegates’ tea room and in the staff quarters. Portable washstands where no washing facilities available in offices. Door notices and direction notices. A bookcase for the Secretary-General and steel press cupboards.18

Taking place in a Whitehall property the costs of the third session also had to be accounted for. On 4 January 1933 the Engineering Division of the Houses of Parliament billed the India Office for the consumption of electricity (1,346 units) and gas (2,500 cubic feet) consumed. This tells us relatively little about the conference working, other than that the weekly usage increased as the work reached its (limited) crescendo in midDecember. Another set of accounting tabulation, however, gives us yet more detail of the material churning of the conference machinery. On 20 October 1932 the chief clerk of the conference, F. S. Collins, wrote to His Majesty’s Stationery Office submitting demand forms for the anticipated stationery needs of the conference, with bills to be sent to the India Office (code 98/13/0). On 4 January unused stationery supplies were returned, with a request that these ‘salvage’ stationery goods be credited to account. Comparing the two spreadsheets allows us to see exactly what materials were used by the transplanted speech factory (Table 6.1). As with the previous chapter, tracing subaltern diplomatic labour requires some quantitative sifting. What this chapter has made clear is that the evidence we have of subaltern labour (of names, and of hours worked) is itself a material trace of that labour (the typing, the copying, the stapling, the filing). All 3,500 ‘India tags’ used testify to the mundane but vital clerical work that made St James’s Palace function as a conference venue. These materials allowed delegates and staff to communicate with themselves, but also with the city and the imperial and international networks in which the conference was situated.

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TABLE 6.1  Stationery usage at the third session

Number issued

Number returned

Number used

5,000

1,500

Description

Specifications

3,500

India tags

1 inch

5,000

1,750

3,250

sheets thin type no. 2

13 x 8

3,000

200

2,800

sheets carbons

13 x 8

5,000

2,500

2,500

sheets duplicating semi-absorbent

9½ x 7½

5,000

3,000

2,000

sheets duplicating semi-absorbent

4⅜ x 5⅝

5,000

3,000

2,000

India tags

2 inches

2,000

200

1,800

sheets blotting demi-white

2,600

1,200

1,400

sheets carbons

9½ x 7½

3,000

2,000

1,000

India tags

3 inches

1,000

250

750

sheets thick type no. 1

9½ x 7½

1,000

500

500

sheets thin type no. 2

9½ x 7½

500

170

330

pencils

HB

250

100

150

envelopes cartridge

16 x 12

144

5

139

packets tape

144

6

138

packets tape

200

100

100

file covers

13½ x 9

120

40

80

stencils Ellam B.45 Waxless

brief

100

30

70

memo pads

9½ x 7½

140

80

60

pencils

Royal Sovereign

70

10

60

pencils

blue

70

10

60

pencils

red

100

50

50

millboards

13½ x 9

50

1

49

packets sealing wax

48

2

46

stylus plates

60

23

37

boxes staples for wire staples presses

foolscap

36

7

29

bottles developine

36

8

28

bottles correctine

20

5

15

tubes Ellams ink

B.19

24

11

13

shorthand notebooks

no. 9 (continued)

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TABLE 6.1  (continued )

Number issued

Number returned

Number used

Description

Specifications no. 5

24

13

11

shorthand notebooks

50

40

10

packet pins

9

2

7

desk knives

60

54

6

inkstands

12

8

4

pairs scissors

12

8

4

water bottles and brushes

12

8

4

punches

6

2

4

bottles gum

6

2

4

reels adhesive brown paper tape

44

41

3

glass trays

6

5

1

pin cushions

3

2

1

typewriter cleaning brushes

no. 5

Source: BL/IOR/Q/RTC/62.

COMMUNICATIONS The RTC depended upon its material infrastructures. They satisfied basic needs, such as shelter, heating and sanitation, and provided the spaces within which, and the objects upon which, work could be done. These materials were also cultural and were saturated with meaning, from the dense historical significations attached to the palace, to the symbolic chains of meaning slung from every painting, cornice and gently rounded table end. These materials were conveyors of meaning. The conference also relied, however, upon a different set of conveyors, which connected the palace to the outside world and to outside bodies of knowledge. These conveyors were also material, taking the form of notebooks, mimeographed minutes and published proceedings; newspaper articles and photographs; telegrams, loudspeakers, radio antenna and gramophone records; and celluloid film projected into movie halls across the world. These were the product of the nineteenth-century revolution

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in communications which had allowed the British Empire to curtail the ‘tyranny of distance’ (Kaul 2006, 4) between its possessions and forge itself into a media as well as an imperial superpower. Such materials constituted the infrastructures of communication which connected the conference and the outside world, also allowing information to flow around the conference itself. Texts, images (still or moving) and sounds constituted and communicated the conference.

TEXTS The conference was inherently textual. Its ultimate object was to produce a text, the next Government of India Act, which would provide the constitutional basis for a new India. To reach this end object the conference would produce millions of words of text, formally and informally. But it was also preconditioned by texts that would provide the basis for its discussions. This was true in the more abstract, social constructionist sense of discourse; terms like dyarchy, dominion, federation and communalism were freighted with generations of meaning and contestation. But it was also true in the more material sense of books and reports. On 9 September 1930 Carter received a telegram from Lewis of the Reforms Office in Delhi regarding the decision that any documents necessary for the British Indian secretariat at the conference would be shipped out from India.19 Lewis asked that the British Indian delegate secretary Sir Geoffrey Corbett, who was already in London working at the Imperial Conference, be asked to supply a list of required texts. On 18 September Corbett replied, via Carter, that Lewis was in the best position to decide and made no special requests. Carter suggested that copies of Indian legislation, census materials and the Nehru Report would be of use. Two days later Rs 4,000 [£13,735] was made available for the purchase of books and other items for the London conference, and the relevant orders were placed. The government publications branch in Calcutta confirmed on 26 September that it had forwarded two boxes by passenger train to Bombay to catch the RMS Viceroy of India, departing on 4 October (also carrying Sapru, Moonje, Jinnah, Ambedkar and others). The boxes contained 100 copies of Government of India Acts, their corrections and copies of provincial electoral laws. B. D. Taraporevala Sons & Co in Bombay had, however, replied saying that the Nehru Report was out of print.

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On 4 November Benn telegrammed the Reforms Office, having consulted English copyright law and its relation to India.20 It was clear that reproducing and circulating the Nehru Report in London would infringe the copyright of the joint authors of the report, all of whose consent would be required. A note in the Home Department two days later felt it unlikely that the Congress leaders would press charges for unauthorised reproduction but that infringement of copyright should be avoided. On 6 November Herbert Emerson, the home secretary, recommended that Benn not place himself in the position of being sued by the All India Congress Committee, not least because it had been declared an unlawful association as a result of the civil disobedience movement and most of its authors were in jail. Despite this, the week before the conference opened the Daily Telegraph reported that ‘certainly there is a mass of data available as the bases of discussion’.21 The Simon Report and the forthcoming Government of India’s despatch were anticipated as the texts most likely to guide discussion, though the joint British Indian and princely states’ commitment to federation dislodged these reports from the conference’s attention, for the time being. As such, rather than discussing set texts, the RTC became a producer and disseminator of written words. It auto-transcribed itself into a new meta-text, the entrails of which audiences around the world would read, scrutinise and divine in an attempt to foresee India’s constitutional future. This was textual production at an industrial scale; a factory of constitutional fathoming. The metaphor recurred in conference commentaries. The Manchester Guardian mused upon the ‘Large-Scale Indian Oratory’ at the second session, the daily recording of speeches being the biggest job in government reporting outside of parliament.22 Every day the ‘speech factory’ at St James’s Palace turned out about 60,000 words, the same as an average novel. The dedicated clerical staff took down the speeches by shorthand, while ‘typing dictatees’ produced reports which were shared with reporters before copies were made by the Roneo process to be shared with delegates that evening for correction, then lodged with the proceedings. This process would continue for three months and would eventually result in published volumes, with the first session’s two ‘blue-book’ proceedings of 600–700 pages (India Office 1931a, 1931b) containing an ‘astronomical’ number of words, certainly over a million, the Manchester Guardian concluded. Either this article or its source was picked up by the Illustrated Weekly of India, which

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reported five weeks later that the speech factory was turning out a novel’s worth of words a day, but that all these words were merely ‘marking time’ and making little progress.23 Even for the scaled-down third session, ‘mountains of typescript’ were being produced by clerical staff, working twelve-to-fourteen-hour days.24 The route from speech to published text was not a direct one. Various iterations of the transcribed speeches were produced but rarely archived, although some do survive. Dr Moonje retained the stenographic notes of the Minorities Committee meeting from 28 September 1931. They opened with MacDonald as chair: ‘My friends, those of you who sat with me earlier in the year will remember that one of my great prejudices is to begin punctually, so that as soon as the time comes for our opening I shall begin the business.’25 This paragraph was excised from the published report (India Office 1932b, 1334), possibly at MacDonald’s request. Similarly, the official minutes end with MacDonald accepting the request for the committee to adjourn so that members could informally attempt to make progress in the minorities question (India Office 1932b, 1340). The stenographic notes, however, have MacDonald encouraging Dr Ambedkar to facilitate the meetings, followed by: DR. AMBEDKAR: The trouble is that there are people here who think they ought to be in sole charge of the whole affair (Cries of dissent). THE CHAIRMAN: Dr. Ambedkar is perfectly right; there is one man who thinks he is charge of the whole affair, and that is myself (Laughter).26

The responses of committee members also seem to have been omitted elsewhere. Moonje retained the stenographic notes of the final plenary of the second session on 1 December 1931. They record the plenary members twice responding with ‘(Applause)’ to MacDonald confirming his government’s commitment to the policy established at the first conference session and to two further announcements, all of which were omitted from the published record (India Office 1932a, 415–417).27 Elsewhere ‘loud applause’ and ‘laughter’ were also omitted. The turnaround for delegates to correct the minutes seems to have been tight. On 8 October conference secretaries Deshmukh and Sladen sent sixty-three pages of stenographic notes to Moonje from that day’s meeting,

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requesting any corrections be submitted within four days.28 He retained a copy of the corrections he made on the notes of his plenary address on 31 November, where the typed notes hint at some of the frenetic labour taking place in the speech factory.29 The text was dotted with strikethroughs, overwrites and erased sentences, wherein Moonje got to correct several spellings (‘pleanery’, ‘exageration’, ‘contage-ous’, ‘concived’) and correct some errors of fact. While these errors were largely innocuous, others threatened major disruption. One transcription mistake nearly derailed the conference before it had begun. On 11 November 1930 Stopford wrote to his uncle that he had been in a meeting with the British Liberal delegate Lord Reading that morning when fellow Liberal and Welsh ex-prime minister Lloyd George came in and unleashed his ‘Celtic fire’ regarding MacDonald’s use of the term ‘Dominion Self-Government’ in a speech from the night before.30 The Liberals were dead-set against any commitment to Dominion status, but Stopford managed to delay them taking action long enough to discover that the prime minister hadn’t used the word dominion, which had been misreported in the press, referring only to freedom in self-government. Three weeks later the prime minister agreed to hold private meetings with some of the leading princes to discuss the concept of the paramountcy of the British in India in any future federation. The meeting took place in MacDonald’s private rooms at the House of Commons on 3 December and confidential notes were taken, typed up and later circulated to the princes, with an agreement that no public announcement of the meetings would be made.31 Further meetings took place on 8 and 9 December with British delegation secretary Patrick in attendance, who produced a record of the conversations. After speaking to Patrick on 9 December, the Maharaja of Bikaner had begun drafting a letter to Benn but had not been able to finish it until having departed Marseilles on the SS Viceroy of India on 23 January. Bikaner felt that parts of the proceedings concerning him had been ‘so improperly worded as to have caused me, not only justifiable annoyance, but a personal sense of grievance’.32 Raising the prospect through its dismissal, Bikaner reassured Benn that he had no desire to ‘make any heavy weather of this or to press for an apologies [sic] for any such mis-statements’ but that in the name of ‘accuracy and impartiality of records of this character’ he was entitled to objectionable and obviously incorrect words (which were not listed) being corrected. On 19 February Benn replied, having spoken to Patrick, who had apologised in person to

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Bikaner for any ‘unintentional discourtesy’ in the language of the notes.33 He had also explained that the notes were ‘hastily compiled for office purposes only from memory of what passed at the meetings’ and came to be circulated in un-revised form at the urgent request of Colonial Haksar, who had also attended the final meeting. There had been no time to revise the office notes before circulation, but corrected versions had been sent to the viceroy to share with all involved. Various texts recording the RTC proceedings kept Indian opinion informed. The press carried constant reports, while delegates and advisors sent letters and telegrams back to India. But after the conference sessions concluded the question of the Indian publication of the formal minutes and proceedings had to be settled. The most immediate precedent was the Simon Report, the result of the touring statutory commission which had been met with boycotts and protests throughout India. Coatman, who served as the British Liberal delegation secretary at the RTC, had been Viceroy Irwin’s director of public information at the time and on 19 March 1930 had made some suggestions for popularising the Simon Report to ‘even the most ignorant villager’ in anticipation of the RTC, who would be aware of the significance of the report.34 Coatman suggested an astonishing range of means by which the common Indian subject could be reached. These included dropping pamphlets from aeroplanes, a ‘little touch of the dramatic’ that would attract broader attention; the inclusion of cartoons that would be ‘immediately comprehensible even to the most ignorant’, with provincial variations that would distinguish between a ‘quick-witted Madrasee’ and a Sikh; the use of photographs of the king and queen, Lord and Lady Irwin and local notables; and the use of local professionals to deliver half-hour talks to crowds, who could be attracted by the playing of music, whether live or by gramophone, the showing of magic lantern slides, wrestling matches or athletic contests. Dunnett penned a Reforms Office note on 24 March that ripped the proposals to shreds. The widespread ‘(and sometimes spectacular)’ dissemination of pamphlets ‘to even the most unlettered’ was misconceived as the report was not issued by the Indian government, nor was it certain that it would even be discussed at the RTC.35 Instead, traditional methods of dissemination would be used. It was anticipated that copies of the report would leave Marseilles on 3 May, arriving in Simla by 19 May which would allow publication in India by the 30 May. Regarding suggestions that the report be translated into vernacular languages the government refused

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to pay for any work required, but also hoped to control the quality of any privately organised translations.36 On the penultimate day of the first conference session Benn telegrammed the Indian government outlining plans for publishing the proceedings. Two ‘blue books’ would be produced, based on white papers submitted to parliament. The first would cover the plenary sessions, proceedings of committee of the whole conference, reports of sub-committees and other resolutions (India Office 1931a). The second would cover proceedings of the sub-committees (India Office 1931b). The Reforms Department estimated that it would need 4,000 copies to be printed by the government press, 3,400 of which would be for sale and 600 copies would be for official use (100 to the Associated Press, 204 to members of the Indian legislature, 50 for local governments, 43 for government departments and 203 for reserve).37 The question of translating the reports was pre-empted by debates over whether MacDonald’s plenary address on 19 January, or perhaps just his concluding statement, should be translated. On 24 January Benn had telegrammed Delhi suggesting translation and dissemination of the whole speech. The Reforms Department had consulted Bajpai who suggested contacting local governments, although he ‘pointed out that it would be very difficult to make the speech intelligible in any vernacular in India’.38 The provinces were consulted, emphasising that they would bear the cost of translation. The replies suggested that within two weeks a substantial number of translations had taken place into various vernaculars, including Tamil, Telugu, Malayalum and Kanarese in Madras; Marathi, Gujrati, Kanarese, Urdu and Sindhi in Bombay; Urdu and Hindi in the United Provinces; Urdu, Hindi and Oriya in Bihar and Orissa; Hindi and Marathi in the Central Provinces; and Burmese. In the Punjab nearly 50,000 translations in Urdu and Gurmukhi were being distributed, covering nearly all the important villages. The Assamese governor, however, suggested that literates in the province would have read the statement in English or Bengali newspapers, while ‘tribes and tea garden populations are illiterate and indifferent’. Private publishers also disseminated the conference proceedings in English. On 10 February G. A. Natesan publishers of Madras advertised its publication of conference speeches, including Irwin’s previous statements and summaries of subsequent House of Commons debates under the sub-title India’s Demand for Dominion Status.39 Two weeks later a question was posed in the Delhi Legislative Assembly asking if vernacular translations of the RTC reports would be made

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available. The government prepared a reply for the question, suggesting that the widely distributed translations of the prime minister’s plenary statement referenced the conclusions of the various sub-committees but that ‘the reports are more or less technical and no useful purpose will be served by publishing them or the debates in the House of Commons in various vernaculars in India’.40 Although the devil of the detail did, of course, lie in these technical reports, any translation would be left to private enterprise. One Urdu example was sent to Dunnett by its author, Maulvi Feroz-ud-Din, on 11 February 1931.41 A Short History of the Round Table Conference sketched out the background context to, and included summaries of, conference debates and speeches. Priced at only Re 1 the book was very cheap, and the Reforms Department considered whether it might be distributed to schools and libraries, though it was passed to Bajpai first to check on its quality. On 19 February he submitted his review. Though well written, the author was found to have laced his commentaries though the book, insisting that minorities not be placed at the mercy of majorities and that in a country where Hindus were provoking communal riots by playing music in front of mosques giving them power would be like placing a sword in the hands of a mad man. The central government declined to distribute the book. The need for reliable vernacular translations was taken up again, however, in March by conference delegate the Begum Shah Nawaz. She suggested to Dunnett in person that the second blue book, containing the sub-committee minutes, should be translated into the simple, not literary, vernacular form, and distributed at low cost.42 Dunnett had insisted this was not a central government matter but agreed to consult the provinces. A Reforms Department note from 13 March reiterated the earlier view that the technicalities of subcommittee work could not be rendered into the vernacular, and that interested parties would most likely read English. The provincial replies were mixed. The Punjab government had distributed 500 copies of an Urdu account, possibly Feroz-ud-Din’s, while the Bombay and Bengal governments had circulated translations, in the former these being unofficial translations sponsored by a Bombay merchant. Madras favoured a translation but had found one hard to supply, while the United and Central Provinces, Bihar and Orissa were not in favour. This remained the policy for the second session. The prime minister’s speech was passed to the provinces to translate, with most provinces either providing the translation to newspapers rather than publishing itself or

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settling themselves with newspapers’ own translations.43 Newspapers were obviously a vital means for communicating the official outputs of the conference in Britain and abroad, but they also had a deep impact upon the organization of St James’s Palace itself.

PRESS AND PHOTOGRAPHY The press were plugged directly in to the speech factory, with summaries of the day’s notes being shared with reporters before the mimeographed versions were sent to delegates for comment. The embedding of journalists in the palace had been carefully contemplated in advance. At the earlier Naval Conference journalists had been based in the palace and had considerable access to the delegates. In requesting the use of St James’s Palace on 30 June, however, Buckingham Palace had been assured that a much smaller installation would be required because the press would play a much smaller part.44 On 22 September 1930 H. MacGregor, information officer at the India Office, composed a confidential twelve-page outline of press arrangements (on MacGregor, India Office publicity and the RTC, see Kaul [2014]).45 Although the decision to exclude the press from almost all of the conference sessions was supposedly one of the first decisions of the free conference, MacGregor was responding to a memorandum from Carter which had made this clear nearly two months before the conference opened. His question was how to mediate the press and the private conference sittings and committees. Following existing precedent, daily press conferences within the RTC would be held. These would be between official conference publicity officers and seventy to eighty accredited press representatives. The officers would need to supervise the workings of the committees, read all relevant press reports and liaise with reporters and newspaper editors, ‘influencing them personally as well as collectively’.46 MacGregor and his assistant, A. H. Joyce, would be joined by G. F. Steward from the News Department of the Foreign Office (MacGregor suggesting that ‘Mr. Steward has a greater knowledge and experience of Press arrangements connected with State and International Conferences than any other man, and is persona grata to London journalists, both home and foreign’).47 The publicity officers would lead the press conferences, having sat in on committees themselves or received précis from committee members, coordinated by Carter as secretary-general. They would draw upon relevant published books

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loaned them by the India Office library although no news report would be attributed to these men as sources. Midday conferences were proposed, giving time to meet the British evening press deadlines and because Indian daily newspapers tended to go to press at 2 a.m., being 8 p.m. London time. This would allow time for the press conference, writing the despatches, telegraphy and processing in Indian news offices. Later, 5 p.m. news conferences could be held but special ‘clearing the lines’ would have to be organised by cable companies and the Government of India. There was also a further liaison body between the press and the conference. This was the Publicity Advisory Committee, set up by and including Benn, alongside the Liberal Indian delegate and newspaper editor C. Y. Chintamani and Indian states advisor Rushbrook Williams. The latter had served as the director of the Bureau of Public Information in India (1920–1926) before Coatman, vacating the post to become secretary to the chancellor of the Chamber of Princes (1926–1930). As such, he was ideally placed to manage the prince’s image in the press, a task he continued to pursue at the second conference session. He produced weekly bulletins, informing the princely delegates of his work on their behalf. For the week ending 9 September 1931 he wrote of his efforts to stop the princes’ interests being overshadowed by the imminent arrival of Gandhi.48 Rushbrook Williams claimed to have succeeded in his efforts to dissuade both editors and press men from regarding Gandhi as the only man in India and to have emphasised the influence the princes would wield in the Federal Structure Committee. He explained the various channels through he felt he had achieved this effect: My own output of articles, signed and unsigned, has been particularly heavy during the week; but I am inclined to believe that these articles are collectively less influential, in moulding public opinion in general and in a direction favourable to Their Highnesses, than my private talks with the many Press men who come to call upon me, or whom I meet in the various Clubs.49

When Gandhi arrived the press did, indeed, clamour for stories of him. This made the media networks even more important. Knowing the right people could grant you access to the hallowed sanctuaries of Kingsley Hall or 88 Knightsbridge where you might pick up a scoop. It also made the disparities in media infrastructure more apparent. During Gandhi’s trip to the Lancashire mills in late September 1931, American press representatives

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had followed him north. In their wake had come representatives of American cable companies, who waited for the journalists to type up their stories, and then took care of transmitting the story to London, from where it could be sent across the Atlantic. Margarita Barns bitterly reflected on the contrast to her work with the Indian press, headquartered in Blackburn, ‘most depressing of towns with its half-dead look due to the many closed mills’ (Barns 1937, 83). If life was difficult for reporters, it was even more challenging for photojournalists. The profession itself was in its infancy while the technology for mobile and discreet photography was rudimentary but playing an increasingly important role in journalism (Rudd 2017). Conference photography was both official and unofficial. In liaison with MacGregor the British press representative organisation, the Newspaper Proprietor’s Association, had established a special ‘picture bureau’ to distribute photographs of delegates to newspapers, as had taken place for the Naval Conference. Some of these were taken by selected photographers at official events, such as Central Press Photographers of 119 Fleet Street, for the opening of the first session at Westminster (one such photographer was unintentionally captured in the reflection of a reflection of a mirror above Gandhi’s head in Figure 3.2, the camera visible balanced on a stepladder).50 The influence of the press was substantial, with Stopford later recalling that when Gandhi was late for his first public appearance at the palace, Sankey had attempted to start proceedings but the photographers had ‘let out a wail’ so the proceedings had to be delayed so they could get their snap.51 Moonje noted in his diary several official requests to sit for photographers, in addition to the various photographs taken of the delegates collectively. He posed for Swaire and La Fayate Photographers, at 146 and 160 Bond Street, on 12 December 1930, while at the second conference session, on 19 October 1931, he was asked to sit for a portrait at Harrods department store and two days later at Messrs F. A. Swaine, 146 New Bond Street.52 During the first week of the second session, photographs taken of delegates by London News Agency Photos, of 46 Fleet Street, had been put on display at the palace, for purchase at £1/1 [£48] for a large mounted copy and 10 shillings and sixpence [£24] for a smaller size.53 Many such photographs have entered the official visual archive, with photographic portraits taken at the conference now forming part of the National Portrait Gallery collections, which include Walter Stoneman’s portrait of the Maharaja of Bikaner from 1930 and Bassano portraits of Madan Mohan Malaviya from November 1931.

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More ubiquitous in the press, however, were informal photographs. Alongside Moonje noting official portrait sittings, he also recorded having his photo taken at a reception hosted by the Spectator magazine at the Ritz Hotel on 10 December 1930 and after leaving a reception at Buckingham Palace on 12 January 1931 while walking down the street.54 Somewhere between the official and unofficial portrait were portraits of elite social gatherings which were usually taken with implicit permission but without control over the ‘candid camera’. This was the title given to the Graphic magazine’s social photography, most of which was taken by Erich Salomon (Rudd 2017). The photographs charted the non-official spaces in which conference work was done. If Kelen was the ultimate interwar conference artist, then Salomon was its photographer. For The Graphic he worked less at St James’s and more at conference dinners, at which delegates were learning to watch themselves. As Benn wrote to Irwin concerning the Maharaja of Alwar’s farewell banquet on 19 January 1931, ‘there was a plentiful supply of the photographic spies who come round and poke little telescopic lenses at you at dinner’.55 Benn was perhaps still smarting from an unflattering photo taken of him, puffing on a cigar, on 6 December at the Maharaja of Darbhanga’s birthday party (see Figure 8.3).

SOUND AND VISION If the palace was a factory of words and photographs, it also manufactured sounds and moving images. One question of sound regarded amplification and the ability of sonic infrastructures to work their ways into the official and unofficial spaces of conferencing (on the broader sonic politics of interwar Britain, see Mansell [2016]). Loudspeakers had been installed in Chatham House on St James’s Square in an overflow room where an extra 100 guests could listen to lectures given at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. When Gandhi spoke there on 20 October 1931, however, the loudspeakers were insufficient and many attendees walked out.56 Within St James’s Palace speakers were installed for any public sessions so that journalists lodged in the banqueting room could hear the speeches.57 A bigger question regarded the broadcasting of conference speeches. Sound and sovereignty interacted in new ways in the interwar world, as demonstrated by the broadcasting arrangements for the kingemperor, the prime minister and the Mahatma.

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New technology and ancient sovereignty produced a novel hybrid in the shape of the golden and silver ‘King’s Microphone’, which became a news object in its own right. A fortnight before the conference was opened by King George V, the press reported that he had given permission for his speech to be broadcast by all stations of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) at noon.58 This would follow a speech by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, to the League of Nations Union banquet for delegates to the Imperial Conference and the RTC, which was to be broadcast to British, Australian and American listeners. The gold and silver microphone itself was owned by the Marconiphone company and had a silver plate recording the nine occasions on which it had previously been used, including at the Naval Conference.59 In a meta-infrastructural moment, Pathé News filmed the microphone head arriving by a Marconiphone branded van at the House of Lords, and of its installation in front of the king’s chair within.60 Central Press Photographers were also admitted to photograph the microphone and chair (see Figure 6.5). The broadcast went smoothly, the Evening Standard depicting the king between a golden ‘throne’ and a silver microphone, ‘his inspiring words encircle[d] the earth’.61 The Daily Telegraph suggested that the king’s words were probably listened to by the largest ever audience for a speech, with a largely good reception in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, although atmospherics interfered with reception in Bombay and Delhi.62 Bombay audiences had a second chance to hear the speech when the Excelsior (movie) Theatre played the king’s speech before a showing of Paramount’s ‘roguish romance’ Love Parade on 24 December.63 The Royal Gallery at the House of Lords was also filled with other microphones, tended with less care than the sovereign’s precious-metal device. Their presence was a novelty and their fragility a concern. The director-general of the BBC Sir John Reith, the Evening Standard reported, attended the opening ceremony and had gazed upon that forest of microphones, those huge pendent amplifiers, with a paternal eye. And when, all careless, the Maharaja of Kashmir seized his own microphone by the neck and began to examine it as one might examine a camera, an expression of agony, helpless but wholly justified, passed across the impassive features of the Director-General.64

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FIGURE 6.5  The ‘King’s Microphone’ and chair at the House of Lords Source: Photograph of Indian Round Table Conference, 1930. Parliamentary Archives, OOW/12/15.

The prime minister scheduled his own radio address the day after the first session closed, in which he read a prepared speech on the conference achievements. The address read like a lecture, spinning the conference proceedings in a clinically produced piece of public relations.65 It was broadcast at 9:10 p.m. on 20 January, being preceded by a lecture by

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A. E. Heath entitled ‘Why We Begin with a Passion for Order’.66 The talk was live relayed to India, resulting in a 2:30 a.m. broadcast (on the Government of India’s interwar experiments with radio, see Kaul [2014]).67 In contrast, Gandhi’s broadcast to the United States shortly after arriving at Kingsley Hall that autumn was unscripted and chaotic. The Daily Herald reported in advance of Gandhi’s arrival that he would use the ordinary Atlantic wireless (radio) telephone on 13 November, which was not subject to a ban on political speeches. His words would be picked up from the telephone in New York and broadcast all over the United States.68 Muriel Lester later recalled the various struggles over gramophone, film and radio companies who had been vying to record Gandhi first, and the range of people necessary to plug the communications infrastructure into her home in the East End: ‘The men who were making a financial scoop of the American message looked portentously solemn: the Press Association reporters highly gratified: the efficient engineers thoroughly preoccupied with switches, wires, levers, lights and signals’ (Lester 1932, 45). The press of guests had pushed Gandhi’s dining schedule off track, and he showed no signs of speeding up his dinner as the moment of transmission approached. Lester filled in for five minutes, before Gandhi finally came downstairs and spoke for half an hour, apparently with the sounds of children on the swings and seesaws in the park below audible in the background. His talk addressed the power of non-violence, international cooperation and the relationship between freedom and self-purification.69 His first sentence, as he contemplated the microphone, was ‘Do I talk into this thing?’ (Lester 1932, 46). Gandhi’s ramshackle tackling of the telecommunications infrastructure combined with his philosophical meditations on the deeper issues at stake at the conference represent the spiritual but not yet material sovereignty of anti-colonialism (Chatterjee 1993). But the British pronouncements were not completely without their spiritual and affective appeals. King George compared the gathering of Indian leaders on British soil to his own visit to India in 1911 and he prayed to providence that the delegates be granted wisdom, patience and goodwill. But these were at heart political speeches. They could, however, rely upon more extensive infrastructures for communicating their message, and not those of others; the BBC did not broadcast Gandhi’s messages in the UK, nor in India. Beyond synchronous broadcasts, there were other means of circulating RTC messages both within and beyond Britain. One of the most established

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was the production of gramophone recordings. The king had consented to his speech being recorded at the Naval Conference and produced as a record by His Master’s Voice (HMV) Gramophone Company. Thirty copies were signed by him and gifted to the conference delegates (allowing them to take home with them, The Graphic punned, ‘His Majesty’s Voice’).70 MacGregor included the production of gramophone records of the king’s speech in his outline press arrangements, HMV also requesting MacDonald’s permission to record and release the speech, subject to government vetting.71 The press outlined the process a week in advance, showing how discs would be driven from Westminster to Hayes in Middlesex where metal matrices from the wax surfaces would be made and sent to Croydon to board an Imperial Airways flight to India. At HMV’s works near Calcutta copies would then be produced so that the Indian people might hear the king’s voice themselves.72 In Britain the record (RB3669), bearing a label in royal blue and scarlet embossed with the imperial arms in gold, would be on sale for 3 shillings [£6.87], with proceeds going to charity.73 Towards the end of the first session, a series of recordings were also made by the Columbia Gramophone Company of views on the conference by different delegations, including Patiala and Hydari (princely states), Pannir Selvam (Indian Christian), Wood (European commerce) and Carr (European non-official community).74 Hydari and Pannir Selvam’s talks were also recorded in Urdu and Tamil respectively. Many leading delegates did not have time to do recordings in London, but Columbia had a temporary recording suite in Madras, so MacGregor suggested to Bajpai on 18 February 1931 that leading delegates might record their impressions there, although there is no evidence of this taking place. A newer technology for storing and transporting communications from the conference was through the medium of sound film. Conferences had been filmed without sound throughout the 1920s, including the signing of the Locarno Treaties in London (1925) and many of the League of Nations conferences in Geneva. Movietone News produced sound film footage of the conclusion of the Naval Conference at St James’s Palace in the spring of 1930. The footage had an informal air, opening with sound film of MacDonald being announced to journalists in the Armoury Room where he gave some general comments, before filming a farewell to the American delegate Mr Stimson in the Downing Street gardens. The Movietone News editor L.  L. Landau wrote to MacDonald’s secretary Rose Rosenberg on 5 December 1930 regarding the perceived success of this footage, and

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repeating the request made in September to film the conclusion of the conference: I merely mention this fact by way of assuring you of our ability to handle such a film in a diplomatic manner, and to assure you that if you can grant us the necessary facilities at the Round Table Conference, the film will be handled just as tactfully and efficiently.75

MacGregor granted the commission and agreed to rig up the Queen Anne Room to allow not only the filming of the final conference plenary session but also the sound filming of the concluding address by the prime minister, one of the earliest recordings of its kind. On top of the frantic bidding to reach suitable agreements to announce at the end of the conference session, Benn also had to worry about the technological infrastructure both working and not obstructing the normal running of the final moments of the conference. He wrote to Irwin on 18 January 1931, the penultimate night of the conference session, having personally checked over the special wiring that had been fed into the palace, with the king’s personal permission, to allow the filming to take place: ‘There is a good deal of terrifying machinery, what with four great searchlights as well as the cameras, and the big cables coming through the windows of the Palace.’76 On 19 January Benn wrote again to Irwin, emphasising the extent to which ‘the Movietone apparatus’ had made them enormous hostages to fortune, because ‘in the end if someone had decided to walk out in protest, the whole thing would have been horribly recorded, although we had made arrangements to – by accident – destroy the film if such a thing occurred’.77 No torching of the celluloid was required, although the filming left a deep impression on most delegates, for other reasons. When the arc lights were turned on the glare was so dazzling that MacDonald temporarily forgot some of his speech (Moore 1974, 163), though the press secretaries scrambled to ensure the newspapers carried the full transcript the following day. Carter organised a private viewing of the film the following day at the Fox Film offices at 13 Berner’s Street, Fitzrovia (Movietone being the British wing of the American Fox Film Corporation), to select which parts of the speech should be used, and whether any sections should be cut for India or American particularly.78 Immediately after the conference concluded, plans for the popularisation and dissemination of the film commenced. Benn had asked that King George

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be informed of the spontaneous and enthusiastic demonstration of loyalty to the king during the playing of the national anthem. Despite an offer, the king’s representative replied, on 24 January, that no private showing for the monarch would be required, as films, especially sound films, were not popular with him.79 Benn did get to attend a special screening, however, on 22 January at the Avenue Pavilion on Shaftesbury Avenue with MacDonald and a small number of delegates. He wrote to Irwin the same day explaining why he felt those film sections including hand shaking and cheering would have an effect beyond the solely political: It will convince a good many people who are more interested – and in my judgement always have been – in the sentimental relations between the two people than in the structure of Government. We are so often asked to engage in counter-propaganda that I attach great important to this film as being a very useful piece of pro-Government advocacy. The negative sort of propaganda which consists in denying the accusations of the other side is, of course, very useful and necessary; but this is positively invading the enemy’s territory.80

This invasion consisted of a forceful representation of the friendly relations within St James’s Palace to the outside world. While anyone party to the debates on the minorities question would have doubted this goodwill, to some outside audiences this message hit home. A Times journalist had been at the screening and praised the use of multiple cameras to capture the friendly conference atmosphere and the multiple personalities in the room: ‘It is an impressive demonstration of the power of the sound film to record significant phases of our national history in a vivid and memorable way.’81 Movietone News, unsurprisingly, agreed with this sense of the historical nature of their recording and suggested on 5 February not only ‘that the film should be officially presented to the government for preservation in the archives’ but that they should produce a film of the film being presented to the prime minister.82 Benn politely declined this offer but was very keen that the film be widely shown in India. After advocating the propaganda purpose of the film to Irwin on 22 January, he explained that he had asked film distributors to go beyond their normal networks in India and to secure distribution to all talking picture houses in India and to also enquire as to the possibility of touring film projectors where picture houses didn’t exist.83

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Benn telegrammed his request to New Delhi on 31 January 1931 and the Home Department enquired into the alternative infrastructures which had been suggested, including the reading out of vernacular translations of the prime minister’s speech at silent screenings.84 On 11 February the director of public information noted that railway cinema cars, designed to advertise travel, including pilgrimages, had been suspended, and there were no portable talkie apparatus in India. Irwin himself investigated the use of regular film distribution networks, especially the Madan film theatre network, and telegrammed the results to Benn on 15 February. The results of the screening of the talking film in Bombay and Calcutta had not been encouraging: ‘Madan reports that it is attracting fair audiences only, as people who go to cinemas naturally prefer more sensational films.’85 Regarding vernacular translations, silent movies were said to attract small enough audiences as it was and that the reading out of a translation would tend to reduce audience rather than increase it, and we do not think prospects of publicity in this direction good. It has to be remembered that every part of the Prime Minister’s announcement has been so thoroughly discussed in press that the politically minded are now fully informed of its terms. This naturally detracts from prospects.

This missed Benn’s point that the concluding scenes of handshaking and jollity were more important that the statements on responsibility, safeguards and reservations, but it emphasised that in the age of telegram and daily newsprints, global news film distribution could be too slow to retain public interest. The British government continued to track the showing of the film, however. Later in the spring it could report that there were three talkie and four silent film reels touring cinema theatres in India, surpassing the previous Indian record for reels in circulation.86 Other than in Bombay and Calcutta the films had reached a wide distribution, the talkie showing in Allahabad, Bangalore, Cawnpore, Colombo (Ceylon), Delhi, Karachi, Lucknow, Madras, Meerut, Poona, Rangoon and Rawalpindi and the silent film showing in Akola, Benares, Calicut, Coimbatore, Hyderabad (in both the Sindh and the Deccan), Jubbulpore, Mysore, Nagpur, Poona, Trivandrum and Quetta. Globally, the film was said to have circulated in every country other than Russia, with Movietone estimating its audience at between 90 and 100 million people. This would have given it the largest

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circulation ever attained by a news picture, although no source was given for this claim. In America the film had been distributed by Fox and Hearst syndicates. This was of particular importance to Benn, who was sensitive to the impact that coverage of the civil disobedience movement had received in the United States. The day after he received news from Irwin of the low appetite in India for showing of the film, the News Chronicle carried a report confirming his hopes regarding the film’s affective potential, for willing audiences. Henry Wilson Harris, a journalist who had covered many interwar international conferences and was an influential advocate of the League of Nations, happened to be in New York when the RTC talkie screened at the Roxy Theatre on Broadway. In England, Harris suggested, the footage would have been of casual interest to those intrigued by the interior of St James’s Palace. But to the American ‘audience beyond measure’ the news clips, being interpolated into every programme, contained a ‘fragment of imprisoned history’ that must have created a deep, if unconscious, impression.87 This went beyond the momentous words, hinting at Dominion status in the prime minister’s ‘arresting diction … lowering his voice to a moving peroration’ on India’s new status. What mattered more was the tumultuous applause with which MacDonald was received. This sound countered anti-British propaganda in America better than any orator could have done: ‘If there was any picture an imaginary British propaganda agency, if such existed, would desire to show to American audiences, it would be this.’ Although not technically a propaganda agency, the RTC Secretariat and Benn had crafted the footage to work precisely as Harris outlined. The statistics on the news footage’s global travels, however, bears testament only to the extent of Britain’s imperial communications infrastructure, and the Anglo-American entertainment complex. We cannot presume that the conference bonhomie was similarly consumed elsewhere, but the British gave the impression of attempting to foster bonhomie directly in the spaces of the capital.

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III THE CONFERENCE CITY

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

7 A HOSPITABLE STATE? OFFICIAL SOCIALISING

AN INHOSPITABLE CITY? The breakout story of the first conference session was the acceptance of the principle of all-India federation by the princes. This had taken many by surprise, including the viceroy, who had been assured by the princes before they left for London that they opposed immediate moves towards federation. On 23 November, however, he wrote to his father of his surprise that the princes had become ‘the most earnest champions of speedy action in this direction’.1 He could only speculate that the princes were acting ‘apparently under some influence that is still rather obscure to me’. Similarly, in an undated note from the undersecretary of state for India’s files reflecting on the princes’ activities after arriving in London, it was suggested that their opinions were ‘in a process of evolution as a result of contact with one another, and with the British Indian delegates, and it would be a rush to prophecy how they may develop by the time the conference meets’.2 On 14 November 1930, two days after the conference opened, Hailey had written to Irwin suggesting that the princes had ‘yielded to the general afflatus which prevails in London, owing to the deliberations of the Imperial Conference, followed by those of the Indian Conference, and have determined to take a much more definite hand in the proceedings than we could have expected’.3 For Hailey, London had an ‘afflatus’, some communication of almost divine knowledge or poetic inspiration. But where did it come from? In later discussions between Irwin, Round Table Conference (RTC) delegates and Gandhi in New Delhi, the latter gave his backing to the idea of a conference session in the Indian capital. Speaking

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on 21 March 1931, he suggested that ‘by its sittings the Conference will both affect its surrounding atmosphere and be affected by it’.4 This RTC afflatus, or atmosphere, had many components (Legg 2020b). It was constituted by the sense of a free conference, by the dozens of expert delegates and staff who made the conference work and by the splendour and efficiency of St James’s Palace. But it was also, to a large degree, a product of the conference taking place in the imperial and national capital. London itself was an unrivalled resource, presenting the amassed riches of a nation and an empire for delegates to consume in unstopping rounds of hospitality (Craggs 2014). But how did these broader infrastructures of the conference city impact the work of the conference itself, and how can we explore these relationships now? Benn certainly felt that hospitality would be a vital part of the conference’s work. In Chapter 4 he was shown to have started a debate with Irwin about the conference method in early May 1930. But by 10 April he had already entered into a private correspondence with Irwin regarding the need to keep Indians in London ‘busy and happy’ and to not have them feel that they had been stranded in the city.5 Keeping delegates happy brought Benn and the British government into the sensitive affectual realm of politics, one that was fraught with dangers. These could relate to individual and specific perceptions. For instance, Sir Sankaran Nair had served on councils with both the viceroy and secretary of state and had led collaboration with the Simon Commission in India. Like Simon, he was not invited to the conference but came to London in a private capacity to offer his assistance. In an India Office note on file from 31 October 1930 Sankaran was said to be under the impression the viceroy had asked him to attend, and Social Secretary F. A. M. Vincent (see below) was asked to look after him socially: ‘The important thing is not to hurt the old man’s feelings, and as he has a reputation for a delicate temper and rather tender feelings, this may not be easy.’6 But British attempts at, and capacity for, hospitality could also be part of the problem. On 24 October, shortly after arriving in London, Moonje recounted taking lunch with Major D. Graham Pole, MP and member of the British Commission on Indian and Burma Affairs. When Sapru joined them, Pole praised him as a great Brahmin requiring proper obeisance and attempted an Indian greeting. For Moonje, ‘All this was no doubt done in joke but to us it looked so theatrical and abhorrent.’7 London satirists feasted

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on such discomfort. In the first week of the conference opening the Evening Standard carried a David Low cartoon, noting that before conference work began the government had been meeting the delegates socially and putting them at their ease.8 Low charted a series of imaginary blunders, regarding the Maharaja of Patiala’s hair, the Maharaja of Kashmir/cashmere, the Maharaja of Bikaner’s moustache, the wearing of ‘pyjamas’ and delegates missing the jungle (see Figure 7.1). Unintentional slights were not all the delegates had to be protected from, however. Indians in London had long been reminded of their subaltern status, regardless of their rank. The wife and children of the first president of the Indian National Congress, W. C. Bonerjee, later recalled the racism they faced in the late-nineteenth-century London home in which they boarded (Burton 2011). More common than these recollections of racism from the inside-out were accounts of Indian dwellings in London from the outside-in, noting inscrutable occupants of dark and threatening dwellings (Ahmed 2011). But to even secure such accommodation was to overcome what had been publicly named by Indians in Britain since 1930 as the ‘colour bar’ (Visram 2002, 275). Indians were denied access to restaurants, dance halls and accommodation on the basis of their skin; the government had repeatedly declared this discrimination a private matter. On 27 June Benn wrote to Irwin about the difficulty of accommodating the delegates for the forthcoming Imperial Conference, in which the government struggled to avoid slighting either the guests or London’s elite hotels. He also noted, ‘At times one comes across the prejudice against entertaining Indians, a prejudice which in so many hidden and subtle ways poisons the relations between our race and theirs.’9 Benn hoped that Geoffrey Dawson at The Times might be persuaded to emphasise to the public how much depended upon decent behaviour to Britain’s Indian guests. The Indian press in Britain had also noted the common experiences of its readership. In an article from June 1930, United India reported, ‘Every Indian during his stay in England feels the full force of race and colour prejudice existent in this country’, although Indian racial sentiments against ‘the Negroid races’ and mixes marriages were also noted.10 In anticipation of the RTC itself, D. T. Monteath of the India Office had written to Sir Atul Chatterjee at the High Commission on 17 October seeking his advice. Regarding the delegations, Monteath anticipated:

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Source: Cartoon, © David Low/Solo Syndication; Newspaper, © British Library Board (NRM MLD24).

FIGURE 7.1  Putting delegates at their ease

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from time to time, some occasion of difficulty with hotel proprietors and the management of places of entertainment in London who might be ignorant of their identity and the important reasons for their presence in London. I have myself occasionally had to refer to you unpleasant incidents of the sort that the Secretary of State has in mind in respect of Indians more or less permanently resident in London; and he is anxious that anything possible should be done to preclude the occurrence of such unpleasantness in regard to the Indian delegates.11

Chatterjee was known to have dealt with two such occasions and Monteath suspected there was a geography at play, with West End venues trusted, but those further afield not. He had to acknowledge, however, that not every venue could be contacted, presumably to point out that these extraordinary elite travellers should not be treated as subaltern Indian visitors. The case of S. K. Datta will demonstrate this racism manifesting itself directly and this delegate’s acute awareness of the intertwining of the social and political sides of the conference (see Chapter 8). The connections between hospitality and conference work were also noted more broadly at the time, as were the uncomfortable contrasts between lavish entertainments in London, the economic depression in Britain and the political and economic crises in India. In the week after the conference opened the Pratap newspaper of the United Provinces in north India asked: How much do the representatives who are taking part in the London Conference care for India? They are comfortably lodged in hotels. They get delicious food, keep themselves engaged in sports and pastimes and have totally forgotten that those Indians who still possess some selfrespect, have still some heat in their blood and feel the chains of slavery irksome at every moment are carrying on an unprecedented struggle for freedom.12

After the conclusion of this first session of the conference, the London branch of Congress activist Pulin Behari Seal (see Chapter 10) had suggested, on 4 February 1931, that the RTC delegates had been enjoying ‘many receptions and parties’ in London but would face ‘brickbats and lathis’ when they arrived back in Bombay.13 As Margarita Barns (1937, 51) later put it:

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On the social side, private individuals and public institutions vied with each other in their efforts to fete the visitors who reciprocated the hospitality with equal opulence. It was not every year that whole floors in hotels were commandeered by Maharajahs and the catering trade had a busy time. It was not always free from anxiety, for the lavishness of some of the hospitality sometimes made them wonder from where the money was coming.

Socialising constituted the major way in which delegates engaged with the city, and the next chapter will focus on social spaces, ranging from hotels, clubs and societies to restaurants and cafés. The government used many of these spaces for official functions, but it also had its own spaces in which conference work took place in the broader city, beyond the already recounted spaces such as 10 Downing Street, the House of Commons, the India Office, Chequers and the Conservative Party Research Department on Old Queen Street. This chapter focuses on spaces where official conference work and the work of social socialising intersected. It opens by considering three spaces that were used temporarily for official work, before turning to the government’s attempts to control official entertainments through the work of its social secretaries at a social centre.

AN AERODROME, AN INDIAN HOUSE AND AN IMPERIAL INSTITUTE By early October the government’s hospitality planning was well under way and the interrelationship between government and non-government hospitality was becoming clear. Benn wrote to Irwin on 3 October that the planned official hospitality more than matched that of the Imperial Conference. These plans would produce a platform for stimulating social London into action: ‘There are many interested parties that I think can be stimulated to giving a hand, and if we can make the Conference interesting enough the regular Society hosts may help too.’14 In general these went well, after a near-disastrous start at an aerodrome display south of London. Between 1916 and 1959 Croydon airport was the capital’s main air hub and the home of Imperial Airways. In the interwar years air flight was increasingly a marker of national progress and imperial might, and

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air shows provided an opportunity to display technological might and to cultivate a viewing public (Rech 2015). As such, RTC delegates were taken by Vincent to Croydon to witness an air exhibition on 24 October. Moonje noted in his dairy that the delegates were taken to the roof of the combined airport terminal and control tower, where there was no seating or protection from the damp and bitter weather.15 Already smarting from perceived differential treatment in terms of status, accommodation and transport, Moonje was dismayed to look down and see the delegates of the Imperial Conference being fêted below: ‘We were angry with the insult and humiliation deliberately done to us. Vincent came up from below and appreciated our anger. He agreed with us that should go home without witnessing show.’16 The delegates returned to their homes and Moonje reported the incident to the India Office. Four days later the Daily Telegraph castigated the socialist government for failing to give the Indian delegates a warm welcome, compared to that given to Imperial Conference guests, as evidenced by the lack of attention paid to the Indian visitors to Croydon.17 Benn explained to Irwin, on 31 October, that the dozen delegates had been taken after some of the Indian princes had been issued invites, presumably to avoid offence given that Bikaner would be attending as an Imperial Conference delegate.18 He admitted that the event had gone wrong in case word of it got back to India. So worried was Benn that the wrong tone might be set by the escapade that on his Sunday visit to the social centre (see below) on 2 November he was joined by the new secretary of state for air, Baron Amulree. He was introduced to those who had joined the ‘unfortunate expedition’ and, Benn wrote to Irwin on 4 November, healed whatever soreness remained.19 Sapru agreed with Benn, writing on 13 November to his daughter that the Croydon incident was ‘a very trivial and small incident, not even worth mentioning’ (Hooja 1999, 157). She had, however, read about it in the Indian press. Sapru suggested the critical newspapers were carrying false or exaggerated stories, and the Croydon debacle had certainly given them much to work with. For the United Province’s Oudh Akhbhar, the insult exposed Benn’s sham claim that India already enjoyed Dominion status, while for the Abhyudaya the visitors had degraded India and her people in the eyes of the world, a punishment for ignoring Congress calls to boycott the conference.20 We will see in the following chapter that the government commandeered many social spaces in the city for official functions, but there were also a

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few government spaces that were used for conference socialising. These help us further break down any distinction between official and social spaces, showing how broader socialising could be hosted in governmentrun spaces. One such space was ‘India House’ in Aldwych, the home of the High Commission for India. The building had been designed by Herbert Baker, co-architect of New Delhi, and sat in a cluster of dominion buildings between Kingsway and the Strand (including Australia House). It had been opened in 1930 by the third high commissioner, Sir Atul Chatterjee, who had proposed the building of the house in 1925. Well received in architectural terms, the London-based United India journal decried it as a monument to Indian slavery, an Anglo-India house like the nearly completed capital of ‘English Delhi’.21 The commission existed to look after Indians in Britain, and during the conference delegates would be targeted to support various related initiatives, such as the Indian Students’ Loan Fund, to help scholars in financial distress due to the economic downturn.22 Chatterjee was, however, also a conference expert himself, having represented India at International Labour Conferences in Washington in 1919 and Geneva in 1921 and 1924–1933, and at the Naval Conference in London that spring. As such, he was keen to use the RTC as an opportunity to show off his new home, which incorporated entertaining and exhibition spaces. In late October Queen Mary had visited an exhibition of works by students of the Bombay School of Art, where she had received examples of their work and a copy of a mural painting in the Imperial Secretariat in New Delhi.23 She also visited the Indian Trade Commissioner’s exhibition and the Indian Railways Publicity Bureau, on the ground floor. Chatterjee had requested that he host one of the first receptions for Indian delegates, and made his case to the India Office, as noted on 15 October 1930. He argued that as the Government of India’s representative in London, and as a host and advisor to Indians in Britain, he should host an event to ‘break the ice’ for delegates in London.24 He had also been invited by delegates to the Imperial Conference to many of their events and wanted to ‘kill two birds with one stone’ by inviting Imperial and RTC delegates to one reception. The honour of hosting the first government reception, on 6 November, was thus granted to Sir Atul and Lady Chatterjee, the latter being a successful industrial welfare promoter herself and a commentator on the ‘new women’ of India (Bourne 2018).25 Benn reported to Irwin that night that ‘India House

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looked very beautiful and very brilliant, with all its guests’.26 The hundreds of invitees included conference delegates and advisors with their wives, London’s leading ambassadors and commissioners, British politicians and campaigners, and the cream of London’s Indian society, all of whom were listed at length in The Times.27 Commentators and satirists got a taste of the forthcoming social contrasts when, as the Daily Express put it, ‘East met West’ (see the racialised and gendered caricatures in Figure  7.2).28 Lord Reading, on the left, was described as being hidden by the ‘jaunty headgear’ of Sirdar Sahibzada Sultan Ahmad Khan, while the ‘fair and pretty’ Miss Diane Chamberlain was flanked by the Aga Khan to her right, greeting Chatterjee himself. India House was also used for events to keep the delegates entertained during their stay, including a ‘conversazione’ on the growing appreciation of India’s contribution to art history, chaired by the Conservative delegate and ex-governor of Bengal Lord Zetland, on 15 November 1930 during the conference’s first week of work.29

FIGURE 7.2  When East met West Source: ‘When East Met West’, Daily Express, 8 November 1930. Reproduced with the permission of the Maharaja Ganga Singhji Trust (BIK/ pad 364/file 2344).

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The government also took advantage of other official spaces in London which evidenced Britain’s historical connections to India and attempted to display the appreciation of Indian culture and social in the imperial metropolis. With the high commissioner hosting delegates at India House, and the British government hosting a reception at Lancaster House (see next chapter), the secretary of state for India’s reception was postponed until late December. This presented challenges of climate, given the government’s fears about keeping Indian delegates warm in a London autumn (Legg 2020b). The hope had been that Benn would host a reception in the courtyard of the Foreign and India Office building, but the Treasury quotes for erecting a canvas roof of £150 [£6,867] plus the same again for furniture, was deemed too high, and doubts were expressed that the space could be kept sufficiently warm.30 Major E. N. S. Crankshaw, secretary of the Government Hospitality Fund, assured the India Office that the Imperial Institute could easily host a reception of 2,000 people, having recently done so for the Prince of Wales’s reception for Imperial Conference delegates. The Imperial Institute was part of ‘Albertopolis’, the great collection of learned institutions built in Kensington, following the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, partly in Prince Albert’s memory. In 1893 the institute was opened (it was later demolished in the 1960s and 1970s to be replaced by Imperial College). In keeping with the object of the 1851 exhibition of the works of industry, the institute hosted information about trade and manufactures and its cavernous hall provided a grand space for social and political events linked to empire, being administered since 1925 by the Department of Overseas Trade (Bremner 2003). It housed a permanent ‘Empire exhibition’ of arts and crafts and in October 1930 the ‘India Museum’ section put on view 220 objects of ‘Eastern Art’ bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum by the ex-viceroy Lord Curzon.31 The Times reported another vast RTC reception at the institute on 22 December, listing column after column of London’s great and good in attendance.32 Benn noted to Irwin the still good atmosphere of the conference, despite the impenetrable fog, which kept many European invitees away, but few Indians.33 Indian delegates had, indeed, proved resilient against the exceptionally dank autumn of 1930. This was, in part, down to the support offered by a unique government institution created to keep the delegates both housed and entertained during the conference, in a Mayfair space explicitly designed to bring together the official and the social.

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A CORPORATE ‘HOME AWAY FROM HOME’: THE INDIAN SOCIAL CENTRE Alongside the various secretaries of the RTC delegations sat the social secretary Frank Arthur Money Vincent. His route to conference expertise had been an unusual one, having served with the Indian police from 1895, specialising with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) before acting as the commissioner of police in Bombay from 1916 to 1919.34 He retired from the police in 1920 and returned to the UK, working in various civil service posts. These included organising secretary of the Indian section at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and administrator of the Indian commercial section at the Philadelphia International Exposition of 1926. On this basis Vincent was appointed to oversee all aspects of the social elements of the delegates’ lives in London. He was granted one assistant who knew the London scene, Mr P. K. Dutt, on loan from Chatterjee at the High Commission. On 6 September 1930 Vincent put forward a bold case for a conference innovation, justified by the unparalleled nature of the event. He argued that there were two specificities regarding the RTC delegates that had to be born in mind, both of which were in contrast to the Imperial Conference, which was soon to begin. First, the delegates would be staying into the winter and, second, not being the guests of the government they would be ‘thrown entirely on their own resources’.35 Having to arrange their own accommodation, in a city many of them were unfamiliar with, would mean ‘the members will lead, out of conference hours, a scattered, individual and comfortless existence’ which would make it near impossible for the social secretaries to assist them in their social and private lives. St James’s Palace and the India Office were both office spaces and could not provide for the comfort of the delegates. What was needed was a social centre, close to St James’s Palace but ‘entirely dissociated from the official atmosphere of the India Office or India House’ which would function as the ‘corporate home away from home’ for the delegation, where the social secretaries could be based to look after the comfort and convenience of the delegates. This would solve various problems. Many delegates would arrive weeks before the conference started and would need somewhere to stay during the Christmas holidays. Vincent continued: All this apart from the fact that before or at the end of a day’s sessions, delegates will want often to have informal discussions; they will want to

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meet on neutral, or let us say on their own, ground, politicians, members of the Press, friends, write letters, have the use of a stenographer, have ‘an address’, warmth and comfort, and last but not least facilities for refreshment, particularly vegetarian and Indian cooking, a factor of the very greatest importance to many of the delegates.36

This was felt not to be incidental to the political work of the conference but central to making it success: ‘This may seem to be an exaggerated statement to make but it will be admitted that the ultimate issue before the Conference might be jeopardised if no facilities for meeting and for discussion of major or minor problems were provided by Government.’ In terms of cost, the best option would be to rent private accommodation, buy the necessary furnishings and sell them on afterwards, which could recoup £500 of the estimated £5,000 [£228,927] cost. This would cover office space for the social secretaries, accommodation for some delegates, eating facilities and socialising spaces. On 16 September Carter drafted a note recording the views of Corbett, the British Indian delegation secretary, on the proposal for a ‘Club House’ for Indian delegates.37 Corbett was doubtful until Vincent showed him the property he had in mind. This was 8 Chesterfield Gardens (7 in Figure 8.1), located a fifteen-minute walk from St James’s Palace, in Mayfair, which had previously housed the Ladies Carlton Club. The twenty-bedroom, large, terraced house was constructed in 1876 to a design by J. T. Wimperis and has been described as a Beaux Arts and Renaissance four-storey design, featuring a heavy marble interior staircase, lattice panelled ceilings and walls with elaborate plaster motifs.38 Carter had also viewed the building and drafted a telegram for Benn to send to Irwin, who would be asked to share the cost, and sent out his own enquiries as to whether such a club would be required. One of these was to Sir Campbell Rhodes, who had worked in commerce in Bengal between 1896 and 1920s, by which point he held roles in the provincial and central legislative assemblies. On his return to England he took up a seat on the secretary of state’s Advisory Council of India between 1925 and 1935, during which time he represented India at the 1927 World Economic Conference in Geneva. Rhodes gave Vincent’s proposals his full backing, on 20 October, confirming the benefits of London home for the political work of Indian delegates, suggesting that ‘the problems of the Round Table Conference are far more likely to find an adequate

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solution in the cheerful atmosphere of a club than at the Round Table itself ’.39 But Rhodes also suggested there was an added advantage that Carter hadn’t mentioned, regarding the broader club culture within the imperial capital: Whilst I know of no rules on the subject, I am under the impression that the London Clubs specially connected with India do not look with favour on frequent invitations to Indian guests for meals, and to take an Indian to an hotel to lunch when it is known one has a London Club is likely to cause heart-burning.40

This was a frank recognition of racism in the capital not outside of but especially within clubs designed for men with experience of India, echoing Monteath’s regarding racial discrimination at hotels. Rhodes suggested that interested figures in London could be made honorary members of the new club, and entertain delegates there, helping to ‘oil the wheels of the conference’ (on the ongoing racial politcs of London bars for commonwealth visitors into the 1960s, see Craggs [2014]). There is some evidence, presented in the next chapter, that this racism extended to the accommodation market, when delegates used their allowance to rent lodgings outside of Chesterfield Gardens.

CREATING THE SOCIAL CENTRE Rhodes was able to join an RTC hospitality committee, alongside Carter, Vincent and Sir Louis Kershaw from the India Office, when the viceroy assented to the plan in early October. It was noted that Corbett and Bajpai had opposed the committee’s favoured title of the ‘Round Table Club’ so it eventually became known as the social centre, to which honorary members would be invited to join.41 The Treasury agreed to fund £2,500 [£114,463], matching that promised by the viceroy, and on 6 October a contract was signed with the owner, Lord Islington. He had asked Carter to have his name removed from any press release as he disapproved of the calling of the conference but felt that Indian visitors should have some protection from London’s winter climate.42 On 10 October Vincent outlined his plan to employ an assistant who would run the Chesterfield centre, overseeing the accounts, stocks, consumption of alcohol, secretarial assistance to delegates, supervising the

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staff and overseeing catering arrangements. This would require someone familiar with London clubs and able to test the quotes and bills provided by caterers. On Dutt’s recommendation Vincent hired Captain A. E. T. Marshall as the centre’s accountant on £6 [£274] per week. Regarding caterers it was felt important to have high quality food of an ‘Indian flavour.… That must force us into the hands of an Indian Restauranteur.…’43 After an unannounced visit to Veerasawmy’s restaurant (see Chapter 8) on Regents Street with Dutt, Vincent felt that they could be trusted to provide catering. A deal was struck that would provide meals below the high cost of West End restaurants and would approach club prices, being 3 shillings and sixpence [£8] for lunch and 5 shillings sixpence [£12.59] for dinner (for comparison the exclusive Royal Automobile Club charged 5 shillings sixpence [£12.59] for lunch and 7 shillings sixpence [£17.17] for dinner).44 To cover the costs of Indian cooks, Indian staff and cooking equipment would cost around £30 [£1,373] per week; should the restaurant not prove popular Vincent budgeted for a subsidy of up to £300 [£13,735] for the conference duration. On Corbett’s insistence, in line with his complaints about the low subsidy provided for visiting delegates, Vincent capped the combined charge for room, bath and service at £4/4 [£192] per week, equivalent to club rather than hotel charges, further decreasing the centre’s income (the Royal Automobile Club’s rooms ranged from £2/16 [£128.17] to £4/7/6 [£200.34] per week). It had been hoped to reduce costs by having the Office of Works help kit out the centre, as they had been doing with St James’s Palace, but the vast majority of goods were being bought new, with Vincent’s wife overseeing housekeeping questions and keeping costs down. The only known images of the interior were reproduced in a photo montage in the Illustrated Weekly of India the week before the conference opened. It featured a grand hallway (Figure 7.3), domesticated with potted plants and populated by two distant members of staff, and the centre’s lounge (Figure  7.4), featuring a large open fireplace for the mean winter nights. Despite Lord Islington’s request, an article in the Yorkshire Post on 18 October announced that in his Mayfair property elaborate ‘social centre’ provisions had been made for the delegates to foregather under the most comfortable and congenial conditions. The rooms have been furnished and decorated in Indian

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FIGURE 7.3  The hall and stairway at 8 Chesterfield Gardens Source: ‘India in London: With the Delegates’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 9 November 1930, © British Library Board (OP 1346).

style. A lounge, reading, writing and smoking rooms, a ladies’ boudoir, a card room, dining-room and a committee room for the holding of informal meetings are all provided. Food, both English and Indian, will be obtainable for the visitors.45

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FIGURE 7.4  The lounge at Chesterfield Gardens Source: ‘India in London: With the Delegates’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 9 November 1930, © British Library Board (OP 1346).

This planned publicity campaign to advertise conference hospitality attracted the ire of protestors against the conference. On 29 October a secret police report was passed on to Carter suggesting that ‘Nharendra Dutt Mozumdar and Hansraj Agarwalla are attempting to collect a band of some thirty Indian students with the object of holding a hostile demonstration against the Indian members of the Conference outside the Chesterfield Club in Chesterfield Gardens’.46 While the picket didn’t come to pass, a police patrol was set outside the centre for the duration of the conference.

MAKING THE CENTRE SOCIAL The first batch of delegates had arrived in London on Saturday 18 October and Benn visited Chesterfield Gardens the following day to welcome the guests. He described the centre to Irwin on 24 October as a ‘lovely mansion’, at which everyone was cordial and courteous, despite some discontent over the fact that delegates were funding their own accommodation rather than being housed together in a hotel (see below).47

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Benn visited Chesterfield each Sunday until all the delegates had arrived, in early November, describing the meetings to Irwin on 31 October as very useful.48 On Wednesday, 5 November, a week before the conference inauguration, Benn hosted a lunch for the British Indian delegates at the centre. None of the princes or their staff stayed at the centre, making it largely a British Indian delegate space. People moved in and out of the centre as they experimented with the London rental market, and the centre’s accommodation was described as suiting those with simple needs, meaning no family or expensive tastes. But this still brought together a wide range of delegates, socially and geographically, from India. A directory of conference delegates issued on 19 December 1930 listed Chesterfield Gardens as the home address of U. Aung Thin from Burma, Sir Shah Nawaz Khan Ghulam Murtoza Khan Bhutto from Sind in northwest India, Captain Raja Sher Muhammad Khan of Domeli near the northern border of India, Mr Fazl-ul-Huq from Calcutta, the council member Sir Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah and Bhaskarrao Vithojirao Jadhav of Bombay, the Viceroy’s Executive Council member Sir Bhupendra Nath Mitra of Poona, Dr B. S. Moonje of Nagpur, Mr K. T. Paul of Salem in south India, Sir Abdul Qaiyum Khan of Peshawar, Diwan Bahadur M. Rama Chandra Rao of Ellore in southeast India, Dr Shafa’at Ahmad Khan of Allahabad, and M. R. Rao Bahadur Srinivasan Avargal of Poonamalle Cantonment in Madras. These members, and outside conference participants, used the centre for a range of social functions. These included a lunch hosted by the Conservative Marquess of Zetland on 21 November; an at-home by Ladies Seton, Holland and Wheeler on 4 December; a Christmas Day party hosted by Benn for twenty-four delegates with no engagements, featuring lunch, crackers, anecdotes, and some singing; an at-home to meet the Nobel Laureate for literature Rabindranath Tagore on 7 January 1931; a luncheon for twenty-three guests in honour of the Conservative delegate Lord Peel hosted by the Anglo-Indian delegate Colonel Gidney on 12 January, who hosted another lunch on the fourteenth for the ex-MP and Daily Telegraph proprietor Lord Burnham; and a farewell party hosted by Sardar Sampuran Singh on 19 January, the final day of the conference’s first session.49 The lists above give a sense of the guests and events at the social centre. Capturing the experiences of this space is more difficult, but some sources reflecting on the centre at the time, and after its closure, give us some

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glimpses into how it was encountered and appreciated. Moonje travelled on a low budget and with a high sensitivity to social slights, especially in relation to the foregoing Imperial Conference. He reluctantly agreed to move into Chesterfield Gardens, being one of the first to arrive, on 18 October 1930. He noted in his diary that none of the Delhi Reforms Office staff, who he knew from India, had been there to greet him, and that he had agreed with another delegate to try the accommodation out and leave if it didn’t suit him.50 His mood eased the following day when Benn visited and asked Moonje to join a committee to decide on who would be invited to join the social club as honorary members. On 20 October, however, Moonje had dinner with British Indian delegate Joint Secretary Latifi, to whom he complained that Imperial Conference delegates were given posh hotels and cars while RTC delegates lacked in prestige, although Dr Ambedkar had rebuffed the suggestion. Benn interviewed Moonje on 23 October, the result being the discontent that he had written to Irwin about. Moonje recalled in his diary: I said that we are comfortable but that we feel that we are mere boarders in a Boarding House. We feel as if we are on a Deputation and we are paid an allowance for it. But we do not feel that we are the guests of HM the King and the contrast in this respect as compared with the treatment given to the statesmen of the Dominions who have assembled here for the Imperial Conference who are treated in respectful fashion as guests of HM the King is keenly felt and may develop into a grievance.… We in India have got our own ideas of hospitality but we, here, do not feel that we are enjoying anybody’s hospitality.51

When Benn asked what he could do, Moonje asked that delegates be announced as guests of the king, that they get food and transport free of charge and ‘if possible we may be located in places close together so that we may be able to meet together frequently’. Benn wrote to Irwin the following day that he saw the problem of rich men living a different life to poor men, but that the system of allowances was the only solution he could envisage. Moonje was further irritated when Shafi, who was a delegate at the Imperial Conference, confirmed to Moonje on 24 October that he was put up in a hotel and had a complimentary car. Vincent’s history with the police force only compounded Moonje’s sense of injustice. He noted in his diary: ‘I said we are in a Boarding House under the proper supervision of a Police officer

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Mr Vincent who was once a subordinate to Sir Charles Cleveland and then Commissioner of Police in Bombay.’52 As such, Moonje experimented with private rentals in London, spending some time in a flat at 28 Half Moon Street in Mayfair, but he returned to Chesterfield towards the end of the conference. When back in Delhi over the summer Moonje visited Dunnett in the Reforms Office and complained, again, that all delegates were not housed together, noting that his flat had cost 6 guineas [£319] per week, as opposed to £4/6 [£192] at the social centre.53 Moonje didn’t write much about his interactions in the centre apart from one very rare acknowledgement of what we might think of as the centre’s subaltern staff. Vincent had mentioned that the Veerasawmy contract would include the employment of Indian staff, and they emerge very briefly in Moonje’s diary not just as table waiters but as political commentators. On 19 November Moonje had rebuked Lord Peel for his plenary address, challenging the suggestion that British contributions to Indian life were underacknowledged and insisting that the British operated a series of monopolies in India (India Office 1931a, 74–76). Moonje noted in his diary that his speech had been well received by all, that on the following day he had received many notes of thanks, including a cable from America, and that ‘even the waiters in the Dining Room of the Chesterfield Gardens congratulated me and expressed great and increased respect for me’54 (see Figure 7.5 for a stand-alone photograph of the Indian chefs and the following chapter for more on Veerasawmy’s).

ASSESSING THE CENTRE The conclusion of the first conference session prompted reflections on how the social centre had worked, and the consensus was generally that it had been a hit. On 27 January Benn wrote to Chatterjee, thanking the high commissioner for the loan of Dutt as joint social secretary. Perhaps echoing Vincent’s original argument for funding the social centre, Benn wrote: Vincent and Dutt did real Trojan work, the effect of which became more obvious as the Conference proceeded. As you know, matters were by no means easy at the beginning; the delegates were most of them strangers to London, many were doubtful of the reception which they would have and there was a natural tendency on all sides to be shy and

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FIGURE 7.5  Indian chefs at Chesterfield Gardens Source: ‘Indian Chefs Preparing Meals for Round-Table Conference Delegates’, Evening Standard, 28 November 1930, © British Library Board (NRM MLD24).

stand-offish. The Social Secretaries both by their admirable running of the Club at Chesterfield Gardens and by their tireless energy in keeping the delegates amused made a very large contribution indeed towards creating the general atmosphere of good-will and good-fellowship which marked the later progress of the Conference in an amazing measure.55

Benn expressed his thanks to Vincent in a letter, also from 27 January: The Club at Chesterfield Gardens, the credit for which is really yours, has provided an almost indispensable meeting ground for the delegates who felt the need for society and comradeship in unfamiliar surroundings: the little parties which you organised so successfully were always delightful: and in general the work that you did to keep the hours of idleness from hanging heavy on the Delegates hands, was one of the most important factors in making the Conference a success. To put it shortly, it was in no small measure due to you and your willing

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helpers that a period that started with gloomy faces and a readiness to feel insulted, ended in wreaths of smiles and general atmosphere of good-fellowship and good-will.56

The social secretaries’ work was also much appreciated by the delegates. At a farewell party on 19 January Vincent and Dutt were presented with gifts of thanks, in response to which they sent a letter to all returning delegates on 26 January acknowledging the gifts as testament to ‘the cordial and happy relations which we endeavoured to establish and which have so happily been maintained and strengthened’.57 A less welcome form of reflection was that of an India Office audit. As with the records of the third conference session held at the House of Lords, the centre’s external location left a rich archival trail. In the broader context of the first session budget, the welfare officers and social club cost approximately £3,612 [£165,376], billed equally between the British and Indian governments (Table 5.1). Although only amounting to around 4.5 per cent of total expenditure, Vincent and Dutt were required to cost their efforts to an excruciatingly fine degree. On 9 February 1931 they submitted their statement of receipts and expenditure (Table 7.1). The listings hint at the subaltern labour behind the scenes; the cleaners, cooks and waiters who kept the centre going. They also suggest the infrastructures upon which the social centre depended. These concerned energy (electricity, gas and fuel), communications (telephones, travelling and postage) but also the mundane materiality of making a space both functional and homely (sundries and furnishings). Some of the latter were sub-documented by place of purchase (Table 7.2). What we see here are the minute materials through which a home away from home was constructed. They relay interests in the weather (umbrellas, hot water bottles), in seclusion and comfort (lighting, cushions and curtains), in consumption (tumblers, bottles) and even in costume (Indian uniforms for the staff). While Benn and Vincent appreciated the significance of these homely comforts for delegates thousands of miles from home, the India Office accounts did not readily appreciate these needs. On 11 June 1931 a query was raised about several items included in further folios related to the centre. One regarded £6 [£274] paid to Henry Polak, who was overseeing unofficial social arrangements for guests in London,

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TABLE 7.1  Expenditure and receipts

Pounds

Shillings

Pence

£ [2017]

9

20,014

Premises

437

2

Electrical Installation

199

12

General and Water Rates

218

2

72

18

8 9

Cleaning Sundry Purchases

9,138 9,985 3,339

32

6

Furnishings (158/6) – Sales (12/5)

146

11

Wages

565

6

11

25,884

24

1

11

1,121

28

6

1

Printing and Stationery Telephone Hire of Furniture

1,480 6,709

900

1,295 4,120

Sundry Expenses (including books, flowers)

16

Laundry

27

5

9

1,249

5

14

4

261

Travelling Postage

10

755

10

6

8

473

Caterers’ Guarantee

346

7

6

15,858

Electricity

145

19

11

6,684

72

15

7

3,332

2

148,928

2

114,221

Gas Fuel Total Less Receipts from Accommodation Net Expenditure

3

7

3,252

15

758

1

2,494

14

153 34,707

Source: BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2012.

for the loss of his coat and how the centre had become liable for it; another for the purchase of towels, the Indian uniform, cushions and curtains and a copy of Who’s Who, the disposal of which was unexplained; and a third for £60 [£2,747] of unsanctioned entertainment spent by the social secretaries. The queries also give more insight into some of the leisure consumables taken by the delegates and their guests. A total of £134/11/10 [£6,162] had been paid to wine merchants for various types of alcohol, most of which was issued but £7/16/11 [£359] remained unaccounted for. This was traced back to nine bottles of whisky which were bought but vanished without trace.

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TABLE 7.2  Materials purchased

Pound

Shilling

Pence 3

£ [2017]

J. Lewis & Co.

Towels

18

6

Harrods Ltd

Bottles and tumblers, ash trays, plants, misc. domestic articles

10

10

480

H&M Rayne

Indian uniform

6

10

297

Hesters

Cushions, curtains, matting

122

9

John Barker & Co.

Hot water bottles

1

17

Radnor Trust

Lamps, electric iron and lights

W. Hay Fielding

Ink stands and ink bottles

3

3

144

G. Harding & Sons

Brooms, brushes, household goods

11

5

515

H. Day & Sons

Carpets, wheelbarrows, blankets, umbrellas

F. W. Woolworth

Flower vases, etc.

Total

3

838

5,606 84

41

1,877

20

915

1

1

236

1

48 6

10,808

Source: BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2012.

On 31 October the India Office declared themselves unhappy with many of Vincent’s replies to their queries, especially given that Captain Marshall had been employed precisely to keep the accounts. Queries over the wine and spirits account were said to be unanswerable ‘owing to the lapse of time’ so these losses had to be written off. The promise that furnishings and household items would be sold on had also proven to be false; of the £240 [£10,988] worth of items purchased only £12/5 [£560] had been sold on, leaving the India Office in possession, amongst other things, of floor and stair fittings that cost £60 [£2,747]. The quibbling ran on until the end of December 1931, when it was pointed out that the subsidy for the Veerasawmy caterers had exceeded the cap of £300 by £46. It was noted that Vincent felt aggrieved by these questions, and that in general the centre had come in under the budget of £5,000 and that all private testimonials from officials at the centre confirmed it had been run with efficiency and economy.58

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SOCIALISING BEYOND THE SOCIAL CENTRE Vincent was also doubtless annoyed that these queries ran straight through the whole of the second session of the RTC. Soon after the social centre vacated Chesterfield Gardens Islington had rented it out, and the conference organisers could find no similar location for the centre during the September–December 1931 conference session. Carter wrote to delegates, on 29 August 1931, that no ‘premises of a similar character’ could be obtained at a reasonable cost, but that the high commissioner had made a lounge and reading and writing rooms available at India House, as well as offices for Dutt and Vincent.59 However, when making his original case for a separate social centre, on 6 September 1930, Vincent had made it clear this wouldn’t work: … the location of India House and the fact that it is an office building with its contingent limitations and restrictions makes it far from ideal. It is very doubtful whether delegates would avail themselves of these limited facilities and the secretariat and Social Secretaries would soon find themselves out of touch.60

Indeed, there is little evidence of the social centre functioning as the sort of hub for the rest of the conference as it had done for the first section. Delegates also didn’t have Chesterfield Gardens’ relatively cheap source of accommodation open to them. The social secretaries did their best to help. Invited delegates were instructed, on 22 July 1931, to let the secretaries know what sort of accommodation they required and of any delegates they might wish to live with.61 The aim was to have delegates live as close together as possible but in practice this was near impossible to coordinate. The social activities which Vincent and Dutt organised took place beyond government buildings in the city. But despite being more geographically diffuse this work still seems to have had remarkable effects. This was done through advertising and inviting delegates to luncheons, at-homes, dinners and parties hosted in London (see the next two chapters). But it was also done through directing delegates towards other activities, some of which the centre organised, allowing us to piece together the dispersed social life by officially advertised entertainments of the city.62 Though more prominent during the second session, these events were also listed during the first session. One early event had been Vincent’s

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calamitous trip to Croydon, but other organised tours fared better. A special train was chartered to take the early arriving delegates for the first session to Coventry in late October to see some engineering works, while on 15 December both delegates and members of the secretariat staff joined an annual ‘pilgrimage’ to Bristol to visit the grave of the Indian reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy.63 This was not an event organised by the government but delegates were pointed towards it as a social event of interest. Irregular postings were sent to delegates at the first session relaying ‘engagements or functions of general interest’ with something on almost every day listed. The overwhelming majority of these related to eating, partying and social receptions, but in December 1930 delegates were also directed towards an ‘India Office dramatic performance’ on the third; a lecture by Professor Patrick Geddes at Chesterfield Gardens (sixth); a visit to Oxford with a lunch at Wadham College hosted by Sir John Simon (fourteenth); and a tour of the House of Commons (sixteenth). They also had open offers to visit Salvation Army sites in the city with Mr A. R. Blowers, who had spent forty years in India, and to visit James Pascall’s confectionary factory in Surrey, which exported to India, while the circus at Olympia would be open over new year and was highly recommended. In January delegates were notified of a trip to museums and the Holburn telephone exchange (ninth), Bethnal Green municipal baths and museum (tenth) and a visit to Brooklands Aerodrome and flying museum (twenty-fourth). For the second conference session, when they were isolated from the delegates at India House, the social secretaries published more regular, weekly social announcements which give a sense of the broader social landscape into which the delegates were encouraged to tread. Again, the vast majority of events related to receptions, dining or partying (see following chapters). Other events in early September included a Port of London Authority tour around the docks and the Thames (ninth, and for a photo of some of the delegates at the port, see Legg [2020b, 784]); a display of Humber and Hillman cars and Commer light trucks at Devonshire House, Piccadilly (sixteenth); a showing of the unreleased film ‘Excelsior’ at the Prince Edward Theatre, Old Compton Street relating to a Kanchenjunga expedition in the Himalayas (seventeenth); and an ongoing radio exhibition at Olympia. In October delegates were alerted to a trip to witness the conclusion of a 500-mile speed test at Brooklands racing track

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(third); a lecture by Dr Shafalat Ahmad Khan on ‘Muslims in the new India’ at Caxton Hall in Westminster, with the ex-colonial secretary Leo Amery presiding (sixth); an invitation by the directors of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden to attend performances of Wagner’s Parsifal (seventh) or Lohengrin (eighth), Rossini’s Barber of Seville (ninth), Verdi’s Aida (tenth, 2 p.m.) or Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (tenth, 8 p.m.); a special exhibition for delegates of Indian art at the British Museum (thirteenth); and another trip to Brooklands (seventeenth). In November delegates were invited to the mayor of the city of Westminster’s annual civil reception at the Park Lane Hotel (fourth); East India Association lectures by Sir A. P. Patro on ‘the Non Brahmin Movement’ (tenth) and the Chief Sahib of Sangli on ‘the smaller states and the new India’ (seventeenth) at Caxton Hall; the Cenotaph ceremony of remembrance (eleventh); a visit to the military academy at Sandhurst (thirteenth); a visit to the British Federation of University Women at Crosby Hall (twenty-sixth); and an open luncheon offered by Bertram Mills’ Circus and Christmas Fair (twenty-third). The intensity of conference work meant that various planned trips in December had to be cancelled. What can we conclude about the function of this array of excursions into the capital? A generous reading would see it as a response to concerns about delegates’ ‘scattered, individual and comfortless existence’ outside of conference hours. But while the dinners and socialising described in the following chapter were implicitly and often explicitly political, can the same be said of this official hospitality? Of the thirty-two events listed above, only four regarded political or military sites (the House of Commons, Guildhall, the Cenotaph, Sandhurst). A further four attested the infrastructural capacities of the state (radio, telephone exchanges, public baths) and advances in transport technology that it fostered (docks, an aerodrome, racing cars). The majority of visits were, however, firmly located within the spaces of civil society. Alongside trips to a factory and a charity were six events in the sphere of education (lectures, institutional visits) alongside the twelve recommended cultural events (museums exhibitions, circuses, performances). What unifies these sites is what they showcased. On display was western civilisation, from the British Museum to Bertram Mills, from Sandhurst to the Salvation Army. While, in one sense, this was a hospitable opening out of London to its guests, it also fits into a longer tradition by which Indian visitors were exposed to the full imperial might of western modernity,

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whether technological, cultural or bureaucratic. As Javed Majeed (2007, 76) suggested of earlier Indian travellers to Europe, ‘The further they travelled, the more disempowered they sensed themselves to be in relation to the Empire that unfolded before their eyes. They experienced a Eurocentred global planetary consciousness as subjects who were aware of being caught up in its webs of power.’ This was the political force of such hospitality, as ‘hidden and subtle’ as the racism Benn sensed in the city. It made the case for India’s continued subjection in empire, through the means of a hospitality that was appreciated by most of the visitors. Before the second session concluded an undated letter was sent to Carter, co-signed by Indian delegates, expressing their ‘deep sense of appreciation of the unfailing courtesy, attention, kindness and excellent services’ of Vincent and Dutt, which had facilitated close contact and understanding between delegates (Figure 7.6).64 The second session was mostly remembered for its failure to overcome the differences of delegates over the minorities question. This is perhaps the only document the second session produced that such a range of delegates would willingly commit their names to, including the Aga Khan, Ambedkar, the Nawab of Bhopal, S. K. Datta, Gidney, Gandhi, Moonje and Sarojini Naidu.

FIGURE 7.6  Signatures to the joint letter of appreciation of the social secretaries Source: © British Library Board (IOR/L/PO/6/63).

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This chapter has shown how difficult this official hospitality had been to justify, budget and provide. It was fraught with dangers, as conference organisers struggled to make delegates feel welcome in a cold, damp and often racist city. For Fenner Brockway, MP, these ‘blaring trumpets and brilliant footlights’ were merely a distraction.65 But the actions of the hospitable state were central to the successful functioning of the conference. The following chapters explore the role of such official and non-official events in London’s broader social world.

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8 SOCIAL LONDON RESIDING AND DINING

A HOSPITABLE CITY? Londoners would be the first to agree that theirs is an eminently selfsatisfied city. London does not worry greatly about the opinion of the foreigner. All through the centuries she has been wooed, and it has left her blasé. With her jumble of new and old, of majesty and meanness, she has the perpetual air of saying, ‘Take me or leave me! I’m good enough for those who like me and much too good for those who don’t.’1

The social city in which the Round Table Conference (RTC) was inaugurated in 1930 represented and reproduced the ambiguities and anxieties wracking the nation and the empire. The ‘roaring’ 1920s had seen the British Empire reach its zenith in terms of extent but had also fostered the anti-colonial sentiment that was calling it into question. As the consequences of the financial crash of 1929 played out across the country, unemployment mounted, finances were in crisis and, a month ahead of the RTC opening, unemployed demonstrators clashed with mounted police at the House of Commons, Hyde Park, High Holborn and Bow (see Figure 4.1).2 While London was still one of the world’s great social scenes, there were fears that it, too, was past its heyday. During the Naval Conference in the spring of 1930 the journalist and author Valentine Williams imagined how blasé London, as described above, would be viewed by visiting delegates and their staff. How would they square the Rolls Royces and jewels of the West End with beggars on the street and unemployment statistics in the newspapers?

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This was part of a broader representational crisis facing 1930s London. Anna Cottrell (2018) suggests that novels and photographs of 1930s London played on the anxiety that its much vaunted cosmopolitanism was derivative, of France and America, and increasingly penetrated by synthetic middle-class spaces of leisure and recreation. Elitist commentators could dismiss as substitutes for real life the new, brightly lit streets of the West End, bounded by Bond Street, Oxford Street, Kingsway and the Strand. Yet in its mass entertainments, affordable eateries and shady spots for nighttime escapades others saw nuanced negotiations of modernity in London’s ‘pleasure district’ (McWilliam 2020). In 1930 St James’s Palace was situated at the intersection of London’s most traditional and newly exciting districts and was also a zone of rapid social change. It was the long-established centre of gentlemanly ‘clubland’ (see below). But it also sat between the glamour and theatrics of the West End and the wealth and privilege of Mayfair; between the green royal parks to the south and west and the urban grit of Soho to the northeast (around which skirted some of the Indian restaurants discussed at the end of this chapter). Sitting at this interchange, the district of St James’s had developed from a nineteenth-century elite enclave into part of a twentieth-century playground for the rich and the middle classes and even, in the nearby Lyons cafés, the working classes (Cottrell 2018, 38). During the conference doubts about these social and spatial changes wracked RTC commentators. One ‘old social observer’ reported that the Indian princes must be missing the brilliance of Edwardian and Victorian London, because many of the town houses had shut, as had the great country houses which they might have visited at the weekend.3 Ease of transport to country estates had diminished the sense of the London ‘season’, although it still pivoted around the royal and government events into which the RTC was plugged.4 Delegates passed through an ‘unparalleled orgy of balls, apart from receptions and parties’ in the week before Christmas in 1930, within the coverage of which women associated with the conference had a special place (see Chapter 9).5 The social events directly related to the RTC were so numerous they defied description. The Indian Magazine and Review explained to its subscribing association members that it would be impossible to fully cover the receptions, at-homes, lectures, papers and activities of societies and hosts, but that definite good was resulting through the personal contacts they fostered, old and new: ‘… they make for that better understanding, and

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friendship between Indians and British, men and women, which has ever been one of the objects of our National Indian Association.’6 This chapter traces the spaces in which these interactions occurred. The first section focuses on spaces of residence and networking, being where delegates slept, socialised and exchanged ideas. The second section explores the all-important art of conference dining, from royal banquets to the intimate Soho spaces of London’s new Indian restaurant scene. What we see is that all of these spaces were political, marking distinctions of privilege through food, bedding and lounge access, but also crafting out the spaces in which conference work continued out of hours. We also find the politics of subalternity at play. Some delegates perceived and experienced the imperial capital as a racial space, in which India was subordinate to Europe, while others inhabited subaltern spaces of dining and leisure where different versions of Indian nationalism might play out.

HOTELS, CLUBS AND SOCIETIES Hotel accommodation was a vital resource for delegates, allowing them to recover from gruelling conference days and social nights. But it was also a vital indicator of social status and was thus a bone of contention for the delegates. In a private note from October 1930 the Maharaja of Bikaner noted complaints that £100 per month [£4,578] plus 25 shillings [£57] a day government allowance was inadequate to enable British Indian delegates to accommodate themselves in the city.7 He had also suggested, however, that money was not a question that troubled the princes. This was certainly how the princes were perceived, and London’s newest and most modern hotels competed to attract them during their conference visits. The Grosvenor made repeated attempts to woo Bikaner, even after he had taken up his accommodation at the Carlton for the second conference session. On 13 October 1931 the Grosvenor had encouraged Bikaner to use their entertaining facilities, each with private entrances, air conditioning and renovated accommodation.8 Believing he would attend the final session in November 1932, the Grosvenor even telegrammed India on 24 September 1932, tempting Bikaner with details of the new system of iced drinking water on tap in each room.9 The newly constructed Dorchester Hotel had also wooed Bikaner with special rates in 1931, which he also had to decline, although he promised he

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would stay with them on his next trip.10 Despite this, on 29 May the next year the comptroller of the Bikaner household wrote to the Carlton suggesting that the maharaja might attend the final session and asking for the hotel’s lowest quotes. These, due to the financial depression, were expected to be lower than the already reduced terms given to Bikaner and his staff during the second conference session. The comptroller also asked whether the same rooms would be available, if there had been any changes in staff or chefs and whether there would still be an orchestra available for afternoon tea, dinner and evening dancing. The Carlton replied insisting that their fee could not be reduced any further and that, as in previous years, an orchestra would be employed for Bikaner’s evening dancing.11 The distinction between the princes and British Indian delegates played out more broadly in hotel accommodation, although what Valentine Williams called London’s ‘jumble of new and old, of majesty and meanness’ meant that there was no neat geographical segregation of delegates at the first conference session. The Carlton (4 in Figure 8.1) was ideally situated, for Bikaner, at the opposite end of Pall Mall to St James’s Palace. On the other side of Trafalgar Square, the Maharaja of Patiala stayed at the Savoy, along with the joint director of the Special Organisation of the Chamber of Princes Colonel Haksar, Hyderabad delegation advisor Colonel ChevenixTrench and secretary to the princely delegation K. M. Panikkar. North of St James’s Palace, the Maharajas of Jammu and Kashmir, Dholpur and Rewa stayed at the May Fair Hotel while the Maharaja of Alwar, the Gaekwar of Baroda and Sir Akbar Hydari stayed at the Hyde Park Hotel, due west of the palace. The geography of the British Indian delegates was more diffuse, although some delegates found lodgings at London’s exclusive hotels. The Aga Khan’s wealth rivalled that of many of the princes and he famously patronised the Ritz whenever in London, retaining a suite there for forty years (Montgomery-Massingberd and Watkin 1980, 94). Despite his insistence on insufficient funds, Bajpai stayed at the Carlton alongside Bikaner, as did Sapru.12 In general, however, British Indian delegates found private rentals, often together. At 11 King Street (19 in Figure 8.1), near Covent Garden, Jayakar, H. P. Mody and Mrs Subbarayan rented rooms, while Kensington Palace Mansions housed N. M. Joshi, Shafi, Sastri, the Begum Shah Nawaz, Ujjal Singh and Latifi. Others clustered between St James’s Square and Piccadilly. Many, however, sought cheaper accommodation further afield, some near Russell Square, others

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Source: Secretariat-General directory, PRO/30/69/578.

FIGURE 8.1  Map of non-London-based delegate residences at the first conference session

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in Paddington, while Dr Ambedkar and Shiva Rao stayed in Maida Vale north of Paddington and 3 miles from St James’s Palace. This geography would be distended further when Gandhi lodged at Kingsley Hall in Bow for the second session, 6 miles to the east. As the Grosvenor had made clear to Bikaner, hotels were not just for sleeping. They were the sites for balls, parties and (to be explored below) fine dining. They were also sites for working, as the discussion of the informal conferencing of the Minorities Committee in Chapter 3 (‘peregrinations from this hotel to that hotel …’ [Barns 1937, 67]) has made clear. The Aga Khan’s rooms at the Ritz were a particularly active hub in this regard. Shortly after the Minorities Committee had started meeting at the second session, Naidu and Gandhi came for a ‘midnight conference’ in the sitting room of his suite at the hotel, having first posed for the press photographers (Aga Khan 1954, 142). By the Aga Khan’s account, the intimate setting failed to produce the desired intimate politics. In response to asking Gandhi to show himself to be a father to India’s Muslims, Gandhi refused to engage in such sentiment, which was said to have produced a chilly effect on the whole conference (Aga Khan 1954, 227). Conference staff would also, on occasion, have to take their work to the Ritz. Stopford later recounted the Aga Khan threatening to resign over a rift with Jinnah at the second conference session. Dr Shaha’at Ahmad Khan arranged an invitation for Stopford to visit the Aga Khan: So I went to the Ritz and was taken up to his suite where on a hot sunny morning at 10 o’clock I found him lying in an enormous bed in a perfumed room with the curtains drawn and the lights on. He said that nothing would stop him from resigning and when I started to stress the unfortunate results which would follow, he lay tossing to and fro with his great bulk making a mountain in the middle of the bed.13

For Stopford the coincidence of the intimate and the political was clearly an uncomfortable coming together and is one of the few accounts of these domestic encounters. Similarly, few of the delegates wrote much about their accommodation or the challenges of finding it, but some evidence survives of the experiences of Dr S. K. Datta. Following the death of Indian Christian delegate K. T. Paul after the first session, Datta was invited to join the conference. He was an experienced internationalist and had wide experience of travel, having served as a Young Men’s Christian Association

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(YMCA) welfare officer with the Indian Army in France during the war and having represented the YMCA at Geneva from 1928 to 1932 (on the role of his wife see Chapter 9). He was also a friend and supporter of Gandhi and had been outspoken on the issue of race reform and the need for a commission on colonial interracial and intercultural relations (Haggis 2021). During previous trips to London he had stayed at the Indian Students Hostel in Gower Street, but hotel accommodation was necessary in order to entertain guests. The author of his unpublished biography, Margarita Barns, believed that it was down to his outspoken views that twenty-four central London hotels refused to provide him with accommodation: Throughout their married life Mrs. Datta had as far as possible protected her husband from slights, both intentional and unintentional, and she tried to keep from him knowledge of the hotels’ refusal and also their unconvincing excuse that while they were not prejudiced they had to adjust themselves to the views of their clientele, largely American and colonial.14

Visram (2002, 276) has shown how common this excuse was at the time. For Datta, this was merely part of the corrupt moral functioning of the entire conference, whereby a princely and British elite had come together to the exclusion of everyday Indians in the social programme which ran alongside the conference and emphasised the gradations of Indian subalternity in London. Barns suggested: Organisations, society hostesses, the visitors themselves – especially the Maharajas – entered into a severe competition to exploit the occasion. According to his mood, Doc [Datta] would be either amused or irritated by what he called ‘the circus’ as it foregathered, arrayed in all the variety and splendour of oriental costume, for a government reception or in one of the most exclusive hotels. Arms folded across his chest, shoulders bowed, he would chuckle at the irony of it all. As he would say, a rich Indian, everything dubious about him except his wealth, would be welcomed in any hotel. A poor Indian, maybe a pedlar in the East End of London, was assured of shelter. But what happened to all those thousands in between, of whom he was one? It gave him no satisfaction, only dismay, to think that he had only become acceptable because he was tacked on to some bejewelled, polygamous, self-indulgent despots.

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He went, of course, to the reception given by the King-Emperor at Buckingham Palace but otherwise so far as possible avoided other private social engagements.15

If the social events were off-putting to Datta, to his fellow Gandhi supporter Muriel Lester the modern hotel also represented the deprivations of modernity more broadly. When wooing Bikaner in September 1931 the managing director of the Dorchester Sir Francis Toole had claimed that in the brief five months since opening, in very difficult economic circumstances, the hotel had become the talk of travellers from all over the world.16 The construction of the hotel was an event itself, a double-page spread in the Evening Standard detailing the thousands of people working on the site, the technology used to regulate air quality and acoustics, and the modernism of its design.17 Five delegates stayed at the Dorchester for the third conference session and having opened in April 1931 it was already being used for work and social meetings during the second session, including a meeting organised by Sapru between MacDonald and Gandhi on 13 September. Gandhi had further meetings in the hotel, during one of which Lester waited for him downstairs. She later recalled her impressions of the hotel and its violent juxtaposition to her East London home (as explored in Chapter 9): I was very comfortable in Dorchester House, sitting waiting for the conference to end. But the contrast made an impact upon one that seemed almost violent. The glittering appointments! The smooth working of this giant home of luxury! How dull this automatic and uniform perfection of service can seem when it is performed professionally instead of by love! Men and women came and went, sophisticated, perfectly clothed, but apparently strangers either to joy or to wonder. From the ballroom came strains of the latest dance music. In the restaurant was every gustatory pleasure. Expensive flowers were everywhere. Soon my guest came out. We had to wait a minute for the car to be called. We sat in the hall. At sight of him, was there visible a faint dispersal of boredom from the faces of some of the other occupants of the hall? I thought so. But it may have been imagination. My guest and I returned to the realities of Bow, to sorrow, joy, prayer and service. (Lester 1932, 115)

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CLUBLAND While close to many of London’s finest hotels, St James’s Palace was at the very centre of London’s gentlemanly ‘clubland’ (Milne-Smith 2011). Clubland was an abstract space, a network of ‘clubbable’ men who possessed the socio-economic capital and cultural nuance necessary to negotiate club life. But clubland was also a place, focused on the district of St James’s. At the southern border were St James’s and Buckingham Palaces, to the southeast was Parliament, to the west were Green and Hyde Parks, to the northwest were the aristocratic houses of Mayfair while to the northeast were the theatres and, beyond them, Soho. The clubs had developed out of the coffee-house culture of the seventeenth century, focusing first on St James’s Street (Milne-Smith 2011, 27). In the nineteenth century they became better regulated and institutionalised, expressed in increasingly grand buildings constructed on Pall Mall, alongside St James’s Palace. A rapid expansion of the broader club scene around the turn of the century facilitated imperial and international travel, offering reciprocal hospitality to members of clubs across Europe, America and the British Empire. Clubs were central to the imperial project, specking colonies with exclusive spaces of European privilege, to which colonial subjects (unless staff) were slow to gain access (B. Cohen 2015). By the interwar years elite political and princely Indians had access to club life in both India and Europe, as the range of clubs increased. In London the number of elite gentleman’s clubs remained, however, small and difficult to access, the core twenty clubs remaining focused on St James’s. They remained such key fixtures in the dense social calendars of the ‘season’ that to live outside the West End risked social ostracism (Milne-Smith 2011, 171). The political and economic networking in clubs also marked them out, for Peter J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins (1986), as one of the key sites of imperial gentlemanly capitalism. While the interwar period saw the pre-eminence of club culture challenged by new and less restrictive clubs, restaurants and mixed-sex dance clubs, St James’s remained a key place and resource upon which the Round Table delegates could draw. The very constitution of Chesterfield Gardens was itself evidence of the importance of clubs for conference work. They provided cheap accommodation for temporary stays in the capital, they provided reasonably priced food and they also provided exclusive spaces within which elites could confer (so exclusive that Chesterfield Gardens was designated only a

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centre, not a club). They provided spaces in which British members could host Indian delegates though, as Rhodes suggested, there seemed to be an implicit racial bar in place. For the prime minister, at least, this could be easily overridden; he invited Sapru to his club, the Athenaeum, to discuss the closing of the first conference session on 30 December 1930 and again on 15 January 1931 (Hooja 1999, 174).18 Some regular Indian visitors to London already had their own clubs; the Aga Khan was a long-standing member of the Marlborough Club on Pall Mall, while during the first conference session Sir A. P. Patro stayed at the National Liberal Club, located between Trafalgar Square and the river Thames.19 Others secured temporary honorary memberships during the conference. At the Athenaeum Sastri was granted membership in May 1931 and Sardar Sultan Ahmed Khan in October 1931.20 Such invitations for club membership further reinforced the social distinctions that had so angered Datta. The case of the Maharaja of Bikaner demonstrates this amply. Bikaner was perhaps the most popular of the princes, and his archives record an overwhelming number of offers of membership from some of London’s most prestigious clubs, the clustering of which demonstrate the prime position of St James’s Palace in the centre of clubland (Milne-Smith 2011, 33). During the first conference session alone he received offers of and accepted (unless noted) honorary membership of the East India United Services Club, International Sportsmen’s Club, Royal Automobile Club, National Liberal Club, Junior Army Navy Club, Junior Constitutional Club, Athenaeum (declined on the grounds of ill health and overwork), Toby’s, the Army and Navy Club, Cavalry Club, Carlton Club, Reform Club, British Empire Club, Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and the British American Dance Club.21 By their nature these spaces were private and rarely reported upon in the press or correspondence. Some of the clubs above did, however, advertise their facilities to entice Bikaner into membership, which gives a sense of the amenities for work and play which members could enjoy. The International Sportsmen’s Club in Mayfair listed the Duke of Westminster as a patron and the Aga Khan as the Indian member of its international advisory committee. This bold, mixed-sex club aimed to provide an international space in which people of all nations could share information about sporting activities. The club house on Upper Grosvenor Street, opened in 1929, presented modern facilities including a swimming pool, Turkish baths, squash courts and a gymnasium, as well as private rooms for partying and dancing and 100

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bedrooms. Bikaner was also sent a glossy brochure, reprinted from a feature in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. It suggested how the sporting facilities of the new club melded into the changing nature of the new London social and financial scene. Besides the artistically decorated swimming pool were terraces upon which tea, cocktails and suppers were served, making ‘the swimming pool a feature of the London season. Winter and summer alike see crowds of young people of both sexes disporting themselves in the rippling water.’22 For those seeking work not play, there was a stock exchange room, where the prices of American stocks were chalked up on a board ‘every five minutes’. To recoup from physical or mental exercise there were smoking and lounge rooms, where open fireplaces, wood panels and lamp coverings ‘give the atmosphere of home rather than that of a club’. Though one of the most modern of the London clubs, the Sportsmen’s Club was replicating a turn taken by other older clubs. The Royal Automobile Club had also sent Bikaner a brochure, explaining that it had acquired the site of the old War Office on Pall Mall, a few minutes’ walk from St James’s, in 1908 and opened its new building there in 1911. The King and Prince of Wales were patron and vice-patron and the club had a more traditional feel. It had special rules regarding female guests and a country house aesthetic, but also featured a swimming pool, American bar, fencing room, squash court, bowling alley, rifle range and Turkish bath.23 While many of the clubs retained their exclusive air, other associations were more broadly welcoming to delegates, perhaps compensating for their restricted or lack of access to clubland. Early on during the second session the social secretaries distributed a notice from the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House opening their facilities to all delegates, including the library, press cuttings department and information office.24 The secretary of the Royal Empire Society at Northumberland Avenue also made the same offer, and on 14 September 1931 a circular extended the offer of honorary membership of the Overseas League to delegates, granting them access to the club headquarters at Vernon House, St James’s Street, replicating an earlier offer made by the National Liberal Club at Whitehall Place. While it is more difficult to recall the interiors and facilities of the dozens of societies that engaged with the RTC, these public forms of associational life leave more explicit traces of how they engaged with and sought to influence the conference through debate and conversation. These predated the conference, including a League of Nations Union dinner to

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which delegates were invited, for 600 guests featuring a radio broadcast speech by the Prince of Wales on 30 October and, on 3 November 1930, the British Indian Union’s luncheon at the Hotel Metropole for Indian delegates to the Imperial Conference.25 At the latter Bikaner made a speech attributing India’s demands to the impact of British history and literature in the subcontinent and setting the terms for the princes’ engagement in constitution making at the RTC.26 The union hosted a further dinner for RTC delegates on 15 November at the Hyde Park Hotel, at which the Prince of Connaught gave a speech praising the society’s object of affording Indian visitors an opportunity to meet the people of Britain socially, to encourage friendship and intimacy, and to give those who had visited India the opportunity to return the hospitality with which they had always been greeted.27 The listings circulated by the social secretaries chart a near constant buzz of events organised by learned and business societies in the city. For the first session these included receptions for delegates by the British Indian Union, British Federation of University Women, Overseas League, Ladies’ Carlton Club (women only), the Spectator magazine, British Empire League, Headmistress’ Association (women only) and the Council of the Royal Institute of Public Health. For the second session invites were issued, in addition to several repeats from those above, by the London Chamber of Commerce, Forum Club and the East India Association. The latter was one of twelve ‘societies and organisations connected with India’ that operated in London in the 1930–1940s recognised by the India Office (on Indian associational life in the city see Chapter 10 and Ahmed and Mukherjee [2012]; Fisher, Lahiri and Thandi [2007]).28 These were pro-imperial organisations, each of which had a specific function. The East India Association hosted debates and published their transcripts, alongside articles, in the Asiatic Review, including the debate between Sastri and Chelmsford over the Simon Report and Dominion status (Sastri 1930). The India Society, the Christian Literary Society for India and the Royal Society of the Arts (India Section) focused on Indian technical subjects, art and literature; the British Indian Union on social relationships; the Indian Empire Society and the Union of Britain and Indian were pro-constitutional reform organisations; the Royal Empire Society encouraged imperial dialogue; and the National Indian Association supported Indian students. Totally absent from this list was any recognition of the societies or organisations based in London which were pro-nationalist or anti-colonial

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(including the London Branch of the Indian National Congress, as discussed in Chapter 10). At the other end of the spectrum to the grand receptions listed above, in terms of size and political disposition, London’s Gandhi Society held small scale meetings in Indian restaurants, celebrating ‘Devalee-Id’ (Diwali and Eid) on 15 November 1930 at the newly opened Abdulla Restaurant on Denman Street near Piccadilly, where a further meeting was held to celebrate New Year on 4 January 1931.29 At the latter, the Labour MP Fenner Brockway, who had denounced the conference method as a sham took the chair and insisted that without financial control any measure of self-government for India would be worthless.30 Mrs Ferozepur Britton seconded a motion calling for Gandhi’s release, and suggested that her ‘fellow-Brittishers’ could never sufficiently hang their heads in shame at the Labour party’s repressive policy of ‘legalised, Constitutional Terrorism’.31 What the two polar extremes of London societies highlighted was the significance of dining spaces for political gatherings. Some of these were in hotels, although smaller meetings took advantage of the increasing number of Indian restaurants in the city. It is to the wide span from the royal extravagance of imperial dining to the lesser-known spaces of Indian eateries in the city that we shall now turn.

MEALS, SPEECHES AND GENERAL WHOOPEE Social life at the RTC ranged from pilgrimages, factory tours and exhibition viewings, to club invitations and peregrinations around London hotels for late night informal conferencing. But perhaps the commonest social activity was dining. The conference delegates ate together at breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and late-night suppers. They met in cafés, clubs, independent eateries and exclusive hotel restaurants. Institutional events often took the form of luncheons or dinners, while every delegation and denomination felt the need to host and be hosted. Gentlemen’s clubs had been amongst the first to introduce gourmet dining to London, in the mid-nineteenth century (Milne-Smith 2011, 27). The emergence of elite hotels, notably the Savoy, furthered the taste for haute cuisine, based on the work of migrant chefs from Europe (including an estimated 5,000 French chefs by 1890; Walkowitz 2012, 99). But restaurants had proliferated later in the century to the east of St James’s,

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extending leisure spaces into the night for post-theatre dining. In Soho a cosmopolitan culinary scene emerged, based on French and Italian cuisine, but also that of Spain, China, Hungary, Greece and Japan. By the 1930s there was also a small but growing Indian restaurant scene, upon which delegates would draw, as well as a cheaper café culture, which proved vital to less well-off delegates. To figures like Dr Datta elite dining was a disgusting spectacle, as it was for many Congress supporters in India during the first and last sessions. Eating together was also fraught with tensions as different social hierarchies and traditions sought happy harmony. There was endless possibility for mishap, from misunderstandings regarding etiquette (such as a delegate who persisted in blowing his nose into a napkin at a formal dinner, recollected in Barns [1937, 47]), to hosts misjudging the patience of their exhausted guests (as with Alwar, below), to the offending of delicate sensitivities regarding social standing (such as when the Indian princes boycotted the Mayor of London’s banquet in October 1930 due to a perceived slight).32 But dinners could also create the relaxed atmosphere in which these mishaps were taken lightly, such as when Sir Akbar Hydari was mistakenly introduced by a toastmaster at a Hyderabad delegation dinner as ‘His Exalted Highness’ (the title of his employer, the Nizam of Hyderabad) which, Benn wrote to Irwin on 11 December 1930, ‘touch of merriment really improved the generally sticky tone of the proceedings’.33 Negotiating these often tricky circumstances was part of the endless social work of the conference, which Sarojini Naidu described to her children on 21 September 1931 as ‘endless personal engagements, public and private, in the shape of meals, speeches and general “whoopee”’ (Paranjape 2010, 249).

ROYAL AND POLITICAL DINING The wealthiest and most glamorous dining events were those between royals in London. Magazines and newspapers were filled with every detail of the season’s royal meetings, especially unique comings together. In November the Sketch reported on the clothing, dancing, canapé arrangements and interior décor of parties organised in honour of the visiting Queen of Spain and her daughters, at which the Duchess of York processed to dinner with the Maharaja of Bikaner, his golden turban reportedly complimenting her white chiffon dress.34

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Bikaner epitomised the closeness of the British and Indian ruling families. He had acted as the honorary aide-de-camp to the king-emperor since he had visited Britain for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902 (Purcell 2010) and received a personal invitation to stay at Sandringham over the weekend of 17 October 1930.35 The next week the Prince of Wales, who had met many of the princes during his tour of India in 1921–1922, hosted a dinner for them at York House.36 On 4 November, ahead of the conference opening, the king and queen entertained the princes and the Queen of Spain at Buckingham Palace (3 in Figure 8.2).37 The dinner was meticulously planned in advance, taking account of princely precedence when setting the seating plan and choreographing entries into the state dining room. On 14 October palace officials had raised the question of inviting the princes’ wives, debating the dilemmas of women in purdah and even the possibility of the Maharaja of Patiala bringing two of his wives.38 It was decided that the wives should not be invited but offered a later tea party instead. As such, the queen hosted Indian wives and the two female delegates for tea on 15 December in a Buckingham Palace state apartment. The Evening Standard recounted the pleasing informality (a hatless Queen Mary showing guests her private apartments) of the still royal event (the queen in red velvet, rubies and diamonds). The surprise turn was the unexpected arrival in a pink frilly dress of the four-year-old Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II), who told the Maharanis of Cooch Behar, Baroda, Kashmir and Sangli that she liked their saris, to their apparent delight.39 Having met the visiting princes first, the British royals also held events to meet all conference participants. The day after the dinner for the princes an afternoon party was held at Buckingham Palace for the delegates, on 5 November 1930. The parallel event for the second session was a much bigger story, the question on everyone’s lips being whether Gandhi would attend, what he would wear and how he might interact with the royals? On 4 November Croft in the India Office had passed to Sir Clive Wigram the names and brief biographies of fourteen delegates he recommended the king meet, including Hydari, Sapru, Shaukat Ali, Shafi, Ujjal Singh, Ambedkar, Sastri, Jinnah and Gandhi. The latter’s biography included note of his loyal service during the Boer and First World Wars; Croft concluded to Wigram, ‘Gandhi had quite a fine record until he became a rebel!’40 While the press were astonished at Gandhi baring his knees before the king, he turned his double pashmina shawl so that the cleanest side was on show (Mirabehn

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Source: Collated by author.

FIGURE 8.2  Map of social engagements across conference sessions

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1960, 138). Rather than the cause of controversy, it was he who had to use his discretion to avoid aggressive questioning by the king-emperor (Guha 2018, 409–410). Gandhi avoided the constant round of political dinners that accompanied the conferences, but most other delegates exploited the networking opportunities they presented. The largest of these were the government-hosted dinners for all delegates and the elite of London’s political society. The first of them took place on 12 November 1930 at the Park Lane Hotel (Figure 8.3), before a vast reception at Lancaster House (see Chapter 9). Dinners, on a less grand scale, were used for explicitly political purposes throughout the RTC. Benthall, for instance, had entertained Bengali delegates on 10 November 1930 and he wrote to Sir George Godfrey, his colleague in Calcutta, the following night describing how throughout and after the dinner the delegates had discussed ‘wide abstractions together’, which he found futile, before getting down to the specific questions of concern in Bengal.41 Benthall was able to report fairly full summaries of each delegates’ views, which he found to be hopeless, but the diners agreed to meet at Sir P. C. Mitter’s lodging the following weekend. Fazl-ul-Huq phoned Benthall the following day to say that the party had been a huge success in producing progress on constitutional issues and Benthall concluded that while the dinner had been expensive, it had been worthwhile. The following night, however, Benthall faced the limits to political dining when he entertained Bombay’s delegates. As he explained to Godfrey, ‘[Sir Phiroze] Sethna, as we expected was very tricky, disinclined to talk or to yield, and being teetotal could not be warmed up for the occasion.’42 Entertaining was an expensive business which further exacerbated the inequalities already thrown up by the accommodation provisions. Even the commerce delegate Benthall found dinners to be expensive, and only the wealthiest hosts could lay on large dinners, like Viscountess Lady Astor (see Chapter 9). The Conservative delegate Earl Peel and his wife could afford to host a large luncheon at the exclusive hotel Claridges (7 in Figure 8.2) in Mayfair, on 13 January 1931, for dozens of guests including leading princes, delegates and advisors.43 Chesterfield Gardens did allow for some lower budget entertaining, such as Gidney’s lunch in honour of Peel the day before his Claridges event. But delegations were also able to pool their resources, in terms of personnel

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Source: ‘Delegates at a Banquet during Indian Round Table Conference, London’, © British Library Board (Photo 13/(3)).

FIGURE 8.3  Delegates at the Park Lane Hotel conference banquet

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and finances, and entertain collectively. Stopford helped organise a Conservative delegation large dinner party on 10 December 1930 at 6 Hamilton Place, Park Lane, which had been made available to Sir Samuel and Lady Hoare by Mrs Meyer Sassoon.44 Having connections with wealthy philanthropists like Sassoon certainly helped Conservative partying; 600 guests were entertained that night, by the Royal Air Force band as well as by the cream of London political society.45 Likewise, the famously well-funded Hyderabad delegation were able to afford a substantial dinner party after the first session had concluded at the Savoy, at which they recognised the support of broader London society.46 The British Indian delegation hosted a meal of thanks as the conference session drew to a conclusion, hosted at the Park Lane Hotel on 13 January 1931 with food supplied by Shafis Restaurant (see below). Sastri stood in for the ill delegation head, the Aga Khan, and lavishly praised both British hosts and British hospitality, which had made the delegates feel like they had never left their homes.47 Benn wrote to Irwin that evening that the 300 guests at the banquet, from every side of Indian opinion, sat at tables of a dozen where the goodwill was evident and only fortified the belief that MacDonald would be able to conclude the conference, in under a week’s time, on an optimistic note.48 The run of social events continued throughout the conference, even into the much diminished third session. The Illustrated Weekly of India carried photographs of Dr Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, Sir Henry Gidney, Hafiz Hidayat Hussain and N. C. Kelkar leaving a reception at Buckingham Palace where they had met the king in December 1932.49 Kelkar was attending the conference for the first time and praised the social secretaries’ coordinating efforts, leaving the delegates ‘so overwhelmed with invitations to tea-parties, receptions, lectures and public entertainments that it was impossible to cope with them; and many among the Members had to make a choice, accept some and decline others, at the risk of even appearing discourteous or ungracious’ (Kelkar 1933, viii). If the delegates had to pool their resources to entertain on a mass scale, this was not an issue for many of the fantastically (and for some, scandalously) wealthy princes. The papers carried regular listings of the entertaining done by the princes, which began as soon as they arrived in London, up to a month before the conference started. The Morning Post of Sunday, 12 October 1931 could report a dinner at Claridges on Friday evening given by the Nawab of Chhitari for nineteen delegates and other guests, while on Saturday a luncheon at the Dorchester on Park Lane was

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hosted by the Maharaja of Kapurthala for thirteen delegates and prominent supporters of Indian causes.50 The princes were also commented upon at the various parties they attended, especially their tendency to conform to the stereotype of an Indian body, unlike many of the British Indian delegates; their bright turbans and jewels never escaping comment. But it was as hosts that the princes attracted most comment. Three examples will be given below of princely extravagances that were generally viewed as successes (Bikaner), extravagances perhaps too far (Darbhanga) and as ostentatious missteps (Alwar). For Bikaner’s travelling staff organising his social calendar was a major task in itself. Before arriving for the second RTC session, a list had been drawn up of those to be invited to lunch or dinner in London. The number totalled 444 people. This included a guest for most invitees, but his over 200 official guests included ex-viceroys, the staff of royalty, ex-governors of Indian provinces and members of the British Government.51 Lists were also compiled of people who had called on Bikaner but who had not been invited to a lunch, dinner or party so that they might be invited in return.52 These had to be fitted around a lunch and dinner on almost every day of the conference, ranging from intimate lunches with Ramsay and Ishbel MacDonald and a few other guests at 10 Downing Street, such as that on 8 October during the Imperial Conference and the return dinner invitation they accepted on 16 December, to the vast banquets at which he was prominently placed and often the key after dinner speaker. Those large dinners hosted by Bikaner were some of the most lavish of the conference circuit, but there was a general sense that the purpose of the dinners was political and worked towards the good of the conference. The Daily Telegraph noted that once the conference had opened Bikaner had ‘made it his especial care to keep the Indian delegates in touch with members of the British Government and other leading politicians in this country’.53 It was in this light that his vast party, on 16 December 1930 at the Carlton Hotel, was viewed, described as the largest private dinner party ever attended by one reporter.54 Amongst the 115 guests seated around a great horseshoe table were the leaders of the British delegations and representatives of every hue of Indian political opinion. An air of informality was fostered by Bikaner’s decision that there should be no toasts, it being a private dinner, and that people should dance afterwards. Bikaner’s internationally acknowledged military and political career helped grant his entertaining a utilitarian air. This was not the case

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with princely dinners where the object was viewed as personal selfaggrandisement, lacking the political purpose whereby such expenditure could be justified. On 28 November 1930 the Maharajadhiraja of Darbhanga threw a party for 250 guests at the Savoy Hotel to celebrate his twentythird birthday. Benn wrote to Irwin the following day that he had given a speech, after the audience had sung ‘He’s a jolly good fellow’, recognising the transformation in British public opinion that the delegates were having, following which guests were given golden garlands by the servants. Having begun at 8:15 p.m. the partying went on until midnight, as captured by The Graphic’s candid camera, who snapped Alwar talking to the Countess of Minto, Benn puffing on a cigar next to the Maharani of Baroda, Earl Russell in a golden garland and the wives of Sir Manubhai Mehta and Sardar Ujjal Singh looking on (see Figure 8.4). Moonje was not photographed but attended the dinner, noting the three to four different wines and champagne served, as well as the large menu. He estimated the dinner would have cost £2 [£90] per head, meaning that Rs 7,000 would have been spent on this dinner alone, in addition to some of the officials receiving garlands that appeared to be of gold.55 An Evening Standard gossip column also wondered at Darbhanga’s extravagance. Having followed up his birthday party with immense parties at Christmas and New Year, he was estimated to have spent more than any other prince in London, when surely it was down to London to entertain its visitors?56 While Darbhanga was viewed as youthfully extravagant, Alwar was less well received. Private comments on his character regularly hinted at his darker side or dubious morality; Ian Copland (1997, 4) retrospectively cited him as the epitome of the bad prince. He faced an uprising by his Muslim subjects in the 1930s and was eventually forced into retirement by the British, amid rumours of paedophilia and the coercive seduction of young boys (Copland 1999). When he died in 1937, aged fifty-five, one Reuter’s report from Paris described him as one of the most intriguing figures in recent Indian history, his personality combining baffling characteristics, talents and incompetency, accomplishments and defects: He could charm and cajole, unbend or withdraw, deliver eloquent speeches, discuss almost any subject with apparent knowledge and insight, or maintain a morose and disinteresting silence. He had the reputation of being a highly cultured gentleman and he certainly did not lack either energy or decision; yet as an administrator, he proved

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FIGURE 8.4  The Maharajadhiraja of Darbhanga’s birthday party Source: ‘An Indian Prince’s Birthday Party’, The Graphic, 6 December 1930.

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inefficient and was often callous and even cruel in the treatment of his subjects and of his personal entourage.57

At the conference Alwar was a pushy socialiser. After repeated requests for an invitation, Benn reluctantly invited him to his home for tea, where he stayed for two hours, while MacDonald received increasingly expectant invitations to him, and his family, to join Alwar for lunch at his hotel.58 During the journey to London he had irritated Moonje by his imperiousness combined with his inability to grasp the finer details of constitutional debates, while on the return journey his secretiveness and temper were noted by another fellow traveller (Legg 2020c). Perhaps conscious of Bikaner’s status relating to his war efforts, Alwar had sent MacDonald a specially printed brochure entitled ‘Alwar and the Great War, 1914–1918’, detailing the troops sent to Europe and the maharaja’s hand in welcoming them home on their return, despite the pouring rain.59 What Alwar lacked in military prowess he made up for in rhetoric. He was described as the ‘star turn’ of a luncheon for 150 given at the Savoy Hotel by the British Sportsmen’s Club on 16 November 1930, the Daily Telegraph praising his perfect English, well-conceived and admirably delivered oration, use of a puff on his cigarette to signal a change of subject and his witty suggestion that delegates were making new constitutions by day and ruining their own by night.60 Alwar made a misstep, however, in the elaborate banquet for 250 guests he organised to celebrate the twenty-eighth anniversary of his reign, at the Connaught Rooms (8 in Figure 8.2) on 17 December 1930. With the conference due to conclude in mid-January most delegates anticipated this as the period of most intense work. Stopford noted in a letter of 18 December that the conference had had one of its worst weeks, with the communal crisis cropping up everywhere, the princes looking for a way out of federation and everyone exhausted, yet on 5 December he had received an invitation ‘commanding’ him to attend the banquet.61 Benn wrote to Irwin on returning home after the meal, describing the pomp with which the evening was organised, with the high table of which he and Macdonald were a part fanfared into the room by a man in tabard and herald’s cap. Alwar later led eight toasts in addition to his own speech.62 He had a commemorative pamphlet produced after the event, listing the table plan, printing the speeches by Alwar, MacDonald, Benn, the Gaekwar of Baroda and J. H. Thomas, secretary for the dominions and featuring an

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introduction by Mir Maqbool Mahmood which suggested that Alwar’s speech had provided a moment of clarity in a turbulent moment at the conference.63 This was, however, far from how the dinner was received. The double page spread in The Graphic featured candid camera photographs, over half of which were of guests looking glum as they listened in silence (Figure  8.5).64 Hailey was clearly no fan of Alwar, having denounced his opening conference speech to Irwin, in a letter of 19 November, as theatrical and obviously insincere. He wrote again, the day after Alwar’s banquet: I was one of the few people who refused to go to Alwar’s dinner last night, knowing my Alwars. He kept an overwrought P.M. and his colleagues listening to a high-faluting and insincere address for exactly an hour and the company did not break up till twelve. They all believe implicitly now all they have heard to the discredit of Alwar.65

Stopford agreed with Hailey’s account: he described the banquet as awful, with guests being detained from 8:15 p.m. to midnight (as with Darbhanga’s birthday meal) but having to listen to Alwar’s one-hour speech. Moonje described it as ‘a rigmarole of sentimentalism, philosophy, poetry and what not. Unfortunate he has not been able to make a good impression.… Mr Lees Smith yesterday remarked that Alwar has a brutal look about him. He deserves it. He is really a beast.’66 If any of these reports found their way back to Alwar, they didn’t dent his confidence. Following the very public dinner he laid on for his servants in early January, he gave a speech at a lunch provided by the City Livery Club on 5 January 1931, guaranteeing that India would honour its obligations, and spoke of his confidence for India’s future with British support as the principal guest at the banquet of the Worshipful Company of Gold and Silver Wyre Drawers on 9 January.67 The oddest turn came in Alwar’s farewell banquet at Grosvenor House Hotel on 19 January, the last day of the conference session, for which it was announced in the papers beforehand: ‘Unseen Maharanee at London Banquet.’68 Alwar’s wife would be a mystery at the feast: ‘She will dine as the diners dine, but she will not dine with them, and she will not be seen by them, for her husband enjoins strict “purdah”.’ Leading down into the banquet hall was a stairwell, at the top of which the Maharanee would sit, veiled and surrounded by screens and curtains of thick muslin.

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FIGURE 8.5  The Maharaja of Alwar’s anniversary banquet Source: ‘A Maharajah’s Anniversary Banquet’, The Graphic, 27 December 1930.

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During the dinner there was, indeed, a curtain veiled area in the dining hall with a table set for two. Yet when Alwar’s home minister was asked who was accompanying the Maharanee, he replied that she was not coming ‘and she never intended to come’.69 The Daily Telegraph decided to get the joke, later praising the feat of hoaxing so many distinguished guests, a demonstration of Alwar’s keen if cynical humour as a practical joker.70 The hotel had reportedly gone to considerable lengths to protect the Maharanee’s privacy, directed by Alwar’s secretary Colonel Singh. This report had Alwar announce that his wife was not coming and that ‘it was never intended that she should’. The initial ambiguity, that the Maharenee had possibility refused to engage in the deception, was replaced with a firm statement of intent, that her absence was planned. The hoax brutally symbolises the silencing of Indian women. This could also be said of a conference with only three female delegates, although the following chapter will demonstrate the wideranging influence of women over the conference. The dinners recounted above attest to the influence of wealth and money through dining and the spaces in which they occurred. This deflects attention, however, from the sparse but suggestive archival record of the dining spaces used by average Indian delegates, many of which catered to the emerging taste for Indian food in the capital.

INDIAN RESTAURANTS This concluding section considers the subaltern eating spaces of the capital. These are subaltern in the diplomatic sense used by Herren (2017), being used by lower ranking staff and delegates at the conference. But they are also subaltern spaces in the geographical sense of being both beyond standard assumptions about the elite dining spaces of big diplomatic events (Jazeel 2014). It is notable that all but one of the Indian restaurants which delegates recorded visiting below were in Soho, whilst all but one of the Soho restaurants visited were Indian (see 1, 12, 22, 23 and 31 in Figure 8.2). Finally, these restaurants are subaltern in that they share analytical occlusions in common with subaltern subjects; leaving little trace, largely escaping representation and being spaces we can speak of but not for (Legg 2016b). This returns us to the criticisms made of conference socialising at the time. It was seen as corruptingly elitist, both by Congress supporters in

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India and by poorer delegates at the conference. Eating was a specific vector for this privilege and discrimination. Moonje noted it at sea during his journey back to India after the second session, when the head steward was noted as sitting Indians together so that they might not interact with Europeans, while a few elite delegates like Sir Abdul Chatterjee and Colonel Sir Henry Gidney could dine at the captain’s table.71 Even within Indian dining in London these distinctions existed, with Veerasawmy’s being the most prestigious, followed by Shafis (as below). These reflected broader distinctions that had been in play for over a hundred years within Britain. The first Indian ‘restaurant’ in London is often listed as the Hindostanee Coffee House, operating at Portland Square from 1809 to 1833 (Palat 2015). But this overshadows the more partial records of the boarding house canteens and cafés set up by former sailors and migrants, especially from Sylhet, in the East End and around ports across the country (Buettner 2008). In the 1920s the scene in London rapidly expanded such that by 1932 the United India could report that a growing number of restaurants were popular with Indians in London as well as English and continental guests attracted by their ‘picturesque oriental atmosphere’.72 These restaurants formed ‘contact zones’ (Ahmed 2011, 99) for Britons and Indians but also spaces for cross-class interactions between Indians in Britain. While the 112 Gower Street YMCA Indian Student Hotel, where Dr Datta had stayed on previous trips, had long offered subsidised cheap dal-chapati, other restaurants were reducing their tariffs to attract broader custom. Locally published magazines for Indian audiences commented on conference events and would have been read by the delegates. Venues placed advertisements in them, hoping to attract often wealthy delegates during the early-1930s economic downturn. In the November 1930 issue of the Congress-supporting United India, coinciding with the opening of first conference session, a small notice appeared, next to an advert for Fenner Brockway’s book The Indian Crisis, for the Hindustan Restaurant at 6 Howland Street, Tottenham Court Road, billed as London’s cheapest Indian restaurant.73 An Indian and Colonial Journal advert showed that it also comprised a hotel, targeted at Indian and foreign students, where they were encouraged to enjoy the high-quality Indian food at the lowest prices in London.74 The YMCA and Hindustan Restaurants were located northwest of Bloomsbury and targeted Indian students. Those Indian restaurants which targeted and attracted conference delegates were closer to St James’s but

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were located in the cosmopolitan spaces of Soho. Historically the southern border of this district took in Coventry Street and Leicester Square, being bound by Charing Cross Road to the east, Oxford Street to the north and Regent Street to the west. For Judith Walkowitz (2012, 13) the area had a ‘temporal as well as spatial geography’, being grubby by day (the West End’s East End) but alluring and tempting by night. There were also fine-grained cultural geographies of respectability and the senses traversing the 130 acres of Soho. Some of these were gustatory, produced by migrant communities who marked their communities with, most famously, Italian and Jewish forms of eating and socialising (Walkowitz 2012, 92–143, 182–208; note that the meal put on by the British Indian delegation for the secretarial staff took place in the Italian restaurant, Florence, on Rupert Street in Soho, see 12 on Figure 8.2). Less remarked upon has been the emergence of Indian restaurants in south Soho, which reinforced the micro-cultural geographies of the district. In the November 1930 issue of United India sat a full-page advert, overshadowing that for the Hindustan Restaurant, for Abdullah Restaurant. It would open within a week at 18 Denman Street, just north of Piccadilly Circus and advertised ‘cuisine par excellence’ and Indian dishes of the highest quality at popular prices.75 The advert was also run in January 1931 in the loyalist Indian and Colonial Journal and the venue proved popular with the Gandhi Society (as recounted above).76 Next to an advert for S. Goswami’s forthcoming book Psychology of Gandhi, in the same journal issue sat notice of Café Indien, ‘The glamour of the East in the heart of the West’, at 7 Leicester Place, Leicester Square.77 Open from 11 a.m. to midnight, the café traded on its location in the theatre district, promising excellent food served by ‘discreet Indian attendants in picturesque Indian garb’ who would enhance the ‘illusion of oriental magnificence of the lavishly coloured surroundings’. An early 1932 advert pitched the café as a calm refuge, ‘situated in the centre of theatreland’, offering ‘an ideally quiet and comfortable meeting place’ to enjoy Indian specialities including rasgola, barfi, Madras sambar, Nepal egg curry, shami kebab and samosa, where bona fide students would be offered a reduced tariff.78 The Anglo-Ceylon Restaurant at 47 Gerrard Street, Piccadilly, also offered ‘comfortable, cosy & select’ food, including special ‘guzrati and parsee dishes’ at ‘extraordinarily low prices’.79 Gerrard Street had a notorious place in the geography of Soho, being located south of Shaftesbury Avenue and north of Leicester Square. Though

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the location of Dr Johnson’s eighteenth-century literary club, by the 1920s it was known for its associations with prostitution, in broad daylight, black dance and jazz bars and its shady nightclubs (Matera 2015). ‘The 43’ club had infamously been run there in the 1920s by Mrs Meyrick, two doors down from the Anglo-Ceylon Restaurant’s home (Walkowitz 2012, 111–113, 216, 243). In 1920 it was on this street that the restaurant was founded which would make the most direct pitch for the custom of RTC delegates. The Shafis had been established at 18 Gerrard Street by the Yasin brothers who had come to London as students and noticed a gap in the market.80 Though it catered to Indians in London it targeted better-off students, reportedly curating the feel of a community centre, and soon started to bridge out to the city’s white population (Highmore 2009). The RTC was clearly identified as an opportunity to increase both custom and status. Anticipating the conference by six months, Shafis ran an advert in the March 1930 issue of United India, in which the editor directly endorsed the venue for visiting delegates, praising its ‘real Indian atmosphere’ in which real Indian ways and manners were preserved, leaving the ‘Indian colony in England’ proud of the Indian establishment in their midst. Tables were said to be ready for conference delegates, and a photograph was included of the interior showing it to be without the mock oriental splendour of some of the cheaper venues.81 Another full-page advert in May explained that the venue had been run by Nora Yasin since the death of Md Yasin and offered a ‘select atmosphere and quickest service’.82 The advert was re-run in the December 1930 issue, in the middle of the first RTC conference session, with the tag line ‘The Shafis is not merely a public Restaurant. It is a proper Rendezvous for all Decent and Dignified People.’83 In February 1931 the same advert was run, this time proclaiming its hand in the dinner of thanks organised by the British India delegation: ‘The Shafis arranged the Banquet at the Park Lane Hotel on January 13th for 350 Members and Guests of the Round Table Conference – Everything was OK. Why? Because: Shafis is the best. Because: Shafis is the oldest.’84 The adverts were run again for the second conference session, recommending as early as the June–July 1931 edition of United India booking in advance for the conference to which Gandhi had been invited. When the conference started Shafis actively billed itself as the place to catch a glimpse of delegates and affiliates of the Mahatma. A page-spread advert gave full Shakespearean billing to the arrival of the Mahatma (see Figure 8.6). This helped attract delegates but also perhaps

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FIGURE 8.6  At Shafis! Source: United India, October–November 1931, © British Library Board (LOU.LON 792 [1931]).

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to attract protestors. On 21 September a short newspaper article reported a firework being thrown into an Indian restaurant on Gerrard Street where a number of conference delegates were dining (Shafis was not named but the presence of the delegates makes it the likely venue for the attack).85 The smoking object was thrown through a window onto the carpet where the manager extinguished it. The rebellious London branch of the Indian National Congress was protesting against the conference at the time, as were communist activists in the city (see Chapter 10), but no culprits could be found in the street. Shafis’ stiffest competition was Veerasawmy’s restaurant at 99 Regent Street (due to a printing error the restaurant became known as Veeraswamy’s). Opened by Edward Palmer in 1926, the restaurant has been credited with making Indian dining fashionable for London society more broadly. Palmer had worked in the Indian Army and ran the Indian section of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, where he would have known Vincent, who was organising secretary, and went on to select Veeraswamy’s to cater for Chesterfield Gardens.86 The restaurant explicitly cultivated a ‘Raj’ atmosphere, with ‘bearers’ and ‘sahibs’ catering to the nostalgia of returnees from colonial India (Buettner 2008). Perhaps because of these connections the restaurant didn’t advertise itself as widely as Shafis, though a spread from early 1932 in United India pitched the venue as a place for businessmen and friends (see Figure 8.7). The restaurant advertised its exclusivity by its luxury, its cuisine, its wine cellar and its cocktails. It visualised a glamorous and white audience. But its location also spoke for it (37 in Figure 8.2). Technically on the border of Soho, it was situated on the west side of Regent Street, closer to Saville Row and the dazzling lights of Piccadilly Circus than the clubs and bars of Gerrard Street. Veerasawmy’s featured regularly, if briefly, in accounts of conference socialising. Moonje attended a reception held by the Indian Medical Association of London there on 30 November 1930 while on 5 January 1931 Mr R. S. Nehra, a member of the executive committee of the League of Coloured Peoples, and his wife hosted an at-home at the restaurant, with 30 of the 200 attendees reported to be members of the RTC.87 On the final day of the first session, in between the morning plenary and the prime minister’s Movietone recorded speech that afternoon, Colonel Gidney laid on a lunch at Veeraswamy’s, attended by forty guests including Moonje, Benn, Sankey and MacDonald (Wallace 1947, 121). At the second session Gandhi himself even attended, joining another Indian Medical

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FIGURE 8.7  Veerasawmy’s India Restaurant Source: United India, January–February 1932, © British Library Board (LOU.LON 515 [1932]).

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Association reception on 4 November 1931, where Gandhi apparently ‘poured cold water’ on the suggestion of establishing a hospital for Indians in London.88 Subsequently, on 26 May 1932, the Gandhi Society switched from Abdullah’s to Veeraswamy’s for a joint meeting with the Indian National Congress League at their annual dinner, with Fenner Brockway in the chair.89 During the dinner it was agreed to appoint a joint council for discussing Indian affairs between the society, league and the Independent Labour Party. Shafis also enters some private records, with Moonje noting meals there on 24 October 1930 (‘The Kofta Curry and the chicken were nice’), 8 December 1930 and dinners on 6 and 7 January 1931, the latter with Alwar and Raja Narendra Nath.90 Despite its supplying food for the Park Lane Hotel meal, Shafis sat between the higher level dinners of Veeraswamy’s, itself beneath the premier tier of West End hotels, and the smaller cafés and restaurants attempting to win conference trade. These were, however, only one side of Indian delegate dining in London during the conference. While delegates would often retreat to their apartments or hotels for food each day, the evidence suggests there was more regular dining out than the larger event dinners or visits to the Indian restaurants listed above. Few delegates noted this dining minutiae but, again, Dr Moonje’s diary is useful in both the regularity of detail recorded and because he was not one of the wealthier delegates and so visited a broad range of venues. He noted locations of dining between 22 October 1930 and 22 January 1931 for the first session and between 8 September 1931 and 27 November 1931 for the second session, a period spanning 178 days in total. Of these, locations of dining were noted on around half (86) of the days, some including both lunches (30) and dinners (65). The ninety-five meals can be analysed using the categories applied earlier in this chapter. Moonje listed nine official dinners, including those at the Imperial Institute, Lancaster House, Buckingham Palace and Chesterfield Gardens. There were also nine occasions at clubs, mostly the National Liberal and the Overseas Club, and five hosted by various societies, including Indian Student Associations and the Empire Parliamentary Association. The largest number were the five lunches and twenty-four dinners in hotel restaurants, notably the Carlton and Hyde Park Hotels. There were nine trips to Indian restaurants, four trips to Shafis against three to Veeraswamy’s, one to Kashmere restaurant and one to the Koh-i-Norr restaurant on Rupert Street in Soho. The other thirty-four trips were to restaurants that were

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neither Indian nor hotel based, or to private residencies. The twenty-one trips to restaurants ranged from high end venues, like the Connaught Rooms for Alwar’s banquet or a party with supper included at Selfridges store on election night, to popular restaurants like the Trocadero in Leicester square or the Lyons venues, which emerged out of an exhibitions catering company founded in 1887 (Bird 2000). The Lyon’s had opened their first teashop at 213 Piccadilly in 1894, and swiftly expanded into a major chair of restaurants serving a broad range of clientele. In 1904 the Lyons’ Popular Café was opening in Piccadilly, a licenced super-restaurant that could seat 2,000 people who could enjoy its set price dinner menus of 3/6 [£8.80] and music by the ‘Picadillans dance band’.91 These were sites for industrial scale production of leisure for the working classes (Walkowitz 2012, 195), which novelists would criticise as spaces designed to prevent thinking (Cottrell 2018, 99). But for less wealthy conference delegates, the Lyons’ Corner Houses and Cafés provided cheap and accessible spaces for continuing their work. Moonje listed eight trips to Lyons’, especially at the second session when cheap dining at Chesterfield Gardens was not available. The remaining thirteen events Moonje listed were meals at private residences. Five of these were meals in the flats of delegates, such as Mrs Subbarayan and Sir Cowasjee Jehangir. The others were at those homes of interested parties, such as C. F. Andrews at Arya Bhavan in Belsize Park, Viscount and Lady Astor at 4 St James’s Square, or the flat of two journalists, Mr Wilson of the Indian Daily Mail and Mr Ashmead-Bartlett of the Daily Telegraph, who ‘took me to their flat and they got themselves drunk’.92 The role of domestic setting was hinted at in Chapter 3 when the Minorities Committee repeatedly resorted to informal conferencing in private spaces in an attempt to break communal deadlock. Private spaces also played a much bigger role, however, than these furtive meetings or the occasional dining suggested here. ‘At homes’ were neither dining events not political meetings, not technically parties nor even bound to take place in homes. What they did was blur the boundary between the personal and the political, the private and the public, and provided one of several ways that women could influence the outcomes of the conference. It is to these domestic if still public and political spaces that we turn in the following chapter.

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9 AT HOMES POLITICAL HOSTESSING AND HOMEMAKING

A very genuine desire has been expressed by Hosts and Hostesses, who have placed themselves unreservedly at the disposal of the Social Secretaries, to take into their home life any of the Delegates who may find themselves without social engagements or ties during the Christmas recess.… At any festive season, there is no one so lonely, east or west, as the stranger in the land.1

On 26 November 1930 the conference social secretaries distributed a note to delegates acknowledging that even the best connected of them might be without somewhere to gather over the Christmas holiday. As above, the concern was that delegates would not have a home in which to spend such a special time. Benn responded by hosting a Christmas Day party at Chesterfield Gardens but hosts and hostesses also offered temporary access to that nebulous domestic atmosphere, ‘home life’, during the festive period. Such invitations were also, of course, political. This could be overt, such as when Benthall invited the Indian labour delegate N. M. Joshi and his daughter to join him and some friends on Boxing Day, given that they all happened to be spending the holiday period near Bishopsteignton in Devon. On 1 January 1931 Benthall wrote to Sir George Godfrey in Calcutta that Joshi had been ‘greeted with some good old fashioned reactionary stuff’ from Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria who had also joined him, which he felt would have done Joshi ‘a lot of good’.2 He also explained his long conversations with Joshi regarding safeguards for communal minorities, representation for mill workers and labour unions

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in Bengal. Benthall concluded, ‘Altogether I struck up quite a useful social acquaintance with him, which may be advantageous in time to come if he ever shows interest in labour on the Bengal side.’ Should this threaten Benthall’s interests, he clearly though his homely chat with Joshi might help him make his case at a later date. Beyond such overtly political moments, home entertaining was a key facet in the broader hospitality programme which Benn felt was vital for the conference’s success. The receptions, lunches and dinners outlined in previous chapters were the public face of this hospitality. But, as shown below, 40 per cent of one large sample of recorded social events were ‘at-homes’. These ubiquitous events defy easy categorisation, many of the events being neither in homes nor concerning homely pursuits. Yet, in general, at-homes brought conference entertaining into domestic spaces. In so doing they opened up an avenue for female political influence, which supplemented two other ways in which women continued conference work ‘at home’ in the broader sense intended by this chapter’s title. The first was the role of the political hostess, organising and overseeing social functions connected to the conference. The second was the role of a home-maker, whether that home be a political headquarters or a ‘homeplace’ (hooks 1991; Legg 2003) that served a broader function as a cultural or even spiritual hearth for delegates in London. This chapter will move through these degrees and spaces of hospitality, from hosting to at-homes, to homes in London that present us with different but overlapping versions of political home-making in the capital. Three studies of the latter will be presented, being Nancy Astor’s home at 4 St James’s Square; Muriel Lester’s community centre at Kingsley Hall; and Gandhi’s base in central London at 88 Knightsbridge, which was a home but also an office, a salon and an artists’ studio. Astor, Lester and Gandhi’s well known female companions, such as Mirabehn or Sarojini Naidu, were all members of the political elite. Less well-known assistants and volunteers that appear below were not elite though by no means subaltern, although Indian women occur in the margins of many of the accounts below. But the homes and homely events that follow do represent subaltern places to the diplomatic palaces, offices and chambers outlined in the rest of this book. Records of them tend to track elite figures, like Astor or Gandhi, but the traces they leave in their wake allow us to sketch out the affective and personal labour of women that went into crafting conference work in domestic spheres.

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The significance to gendered histories and historical geographies of the ‘placing’ of women and the policing of the public–private divide has been made clear (Walkowitz 1982), any reading of women at the conference through their domestic work is fraught with the risk of re-inscribing women’s influence to the home. This is especially the case given the revelatory public performances of India’s female delegates. Shah Nawaz and Subbarayan commanded a strong public voice in St James’s Palace and at dinners, society talks and receptions. Though they appear below they are not the focus of attention here, not least because of Sumita Mukherjee’s (2018) comprehensive account of their conference work (Naidu represented Indian women at the second session and appears below, as well as in Mukherjee’s work). The focus here is on domestic space, as a place of hosting and habitation, and relatively little record remains of what Shah Nawaz and Subbarayan did in their lodgings at, for the first session, Kensington Palace Mansions and 11 King’s Street, Covent Garden respectively (18 and 19 in Figure 8.1).3 More broadly, evidence of female labour and its representational effacement has already been presented here in terms of cleaners, secretarial workers, staff and guests at clubs and restaurants. The aim has been to show that women contributed across the various spaces of the conference, but now we explore the rich evidence of women’s contribution towards the conference aims from within London’s homes. While this attests the inscription of women’s social and political work to domestic spaces, far from the centre of conference power, the material below also shows how women made homes into political spaces. These could be domestic political headquarters which might feel very close to the political centre (especially for Nancy Astor’s house at 4 St James’s Square, a five-minute walk from St James’s Palace), but they could also be homes which offered respite and perhaps an alternative space from which the very concept of a conference could be reimagined. This analysis draws from much broader attempts to explore the histories and geographies of women’s international lives. Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler (2021) have recently reminded us of the ongoing neglect of the role of historical women by both historians and international relations scholars. While their interest is in the contribution of women to internationalist thought, they acknowledge the existence of rich studies of the erasure of women from intellectual and disciplinary histories despite evidence of the presence of women in the practices of international relations

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and diplomacy. In terms of the latter, Christine Sylvester (2002) outlined how feminist perspectives not only introduced the study of women to international studies but had changed its very epistemology (see Calkin and Freeman [2020] for the equivalent process in the geographical discipline). Feminist scholarship in the 1980s had ‘asked us everywhere to give up thinking that international relations consisted of peopleless states, abstract societies, static ordering principles, or even theories about them, and begin looking for the many people, places, and activities of everyday international politics’ (Sylvester 2002, 3). Through the 1990s feminist scholars continued to challenge emphases on abstract international relations with studies of the social relations of the international, positioning sociality as the reality of international relations through using an expanded range of methods and sources. This brought about a determinedly situated knowledge of the international: ‘Feminist programs aim first to reveal places where gender and women are located in international relations and then to offer compensatory versions of theory and practice that are less partial and more just …’ (Sylvester 2002, 10–11). The relative absence of learning from parallel moves in postcolonial and subaltern scholarship was noted by Sylvester with regret. While focusing solely on western examples, Carolyn James and Glenda Sluga’s (2016) edited volume has expanded the limited historical scholarship on women in diplomacy and international politics. Their 500-year scope begins with Renaissance Italy and the ready access to dynastic politics and diplomacy that elite women could enjoy in the intimate spaces of royal courts or private dwellings. Aristocratic women, continuously across the periods studied, could and were expected to use long-distance correspondence and small-scale parleying to achieve diplomatic outcomes. The changes to the practice of international relations wrought by 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna was a turning point for women especially. The prolonged conference marked a highpoint for women’s influence via salon networking, which brought diplomats into informal spaces and constituted one of the main vectors of public opinion, alongside press and print cultures (Vick 2014, 132). But the conference marked the emergence of new scientific, technical and lessaristocratic approaches to diplomacy. Though the feminine salon continued to influence informal diplomatic sociability, James and Sluga (2016, 6) show that the newly public international relations was a determinedly masculine international public dominated by inter-nation-state relations, in which women’s formal contributions were delimited to that of the diplomat’s wife,

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and the informal diplomacy of the salon became more social than political. While the British Foreign Office actively banned the employment of women in diplomatic roles in the interwar years (McCarthy 2016, 169), women found influential roles in emerging international institutions. They could represent nation-states at the League of Nations (Herren 2016, 182), this privilege itself being testament to the significant influence of the longerstanding networks of feminist internationalism (Sluga 2016). Such networks had long engaged with colonial questions, with imperial feminism fuelling anti-colonial sentiment in interwar India (Sinha 2006; Legg 2014b). While many Indian feminists adopted and adapted the campaigns and methods of European feminists (Mukherjee 2018), others took their forms of campaigning and networking from anticolonial movements and institutions. Conferences proved key sites for forging these solidarities, whether the regional and national meetings of the All India Women’s Congress (Basu and Ray 1990) or the later explicitly internationalist and pan-Asianist meetings in which Indian women would play leading roles (Armstrong [2016]; on black feminist internationalists in interwar London see Umoren [2018]). The Round Table Conference (RTC) marks a staging-post in this journey, which saw mostly British, but some Indian, women playing pivotal roles spanning the spaces of the salon, the home and the conference chamber.

POLITICAL HOSTESSING In this section we explore how women supplemented formal politics through hosting, in both public and private. During the Imperial Conference that immediately preceded the RTC a reception for the delegates’ wives had been held by the women-only Forum Club, which The Graphic covered under the heading ‘Empire Women at Luncheon’.4 Its ‘candid camera’ snapped wives and daughters of conference delegates and displayed them at table. Here they were addressed by ‘Mrs Sidney Webb’, who suggested that during the next imperial conference the delegates’ wives should hold a conference themselves. Beatrice Webb’s achievements as an intellectual and social campaigner herself were quietly effaced, just as in other articles the contribution of women were subtly ridiculed. A piece from June 1930 covering an International Soroptomist gathering of professional women included six photos of the evening dress clad audience,

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listening to an ‘exultant account of feminine progress’, in an article entitled ‘A Regiment of Women Hostesses’.5 Elsewhere photographs of militant women’s protests in the streets of New York jostled for space with bronzed nudes of women in modernist poses or caricatures parodying the changing capacities and desires of the new, modern woman.6 This was the media landscape that women who engaged with the RTC had to enter, although many of them were adept at working the press to publicise themselves, and their causes. Though rarely acknowledged explicitly, the conference organisers were aware of the women associated with the RTC and with the broader political establishment upon whose labour they could draw. We have seen that this could range from Queen Mary’s afternoon tea for women at Buckingham Palace to F.  A.  M.  Vincent’s wife overseeing the budget of household provisions at Chesterfield Gardens. For the final, much smaller conference session in 1932 a list survives of thirty-eight ‘ladies of the conference’, divided into the four sections of participants.7 There were nine ‘ladies of delegation staff’, being the wives of conferences employees including Carter, Vincent, British Indian delegation Secretary Mr B. Rama Rau and SecretariatGeneral Secretary Mr S. N. Roy. There were six women associated with the British Indian delegation, besides the sole female delegate Begum Shah Nawaz, being male delegates’ wives and N. M. Joshi’s daughter.8 There were ten women connected with the Indian states, being relatives of the advisors who represented the princes at the final session, of whom Mrs Rushbrook Williams and Lady Chenevix-Trench were British. Finally, there were twelve women linked with the British delegation. These were mostly wives of leading politicians connected somehow to the conference, such as Lady Maud Hoare, the Countess Peel or Lady Irwin. Sankey was assisted by his sister, while the first listed ‘lady’ was not a political wife but a political daughter.

ISHBEL MACDONALD AND ‘COLLATERAL KINDNESS’ Ishbel MacDonald was the eldest child of Ramsay MacDonald. Born in 1903, her mother died in 1911, such that when her father became the first Labour prime minister in January 1924 she became the youngest ever hostess of 10 Downing Street, aged twenty (Barron 2015). The government fell in November of that year, but Ishbel continued to support her father, in addition to sitting as a member of London County Council from 1928 to

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1934. When Ramsay MacDonald returned to Downing Street in 1929, Ishbel resumed her work, acting as a hostess but also as a coordinator of official business and campaigner for her father’s re-election in 1931, which kept her very much in the public eye. As the imperial conference drew to a close in November 1930, the Evening Standard reported on its front page ‘The Empire Disappointed’ at the failure to agree reciprocal tariffs.9 But it also reported how ‘“Bachelor” Miss Ishbel’ was insisting that ‘bachelor girl’ was much more preferable than ‘spinster’ to describe women who had chosen a profession over marrying from the ‘reduced choice’ of men left after so many ‘of our finest were lost’ during the war. A rival viewpoint by Dame Louise McIlroy defended spinster as being preferable to ‘old maid’. Despite these forthright views, MacDonald’s body was fetishised by the press regarding both appearance and apparel. One Evening Standard article carried photos of her being recorded for a charity film, but also one of her snapped during preparation, in front of a sign ‘make up like a film star’, being attended by hairdressers and cosmetic attendants.10 A later report showed how RTC figures were fitting in to and around the December social scene. It was advertised in advance that after attending the Liberal delegate Lord Reading’s reception for conference attendees, high-society figures would be moving on to the Women’s National Liberal Federation Ball, while the French wife of the British India delegation leader, the Aga Khan, was starring at the Eclipse Ball in a green-spangled frock as Venus. Ishbel MacDonald chose, instead, to join a dinner hosted by women secretaries, also attended by the London School of Economics professor Harold Laski, who complemented her professional success. The Daily Telegraph article, however, reported this comment under the sub-heading ‘Charming Dinner Frock’: ‘The practical dinner frock in which Miss MacDonald looked extremely pretty was studied with great interest. It had an old-world air which greatly suited her. The dark blue velvet bodice had a high Medici collar at the back and buttoned tightly down the front.’11 While the press obsessed over her looks, MacDonald fulfilled a vital role during the open weeks of the conference. She presided over a ‘Women’s Committee’, which looked after the interests of British Indian delegates’ wives. The first event in the conference calendar involved entertaining these women while the male delegates attended a government dinner (see Figure 8.3), before the grand evening reception on 12 November. While the delegates dined at the Park Lane Hotel, Ishbel MacDonald invited select

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women, including the wife of Secretary W. H. Lewis, to dine with her at 10 Downing Street, before heading to the later reception.12 Benn felt that these events were of vital political significance. The Women’s Committee was used to ensure that figures of a ‘key sort’ were especially well entertained ‘in the hope that a little collateral kindness might help us in our major task’.13 The wives of the visiting Indian princes were left solely for Ishbel MacDonald to host. In the event, the women were felt to have made a real contribution towards cultivating a successful social atmosphere, as Benn recorded in his official diary on 13 November: Everybody expressed themselves as delighted with the Opening Ceremony in the morning and I think there is no doubt that the atmosphere is very good. The men met to the number of 260 at a Hotel for dinner and about 70 of the women were dined in small parties. My wife had Mrs. Brijlal Nehru as representative of the extreme Left, Mrs [sic] Jinnah, Lady Hydari and others whose influence I thought might be helpful. Her party was very successful and everybody was in excellent spirits. After the dinners there was a vast Reception at Lancaster House in which the same buoyant spirit prevailed.14

Beyond formal hosting, Ishbel MacDonald also used her position to cultivate relationships not just with delegates’ wives but also with the two female delegates at the first session. The Begum Shah Nawaz later recollected in her autobiography that she became good friends with MacDonald, attending a meeting of the London County Council with her, and visiting a part of the city that was being newly developed (Shahnawaz 1971, 115). Women described by Benn as ‘the Cabinet wives’ had also been busy entertaining conference delegate wives, such that he could claim that ‘the Indians now, so far from complaining as to hospitality, are just overwhelmed with the flood of invitations’.15 Shah Nawaz, for instance, at a later dinner with Benn’s successor as secretary of state Sir Samuel Hoare, was invited by his wife Lady Maud Hoare to visit her husband’s constituency of Chelsea. There she met female workers at an infant welfare centre, described to her as ‘the selfless and unknown workers who have built the nation’, although all these women turned out to be relations of Lords and Peers (Shahnawaz 1971, 116). Shah Nawaz was also invited to Queen Mary’s tea party. Though not billed as such, Queen Mary’s party was an exceptional example of an ‘at-home’.

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AT-HOMES At-homes were social events to which individuals or groups, in this case RTC delegates, might be invited. The events originated as invites to a domestic setting and this remained their tone, although formal receptions, lunches and dinners could also be offered in private homes. Just as these other public events could take place within homes, so at-homes by the 1930s could also take place in any number of spaces beyond the domestic. While the location might vary, what they implied was a sense of homeliness, a meeting space of informality and hospitality. As will be shown below, the majority of at-homes were not in homes, but they were events disproportionately associated with women. The RTC flurry of at-homes offered another of Benn’s forms of ‘collateral kindness’ by London figures but could also be used by delegates to establish their status and to champion their causes. Being technically unofficial there is no register of these events, nor were their happenings much recorded in public or private records. Some archives do, however, retain the invitations issued to social events in general, of which at-homes formed a part. Three archival collections are used below. The Maharaja of Bikaner maintained files of invitations during his time in London, which cover the first two conference sessions only, as ill health forced the maharaja to cut his second trip short.16 Invitations to MacDonald were stored in his private correspondence files and cover all three conference sessions;17 while extra events were also mentioned in the social secretaries’ circulars to delegates.18 These records are necessarily partial, with not every invitation stored, nor did every organiser invite prime ministers or maharajas. These three sources do, however, give us a broader sense of RTC social events and the role of women in them. As with the attempt to reconstruct the working hours of secretarial staff or the materials accoutrement of Chesterfield Gardens, finding a way in to the at-homes requires some quantitative sifting. Not including duplicate invites, the three sources chart a total of 88 social events of all kinds. The three conference sessions spanned 193 days in total, including weekends, such that even by this incomplete listing there was a social event on average every 3 days, rising to 1 every day and a half for the first session. Although the nature of the events sometimes overlapped, they can be relatively clearly distinguished into the lunches (10) and dinners (18) that were the subject of the last two chapters. In addition, there were meetings (2), parties (4) and receptions (19) although the largest number

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were at-homes (35). Of the latter, only 11 took place in homes, the others being in hotels and lodges (6), institutions and societies (11) and places of work (7). Most of the 88 total events were hosted by British residents of London (52), with an additional 9 events hosted by British institutions run by Indians (such as the London Mosque, the Punjab Association, the Punjabee Society of London, the Iqbal Literary Association and the Indian High Commission). The events hosted by visiting Indian delegates were evenly split between those from British India (13) and the Indian states (14). In terms of gender, 33 (38 per cent) of the invites explicitly mentioned a role for women, although these varied in extent. Women featured as hosts, as wives, as organisers and, for a reception hosted by the council of the British Empire League on 15 December 1930, as nameless subjects, with each male guest listed with ‘and Lady’ on the invitation card. The 55 events with no mention of women were dominated by three types of events, there being 18 at-homes (33 per cent), 14 receptions and 13 dinners. For the 33 events featuring roles for women, it was clear where the geographical emphasis lay. At-homes accounted for 17 (51 per cent) of invites, followed by a similar number of receptions (5), dinners (5) and lunches (4). Given the small number of female delegates and visiting Indian family members the majority (24) of female roles were for British women leaving 9 featuring roles for Indian women. Of the 24 invites mentioning British women, they were hosts or co-hosts with other women in 14 cases, co-hosts with husbands in 5 cases, and featured in various other ways elsewhere, including being listed as organising secretary, as a wife, either as an invitee or patron, or as the people whom guests were being invited to meet. In terms of event, the invites included a dinner at Claridges hotel on 4 December 1930 (7 in Figure 8.2) hosted by the Marquis and Marchionness of Zetland, where a further lunch was held by the Earl and Countess Peel on 13 January 1931; a reception hosted by the British Indian Union on 15 December to meet the Prince and Princess of Connaught at the Hyde Park Hotel; and a reception, including music and dancing, between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m., hosted by the Mayor and Mayoress of the city of Westminster at the Park Lane Hotel on 4 November 1931. Political wives also did their own hosting, however, including an at-home at the India Office on 14 September 1931 organised by Benn and his wife Margaret, a religious campaigner in her own right (Stearn 2004); an at-home to meet Indian delegates at 6 Hamilton Place,

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Park Lane (10 in Figure 9.1) on 10 December 1930 that was co-organised by Lady Maud Hoare, the wife of Sir Samuel Hoare, and ‘Mrs Meyer Sassoon’, being Mozelle Sassoon, the wealthy philanthropist. Another reception was hosted on 8 October 1931 by ‘Mrs Stanley Baldwin’, being Lucy, the wife of the Conservative leader of the opposition. At-homes were also thrown by leading socialites as well as some campaigning organisations, which give a sense of how expansive the category was. The London Association of the British Federation of University Women hosted an at-home at their institutional base of Crosby Hall on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea on 5 December 1930. Similarly, the Dowager Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, who had accompanied her husband to India during his time as viceroy (1884–1888) and campaigned to improve Indian women’s health, hosted an at-home at Grey’s Inn Road Hospital on 11 December 1930, at which there were to be ‘Scientific and Cinematographic displays’, and singing. Other at-homes without female roles to which RTC delegates were invited reinforced the sense that the at-home had lost its domestic moorings. On 26 November the chairman and Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs held an at-home at their grand St James’s Square residence of Chatham House; the Spectator magazine held an at-home at the Ritz on 20 December; Maulvi Farzand Ali, Imam of London Mosque, held an at-home at the Strand Palace Hotel on 14 January 1931; while the British Indian Union held an at-home to meet RTC delegates at the Waldorf Hotel in Aldwych on 13 December 1932. Closer, perhaps, to a corporate sense of homeliness was the at-home organised by Miss E. J. Beck for the National Indian Association and Northbrook Society at their South Kensington offices on Cromwell Road, on 5 December 1932. The association sought to care for Indian visitors in Britain and the society provided a reading space as a home from home for Indians in London. British institutions directed by Indians also provided at-homes featuring prominent roles for women. These included an at-home by the British Indian Union, hosted by Mrs M. C. Ghose at 10 Grosvenor Gardens on 16 January 1931, and an at-home hosted by Indian High Commissioner Sir Bhupendra Nath Mitra at India House in Aldwych on 6 October 1931, where his guests could meet the ex-viceroy Lord Irwin and Lady Irwin. In terms of Indian women, the nine invites in which they feature regarded two lunches, three dinners and four at-homes. Most women did not have an official role at the conference, nor their own hosting spaces in the

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Source: Collated by author.

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city. As such, they feature mostly as (unnamed) delegate wives, co-hosting social events with their husbands. Such events included a lunch provided by the Maharaja and Maharani of Jammu and Kashmir at the May Fair Hotel on 8 December 1930; dinner at the Carlton Hotel hosted by Sir Muhammed and Lady Shafi on 15 December; lunch at the Ritz provided by the Aga Khan and his recently married French wife, the Begum Aga Khan, on 19 December; dinner at the May Fair Hotel with the leading Sikh delegate and his wife, listed as Sardar and Sardini Ujjal Singh, on 16 January 1931; and dinner at the Savoy hosted by the princely states representative and his wife, the Nawab and Begum Liaquat Hyat Khan, on 14 December 1932. Only two Indian female-hosted events were recorded. One was an at-home organised by Lady Amin Jung, which took place at India House by permission of the high commissioner on 9 January 1931. Jung was the wife of a minister of Hyderabad state, and the afternoon event allowed delegates to meet friends of Hyderabad in London. The second event was an at-home co-hosted by the two female delegates at the first session, Begum Shah Nawaz and Mrs Subbarayan, on 5 January 1931. It took place at Chesterfield Gardens, where visitors would have the opportunity to meet both the prime minister and his daughter, Ishbel MacDonald. The event took place a fortnight before the close of the first session, at the beginning of which Ishbel had hosted the visiting Indian women herself. Just as Ishbel MacDonald’s body and attire had been dwelt on by the press, so the few at-homes that were covered in the press featured detailed appraisals of women’s attire. This was especially the case in the tabloids, such as in the Daily Sketch’s ‘Echoes of the Town’ gossip column. A report of the Lord Chancellor’s December 1930 at-home in the Royal Gallery of the Palace of Westminster noted Lady Maud Hoare in dark blue satin, while the Begum Aga Khan ‘looked very French with her little black cap bordered with a tiny piece of black tulle reaching to her eyebrows’.19 In contrast Indian female guests were all said to wear brightly coloured saris, as also commented upon at the October 1931 reception hosted by Mrs Stanley (Lucy) Baldwin in the Evening Standard’s column ‘Women’s World, by Corisande’. An article entitled ‘Touches of the Gorgeous East in London’ rejoiced that diplomatic entertainment in general enlivened the London social scene in the winter season. Baldwin’s afternoon party had been a special success, with the Indian women delegates and wives of the male delegates mixing in an ‘air of cheerful informality and ceaseless conversation’:

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The gayest guests in European clothes looked almost drab when side by side with one or other of the wearers of gorgeous saris. A brilliant figure in an emerald green and gold sari and decked with an emerald necklace proved to be the daughter of the Nizam of Mysore. Lady Hydari’s blue and white sari was richly embroidered; the Begum Shah Nawaz wore long pearl tassel earrings in addition to fine rubies. Lady Cromer, Lady Minto and Lady Irwin, all of whom know India, were among the guests.20

What we see is the recurrence of women being described through their bodies and their clothing. But we also see abundant evidence of women being politically active in spaces around the conference. These included restaurant and institutional spaces, but also at-homes. Ironically the majority of at-homes organised by women took place in institutional, hotel or work settings. One of the relatively few at-homes at home was that of Viscountess Astor, on 11 December 1930, at her vast abode in St James’s Square. Astor’s cultivation of a domestic campaigning space gives us one example of a political home that functioned through but also beyond formal at-homes.

POLITICAL HOMEMAKING 4 ST JAMES’S SQUARE In this section we complement the studies of hosting and at-homes with attention to three more permanent forms of home-making, although all were political and involved forms of hosting. The first example is more that of a home as political headquarters, the second and third combining more openly political home-making and the emotional and affective work of making a ‘homeplace’. Nancy Astor made a deep impression on many RTC delegates. Despite having no formal role at the conference, Astor became one its most influential salonnières. This was down, in no small part, to her family’s wealth, her generous but always political hospitality, and to the dazzle of her glamorous home. The Evening Standard reported of a dinner party and reception at 4 St James’s Square on 11 December 1930 that even the Indian princes must have been impressed by the Astor gold plate, shown in all its

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splendour, the carefully chosen menu and the guestlist.21 The Times listed forty-nine dinner guests, including prominent RTC delegates and their wives, the two female RTC delegates, female MPs, several prominent aristocrats, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Prince of Connaught, and the playwright, political activist and close friend of the Astors, George Bernard Shaw.22 At Lord Reading’s reception given to Indian delegates the following week, the Daily Sketch reported at length on the marvellous jewels on display and the political conversations that took place.23 Ramsay and Ishbel MacDonald were spotted, the latter in lengthy conversation with the Prince of Wales. Various sets of family diamonds, worn by partying aristocrats, were mentioned, including special note that ‘… Lady Astor’s tiara of carved turquoises and diamonds attracted much attention’. During the second conference session, Astor continued to dazzle. The government hosted a second reception at Lancaster House, where the Evening Standard’s ‘Corisande’ noted Lady Shafi’s peach coloured sari, Sarojini Naidu’s in crimson, Ishbel MacDonald’s geranium-red velvet dress with jewelled shoulder straps and the coloured headwear of various princes. The longest description, however, was of Astor: ‘… a striking figure in sapphire velvet with a short train, with overcoat to match, and an exquisite diamond bandeau with a great pearl in the front. Diamonds flashed from the sautoir round her neck, solitaire diamonds in her ears were as large as sixpences.’24 Astor clearly cultivated her media image as a star of the London social scene. But this public self worked in synch with her historic political achievements. Born in Virginia in 1879, Nancy moved to Britain aged twentysix and married Waldorf Astor in 1906, bringing her access to both vast wealth and political influence, through Astor’s ownership of the Observer newspaper. In 1919 Nancy Astor had become the first woman to take up a seat in the House of Commons, having contested for the Conservatives the Plymouth constituency her husband vacated when he succeeded to his peerage and entered the House of Lords. As such, Astor had access to traditional aristocratic networks of diplomacy and politics, whilst also being plugged in to media and parliamentary networks. All of these would come together in her campaigns, using political networks, money and properties to forward her aims. Cliveden, the Astor country house, would eventually become (contentiously) synonymous with the campaign for appeasing Hitler in the mid-1930s (Rose 2011) but had functioned in the interwar period as a country retreat for British and visiting diplomats.

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FIGURE 9.2  No. 4 St James’s Square, staircase Source: 4 St James’s Square, Westminster, LB: entrance hall and staircase, image, © London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

In London, the Astors had an enviable political headquarters in the shape of 4 St James’s Square, which neighboured Chatham House and had been bought by Waldorf Astor in 1912. The three-storey house, constructed between 1726 and 1728, incorporated a high second-storey space for public entertaining (see Figure 9.2), including a front facing drawing room essentially unchanged since the early eighteenth century,

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in addition to the large courtyard at the back of the house, and smaller private rooms on the third storey (Sheppard 1960, 88). Astor used the house to establish herself, in one biographer’s opinion, as the secondmost influential political hostess in London (Fort 2013, 214). It was here in March 1924 that the leading socialist ministers of the first Labour government, under Ramsay MacDonald, were introduced to the king and queen, an early social and media coup for the Astors (Fort 2013, 215). For some on the left the cross-party appeal of 4 St James’s Square rankled. In April 1930 Harald Laski had penned a withering caricature of Astor’s parties in the Daily Herald: ‘I suppose no new lion has ever come to London without being at her house.… It gives the socialist attendants a consciousness of recognition, while the aristocracy is able to feel the full limit of its generous condescension’ (quoted in Collis 1960, 155). Astor was also inspired by the imperial federalist work of the Round Table group. She was especially close with Philip Kerr, who as the Marquess of Lothian would lead the RTC Franchise Committee that tackled the question of women’s votes. Astor added her signature to a memorandum addressed to the conference during its opening weeks urging that the female delegates be appointed to every committee likely to affect the interests of women.25 She became a friend of both female delegates at the first session and remained a correspondent with Subbarayan after the conference (Mukherjee 2018, 211–213). The Begum Shah Nawaz also recalled Astor’s parties warmly, where she introduced Astor to the Indian film star Devika Rani, and Astor introduced Shah Nawaz and her family to Bernard Shaw. At other events Shah Nawaz was introduced to the Crown Prince of Sweden, the pilot Amy Johnson and leading professional women of the city and later wrote of Astor: ‘She was a charming hostess, an impressive personality, a born parliamentarian, very charitable and popular with all’ (Shahnawaz 1971, 118). It was less through direct political intervention and more through indirect but still political hosting at 4 St James’s Square that Astor exerted her influence. She described her hosting thus: The purpose in our entertaining is to give people of every sort and kind a chance to get together and find out the truth about each other’s views. You see, I’m a democrat.… What I really like to have in my house is a party which contains thoroughly opposing elements – pacifists and fireeaters, reformers and die-hards, rich and poor, old and young. (Quoted in Fort 2013, 214)

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Astor herself was quick-witted, with a raucous sense of humour and a passionate commitment to tee-totalism, social reform and AngloAmerican cooperation. These traits shine through in Moonje’s diary entries regarding his social invites to 4 St James’s Square, where his outspoken views made him a favourite of Astor, presumably as one of her provocative party fire-eaters. At a private lunch with Astor on 20 November 1930, during the first week of the conference, Moonje was seated next to Lothian and tried to impress upon him his communal opinions. Referencing this and his refutation of Lord Peel at the opening plenary: ‘Lady Astor dubbed me a quarrelsome fellow and a rebel and I retorted that if two honest men quarrel and if their quarrel is honest, it must and is happy success.’26 Building on this shared appreciation of quarrelsome socialising, Moonje and Astor bantered each time they met. At Lady Maud Hoare’s at-home at 6 Hamilton Place on 10 December, Moonje recalled, ‘I met here Lady Astor she made a joke and accosted me as “wicked man”. I have got this nick name as I am by contrast the only man who fights so stubbornly for his cause.’27 But at the Astor’s at-home the following day, at which their gold plate had drawn notice in the media, Moonje felt Astor’s jibes to be wearing thin: ‘Lady Astor is a most irresponsible and hasty woman. From the day of my speech she calls me a wicked boy, though in joke, but she repeats it in season and out of season.’28 On 18 December Moonje was with Lothian at his home, further debating the communal question, when Astor telephoned and asked if the ‘wicked man’ was free to dine with her that evening.29 Moonje made his excuses. The sparring was renewed during the second conference session but it was overshadowed by the arrival of the Mahatma. Moonje had arrived in London on 8 September 1931 and joined Astor for lunch at 4 St James’s Square on the seventeenth alongside Lothian, Sankey, the Aga Khan, Hydari, Mrs Subbarayan and Sarojini Naidu. Astor reverted to type, suggesting not only that Moonje was a ‘wicked boy’ but that he enjoyed being called so. Moonje recalled replying that ‘there was now a much greater wicked boy’, after Gandhi had arrived in London (on 12 September).30 Astonishingly, given that Naidu had joined them, Astor apparently replied, ‘Oh no, I have no faith in him. I have no opinion about him. He has no policy, I have seen Russia. Lenin has a policy and a constructive scheme. Mr Gandhi has nothing like that; with him there is confusion and disorganisation.’31 Moonje suggested she should meet him and form an opinion first. She refused, insisting that she did not like

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slavery and that all Hindus were slaves to Gandhi, having surrendered their judgement to him. During the conference Astor, however, surrendered to the attraction of one of London’s hottest draws, Lothian organising her introduction to Gandhi. She cultivated a relationship with her ‘wild man of God’, after having previously insisted that Indians had little to complain of (Collis 1960, 154). That she succeeded in attracting this new lion to one of her parties is testament to the influence she could exert from her home; before arriving in London Gandhi had telegrammed the Evening Standard announcing that he had no desire for social functions or places of amusement, although he would make himself available to public men and women interested in India.32 On 11 November Astor had assembled a large party for Remembrance Day lunch, including Jinnah, the Liberal RTC delegate Isaac Foot and the Conservative delegate Major Elliot. Moonje recalled Astor welcoming him as her ‘wicked man’ as she came down to the drawing room, having spent two hours upstairs talking to Gandhi. After he had left Astor reportedly told Moonje: He is a hopeless man. He may be an idealist but for practical every day life purposes he is no good. He will create difficulties unless he is fully satisfied but in politics there is no such thing as full satisfaction of any one man. It must be a compromise but with the conflicting interests of all parties.33

We can piece together the other side of the story and some sense of the interior of 4 St James’s Square from Muriel Lester’s recollections, which paint a different picture. Lester (1932, 108) recalled driving from 88 Knightsbridge to Trafalgar Square with Gandhi, where gunshot and sirens inaugurated the 11 a.m. commemorative silence. After this they went to Astor’s home, where Lord Astor greeted them at the door and took them to an upstairs sitting room. While there was no gold plate on display, the interior certainly struck Lester, the sitting room being flooded with sunlight and festooned with beautiful flowers and greenery which melded into the wallpaper. After they sank into deliciously comfortable armchairs, Astor began: ‘Can’t you make your holy man see how dangerous his policy is?’ (Lester 1932, 110). Turning to Gandhi she suggested, with a smile, that he was only destructive and that he was humbug, while the English were actually creating things. Gandhi eventually convinced her to let him have

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a say, whereupon he laid out the facts of Indian constructiveness since the war. He spoke of village work, peasant industries, sanitary improvements, temperance propaganda and women’s rights (two joint passions of theirs). Astor apparently responded with argument, digression and exceptions until Lester felt that the conversation finally found a very deep union, uniting all in a faith in God. This provided a meeting ground of hope, which would inspire future meetings. Gandhi repeatedly visited, according to a maid he would bring his spinning wheel to the sitting room. Astor later suggested that the clothes he made and wore, like those of millions of poor Indians, had to be held on to all the time: ‘No wonder they don’t get anywhere’ (Collis 1960, 154). If Astor remained an at best partial Gandhian convert, Lester, likewise, was left unimpressed by environments like 4 St James’s Square and the technological modernity of the Dorchester. It was these formal spaces of diplomacy that, for her, were part of the political and spiritual problem of the age.

KINGSLEY HALL When we are hopeful that the Round Table Conference is to begin a new era in the history of India, isn’t it fitting that the chief representative of India should initiate a new way of life for ambassadors and plenipotentiaries from foreign lands? Haven’t we noticed for many years that conference after conference on Disarmament and other subjects meets, holds daily sessions, and then breaks up accomplishing little? Isn’t that perhaps due to the air of unreality that permeates the proceedings when the members themselves are dumped down in some completely artificial atmosphere like Dorchester House or the Savoy Hotel? Isn’t it time that a new line was struck? And anyway, where is it more fitting for a man representing the poorest people of India to live than among the poorest people of London? (Lester 1932, 24)

The popular memory of Gandhi’s time in Britain is dominated by images of three locations. The first has him sat in the Federal Structure Committee at St James’s Palace, next to Lord Sankey (see Figure 3.2); the second has him huddled amongst cheering female workers in Lancashire; the third has him at Kingsley Hall in East London, variously waving at the amassed crowds outside from a balcony, planting a tree, or meeting the Pearly King of Hoxton. This was his home, where he slept each night, but it also became a

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(distant and inefficient) political headquarters. Gandhi eschewed the glitzy hotels of the West End in favour of a spartan cabin on the roof of a charitable mission hall in Bow. This is taken as evidence of his ability to combine an ascetic and spiritual commitment to prayer and the working classes with a showman’s ability to capture the attention of the world’s media. This attention has been perpetuated in scholarly works, such as James D. Hunt’s ([1993] 2012, 175–208) study of Gandhi’s London and Ramachandra Guha’s (2018, 395–418) compendious biographical work, both of which drew on Muriel Lester’s (1932) Mahatma-proselytising and self-publicising Entertaining Gandhi. The object here is not to replicate these works but to, first, explore how Kingsley Hall functioned as a political home which depended upon overlapping and at times rival bodies of female labour. A second object is, if not to displace Kingsley Hall, then to supplement it with the subsequent study of 88 Knightsbridge. These rivalries, between women and between locations, were used in attempts to discredit Gandhi’s campaign at the time. Here they are used to explore the diversity of peoples and places that were effective in creating headquarters and homeplaces in which Gandhi worked at what he considered the ‘real conference’ (Desai [1932] 1961), far from the palatial confines of St James’s. If 88 Knightsbridge resembled a particularly Indian vision of a political salon, then Kingsley Hall constituted a radically new space for international politics in the city. Kingsley Hall is synonymous with Muriel Lester, who joined the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1914, the same year she co-founded the hall with her sister, Doris. Moving into its newly constructed home in 1927, the hall was used to serve the local community of Bow, a deprived neighbourhood in the industrial east end of London. Lester and her volunteers (for three at breakfast, see Figure 9.3) preached Quaker values, including non-violence and abstinence from alcohol, in the assembly room which was used for religious ceremonies on Sundays. The architecture of the hall emphasised the ‘settlement’ nature of Lester’s vision, its three storeys towering over the surrounding terraced housing, with a mezzanine balcony and two imposing flag poles facing on to the street. In addition to a ‘sanctuary’, open to the public, the hall contained a classroom, club room for youth meetings and accommodation (cells) on the first floor and on the roof for the ten settlement workers at a time who staffed the hall.34 Lester had spent two months with Gandhi in India in 1926–1927 (Lester 1931), and he accepted her return offer of accommodation for his London

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stay. Lester spoke in the press ahead of Gandhi’s arrival of how the ashram at Sabarmati had inspired her to design the only space in London where Gandhi would feel at ease: ‘For we practice the life here he himself practices. We live in extreme poverty with only the rudimentary necessities of life. In any other setting I know Gandhi would be bothered by carpets and luxuries of which he disapproves.’35 The Daily Herald despatched a reporter to inspect the cell (see Figure 9.3), in an airy and cheery spot on the roof, and the venue itself: ‘Kingsley Hall is a church, a club and a settlement, all rolled into one. It is a fellowship of people who are making “an effort towards the Kingdom of God on earth”.’36 Gandhi’s advent in East London was not universally welcomed. Lester (1932, 35) reported a communist pamphlet doing the rounds, denouncing Gandhi as an agent of capitalists and imperialists, using Kingsley Hall as a front to dupe the British working classes. For Desai ([1932] 1947, 112) truth was an ‘unwelcome guest’ to the newspapers, who stoked anti-Gandhian and racial feeling, the like of which it was felt Datta had experienced in

FIGURE 9.3  Kingsley Hall Source: ‘Gandhi’s Simple Lodging in the East End’, Daily Sketch, 3 September 1931, © British Library Board (MFM.MLD19).

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his search for a London hotel that would accommodate him. While Lester felt these opinions to be in a minority in the public, they found their way into the Kingsley Hall post-bags. Lester (1932, 36) précised a sample: ‘As a patriot how can you harbour this man? Shameful if you do’; ‘You should be deported’; ‘Repent! How can you entertain an old devil like Gandhi! What can you be thinking about – an Englishwoman.… Black people should know their place’; and ‘How any British woman can contemplate having a naked nigger in her house passes my comprehension.’ Desai ([1932] 1961, 222) also related a trip with the journalist H. N. Brailsford to a school 40 miles from London where he asked the school children which country he came from. After a brief silence the five-yearold daughter of the teacher replied, ‘From a nigger country’, to which a shocked older boy corrected her, ‘He is not dark. He is an Indian.’ Desai didn’t comment on this racial differentiation but did discover that the older boy was the son of a working woman who had a high regard for Gandhi, cementing the view that the ‘real conference’ lay in speaking directly to the British masses. For Lester, Kingsley Hall was perfectly located for this task. It was a home for the local community and a temporary home for voluntary workers or visitors, like Gandhi and his staff. As much sarai (travellers’ sanctuary) as ashram, Kingsley Hall was a disciplined and institutionalised home. Its fortress-like architecture was well suited to the regular scrums that developed as journalists and fans sought an audience with Gandhi. The screening of these applicants was thorough and, to most, anything but homely. The American artist Nancy Cox-McCormack had secured an introduction from the president of the New York Branch of the India National Congress, Saliendra Ghose, and headed to London, arriving at Kingsley Hall on 18 September in the hope of modelling Gandhi’s sculpture (Cox-McCormack Cushman 1960). The policeman on guard outside informed her that it was a queer place but that someone would be around soon enough to deal with her query. One of the ten volunteers at the time gave her a tour, including of the rooftop cells where she found Gandhi squatted on the floor, surrounded by ‘loin cloths’ drying upon a clothing line. Lester was there but insisted that she only made herself available via pre-booked appointments. When Cox-McCormack returned a few days later she was informed of Gandhi’s punishing schedule. He would rise at 3 a.m., after which he took prayers with his followers. At 6 a.m. would be a local walk, before attending the 7:30 a.m. religious service at the Hall, after

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which he would meet visitors before heading to St James’s Palace for a full day’s work. It was clear to Cox-McCormack that there would be no time for art work at the Hall. The Daily Herald article had noted that one of the volunteers helping ready Kingsley Hall for Gandhi’s visit was an ‘American Girl’. This was likely Mildred Osterhout, a Canadian scholar who had met Lester in Pennsylvania and accepted her invitation to volunteer at Kingsley Hall. Her arrival happened to coincide with the preparations for Gandhi’s visit and her letters give a sense of the behind-the-scenes home-making and the play of gender at the Hall (Knickerbocker 2001, 49–61). On arriving Osterhout was immediately asked if she could cook. On hesitantly replying that she could, she was named chef for the other nine volunteers, in addition to work she would do with the local elderly. She was concerned at the prospect of cooking for Gandhi, with London being ablaze with discussion over whether he would bring his own goat to milk, and where it would stay (Mirabehn, as introduced below, took care of most of Gandhi’s food, though Osterhout did manage to source goat milk from the milkman). Osterhout wasn’t overawed by Gandhi, finding his radio broadcast from Kingsley Hall to be rather simple, and detecting his emotional distance from his son Devadas, who had accompanied his father to London in western style dress, to Gandhi’s evident disapproval. Osterhout spent much time socialising with Devadas and Mahadev Desai, who introduced her to curries and mangos at the East Indian Students Union in central London. Eventually they stopped sleeping at Bow, leaving only Gandhi and Mirabehn to the daily commute. Cox-McCormack had noticed the cell of Mirabehn, the wealthy daughter of a British admiral who had given up the name of Madeleine Slade and become a ‘confirmed cultist’ (Cox-McCormack Cushman 1960, 147). Osterhout was also ambivalent, writing of: ‘Mirabehn  … who used to be Mis Slade until she went to India 6 years ago and fell at the feet of Gandhi where she has remained ever since, so to say  …’ (Knickerbocker 2001, 54). In this state she was, however, acknowledged to efficiently cater to Gandhi’s bodily needs, including his food, clothing, spinning and prayer rituals, while Desai took care of his diary and secretarial duties. The press clamoured for details of this shorn-haired, celibate devotee. In a rare interview, on the SS Rajputana between Bombay and Marseilles, Mirabehn emphasised that her attraction to Gandhi was entirely religious and what the materialistic world needed was lessons from this practical

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mystic.37 In London the Evening Standard tracked down her cousin who was rehearsing for a play at the Adelphi Theatre, who suggested that ‘Madeleine’ had always had crushes on things, taking things up violently and then dropping them suddenly.38 Gandhi himself was ambivalent about what he called, in 1929, Mirabehn’s ‘idolatry’, sending her away to learn psychological independence but allowing her back when she became sick (Suhrud and Weber 2014, 25). Mirabehn’s own account of her role in Gandhi’s visit emphasises the domestic focus of her duties, rushing around Bombay before their departure buying goods and collating gifts, only to be berated by Gandhi mid-journey for the ‘swanky leather suitcases’ Devadas had bought (they were sent back to Bombay at the stopover in Aden; Mirabehn 1960, 131). At Kingsley Hall Mirabehn found a corrective to the official chilliness of the government’s reception of Gandhi; in the midst of the working people of Bow all formality being forgotten. Her daily ritual was, however, punishing. She would wake Gandhi for his prayers at 3 a.m., after which they would sleep again until 4:45 a.m., when she would prepare him a hot drink before his local walk with Muriel Lester and some hall volunteers. When he returned, she would heat Gandhi’s bath and provide his breakfast, sweeping his bedroom after he departed, before washing his clothes, shopping locally for food and cooking his lunch before taking it personally to 88 Knightsbridge. There she would prepare Gandhi’s evening meal, which would be taken to St James’s Palace if he was working late. Mirabehn’s memoir contains few mentions of Lester, while Lester’s account of Gandhi’s visit only mentions ‘Mira’ outside of Kingsley Hall. The two female devotees seemed to work in synch, having different roles, one as host, the other as attendant. But others had their doubts. Benthall wrote to P. H. Brown in Calcutta on 18 September that Lester and Mirabehn, while both devoted to Gandhi ‘ are so jealous of each other that they are expected to come to blows at any moment’.39 It was not, however, disharmony at Kingsley Hall that pulled Gandhi away from Bow and into the influence of further female workers. Henry Polak was head of Gandhi’s reception committee in London and Lester had been instructed to communicate Gandhi’s acceptance of her offer of accommodation to him (Lester 1932, 23). Both Polak and C. F. Andrews argued that Bow would be impractical and that he would be better placed at Arya Bhavan in Belsize Park, Hampstead. The press picked up on the tussle, with one early September story reporting the

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Arya Bhavan general manager having had the house stripped down to replicate Gandhi’s simple tastes with a kitchen and special shower being installed.40 After arriving in London on 12 September 1931 it became apparent within a week that the ninety-minute commute by car from Bow to the West End was disrupting Gandhi’s conference work. Benthall also wrote in his letter to Brown on Friday, 18 September, that conference delegates found it difficult to contact Gandhi, meaning that no one knew what he was going to say or do. After lunching with Naidu, Benthall described Gandhi’s advisor as a good realist with no illusions, who was set on separating Gandhi from Lester and Mirabehn and persuading him to live in a ‘sensible part of London’.41 If successful, Benthall was convinced that ‘behind the scenes’ conversations would much ease the progress of the Minorities Committee. On the same day, the Yorkshire Post mis-reported that Gandhi would be moving to Hampstead, given that most of the important conference work was happening outside of St James’s Palace.42 The following Monday the press reported a weekend of ‘flat-hunting’ after even Hampstead had been decided to be too remote from the West End.43 Gandhi insisted, however, that Kingsley Hall had become his ‘real home’ in which he would reside, regardless of any other space taken in central London (Desai [1932] 1961, 255).

88 KNIGHTSBRIDGE The house which Gandhi used as his central London base outside of St James’s Palace features little in the literature on, or popular memory of, Gandhi in London. This is perhaps because the building itself was destroyed through bombing during the war, and it is definitely because the media had its attention directed at Bow. For all its business-like functionality, however, 88 Knightsbridge (17 in Figure 9.1) became both a political home and a spiritual site of pilgrimage. This was made possible by the way the building itself was configured. One of the few detailed descriptions is given by Agatha Harrison, a friend of Henry Polak, Horace Alexander and C. F. Andrews, whose work with the latter at number 88 Knightsbridge anticipated her role as secretary of the Indian Conciliation Group. Although Harrison ([1933] 1945) described the property as a pied-à-terre, it was a substantial house, the cost of which was a constant worry to Gandhi. While it was used as a

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political headquarters, it also had residential accommodation and became a homely artistic and spiritual space, on one of the West End’s most prestigious streets. The back of the house looked over Hyde Park and was described by one visitor as being about four doors from the Hyde Park Hotel.44 The ground floor was occupied by secretaries, visitors, journalists, detectives and others who were not admitted to Gandhi’s apartment on the first floor (Barns 1937, 75). The building did host some official business; as part of the unofficial conferencing of the Minorities Committee the smaller minorities petitioned Gandhi at 88 to make their case, on 30 September.45 It was also the place where Gandhi did much of his work, although the setting was more that of a commune than an office due to the permanent residents and temporary visitors to the house. Andrews took the ‘sky parlour’ in the house, where he dictated his autobiography to Harrison and coordinated efforts to support Gandhi (Barns 1937, 75). After a stint at Kingsley Hall Desai, Pyarelal and Devadas had also taken up residence, while two of their friends attended each day to help with their work (Mirabehn 1960, 134). On 6 November S. K. Datta had also circulated a note to his friends informing them that he and his wife had moved in to 88 three weeks prior, allowing them to both be closely associated with Gandhi’s work. While the ‘push’ behind this move may have been London’s racial residential landscape and the circus of social gatherings, the ‘pull’ was that of Sarojini Naidu, drawn as much to Datta’s wife as to himself. As Benthall noted after his lunch with her, Naidu was one of the architects of the move, along with the former advocates of Arya Bhavan C. F. Andrews and Henry Polak. Whilst Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel had discouraged Gandhi from coming to Britain for the conference, the Indian government identified Naidu as one of the main parties pressing for it.46 She was a believer and proponent of the sort of networking that conferences entailed. In a magazine article introducing conference delegates, Naidu was described as a successful poet, a past president of Congress, a devotee of Gandhi and someone who could craft the imagination of the nation, though she would not be looked to ‘for well-thought-out political plans’.47 Despite her campaigning in South Africa (Vahed 2012), her ongoing participation in feminist international conferences (Mukherjee 2017) and her powerful public speeches, Naidu was regularly portrayed in the realm of

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the emotional and the domestic. But these accounts acknowledged the way that she, like Nancy Astor, crafted these emotions and places to make the personal political (Paranjape 2010, xxx). A Yorkshire Post article issued a few days after Naidu’s arrival in London described her as ‘the greatest of India’s hostesses’.48 Her ‘celebrated salon’ at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay would, each evening, host a jumble of people: ‘Princes, Englishmen, musicians, dancers, penniless students, American journalists, and the women workers of Congress, all jumbled together, and ultimately finding accommodation on the floor.’ If Gandhi was going to conquer the East End then surely, the Yorkshire Post prophesied, Naidu would conquer the West End. But it quickly became apparent that she would need him in the West End too, and the home she managed to make for him much resembled the description of her Bombay headquarters. The weekend of ‘flat-hunting’ had been led by salonnière Naidu and she wrote to her children on 23 September that with great difficulty she had found a beautiful house overlooking Hyde Park, although ‘some kink in the brain’ led Gandhi to cling to Kingsley Hall, to the despair even of the ‘devoted Miraben!!’ (Paranjape 2010, 248). All did not, however, go to plan. In her unpublished biography of S. K. Datta, Margarita Barns recalls Naidu being so infuriated by the chaos at 88 that she felt it would have been better if Gandhi had never come to London.49 On Gandhi’s initiative Dr and Mrs Datta were asked to take responsibility for instilling some order: This involved settling some of the conflicting claims advanced by politicians, Indians resident in London, artists, journalists, radio men, notoriety seekers and others upon the limited time and strength of Mr. Gandhi. While Miss Slade [Mirabehn] made the provision of his unusual diet her special care, the rest of the household management fell to Mrs. Datta who with her customary organisational ability was soon able to bring order to bear upon such matters as provisions, the keeping of engagements, the curtailing of the large number of visitors and what were then becoming to be known as ‘gate-crashers’, the domestic organisation of the house and last, but by no means least, the shepherding of the delightfully unconventional friend of their youth, Charlie Andrews. But not even Mrs. Datta, for all her serene disciplinarianism, was able to prevent dekshis50 from being placed straight on to her best damask table-cloths.51

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Out of the chaos Mrs Datta was widely seen to have brought order and made the house a family home; as Agatha Harrison ([1933] 1945, 84) said of number 88: ‘Dr SK Datta and his gracious wife also made this their headquarters, the latter acting as hostess for our family.’ Though her first name is not mentioned in any of the accounts used here, Rena Datta herself had developed her ‘organisational ability’ through a bold internationalist life. Alexandrina McArthur ‘Rena’ Carswell was born and educated in Glasgow and graduated from Queen Margaret College with a bachelor of arts degree in 1908, after which she served as travelling secretary for the Student Volunteer Missionary Union working closely with the YMCA (Russell 2017). In 1915 she travelled to India to serve as national general secretary of the YWCA, though she returned to Europe for voluntary work during the war, where she met S. K. Datta, whom she married in Geneva in 1919.52 On their return to India the Dattas faced social boycotts due to their racial union, even within missionary circles. Rena Datta assisted her husband in his religious education work in India before returning to London for the RTC where she was drawn into ordering number 88, alongside Harrison, Naidu and Mirabehn. Harrison ([1933] 1945, 91) even saved mention for the maids employed to help out, working beyond their normal hours, answering the never silent doorbell and providing food whenever required. Number 88 never approximated the spartan disciplinarianism of Kingsley Hall, although some effort had been made to strip out the furniture of Gandhi’s apartment on the first storey, the floor being scattered instead with cushions and pillows (Barns 1937, 75). Gandhi operated this space with the openness he had tried to bring to St James’s Palace. Important political conversations were carried on in front of any visitors; cables and letters were left in the open (Harrison [1933] 1945, 85). The impression on the senses could be bewildering. Benthall described Gandhi’s double-room on the first storey as running the whole width of the house, the out room being his ‘audience hall’ and the inner being used by secretaries and staff.53 Gandhi ate his dinner throughout one of Benthall’s attempts to discuss the standing committee of the RTC and the terrorist situation in Bengal. He was put off by Gandhi’s washing of his false teeth in a bowl of water and lost the Mahatma’s attention completely as 7 p.m. neared. The apartment started to fill with ranks of admirers, people of every hue, body type and age, gathering to hear Gandhi’s evening prayers. For Benthall it was a perverse spectacle, further playing

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to Gandhi’s megalomaniacal tendencies. Others accounts of visits to the double-roomed apartment relay a similar ambivalence. Having realised she would not have time to capture Gandhi’s likeness at Kingsley Hall, Nancy Cox-McCormack had petitioned Desai to be granted an audience at number 88 and was allowed to visit on one of Gandhi’s days of silence. While waiting for Gandhi to arrive she chatted to Mrs Cheeseman, who explained that she had assisted Gandhi during a previous visit to London and agreed to return to his service (Mrs Maud Cheeseman, neé Polak, had assisted Gandhi during his 1914 London visit, having been an intimate collaborator with Gandhi in South Africa, assisting her brother Henry Polak). Gandhi spent the day spinning and answering questions by handwritten note, as Cox-McCormack got to work. Both Mirabehn and Naidu were suspicious of her, the former because she feared she was a gossip-seeking journalist, the latter because she had promised the first portrayal of Gandhi to Churchill’s cousin, Claire Sheridan. Over three weeks Cox-McCormack worked on Gandhi’s likeness, finding him stubborn and uncooperative, both serene and egocentric, fastidious yet unhygienic, old but childlike, unaesthetic yet vain (Cox-McCormack Cushman 1960). Two features of the routine at number 88 stood out. The first was the prayer time at 7 p.m., when the lights would be dimmed and Gandhi would lead the singing of Sanskrit poems. The second was the filling up of the flat with artists, including the etcher Elias Grossman, the woodcut illustrator Claire Leighton and the sculptors Jo Davidson (see Figure 9.4) and, eventually, Claire Sheridan. Being Churchill’s cousin, Gandhi reassured her, made Sheridan more, not less, welcome. After finishing her clay model, she took it back to her studio where it slipped from her grasp, falling to the floor and flat onto Gandhi’s face. She had to return to number 88 the following day and started again, to Gandhi’s amusement and Naidu’s approval, when the second model turned out, as she put it ‘strong and fighting, the other was mouse-like and philosophic’ (Sheridan 1957, 269). Harrison also selected similar stand out memories of number 88: the evening prayers packed with guests and the mornings when the apartment was filled with famous sculptors and artists, trying to capture the elusive man (Harrison [1933] 1945, 91). For Barns (1937, 75) Gandhi ‘at home’ was not an advertised, invitee affair, like the at-homes described above. Rather, it was a near permanent state, with the Mahatma reclining on a cushion surrounded by artists, food and correspondence, all structured around the hour of prayer.

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FIGURE 9.4  Jo Davidson and Mahatma Gandhi Source: ‘Mohandas Gandhi’, AP/​Shutterstock 7405041a.

The commingling of art and prayer was best captured by the caricaturist Emery Kelen, whose individual and collective portraits at the first session (Figure 1.4) had been such a success that he returned to capture new delegates at the second session (Figure 9.5). For this eminent political artist, number 88 felt like a different sort of home: The inner sanctum where Gandhi spent his days in London was about fifteen by twenty feet. There was a fireplace, a ratty sofa, and two windows. The moment I entered I felt I had come home. This was no holy shrine of a saint, but an unholy art studio smelling of linseed oil, turpentine, and body odour. (Kelen 1964, 255)

Kelen returned repeatedly, drawn to the twinkle in Gandhi’s eyes: ‘These lively shiny blackberries advertised the presence of a wheel inside him that never stopped spinning.… Gandhi the prophet was shy, sensitive, introspective, abstract-minded, idealistic; Gandhi the ward politician

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was tenacious, assertive, uncompromising, extrovert in the sense of being impelled to action’ (Kelen 1964, 257). Kelen’s cynicism collapsed, however, when recalling the power of the evening prayer sessions. As Gandhi and his supporters started their chant: We listened awestruck, the painters and the sculptors, the Scotland Yard detectives, the circumcised and the uncircumcised. Through the walls we heard the rumblings of the city of London, the yapping of taxis, the growling of buses, the shrieking of breaks. Little did I realise Gandhi’s grandeur at the time. But one evening, when the fog outside was pink, and inside the strange prayer wailed and moaned, and the orange light of the fireplace flung shadows against the wall, I noticed among the shadows that of Gandhi apart from all the rest, and huge. I’ll never forget that giant pyramidial shadow with the head of a child. (Kelen 1964, 262)

However, no matter how hard Gandhi worked number 88, or how widely he toured his ascetic politics, it didn’t help achieve formal conference aims. Unable to overcome what he called the unreality of the conference method, his trip to London ended in failure. These frustrations also played out in number 88. When Cox-McCormack went to collect her own clay model, her visit coincided with one of Gandhi’s many failures at St James’s Palace and he returned in a foul mood. In her recollection, she made the mistake of asking for his ‘distinguished signature’ in a book of hers. As she later recalled, ‘‘‘Distinguished signature” he retorted with reflexious sarcasm not unmixed with venom’ (Cox-McCormack Cushman 1960, 159). Similarly, Benthall’s visit, described above, had been on 2 December 1931, the day after the conference had ended, with no movement on the minorities question. Gandhi was described as tired and depressed, being at a loss as to his next step, but lifted by his evening prayers with the ranks of London visitors, his ‘real conference’. For Gandhi the real conference could take place in a private flat, at prayer or during a 6 a.m. walk down a sewer canal in Bow. For Astor and the hosts of the at-homes which supplemented formal diplomacy, the conference could be worked without stepping inside either of its royal palaces. These spaces highlight the broader geographies of the conference, the wider range of women involved than the official record would suggest, but also the broad range of labour (working on food, emotions, art and affect) that constructed

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homes as political spaces. These were spaces cultivated by women because they were excluded from the diplomatic spaces of the RTC. So too were those dissenting voices who objected to the conference aims and means. It is to these broader geographies of resistance, on the page and the street, that we turn in the next chapter.

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IV REPRESENTATIONS

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10 PETITIONS AND PROTESTS THE PAGE AND THE STREET

THE QUESTION OF REPRESENTATION The Round Table Conference (RTC) was tasked with squaring the circle of interwar Indian politics. Around an oval table the delegates negotiated the incompatible geometries of colonial sovereignty and liberal freedoms. At the centre of the table was the question of representation. For all its clanking authoritarianism, the Government of India did not desire full autocracy; it sought sovereignty, not domination alone. Modern governmentality, rather than simply sovereign power, required the assent of those whom the government represented. For Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007), drawing on Thomas Hobbes, by the interwar years the British in India accepted that they could not aspire to ‘instituted’ (or constituted) sovereignty, willingly given by the people to their chosen representatives (also see Mantena 2016). At best they hoped to solidify their ‘acquired’ (or constituent) sovereignty, through which the people accepted that they would be represented by their conquerors. The question of representation was not an abstractly philosophical one at the conference. Rather, it was a constant refrain in the protests, both written and enacted, that accompanied the conference throughout. For the conference’s most famous delegate it was at the heart of the RTC’s unreality. In an interview on 31 October 1931, Gandhi was asked by the Indian Conciliation Group, ‘Upon what grounds do you consider the Round Table Conference to be unrepresentative?’1 He responded, ‘It is unrepresentative in every sense of the word. No one has come by right of election – even those who have been elected have come by invitation. I have come by invitation.’

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He continued that while not even the king could turn the prime minister out of the House of Commons, Gandhi could be barred from the conference at any point. The conference delegates should, he insisted, have been elected by the Indian people as their representatives at a free conference. Gandhi, however, quickly found himself mired in the intractable question of Indian representation. First, he asserted that Congress was representative of the masses and if the depressed classes had been given a referendum, he would have been chosen as their representative: ‘They do not want separate representation.’ Secondly, he claimed that the princes had come to London in a false double capacity, claiming to represent themselves and their subjects. While he did not want to hurt the princes’ feelings, he nevertheless denounced them as reactionaries who were not representative of the religious and social groups they claimed to represent. The fractured and unresolved geographies of sovereignty in India meant that the question of representation was explosively political. The conference was designed to plan the next stage of political representation in India (who could vote, what powers the elected would have) but it was also contested as a misrepresentation of India itself. This chapter explores resistance against the conference in two senses. First, it explores how groups in India made representations to the government in New Delhi and to the conference directly, often regarding who was representing India in London. Second, it explores protests in the British capital, in the street and on the page, where the misrepresentative nature of the conference and its delegates was laid bare.

INDIAN PETITIONS Being a conference hosted by the British government in London, at the RTC India figured only through mediation and representation. Each delegate brought with them their own India, encapsulated in statistics, demands and political geographic imaginations. The government in New Delhi was also keen that their India find its place at the table, as championed by the Indian Civil Service advisors and secretaries who travelled to England. Secretary of State Benn, more so than Hoare, was keen to take Indian opinion into account. He sought Irwin’s opinion regarding policy and requested that regular appraisals of press reactions in India be sent to him. The detailed telegrams summarising press

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comment from across the country illustrated the breadth and depth of public commentary and debate about the minutiae of committee work throughout the first conference session.2 Having had their representatives chosen on their behalf, however, there were few channels through which Indian individual or collective opinion could make itself heard in London. Telegrams were cheap and quick, and their influence was bemoaned by both Benn and Hoare. Both felt that delegates were amenable to compromise in London until reports of negotiations found their way to the Indian press and messages jammed the lines from India. Benn felt that telegrams had scared Muslim delegates away from backing separate electorates, blocking a breakthrough on the communal deadlock in mid-December 1930.3 Two years later, on 15 December 1932, Hoare likewise wrote to Viceroy Willingdon: The Indians, if left to themselves, are all right, but the longer the Conference goes on the more restive they become under the shower of telegrams that reaches them every day from the partisans in India. If we have to adjourn for Christmas, the delay will give a great opening to this barrage of protesting wires.4

While telegrams rarely entered the archive, petitions did. Rohit De and Robert Travers (2019) have explored the diverse range of petitioning practices, and their meanings, in colonial South Asia. Building upon Lex Heerma van Voss’s definition of petitions as ‘demands for favour, or for the redressing of an injustice, directed to some established authority’ (see De and Travers 2019, 5) these demands were differentiated from complaints (to redress a wrong) and plaints (legal suits). In practice these functions blur, just as petitions take the forms of memorials, letters or addresses. In terms of their relationships to the state, petitions routinise political hierarchies and authorise the centralising power that is petitioned. But they also form creative avenues for dissent, allow for the creation of new publics and means of protest, and present symbolic and affective channels through which popular forms of sovereignty produce self-representation. Representations were made to both individuals and groups, with many of the former tending more towards complaint than petition. Some letters were openly coercive and bitterly affective. Lester’s (1932) published pen letters exposed the hateful and racist correspondence she received for hosting Gandhi. But critics of Gandhi’s politics also received their fair share

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of poisoned petitioning too. The pioneering lawyer and social reformer Cornelia Sorabji was an outspoken critic of Gandhi throughout the conference (on Sorabji see Banerjee [2010, 116–149]; Visram [2002, 93–97]; Mossman [2020]).5 She received regular correspondence condemning her views. A letter of 20 January 1932 from a Karoline Marchlaneski accepted her criticisms of Gandhi but insisted that her ‘attitude of humble servility towards the British I cannot understand! I think such an attitude is contemptible!’6 On 19 May a further letter, from B. Singh, responding to an article by Sorabji in The Times, asked: ‘If you cannot tell the truth please do not tell lies. Why blame Gandhi or the Congress? Search your own heart and see the biggest and blackest spot in there.’7 Ramsay MacDonald received more representations than most. Two days before the conclusion of the first session, Ambedkar’s requests to the prime minister for a private audience having been refused, he directly petitioned MacDonald, on behalf of himself and fellow delegate Rettamalai Srinivasan. In a handwritten letter he insisted he was ‘obliged to represent to you that as the rights of the Depressed classes in the future constitution are not settled’ any government announcement would have to include community safeguards.8 While Ambedkar’s petition was aggressive and formal, others were gently coercive and affectively intimate. On 24 September 1932, after the Communal Award but before the final RTC session, the poet and nationalist icon Rabindranath Tagore replied to a condolence letter MacDonald had written him, on hearing of the death of his grandson. He thanked MacDonald for his sympathy and, while insisting that he kept away from politics, wrote that he was saddened by the recent turn negotiations had taken: ‘I appeal to you for the sake of humanity – do nothing to help the alienation of our country with yours, to embitter the memory of our relationship for good.’9 While these letters pursued individual petitioning, two sets of collective Indian petitions relating to the RTC are explored below. The first were logged in New Delhi and illustrate the range of individuals and organisations who tried to use the Indian government as a node through which to sway conference proceedings. The second set were received by delegates at the conference and show how the petitioners’ statements found their way to the heart of St James’s. The petitions focused on two representational concerns  – namely, who would represent India in London and how constitutional concerns would be represented at the conference.

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PETITIONING DELHI For many complainants in India the conference was strung along a historical line of misrepresentations and exclusions. On 25 October 1930, a few weeks before the conference started, a ‘Humble Memorial of the Hillmen comprising the Nepalese (Gurkhas), Bhutias and Lepchas of the District of Darjeeling’ was printed and submitted to the Bengal government, who passed it to the Reforms Office in Delhi.10 The memorial was addressed to Benn and asked that the district be removed from the scheduled list of areas excluded from the reforms of 1919. On the basis of both its physical and human geography the area had been denied full democratic representation under dyarchy, despite petitions being submitted to Secretary of State Montagu during his Indian tour of 1917–1918 (Legg 2016a, 56–58). The petitioners felt that the Simon Report had not given their claims for full franchise a fair hearing, misrepresenting their ethnic makeup and failing to understand how much the dyarchy reforms had privileged the exploitative tea planters while denying the inhabitants any ownership rights and exposing them to forced labour, despite India’s commitments at the League of Nations. In a later note R. N. Reid suggested, on 11 December, that the Government of Bengal was sympathetic to the need for reform but that the educated Hillsmen Association didn’t speak for all hillsmen, many of whom needed safeguards against future constitutional developments which would be devised in London. Other anticipatory petitions focused on who would be represented in London. As the details of the RTC started to take shape in the spring of 1930 a steady stream of petitions found their way to Delhi (also see Legg, forthcoming). Members of the ‘Hindu Depressed Classes’ from Azamgarh in the United Provinces demanded, in early May, that they secure representation at the RTC and in the future constitution in proportion to their population size, on threat of propaganda and agitation upon Congress lines.11 Similar representations were made by railway and cantonment organisations, while the All-India Shia and Buddhist Conferences requested their representatives be invited to London. During the summer requests for representation were logged from the Anglo-Indians of Madras writing from Ootacamund, landholders in Bombay and the Catholic Association of South Kanara writing from Mangalore. The petitions were opportunities to both demand representation and question it where it had been granted. On 16 July the private secretary

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to the viceroy received a petition from the general council of the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal, Benares, which campaigned to safeguard the rights and privileges of orthodox Hindus. A three-page, 2,500-word printed memorandum was submitted, arguing that the Hindu Mahasabha, represented by Dr Moonje at the RTC, did not speak for the orthodox community. The threat was not so much from Christians or Muslims as rival Hindu organisations, which had no ambition for preserving the ‘Dharmic citadel’, inherited from the ages, risking its effacement from the map of India: Some of them with machine-guns moulded in the Legislative arsenals of British India, some with sword and spear sharpened in separatist congregations and sabhas [societies], some with match-box propaganda trying to inflame the passions of the ignorant and gullible – all want to demolish the mighty structure of Hindu India, planned in conformity with the highest laws of Nature, and embellished with the ripe experience of countless ages.12

Communists, the British, materialism and atheism were all denounced, the concluding plea being that both the British and Hindu reformers abstain from any future interference in religious practice. During the first conference session there were fewer memorials to Delhi, although fears that Hindus in London might capitulate to Jinnah’s fourteen points led to flurry of protests being sent to the viceroy in late December. On 19 December the Hindu Sabha of Krishnanagar, a Bengal town 60 miles north of Calcutta, also forwarded a resolution to the viceroy protesting against the actions of Jatindra Nath Basu and Sir Provash Chandra Mitter.13 These Bengali Hindu delegates were felt to have ceded too much authority to the Aga Khan, as chair of the British Indian delegation, and to have not resisted the prospect of 51 per cent of seats being reserved for Muslims in Bengal. The protests went beyond this, however, to target the representational politics of the conference itself. Basu and Mitter were not felt to represent Bengali Hindus but to act in London without consultation; any resulting solution specific to Bengal would create false divisions between Hindus in other provinces. A week later, on 26 December, the Viceroy received a handwritten letter reiterating this point from the secretary of the Hindu Sabha, Midnapur, a town 85 miles east of Calcutta. It repudiated ‘the representative character of the Bengal Hindu delegates to the Round Table Conference and denounce[d] the principle of solving the communal question of Bengal

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by personal arbitration’.14 Similarly worded petitions arrived from Hindu Sabhas elsewhere in Bengal, including Kishoreganj, Pabna, Comilla, Patna, Tangail and Jalpaiguri. A newspaper cutting from the Amrita Bazar Patrika on 6 January 1931 was filed in Delhi, reporting on the latter of these meetings and noting that the substance of their representation had been telegrammed to MacDonald and Moonje in London. Memorials in India subsided during the conference sessions while the telegrams continued, but they soon revived after the delegates returned to India and planning for the second session got underway. In February 1931 a set of petitions arrived in Delhi, making the case variously for the protection of the rights of the Marwari trading community in Calcutta, the fundamental rights of workers and the need for labour protection to be a central, federal subject.15 After the Gandhi–Irwin Pact was announced in March, petitions to have group interests represented alongside Congress’s cause in London began to pour in. One file, opened in late March, logged lengthy submissions on the lines of those above, making the case for nonintrusion in orthodox Hindu or Punjabi Sikh life.16 But in addition were fiftynine pages of office notes summarising ‘requests for representation’ at the RTC. Over 650 recommendations were made, mostly for new members, but often for existing delegates to be promoted to either the Federal Structure or Minorities Committees. Dunnett, secretary of the Reforms Office, submitted a note on 11 April noting that these submissions were pointless as the conference delegation was being rolled over almost in its entirely, with some replacements for members who had died and the addition of some business representatives. The government had been willing to grant Congress up to twelve delegates, but only Gandhi was sent. Once the delegate lists were published the submissions to government subsided, although nationwide organisations could be organised to add weight to their delegates’ cause. As with the Hindu Sabhas above, on the eve of the second session opening a series of seemingly coordinated petitions arrived in New Delhi by ‘depressed classes’ organisations.17 Ambedkar and R. Srinivasan were authorised as spokesmen for the downtrodden communities which were said, in one petition, to constitute one-sixth of India’s population for whom one-sixth of seats should be preserved in the legislative assembly. Another petition argued, instead, for separate electorates, anticipating the most contentious point of the Communal Award, which resulted from the breakdown of the conference method. This breakdown came after nearly

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three months of debate in London at the second conference session at which petitions were also received and debated.

PETITIONING LONDON Most petitions from India regarding government policy were routed through New Delhi and there is little record of Indian petitions having an impact on the British government or the secretariat-general. It is possible, however, to glean some sense of the written representations that delegates were receiving from the private papers of Mitter and Moonje. The former collated memoranda he received before and during the second conference session.18 The range of issues upon which he was called to intervene is striking. In June 1931 the Indian Chamber of Commerce sent a printed note outlining the residential segregation that Indians working in Mombasa were facing, in spite of Kenyan pledges to remove any such disability. In August the Indian Medical Association raised the lack of freedom of opportunity that Indian medics faced when in India, while an undated memorial from the ‘backward tracts’ of Chittagong requested the limitation of the powers of the Bengal Legislature there in the future. The submissions to Mitter continued once the second session got underway. He received a petition from residents of Kumaon, an area bordered by Tibet, Nepal and the Punjab, requesting separate province status in the future constitution; a printed appeal by an Ibn Hussain that the future constitution place the needs of the poor at its heart; a printed appeal to RTC delegates by the Taluqdar landholders of Oudh asking that their landholdings and titles be preserved; a petition from the non-official Legislative Council members for Berar asking that a special category of territories that were neither (Hyderabadi) states nor provinces be created for it; a printed circular from the Central Provinces Zamindar Organisation insisting that tributes be differentiated from rent, and the former be fixed; and a request from Sylhet–Cachar Transfer Committee that those two territories be transferred to Bengal from Assam in the future constitution. These were in addition to the earlier correspondence he must also have received regarding his working with the Aga Khan, which was perceived to be against the good of Bengali Hindus. Moonje also collated some of the petitions and pamphlets he was sent, and sometimes noted the telegrams he had received, although the wire from the Jalpaiguri Sabha communicating the displeasure of Bengali Hindus

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was not mentioned in his diary. He did, however, mention contradictory demands from high powered figures in India during the first month of the second conference session. Ahead of the Minorities Committee beginning its work Moonje received a telegram, on 18 September 1931, from the influential Hindu Mahasabhite Bhai Parmanand insisting that the RTC could not sacrifice democracy in the manner suggested by Gandhi’s willingness to give in to all Muslim demands in order to preserve unity.19 As Gandhi attempted to forge some communal breakthrough in October Moonje was wired by both leftist Congress leader Subash Chandra Bose and Hindu nationalist and industrialist Jugalkishore Birla asking him why he was not backing Gandhi’s demands.20 The written representations that Moonje received were less targeted at him specifically and instead addressed at more general concerns at the conference. The Commonwealth Assurance Company Limited, Poona City, wrote to him on 29 October 1931 congratulating him on his efforts and asking that he resist Gandhi’s overly liberal stance in the face of Muslim campaigns for Jinnah’s fourteen points.21 On the same day the Indian States People’s Delegation submitted a statement to Moonje insisting that the new constitution provide for a court in which the residents of the princely states could lodge appeals regarding transgressions of federal laws. While petitions could expose delegates to contradictory and difficult demands, they could also be wielded to grant credence to their causes. Moonje preserved in his papers a document circulated by the RTC secretariat-general on behalf of Ambedkar and Srinivasan on 14 November 1931. It comprised sixteen pages, likely mimeographed in the small secretariat staff office off Engine Court at St James’s Palace, detailing fiftyfour telegrams received by them backing their campaign for the depressed classes. They were divided by province, with the majority from Bombay and the Central Provinces, and a smaller number from Bengal, the Punjab and the United Provinces. Whether from individuals or organisations, the recurrent message was that they supported Ambedkar’s demand for separate electorates and condemned Gandhi’s opposition. These testimonies could be used to claim representativeness of the people of India. A telegram from Nasik in the Bombay Presidency from 13 November claimed that a meeting of 5,000 people had condemned Gandhi’s stance.22 Other organisations, such as the Chowghat Young Men’s Association in Colombo, Ceylon, telegrammed on 30 October, emphasising that their membership was entirely of Malayalee depressed classes, and insisting

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upon special representation in any future legislative chambers. Ambedkar repeatedly marshalled his claims to popular sovereignty among those previously known as untouchables in India, successfully making the case for their separate electorates, as recognised in MacDonald’s Communal Award of 16 August 1932.

THE COMMUNAL AWARD Among the many turns of the RTC, the reaction to the Communal Award was perhaps one of the most unanticipated. The communal question had been the most divisive question of the conference, crippling the Minorities Committee and remaining unresolved after the first two sessions. The incompatibility of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh demands for representation had been the obsession of delegates, staff and the public alike. Having postponed the role of arbiter as long as possible, MacDonald took up the mantle in the spring of 1932 and declared how seats would be distributed in the future constitution (for the Indian context, see Page [1982, 245]). A government summary of the award recounted delegates reporting on 19 March 1932 that no settlement had been reached in continued negotiations in India.23 The award addressed communities in the provincial legislatures of British India only, where separate communal electorates would select representatives for seats allotted to Muslim, Sikh and European constituencies covering the whole province. Seats in each province were carefully calibrated to ensure that large minorities were protected but could not secure majorities without winning other special constituency seats (Moore 1974, 262). Members of the depressed classes would vote in general constituencies, but special seats would also be allotted to them in areas where they lived in large numbers. This was envisaged as a temporary policy of twenty years to allow political representation in the community to become well enough embedded to function in open constituencies. Even taking into account the crippling of political dissent in India during the second phase of civil disobedience, the award was received much better than the Indian government could have hoped. The Reforms Office in Delhi noted that the reaction had been helped by Sastri and Sapru publicly stating that the conference method had shown that no settlement could be reached.24 While Congress and Liberals in the United Province had rejected the settlement, it was felt that Muslim leaders were protesting in public but were satisfied in private, that Sikh leaders were menacing but not dangerous,

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and while Hindu leaders recognised the concerns over guaranteed Muslim majorities in Bengal and the Punjab, their genuine angst concerned the depressed classes. The award had also stated that revisions would only be considered if proposed changes were agreed upon by all parties concerned. This may explain the relatively low number of petitions logged in Delhi, although many did arrive. One printed pamphlet lay out ‘A Survey of the Communal Award’ by the Madras High Court advocate Mr Mahomed Muazzam, praising the impartial government’s attempt to safeguard minority interests and suggesting that ‘once we discard purely democratic ideas as wholly unsuited to Indian conditions, the character or form of the electorate for the minority communities of India cannot but be separate or communal’.25 The National Council of Women in India telegrammed the viceroy suggesting that the award neglected the views of India’s women, whose opinion, they claimed, was overwhelmingly against communalism. The vast majority of petitions were, however, from groups who felt they would be under-represented in the new constitution. On 7 September 1932 the Purbha Srihatta Hindu Sabha, from Karimganj in Assam, forwarded resolutions against the divisions of the Indian public, the reduction of Hindu majorities to minorities in parts of the province and the separation off of the depressed classes. A large meeting of Muslims in Sunamganj subdivision of Sylet in Assam submitted an alternative petition protesting that their community constituted 33.7 per cent of the population but would secure only 31.4 per cent of the province’s seats. Comparable detailing and claims of under-representation were made by associations representing Bihari landholders, Kanara Catholics, landholders of the United Provinces, southern Indian commercial interests, Madras’ Indian Christians, Keralean Muslims, traders in Sind, press employees in the labour seat of Bowbazar in Calcutta, south Indian Christians and landholders in Burdwan, Bengal.26 Of these only one, a resolution by the Jamiat-ul-Quresh in the Punjab, appended their plea for more Muslim seats with the suggestion of a nominee for the final session of the RTC conference. The petitions above were, however, overshadowed by the major disputation of the communal award, which brought all politics in India to a standstill and captivated global public attention. In March 1932 Gandhi had indicated to Hoare, from Yervada jail, that he would fast to the death against separate depressed class electorates (Moore 1974, 265). The fast began on 20 September and concluded six days later with the Poona Pact, in which

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Ambedkar conceded separate electorates and reached an agreement with Malaviya for 147 seats to be reserved out of the general electorate. Given that leaders of the concerned parties agreed the amendment, it was accepted by the British government. The president of the Hindu Mahasabha was scheduled to give his annual address on 24 September, four days into Gandhi’s fast, and spoke at length regarding the RTC and the communal award.27 N. C. Kelkar, who would be invited to the final conference session, berated previous delegates for ever thinking that conclusions could be jointly arrived at through a conference where the host had nothing to gain and everything to lose. The award was denounced for its prejudice against Hindus, but the only protest with any hope of effecting change was Gandhi’s fast. This presented a dilemma for Kelkar. Approve of Gandhi’s methods and you betrayed reason. Disapprove, and you secured the odium of a country in the sway of the Mahatma’s noble sacrifice. For Kelkar it was truth, with which Gandhi had experimented with all his life, and reason that must win out: ‘That truth, in my humble opinion, is that, this method of selfimmolation is not valid. It is grand but it is not politics. Nor can it be justified by the highest principles of Hindu Dharma. It is the negation of all argument and the apotheosis of unreason.’28 For Kelkar this immolatory display of passion and emotion could not be the foundation of a new regime of democracy and self-government. But he also acknowledged that it had brought about the prospect of a compromise formula with Ambedkar, which the RTC had not. For Ambedkar, the Poona Pact was a crushing defeat (B. Chakrabarty 2016), marking the abandonment of the conference method by both the government and by Gandhi, who had resorted to his own method of negotiation, with brutal success. In this sense, the Communal Award was outside of the RTC as it was achieved without the consent of the delegates. It was calculated, however, by Hoare based on the statistics produced at the conference and on the basis of its months of debates. In the autumn of 1932 the award was factored into the final recommendations of the conference’s last session.

LONDON PROTESTS Although they ranged widely across the spectrum, most Indian delegates to the RTC could be described as nationalists. Besides Gandhi, few

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of them sought immediate self-rule, but most sought increased selfgovernment, whether as elected or hereditary rulers. That is to say, they wanted what Britain had. The journey from Bombay to London was, therefore, a journey across both space and time, to a freer, more liberal place and future. This exposed delegates to every face of liberalism. During two of the three RTC sessions India was wracked by both civil disobedience campaigns and government anticipatory- and counter-measures, through which press freedoms and the liberty to gather freely in public were curtailed. Whilst censorship and the policing of public space were also prevalent in Britain, they operated behind tighter lines of control protecting the public sphere. Delegates were free to speak, debate and protest on the pages and streets of London and the UK. These long-exercised freedoms had made 1930s London a ‘junction box’ (Gopal [2019, 212]; also see Matera [2015]) for black and Asian anti-colonial internationalists (for earlier spaces of Indian anticolonialism in London, see Laursen [2021]). The same freedoms also applied, however, to their opponents. The RTC and its delegates were opposed in the press and in the cityscape of London in ways that would have been difficult if not impossible in India at that time. The British government found itself expending significant time and money on protecting the visiting delegates through various means and across various scales. At the level of the bureaucratic and the international, on 9 June 1931 the political secretary of the Government of India received a request, from the agent to the governor of the Punjab States, to refuse the passport requests of three men.29 Their object was to revive at the RTC an agitation that had been launched against the Maharaja of Patiala in 1927, alleging that he had abducted Amar Singh of Roorki’s wife and later offered bribes to cover up the affair. This was one of a larger series of complaints against the maharaja coordinated by the Indian States People’s Conference, regarding which he was acquitted by a government investigation in 1930 (Copland 1997, 81). Despite doubts that the refusal would be covered by passport rules, the Indian government denied the agitators permission to visit Britain. At the opposite scale of protests, at the local and the representational, on 15 September 1931 the Lord Chamberlain banned a new song regarding Gandhi’s visit, entitled ‘Back in Town Again’, from being performed in the West End play ‘Folly to the Wiser’.30 The attacks on the RTC in the British press are well known, although Rothermere’s Daily Mail was an outlier in its vitriol, Geoffrey Dawson’s

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The Times being pro-reform, and much more influential (St John 2006). Less well known are the conflicts that took place in the streets of London and the pages of its publications for and often by the Indian diaspora. Interconnecting the physical and representational spaces of the street and the page were debates over the legitimacy of the conference method, tensions between leftist and moderate forms of Indian nationalism and the perpetual provocations of one charismatically divisive figure in particular. One of the quirks of the Indian political scene in interwar Britain was that one of its most disruptive and provocative voices was that of a communist member of parliament for Battersea. Shapurji Saklatvala had arrived in Britain from India in 1905 to recuperate his health and to help manage the affairs of his family firm of Tata Sons (Visram 2002, 304–319). He became an active member of the Independent Labour Party but defected from them over their failure to affiliate to the communist international in 1921. In 1922 he won the Battersea North seat for Labour but was expelled from the party due to his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, for whom he retook the Battersea seat in 1924 and which he held until 1929. He championed Indian causes through parliament and argued for dialogue between British and Indian workers to create global partnerships to resist imperial capitalism (Squires 2011). During a 1927 trip to India he had engaged Gandhi in a public dialogue, criticising his suspension of the non-cooperation movement, to which Gandhi responded that Saklatvala was too urban, too western and too modern to appreciate the specificities of the Indian context (Gopal 2019, 239).

IN THE STREET As has been apparent in previous chapters, there was a rich and varied Indian population in London who engaged with and supported broader conference activities in various ways. They ran and staffed Indian restaurants, organised and attended Indian societies, attended lectures and stood for hours in the pouring rain outside Friends’ House in Euston, awaiting Gandhi’s arrival in September 1931. Difficult to quantify using British records, Congress estimated in 1932 that there were at least 7,128 Indians living in Britain (Visram 2002, 254). Their number had been increasing in the 1920s, forging a rich diaspora composed of settled lascars, sailors, Punjabi textile pedlars, civil servants, businessmen, adventure seekers and students.

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In the 1930s there were rival organisations seeking to represent, educate and politicise these men and women. The Congress-supporting India League was led by V. K. Krishna Menon and bridged working-class Indians and professionals (on Menon, see Ahmed [2011] and Visram [2002, 320– 340]). Alongside it was the Indian Freedom League, founded in 1928 and with a small, fluctuating membership which held regular meetings in Hyde Park, with connections to other anti-colonial organisations in London. More significant were the British and London branches of the Indian National Congress (INC). The latter of these had been established in 1928 and could claim 280 members by 1930 (Visram 2002, 302), administered from its shared its offices with the more radical internationalist network, the League against Imperialism (LAI). In part through the influence of Congress’s London branch the New Scotland Yard logged a report on 15 October 1930 suggesting it had become almost necessary for Indians in Britain to express disapproval of the first session of the RTC.31 Such reports were fed to Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), a secret organisation within the India Office. It collated political intelligence data about Indians abroad from the police, the Security Service (MI5) and Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in collaboration with the Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi.32 The IPI had emerged in 1909 in response to Indian anarchist activities in Britain and its main focus remained anarchist, revolutionary and communist Indians in Britain, bringing the more radical wing of Congress in London, and its most famous member, within its purview. Saklatvala had opened his campaign against the RTC a month in advance. During a meeting on the Indian question on 19 October, organised by the London Council of the Labour Party, Saklatvala had interrupted a speech advocating parity between Britain and India by shouting ‘Dominion Status be Damned’ (the audience had been unswayed and called upon Saklatvala to ‘shut up’).33 He was, however, just one of many activists in London preparing to agitate against the conference. On 23 October Sapru wrote home to India describing rumours that his fellow countrymen and Indian ladies were planning black flag processions against the delegates: ‘Mrs Brijlal Nehru told Colonel Haksar the other day that she might be nasty on this occasion.’34 Secretary of State Benn had reassured Sapru that he had nothing to worry about and was fully aware of the plan. Rameshwari Nehru was the wife of Brijlal Nehru, cousin of Jawaharlal, and the chair of the Women’s Committee of the India League. She was hosted by Margaret Benn as part of the ‘collateral kindness’ campaign at the launch of the conference

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on 13 November, networked with delegates throughout and presided over a meeting of the London Committee of the Women’s India Association on 2 October 1931 at which a purse of £160 was presented to Gandhi to aid women’s work in India.35 Rameshwari Nehru’s switch from opposing to supporting the conference with Gandhi’s arrival was representative of a broader shift which split London’s Indian political institutions. This is not to suggest, however, that they had remained unified in opposition to the first conference session. The London branch of the INC, based at Kilburn Park, was reported to receive £400 per annum [£18,314] from Congress in India and had been the subject of especial police scrutiny since the Lahore resolution of Congress in favour of complete independence in January 1930.36 They listed seventy-seven members of the branch, which met at Saklatvala’s home in Highgate or the office of the journalist and activist Pulin Behari Seal on Fleet Street.37 From August 1930 reports were logged that the London branch was planning to create dissension among the delegates and to suggest that Vincent, as joint social secretary and an ex-police man, had been appointed to spy on delegates. The London branch had strong ties with the LAI, the Brussels conference of which Jawaharlal Nehru had famously attended in 1927 (Louro 2018). On 28 October the police reported that the league would support the London branch in propaganda against the RTC, including demonstrations in the opening days of the conference. But they also noted emerging tensions regarding the influence of communists within the London branch, many of whom were LAI supporters, which had led to resignations and a dwindling membership. Seal was secretary and Saklatvala treasurer of the branch, but messages had been received from Congress in India warning against deviating from their programme in favour of communist policies. Relations deteriorated during the first conference session, such that by Christmas of 1930 the police could report that Congress in India had severed connections with the London branch, leaving it with twenty-eight members and little influence. During this time the branch had, however, presented a significant risk to the carefully laid plans for the conference launch. On 13 October the police reported plans for demonstrations at Victoria Station and a demonstration on the opening day of the conference.38 They had considered which members might require special protection and decided that none would, although Patiala was felt to be most at risk due to the ongoing agitation against his

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rule. ‘Mahomed Ali’ was unpopular due to his denouncements of the civil disobedience movement the London branch had hoped to insult him ‘by throwing ink at him or tarring his beard if they can get the opportunity’.39 On 23 October the police reported ambitions of the London branch to secure the collaboration in its demonstrations of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Indian Seaman’s Union, the Sinn Fein Club and the Indian Freedom League, among others. It was hoped that this coalition would enable a protest on 12 November, the day of the conference’s inauguration, at Trafalgar Square followed by processions to delegates’ dwellings during the weekend before the conference opened, and demonstrations outside St James’s Palace on the first day of work.40 A meeting would be held at Hyde Park, building on five years’ worth of speeches there by Indian Freedom League speakers and Saklatvala (Visram 2002, 300, 313), followed by a procession towards a large meeting in central London. As the conference neared, further details emerged of plans to picket Chesterfield Gardens and of suggestions by more extremist Indians in London to react ‘roughly’ to any undue police attention and to create an ‘impression’ on the delegates, in line with civil disobedience tactics in India. On the eve of the conference opening the police logged a report of the demonstration organisers facing indecision, constraint and diffidence, with disputes arising over the location for protests. A scheme had emerged under the direction of a committee which included Saklatvala, Seal, the British ex-diplomat and LAI supporter Reginald Bridgman and the Indian communist Clemens Palme Dutt. Discussion of potential tactics had ranged from private letters to delegates and producing pamphlets exposing delegates’ financial standing, to throwing bricks, hammers or other missiles at related processions or gatherings. It was proposed that two vans be hired for the procession, each carrying a tableau, one depicting the RTC and the other depicting ‘Scenes behind the Round Table Conference’ which would show the police striking unarmed Indians. They would then be used as platforms for the Hyde Park meeting. A week after the inauguration event the IPI submitted their report on the demonstration. The account dripped with contempt: The procession to Hyde Park, composed of some 30 Indian students and one or two East End silk merchants, plus Bridgman and a sprinkling of seedy-looking Communists, was a very ragged affair. No lascars could be induced to attend; and the much advertised ‘tableaux’ fell through

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owing to lack of funds. The processionists, one and all looked very miserable as they raced along trying to keep up with the Police who led the vanguard and brooked no delay. Consequently the occasional cries of Banda Makram [Vande Mataram] sounded rather hollow and out-of-breath.41

The Hyde Park meeting attracted an audience of 200 but the proceedings were said to be frigid due to slanderous attacks on the king by Saklatvala. This summary was based on an overview of events provided by Sergeant W. H. Evans, who would go to guard and be regarded as a family member by Gandhi in 1931, and transcriptions of shorthand notes made of speeches by seven speakers. The proceedings were opened by Dr C. B. Vakil who drew attention, as did many of the petitions lodged in New Delhi, to the nonrepresentative nature of the delegates: The people who have come from India to take part in the Conference have no right to represent India in any shape or form. They have come of their own accord as the nominees of the Viceroy. They have no locus standi. They are people of the past – some of very doubtful pasts, and they have no future as far as India is concerned.42

The theme was taken up by the next speaker, N. Dutta Majumdar, who denied the delegates were representative of India: ‘The Conference is composed of the lackeys of British Imperialism  – the puppet princes of India. The people taking part in the Conference represent nobody but themselves.’43 While other speeches outlined the benefits of the LAI approach or the Congress argument for India determining its freedom, Saklatvala opened with a lengthy explanation to the British members of the audience of how Britain was the most hypocritical nation on earth. The RTC was denounced as the most ‘gigantic impression of imperialist doctrine’ in the history of any nation.44 The press, Labour Party, prime minister and the king himself were accused of pretending that delegates were representative of India, while the Armistice Day commemorations the day before had proven the criminality of forcing of troops on another country, just as Britain continued to do in India. On 26 November the police compiled a report on protest activities during the first two weeks of conference. Much discussion of the unsuccessful

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demonstration had taken place, with poor organisation and student apathy blamed. Since then it was felt that conference speeches impressed Indian students and other residents in London. During the following fortnight, to 10 December, the London Congress branch focused on heckling noncommunist Indian speakers at public meetings. This included all delegates, but they had been informed and had been avoiding events where this was a risk. These tactics confirmed the heavy influence of communist organisers within the London branch. At a public meeting at Essex Hall off the Strand on 20 December Saklatvala, Seal and others condemned the emerging consensus that Burma would be separated from India, insisted that the RTC was unpopular in India, but also had to insist that rumours of the London branch’s imminent dissolution were false.45 It was felt, however, that London members were making overtures to Congress in India to curry favour more effectively, and on 28 January 1931 the IPI reported a branch meeting where future joint meetings with the Communist Party or LAI were banned. It was also noted that G. S. Dara, who ran the United India newspaper and organised the Gandhi Society in the capital, was planning an alternative to the London branch of Congress, called the Indian National Congress League, to propagate the policies of the Indian Congress faithfully.46 The release of Congress members from jail in January 1931 reignited Saklatvala’s campaign against the Gandhian creed. In early March the IPI logged a manifesto signed by the president of the London branch of Congress C. B. Vakil, suggesting that Gandhi had accepted British imperialism and the RTC: The British Imperialists and their white supporters in Europe and America intentionally contrived to boost Gandhi with his dramatic, hypocritical, metaphysical nonsense as the World’s Holy Saint, as by that process, the British Raj in India gave Gandhi a valuable hold over mass psychology with a superstitious awe.47

Real independence would demand India rid itself of the dramatic and effete Gandhi, whose mouth merely transmitted Viceroy Irwin’s commands, to be replaced by the mass force of India’s workers and peasants. Remarkably, after this the branch continued functioning and was planning in June 1931 to remove Saklatavala and others from its executive board to allow the branch to welcome Gandhi. On 26 June Vallabhai Patel, who

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had recently presided over the Congress session at Karachi which ratified the Irwin pact, attended a conference organised by the branch to debate its adherence to the Indian nationalist movement. Patel’s presidential address was challenged by Saklatvala and other communist supporters, but all resolutions put to vote went against the communist members. This encouraged Patel to believe the branch was beyond help, with a leadership resisting both Indian Congress and its local membership. The United India could later report that on 4 August Congress’s Working Committee disaffiliated the London branch, on the grounds that it had acted contrary to Congress principles and had disobeyed directions given to it.48 The branch survived, with Gandhian members cooperating in reception committee activity, while Saklatvala corralled communist members in preparations for demonstrations against Gandhi’s arrival. A meeting in Hyde Park, with the support of the LAI, was planned for 13 September, the day after Gandhi’s arrival. Saklatvala was talked out of it, and on 16 September Nehru’s order that the branch be disaffiliated was formally read out at their annual meeting.49 From this point the branch ceased its pretence of unifying its two wings and they split off to pursue their own ends. The British government was worried that Gandhi might be attacked by a leftwing fanatic, prompting the round-the-clock protection described in Chapter 5. While fears of a protest at Victoria Station were great enough for Gandhi to agree to taking a car from Folkstone to London instead of the train, there was little if any conflict in the streets for the second or third conference sessions. The Indian press in London, however, hosted both the rivalry between Gandhian and left-wing Indian politics and ongoing protests against the RTC.

ON THE PAGE Whilst the Labour Party supporting the Daily Herald and the Manchester Guardian gave the RTC some positive press, the majority of the centrist or right-wing press were hostile to the perceived surrender of sovereignty to India. During the first session, the Indian British press was also united against the conference. The Indian and Colonial Journal published its first issue on 3 January 1931, proclaiming itself an organ to demand independence for India and the colonies, without affiliation to any organisation and thus free from any reservation in the opinions it could express.50 Its first issue was packed with anti-RTC stories: condemning the representatives for

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not representing India; suggesting that the communal question was being foregrounded to stymie the conference; arguing that the separation of Burma aimed to provide Britain with a more pliable military base than would a united, independent India; and republishing an anonymous letter from an eminent source that had apparently been sent to delegates in London. It compared them to Algernon Swinburne’s 1870 poem ‘The Moderates’ which opened with a quote from Persius: ‘Virtutem Videant Intabescantque Relicta’ (Let them look upon virtue and what they have left behind, and let them rot!).51 The poem had condemned the moderates who had later been forgotten in the unified and free Italy. Being in favour of both Indian and global colonial independence, the journal covered in positive terms both Congress’s work in India and the LAI’s broader and more radical campaigns. During the second conference session a split over these two movements created a spectacular divide between the pages of the United India and the Daily Worker. The United India had been founded in 1920 as the Hind and, under the editor and publisher G. S. Dara, had become a mouthpiece for Congress and the non-violent creed. Having pushed for Gandhi’s release from jail and late inclusion in the delegate list for the first session, it had attacked the first RTC session from the outset, questioning its supposedly free method and slamming the spectacular ceremonials as a distraction from its hollow purpose. It promoted the work of the new Indian National Congress League, publishing their condemnation of the delegates as non-representative;52 it condemned the detested conference as a means of perpetuating British domination under a new guise;53 and it condemned the session proposal of responsibility with safeguards as a self-negating contradiction in terms.54 As much, if not more, ink was split decrying communist influence in the London Congress branch. In March 1930 ‘Communists cloaked as Congressmen’ were condemned as property-owning bourgeoisie who would deny these privileges to others. In August the journal announced that Gandhi and Lenin could not be preached from the same platform, nor could an ‘International’ be formed from unfree states.55 As the conference approached, Indians were advised to steer clear of the ‘worshippers at the Shrine of Moscow’, most notably, Saklatvala. In November it relayed insider stories of the communist takeover of the London branch of Congress and encourage readers to join its League Congress.56 Ahead of the branch’s disaffiliation in August, the United India reproduced a Saklatvala speech in which he accused Gandhi of exploiting the superstitions of ignorant Indian

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people. It concluded that Saklatvala’s holding together of the Mahatma’s method and the Moscow method had been made unsustainable by the Gandhi–Irwin Pact.57 This was, indeed, the case, but Saklatvala would flourish even without the backing of the INC. He developed his earlier critiques of the conference, where he had honed an ideological unmasking of the RTC. At the conclusion of the first session he had published an in-depth analysis of the conference in the Labour Monthly. He argued that the princes’ offer of federation had saved the British, the viceroy’s emergency powers making the new constitution merely a camouflage of despotism which marked the Labour government’s increasing tendency towards fascist methods.58 Anticipating and externalising the question that the United India had asked of his London branch, Saklatvala asked how long Congress in India could contain the evident passion for violent uprising within its non-violent fold. Praising Gandhi’s unifying of political sentiment in India, he felt sure that any discriminatory amnesty with the viceroy would clear the way for a Soviet India. After the Gandhi–Irwin Pact the communist Daily Worker unleashed their full fury against Gandhi and the RTC in mostly unattributed articles that bore heavy the imprint of Saklatvala’s hand. They built on earlier criticisms, recounted in earlier chapters, of the bloodsucker nature of colonial autocracy and the conference method as a sham. Providing much of the vocabulary that found its way into the anti-Gandhi pamphlet Muriel Lester noted in circulation around Kingsley Hall, Gandhi was denounced as the trump card of the British capitalist parties, providing a sham opposition to the union of British and Indian capital.59 On his arrival Gandhi was labelled a traitor and a hypocrite for accepting the protection of the British police, the Indian wing of which he had insisted be investigated for their atrocities.60 His claim that he had come to the conference to demand control of the army, finance and foreign relations was belied by the Irwin pact in which he acknowledged imperial autocracy in all these matters. On Gandhi’s arrival in London, the paper announced ‘the great wangle opens’.61 The conclusion of the second session in December had, for the Daily Worker, heralded no new policies just further imperial entrenchments. The North-Western Provinces would become a full governor’s province but with any military needs of policing the Soviet border attended to.62 Communal differences were being fermented to perpetuate control. A committee would continue the work of the conference in India under the

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direct supervision of the autocratic viceroy. For this, Gandhi had thanked MacDonald, marking their anti-revolutionary union. The RTC had been exposed, again, as a sham, with increased police powers in Bengal being the reality, as was widespread starvation and economic crisis. These were the real India, whereas all-India federation had vanished from view. Saklatvala’s Gandhi emerged strongly in this anonymous article: The curtain rings down on a Gandhi, this time, politically naked, exposed as a charlatan and miserable truckler to the enemies of the Indian masses. The other delegates were mere automatons, paid agents of their imperial masters, with little to lose or gain.63

At the point when Saklatvala’s Congress branch had been excommunicated and his mobilising power was at its weakest in the street, on the page he produced this excoriating analysis of conference failings, the product of delegates who did not and could not represent the people of India. Saklatvala would go on, however, to question the representation of the RTC as a failure, which was how many delegates represented the conference, both in private and in public. The next chapter will show us how, before considering why so many people stood to gain by depicting the conference as a failure.

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11 FAILURE ENDING AND FAILING

THE QUESTION OF REPRESENTATION In the previous chapter representation was approached as a question of sovereignty and of politics, of representing India in Britain and of representing dissenting views in the streets and pages of London. In this chapter representation is studied in two senses. The first is a literal re-presentation of the Round Table Conference (RTC). Its third and final session was smaller, shorter, had a much-curtailed conference method and took place not in the Palace of St James but in the Palace of Westminster. The second sense is of that developed in art history, cultural studies, the new cultural geography and myriad other disciplines in the 1980s and 1990s. Here the interest is in the relationship between the signifier and the signified, how culture transmits signs which convey meaning and power (Duncan and Ley 1993). Postcolonial studies not only pioneered some of the most influential developments in the turn to representation but also reacted to criticisms of its elitism and detachment in the 2000s by engaging in the turn to studies of materiality and embodiment. While clearly inspired by emphases on material spaces and complex individual lives, this book also supports the recent case made for the ongoing centrality of representation to postcolonial studies and beyond (Jazeel 2019). As such, rather than telescoping in from the imperial scale of dominion to end on the micro scale of the body, this volume concludes with the vital significance of representation to how the RTC worked and how it is viewed. This brings us to the representation of the conference as a failure and several questions that arise from it.

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First, what does it mean to fail? Colin Feltham (2014, 17) has explored some of the philosophical nuances of failure, which usually implies a breakdown, malfunctioning or underperformance of some kind. This does, however, suggest that the antecedent was working, or at least was a non-failure. This was emphatically not the case for the RTC. The Simon Commission had proved to be a disaster and Congress had vowed to disown its recommendations; after the Nehru Report, collaboration between the Muslim League and Congress had broken down; the princes were bridling at the potential outcomes of the Butler report; and Liberals were sensing that the British commitment to Dominion status was lapsing. The conference was called because of failure, but it was deemed to have failed to solve these failures, and thus became a sign of them. Second, how was the conference deemed to have failed? What sort of failure was it? Feltham (2014, 18–22) lists eight types of failure, in terms of constancy (for instance, shock), biology (illness), mechanics (a technical fault), society (war), morality (selfishness), aesthetics (ugliness), episteme (myth) and purpose (such as meaninglessness). This presents a diagnostic palette with which to analyse and explain failure. That is not, however, the purpose of this chapter. Rather, the aim here is, first, to move towards an understanding of how and why the conference in Britain was deemed to have failed to solve the failures of imperial Indian politics. The second aim is to consider what function this representation as failure served. One route towards this latter aim is presented by Marcus Lindahl and Alf Rehn’s (2007) managerial and philosophical analysis of project failures. They make the case for thinking in detail about failures without histrionics or normative bias. Rather than lapse into nihilism or cultural relativism, they defend thinking about failures as productive because they are, first, useful and because, second, of the way in which they are used. In terms of the former, Georges Bataille’s theory of general economy is used to argue that failures contribute to the expenditure of energy in a system, that waste is empirically dominant around us and that failure should be studied as a productive necessity. In terms of the latter, Thorstein Veblen’s theories of consumption are used to show how failures can be represented as symbolic actions: ‘… a failure might not be a failure unless it is noted as one, i.e., unless it is conspicuous as a failure’ (Lindahl and Rehn 2007, 249; emphasis in original). This will depend on what sort of failure is being considered. If an event is not considered at all likely to succeed, it must surely be deemed

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less of a failure than that of the collapse of a surer venture? Yes, but some of these failures (not necessarily the biggest) need to be marked as such to allow other projects to be viewed as a success and to allow broader progress. As such, representing something as a conspicuous failure can be an act, borrowing from Batailles, of sacrifice (Lindahl and Rehn 2007, 250). Designating something a failure, therefore, is both a statement about the world and a political intervention into it. These dual functions mean that failures might not be something one can or should rid oneself of. A parallel argument has been made by Sukanya Banerjee (2010) in her study of imperial citizenship claims within and beyond the late-Victorian Indian state. While these claims ultimately failed, this failure reconfigured discourses and processes of citizenship. This led Banerjee to ask how imperial citizenship narrativised failure, how it functioned as a failed narrative, but also how it fails narrative (Banerjee 2010, 193). Such questions are returned to in this chapter’s conclusion, after showing how the conference ended in its final session and how it was read at the time as a failure. It concludes with a left-wing commentary which suggested that the branding of the RTC as a failure was a distraction from what it had actually achieved. This raises the question of whether this is a distraction that we have, until now, remained distracted by.

ENDING As described in Chapter 4, the conference method survived Hoare’s attempt to assassinate it in the summer of 1932. But the final session, running for five weeks from 17 November, was much denuded. An India Office communiqué of 22 October had suggested that the two conference sessions and the touring committees had produced work that would only be delayed by further large, formal conference sessions.1 The smaller conference would produce decisions in less time, and it would run to a fixed agenda without any public sessions. Whereas the first session had 96 members and the second 108, the final session was composed of 46 members only. Of the princes only the Raja of Sarilla attended, the others being represented by their ministers alone. Having capitulated to the orchestrated backlash in India against Hoare’s attempt to ditch the conference method, the third session was in many ways a recognisable extension of the first two. As shown in previous chapters, the

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secretariat staff worked increasingly long hours up until the conference’s final conclusion on Christmas Eve. Sankey was appointed as deputy-chair of the conference. The social swirl ground into action, flattering delegates with at-homes, dinners and a reception at Buckingham Palace. And just as the king-emperor had opened the first session, the conference concluded with the reading of his statement wishing delegates peace and goodwill (India Office 1933a, 137). The third session, however, felt like a failure in the three senses explored below. In terms of infrastructure, there were problems with accommodation, procedure and participant numbers and experiences. In terms of the work done, the proceedings were not published so there are no printed verbatim records apart from the closing plenary. However, as with the Minorities Committee discussions beyond the confines of St James’s, using personal recollections and press reports it is clear that the work was felt to be dissatisfactory for most delegates. And, finally, the results of the final session were represented, at the time and in retrospect, through the lens of failure.

INFRASTRUCTURE The third conference session saw the RTC speech factory transferred to the House of Lords. Whereas delegates had previously enjoyed the run of much of St James’s Palace, they were allocated just one committee room in the House of Lords for the final session. This was part of Hoare’s attempt to limit the conference’s size; the room allocated was used to explain why the delegate number had been decreased. On 28 October C. Latimer, the agent to the governor-general in the Indian states of western India, wrote to the rulers under his charge explaining that the accommodation in the Conference room will be a good deal more restricted this time than on the previous occasion and accommodation can only be found for about 15 members of the staff of States delegations including Advisors, Secretaries and any Princes who may desire to watch the proceedings of the Conference.2

Likewise, on 22 November the India Office had to explain to the high commissioner Sir Bhupendra Nath Mitra that the shortage of accommodation in the allocated room meant that there was only space for

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three visitors such that he could not be guaranteed a regular place.3 It was hoped, however, that better quarters might be found. The need for larger accommodation became apparent as soon as work began. On Monday, 21 November, Sankey wrote in his diary that they had been allocated a small committee room in the Lords: ‘92 people in a room which was meant for 50. No ventilation & dozens of them smoking. A regular black hole.’4 Whether or not Sankey was referencing the ‘black hole of Calcutta’ (Chatterjee 2012) is unclear, with its connotations of alleged Indian cruelties and retaliatory British violence. But after complaints from Sankey and Hoare, on 25 November Carter issued instructions to transfer the conference to the king’s Robing Room over the weekend, having received assent from George V.5 This was the ornate room in which the monarch prepared for Opening of Parliament; as a happy coincidence for the RTC, the frieze was emblazoned with the arms of the Knights of the Round Table. Within the first week of work, therefore, Hoare had to apologise to the delegates for the paucity of their accommodation and announce the move. By this time the accommodation had served its purpose, however, which was to enable Hoare to whittle down the conference to the smallest number of delegates possible. This would allow it to force through its final work, but it also led to anger in India. In a private letter dated 19 September Viceroy Willingdon had begged the secretary of state that he be allowed at least thirty British Indian delegates, not the twenty Hoare suggested, any fewer making all the interests seeking representation impossible to reconcile (only twenty-two attended).6 While some delegates were keen to travel to London, many were not. Before the idea of cancelling the third session had yet been aired, Bikaner had written to the viceroy, on 3 May, confessing that a third trip to England for the RTC ‘is like a nightmare to me’, although if the princes were required in London he would do his duty.7 The princes did not attend, with Bikaner explaining in a speech on 25 October that he had spent nine out of fifteen months covering the first two sessions away from his people, that the princes had given the lead on all-India federation and that the remaining technical questions were better dealt with by ministers than princes.8 He reiterated, contradicting rumours of backsliding on the issue, that the princes remained committed to federation. While the Labour Party could also claim to support the aims of the conference, they boycotted it on the grounds of changed government policy and the unrepresentative nature of

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a conference absent of Congress. Sapru and Jayakar were presented with a letter from the Labour Party on their arrival at Folkestone but insisted that they had accepted the Labour Party’s original invitation to join the conference against bitter opposition in India, and now felt abandoned (Barns 1937, 114). This ill augury for the conference proceedings was born out in the weeks that followed.

PROCEEDINGS, ATMOSPHERES Margarita Barns (1937, 115) recalled tempers being frayed throughout the conference, attributing the atmosphere to the monotony of conference process, the depressing situation in India regarding the economy and civil disobedience, and the financial difficulty which the delegates’ travels placed them in. While new debates over financial safeguards and the size of the upper and lower houses in Delhi emerged, some felt that the replacement of the princes by their more technocratic ministers eased the proceedings along (Cross 1977, 160). Hoare wrote to Willingdon on 18 November that the conference opening had gone well but that even Jayakar and Sapru, the sort of Liberals he had depended on at the last session, were unhappy and uncooperative.9 His following report, after the first week’s work, suggested that the delegates seemed friendly and willing to work quickly but, if anything, were more divided than in 1931. Despite this smaller conference format Hoare suggested to Willingdon, on 25 November, that Hindus and Muslims refused to agree on the size of federal chambers and that the government would be forced to decide, as they had with the Communal Award. The Manchester Guardian felt that the first week’s technical debates had operated in an ‘air of unreality’ due to their sidestepping around the most contentious issues regarding safeguards and financial controls.10 Likewise, Sankey noted in his diary, on 28 and 29 November, that despite all the talk delegates kept returning to the essence of his Federal Structure Committee report of the previous year.11 On 1 December Hoare wrote to Willingdon explaining that his predecessor, Lord Irwin, had joined the conference as a government delegate and had been used to open the discussion on the relative powers of the viceroy and the provincial governors ‘as I felt that he would create a sympathetic atmosphere with the Indians. This proved to be the case, although Sapru, who made a most incoherent and rambling speech, gave

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the impression he was repudiating all the safeguards that he had accepted last year.’12 Things turned sour over the following week, as key figures, such as Sankey, felt they were being edged out of conference work by not being appointed to a series of small committees. Alongside this, Sankey noted in his diary on 8 December that Hoare had desperately offended the Hindu delegates.13 This may relate to a misunderstanding over whether Hoare had intended a slight when he left the room midway through one of Sapru’s speeches, which was blown up by the press (Barns 1937, 117). While divisions remained between the Indian delegates, Hoare had finally achieved what he had been seeking since the RTC had been announced. With no Labour delegates present, he had been able to forge a unified British bloc, admitting to Willingdon on 9 December, very confidentially, that Reading and Lothian, the British Liberal delegates and members of the National Government, were being given relevant cabinet papers and were meeting before the conference each day to successfully plan the conduct of debates.14 Despite Hoare’s acceleration of the conference pace, on 12 December influential Indian delegates including Sapru, Jayakar, Thakurdas, Joshi and Ambedkar co-signed a letter to Sankey protesting that important matters, including financial safeguards and fundamental rights, were yet to be decided, with just twelve days remaining.15 In particular, the Indian states’ refusal to commit to federation put central responsibility, the ultimate goal for British Indian delegates, at risk. Despite Sapru’s campaigning, it did not prove possible to get the princes to commit to a timeline to accede to the federation, which he felt put all of his and the conference’s work over the last three years at risk. The conference concluded with two days of general discussion, opening with Sapru. He reiterated that delegates at the first conference had come to England ‘in the midst of the curses, of the jibes and of the ridicule or our own countrymen’ (India Office 1933a, 76). Yet, even when Congress joined the delegates at the second session, the conference ended in failure, its only success being to hold the National Government to the commitments of the previous Labour government. The third session had been filled, for Sapru, with moments of great depression; many issues were unresolved and would remain that way until the government addressed the political bitterness in India and created a ‘spirit of hopefulness’ (India Office 1933a, 87). Other delegates’ speeches delivered few surprises. Returning to the language of the India Office bureaucrats who had pilloried the lofty idealism of Benn in

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the summer of 1930, Peel suggested ‘I certainly think this Conference has been more practical and perhaps less rhetorical than the others. We have got a good deal closer to the facts and realities of things’ (India Office 1933a, 88). Reading insisted that the conference had increased trust between the two nations. Hoare explained that they had been trying to recreate the fellowship of the Round Table, as depicted on the walls of the Robing Room around them, and to make a real not a paper constitution, informed by facts, which required the real and very difficult work of compromise. In concluding Sankey apologised that the prime minister had not been able to attend, but he attempted to rally morale. The princes’ declaration in favour of federation still stood: ‘There is no need to be despondent, there is no need to falter, no need to fail. The event is beyond doubt’ (India Office 1933a, 147). The conference had blazed the trail for federation, expanded the Indian franchise, improved the position of Indian women and enhanced mutual knowledge between India and Britain. He implored the delegates to work in India on what was practically possible, from which might emerge the ideally perfect. But that evening he confided in his diary: ‘I hope & think it has been a success, but I thank god it has come to an end. I am dead beat and stayed on in the Govnt for the sake of India & I pray it will come right.’16

RECEPTIONS The British press greeted the final conclusion of the RTC in generally good terms, although the Spectator pointed out that the India Office communiqués regarding the private proceedings had prioritised British policy announcements over any discussion or disputation that was taking place in the House of Lords.17 Even the Daily Mail noted that rarely could such important discussions affecting the destiny of a whole continent have been carried out at such high speed.18 Much press coverage was positive, the Sunday Times backing Sankey’s summaries of the conference’s successes and reporting an auspicious conclusion of the debates.19 The Manchester Guardian concluded that the conference had ended well, presenting a way out of the present predicament in which Britain was governing the democracy of the future using the strong methods of the past.20 A tone of ambivalence was present even through the positive reports, however. While the Daily Telegraph raised the prospect of legislation as early as the following year and praised the practical conference method deployed, it also acknowledged the scope of work remaining to be done.

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Quotes were given from leading delegates, all of whom acknowledged the steps taken towards federation, but most of whom also recognised the disappointments. The prime minister of Patiala, Nawab Liaqat Hyat-Khan, acknowledged that the conference could not have worked miracles, and Sapru refused to be either pessimistic or optimistic, insisting only that work remained to be done.21 Of the mainstream press the Labour-supporting Daily Herald had been most hostile. It had suggested the conference was taking new steps to its grave in mid-December when committee work was temporarily halted; had faced total collapse over the British insistence on financial safeguards; and, with only moderate delegates invited, it had still ended in failure on many of the vital points.22 The withdrawal of Congress from the RTC allowed G. S. Dara’s United India to revert to their conference criticism of 1930. In November the conference was denounced as a smokescreen: ‘Behind it lies deep a bigger and blacker Imperial plot that [sic] India has ever had to deal with.’23 The ‘microscopic group’ of moderates and Liberals were nominated and not representative, only Congress was said to represent India. Following the conference, the much-touted reservations and safeguards were listed as evidence of the ongoing imperial bias of the conference proposals: army, foreign relations and ecclesiastical subjects reserved for the governorgeneral; special powers to override elected ministers’ policies; and extraordinary powers in the event of a breakdown of order.24 The Daily Worker, however, had a richer and longer-developed vocabulary upon which it could draw to savage the RTC’s conclusions. It repeated its coverage of the first session as a cover-up and a sham, highlighting the hypocrisy of the king-emperor expressing his best wishes for India while workers starved and political prisoners languished in jail.25 The delegates (‘hand-picked, thick and thin adherents of British imperialism’) had accepted British control of the armed forces, finance and commerce, while the ‘sham constitution’ had no fixed date of operation: ‘So the Indian puppets of British imperialism take back an empty husk.’ A second piece attributed to ‘An Indian Worker’ suggested the sham conference had not even worked as a sham, the comments of the handpicked delegates highlighting the disappointments of being denied the opportunity of discussing India on equal terms in the rigged ‘mock conference’ of the final session.26 To many of the delegates the conference world in London was familiar, but for the few new delegates the mechanisms and politics of the Round

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Table were novel, fascinating and frustrating. For N. C. Kelkar, who had replaced Moonje as the Hindu Mahasabha representative, the conclusions of the conference were undesirable, the British reservations being unjustifiable and their financial safeguards overly cautious. Both extremes of the political spectrum, nationalist and imperialist, had jammed the conference method, resulting for Kelkar in stalemate and, ultimately, failure: To a foreigner British Indian politics would seem to be funny. At one end the Indian National Congress has already declared independence! At the other end he sees the British statesmen solemnly trifling with political reforms and investigating the mathematical minima of concessions. Disparity like this was found only by Alice in the Wonderland, when she had her body lengthened out to enormous proportions and sky-high, or shrunk like a shut-up telescope, according as she munched the one or the other end of a magic Mushroom! (Kelkar 1933, xx)

FAILING Failure stalked the RTC from its inception and was a constant companion. The RTC was summoned to address the failures of dyarchy; Irwin’s declaration of 1929 was nearly strangulated by his own Conservative colleagues before it drew breath; Congress rejected the RTC on the basis of the refusal to place Dominion status as the object of the conference; whilst delegates on arrival in London were easily and almost catastrophically offended, whether regarding princely protocol at the Lord Mayor’s banquet or Vincent’s badly mishandled trip to the Croydon Airshow. Such failures had been anticipated. Benn had written to Irwin on 20 June 1930, ahead of the viceroy’s public statement on the conference aims. This was also a week before Benn’s explanation to the viceroy of the need for modern conferences to be free, equal and effective. While Irwin had used the commitment to an open agenda in December 1929 to refuse Congress demands that the conference focus on awarding Dominion status, Benn was still considering the openness of the conclusions of the conference. He wanted these conclusions to be proposed by agreement, but acknowledged that this might not be possible, resulting in failure: ‘The authority of the Conference in this case shrinks to very little and the question arises whether

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we should even pretend to endow it with authority.’27 Benn decided, however, to have faith in the conference’s ability to represent all shades of Indian opinion and thus committed to using the conference decisions as the basis of the government’s proposed legislation. Even Indian Liberals, key proponents of the conference method, were contemplating in advance its failure. In a letter of 25 September 1930, Sastri anticipated being struck dumb in the face of the ‘babel of opinion’ that would be represented by the likes of Moonje and Muhammad Ali (Jagadisan 1963, 197). These concerns continued to be expressed throughout the conference sessions. Examples will be given below of the doubts expressed by conference subjects working in situ and in representations of the conference, in the press and in memoirs, before concluding with those who questioned how, or even if, the conference had failed.

IN SITU Informal commentaries by participants in the first conference session, considered the most successful of the three, show that it was perpetually felt to be on the brink of failure. After Stopford had engaged in preparatory interviews with delegates before the conference started, in his role as Conservative delegation secretary, he noted in his private papers on 9 November that ‘the Conference is going to be a dismal failure. The Hindus + Moslems are hopelessly divided … it’s a black outlook’.28 Similarly, after having taken up the task of weekly reports to New Delhi, by 27 November Haig could report that despondency had succeeded optimism as the practical complications of federation emerged: ‘The result of all this is that suspicion and embarrassment prevails.’29 Likewise, joint secretary to the British delegation Lewis was also pessimistic. On 5 December he wrote to Dunnett in the Reforms Office in New Delhi that the atmosphere was depressing, with the Indian officials mistrusted by the delegates, the conference making little real progress as the princes realised what the full consequences of federation would be, and the communal question worst of all, with no agreement in sight.30 After the failure to reach a communal solution at Chequers, Sapru wrote, in a letter home to Braj Narain Gurtu on 19 December, that ‘I cannot tell you how deeply cut up I feel when I know that the end was within our grasp and we let it go. Frankly I do not expect any great results now.… I have lost all hope and courage’ (Hooja 1999, 167). While his spirits rallied after

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Reading’s coming out in favour of federation, the personal reports and press coverage had impacted upon feelings in Viceroy’s House too. Irwin wrote to his father on 29 December that while it would be wonderful if something good came out of the conference, he did not permit himself any extravagant hopes.31 New Year seems to have been the nadir for many delegates, including Sastri. He wrote to V. S. Ramaswami Sastri on 1 January 1931: ‘We are all in a mortal funk as to the Conference. It is likely to end in 0. The Prime Minister has taken fright. Bloody revolution may have to be faced in India’ (Jagadisan 1963, 205). MacDonald had, according to Sastri, all but said that the blame would be cast on Indian delegates; how could they have democratic powers if they couldn’t rise above communalism? Many delegates believed they were trapped in this stalemate, the feeling of which penetrated the Federal Structure Committee as well. This spooked Sankey and Hoare, of whom Stopford wrote on 13 January: ‘The day ended better than it began, but the death-agony of the Conference is prolonged + trying. In essence, it is only a preparation for a re-birth in India.’32 MacDonald was equally frustrated. After his attempt in the Tapestry Room to force the Minority Committee into a compromise, frustrated by Ujjal Singh, he wrote to Subbarayan on 15 January apologising that the ‘tremendous tussle’ had failed, although it had carried them further than ever before.33 Lewis had reported the depressing effect of the communal question on the conference, although MacDonald’s reservations and safeguards pledge on 19 January at the close of the conference was enough to convince the delegates, and eventually Gandhi, that a re-convened conference would be worthwhile. Gandhi’s participation in the second session was the great hope, but it quickly faded. For his critics, this was down to Gandhi’s failure to adapt to the conference method and to perform convincingly at St James’s Palace. To Gandhi, it was down to the unrepresentativeness of the conference, giving it an air of unreality. For members of both camps, the second session quickly became steeped in the sense of failure. Naidu wrote home to her children on 23 September 1931, just ten days after arriving, with no sense of what the conference could achieve: I have never attended anything more disappointing and dull in every way. It is almost worse than the endless Unity & All Party Conferences we have had ad nauseum in India! The only real work is effected in

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private talks but even these don’t take one far. The Little Man [Gandhi] makes his impression everywhere but it is not of the magnitude that one expected. (Paranjape 2010, 248; emphasis in original)

Two days later Hoare, as secretary of state for India, wrote to Viceroy Willingdon confessing he had no idea how they would ‘get out’ of the conference and anticipating that delegates would try to put the failure, if it failed, on the shoulders of the government.34 Hoare was actively contemplating the conference capitulating, in which case the government could get on with drafting legislation based on the views heard so far from Indian delegates. Sankey noted in his diary, on 28 September, that while Hoare didn’t want the conference to break down, the Tories in general were ‘desperately anxious that it should’ and even Sankey felt it was inevitable.35 The feeling was shared by many of the delegates. Sastri wrote to T.  R.  Venkatarama Sastri, on 2 October, that the omens were black (Jagadisan 1963, 219). The Aga Khan and Muslim delegates, backed by the Tories, had refused to amend their demands. Gandhi, on the other hand, had been harassed but had also been a victim of his own unwillingness to compromise and had explained at a dinner with Sapru the night before that he planned to announce the conference a failure, blame the British and walk away. A week later, Gandhi announced his ‘utter failure’ to solve the communal question. Gandhi’s declaration nearly destroyed the conference. Benthall wrote to P. H. Browne in Calcutta, on 15 October, that the RTC had nearly broken up twice since Gandhi’s declaration, and he wrote again on the twenty-third fully expecting a crisis in the next week which would not be overcome.36 The conference survived, but on 30 October Stopford wrote to the Tory delegate Lord Zetland that he didn’t see how the conference could continue in deadlock and produce conclusions on the main points.37 Sankey continued chairing the federal committee but confided to his diary on 19 November that Hoare was getting intolerable and that the committee was at breaking point: ‘It will require all my powers of diplomacy & conciliation. But I am getting exhausted & worn out.’38 Even Archibald Carter, the unflappable secretary-general, seemed to have caught the bug, writing on 1 December to the chief secretariat staff of Mr Collins and Chapman and Miss Williams that whatever may be the results of the conference, they had played their parts splendidly.39 This was the last day of the conference, at the end of

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which Gandhi announced his parting of ways from the conference method. On his return to Bombay he sent a telegram to Irwin, now residing at 88 Eaton Square in Belgravia, stating plainly: Pray believe me I tried my best but failed nevertheless I do not lose hope and god willing I shall retain same spirit that you believed actuated me during that sacred week in Delhi I shall not belie your certificate.40

REPRESENTING FAILURE There was a keen interest within the British public for news on the RTC, and the information officers, led by MacGregor, furnished the press with regular, anodyne communiques on conference work. The constitutional minutiae of these reports quickly lost popular interests, but the RTC offered up opportunities aplenty for juicy reportage, whether of royal meals, celebrity delegate antics or walking tours of the ancient conference venues. Political sensationalism also made good press. Especially among the rightwing newspapers, these sensations vacillated between the conference spelling the end of the British Empire and it being a hopeless failure. The examples of the former are legion and proliferated after the conclusion of the first session (St John 2006). For instance, in the Daily Mail Lord Lloyd, the ex-governor of Bombay, asked whether it was understood ‘that this Constitution [framed by the Round Table Conference] means nothing less than the surrender of our Indian Empire?.… Every man in England should realise this.’41 While Churchill frothed and slavered over the conference, the narrative of failure anticipated and accompanied the RTC more consistently. The Times reported the breakdown of talks between Sapru, Jayakar and the Nehrus in early September 1930 as part of a last-ditch effort to secure Gandhi’s participation; the Daily Telegraph described the prospects in India as hopeless.42 By late October the ex-war correspondent Ellis AshmeadBartlett could confidently report that there was no prospect of an agreed report issuing from the conference because the aim of negotiating the exit of the British from India could not be designed by delegates with more to gain from the Raj than Swaraj, while Britain would be strengthened in future negotiations if the conference failed.43 Most papers carried the story of the mid-December Chequers failure to solve the communal deadlock in full, although the conclusion of the conference session a month later was

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generally well reported upon. United India, however, gladly rattled off the conference’s failings: the composition of the legislatures was undecided; the prince’s powers would remain unimpaired; the viceroy would maintain his veto; as such ‘virtually speaking, there was nothing done’.44 The newspapers were quick to register the faltering of Gandhi’s informal conferencing of the Minorities Committee. By 3 October the Saturday Review could report strong undercurrents of pessimism swirling around the conference as all parties manoeuvred to place the blame on each other, with Hindu–Muslim difficulties having overtaken disunity between the princes as the most likely cause of breakdown.45 On 6 October, Gandhi was reported as describing ‘the most humiliating day of my life’ in his informal Minorities Committee.46 Three days later the Daily Mail could report, with barely disguised relish, that Gandhi’s self-admitted failure to solve the communal deadlock was inevitable, the deep seated racial and religious problem which had been set to solve being unsolvable.47 Even the more sympathetic Weekend Review reported: Gandhi has had to confess his failure as a negotiator.… The fact is, that he has been a failure over here in almost every respect. His spectacular observances, his loin cloth, his fastings, his Monday silences—all these fail of their effect over here … simply because we do not associate such things with the purely secular and detailed business of drafting for India a constitution on Western lines.48

The rhetoric of failure also framed most delegate memoirs and recollections. Mahadev Desai’s account, published in 1932, is comprehensive and devastating: The Round Table Conference has been the subject of all kinds of similes. Some have compared it to a carcase [sic] which was sought to be kept alive with oxygen. Some have likened it to a drowned person rescued and being revived with artificial respiration. Some even thought that the Conference was dead and that the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor were casting about how best to give it a decent burial. (Desai [1932] 1947, 163)

Margarita Barns’ (1937, 40) later recollections suggested that the individual brilliance of the delegates was offset by their collective

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ineffectualness, while a sense of futility, especially when Congress did not participate, often gave rise to ‘frequently amazing irresponsibility’. Writing twenty-two years after the RTC, the Aga Khan (1954, 244) concluded that the conference achieved little other than a vast array of statistics and dates. And over thirty years after the event, the biographer of the chair of the Indian States Enquiry Committee J. C. C. Davidson also reflected on the seeming futility of the hours of work piled in to the RTC reports, committees and papers destined for the briefest of discussions by the press and parliament: ‘And then, to join its myriad predecessors in the endless official Valhalla!’ (James 1969, 387). Secretariat-General Secretary C. D. Deshmukh (1974) acknowledged in his memoir that the conference appeared to have failed but insisted that it was the foundation of the Government of India Act of 1935. While his is a relatively solitary positive voice in the recollections, there were those at the time who questioned the failure narrative, but from very different perspectives.

QUESTIONING FAILURE There had been voices in the press who were willing either to give the conference a fair hearing or to make the case for its results. On 2 January 1931, when Sastri and Irwin were most doubting of the first session, the Daily Telegraph carried a riposte to the predominant assumption that the conference was ‘procrastinating or shirking difficulties or doomed to failure’.49 No conference in history was said to have faced problems so colossal, so complicated or so interdependent. Yet its aim was not to draft a constitution but to present an outline to parliament for future legislation. Huge progress had been made in terms of planning but also of trust, itself a remarkable product of the commitment to an open conference method. Following the first session’s conclusion, MacDonald gave a radio broadcast selling the achievements of the conference, later published in The Listener. Beyond laying the foundations for future, more detailed constitutional work, British and Indian politicians had come to know and understand each other, and the sense of a British public unwilling to countenance Indian reform had been dispelled in the minds of the visitors.50 The tone after the second session was different, and while MacDonald could not pitch it as a success, he could insist that the conference had not been a failure. In his concluding address he insisted that in his wide experience

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of conferences he had found that the road to agreement was broken and littered with obstructions, leading one to despair, but that quite suddenly and unexpectedly the way smooths itself and the end is happily reached (India Office 1932a, 421). Few could have been reassured by this prospect. As shown earlier, the final session was deemed to have been a success by many in the press, but this was in terms of its limited and strictly policed agenda. Other commentators had dug deeper into what it meant to call the conference a failure and, at times, what the very nature of failure was. On the eve of the conclusion of the first conference session, the Sunday Times speculated on how MacDonald would bring it to a close: Has it reached success or failure? Success and failure are relative terms and cannot here be applied with precision. Many who thought the Conference doomed to sterility before it started have been pleasantly surprised by the course it has taken; others, who came to it too full of optimism, have necessarily been disappointed. The Conference is certainly not a complete failure, or anything like it; it has not broken down, it has not been content merely with rhetoric and generalities – though delegates have had their fill of these. On the other hand, the representatives disperse from St. James’s without a definitely formulated result.51

For others, failures were an inherent part of political and spiritual life. On 15 October 1930 Sastri had anticipated the conference without hope but insisted he would go into it with good faith, inspired by the inner meaning of the liberal reformer and nationalist G. K. Gokhale’s teachings: ‘We must serve through our failures, more fortunate people may serve through their successes’ (Jagadisan 1963, 198). Failure was not, therefore, an end but a phase. A qualification to Gandhi’s capitulation was, indeed, that he had failed, but he had not been defeated.52 One answer to the accusation of failure was, therefore, to insist that failures were hard to identify, or a purgatory borne by some for the good of others. For those on the left this would have been centrist, liberal nonsense. For V. K. Krishna Menon, president of the India League, the RTC was a ‘torpedoed conference’. The RTC’s model was to distract delegates with minutiae while refusing to budge on fundamentals such as finance or the military:

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The Committees of the Indian Conference are discussing with comic meticulousness the future of a constitution for India the basis of which it fears to lay down, and therefore avoids mention. While these committees are progressing at snail’s pace in developing the minutes [sic] of a hypothetical constitutional machinery, momentous developments have taken place which throw the whole Indian issue into the vortex of struggle.53

For Menon the story was that of divide and rule; the conference forced failure onto the delegates, further proving their inability to rule. For others, however, the mechanism of the conference was more complex and British duplicity deeper than most critics had fathomed. The case was made in a manifesto issued by the executive committee of Saklatvala’s disaffiliated London branch of Congress in October 1931.54 It condemned, outright, the Indian National Congress’s participation in the second session. In spite of the Indian press dismissing it as a failure, the conference was said to have strengthened imperial control of India. First, the reforms in Sindh, Baluchistan, the Northwest Frontier Province and Burma would allow direct military control. Second, Indian ministers would now administer revenues which the viceroy would have ultimate control over. And third, it united the princes, landlords and capitalists as a bloc, supporting perpetuated British influence in India via federation. Gandhi and Irwin had made a pact not to disturb any of these elements, the manifesto argued; the tactics but not the nature of the conference had altered. Gandhi’s definition of independence had morphed back into the old sense of Dominion status, which for the London branch was merely the continuance of the imperialistcapitalistic social and economic order. There was no space for ambivalence about success or failure, nor was there a solution that could reconcile the needs of the poor and the rich without prioritising the latter. Only scientific realism, analysis and criticism could distinguish these points. In a Daily Worker article of 11 November 1931, Saklatvala dug deeper into the representation of the RTC as a failure. The piece was entitled ‘Why the Round Table Conference Is Not a Failure at All’.55 It was issued three weeks before the second session concluded and a month after Gandhi’s admission of his utter failure in the Minorities Committee. Feeding upon his broader output in the Daily Worker, which had positioned the conference as an agent of autocracy, he suggested that it would have failed had the delegates refused British overtures, declared war on British assets in India and sparked an

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uprising in India’s 600,000 villages and towns. This would have signified a failure of the conference. The RTC had not, in fact, failed because it was the concoction of a British viceroy and prime minister which aimed to stem the Indian revolution. Even to have satisfied the Indian capitalist delegates would have meant some surrender of British capital. That they might leave unhappy also signalled the greater triumph of the conference. Public debt in India was assured, and a unified democracy was stymied by the inclusion of feudal landlords: ‘We call this a success of the Round Table Conference for the British imperialist thugs who created it, in order to outwit the lesser Indian capitalist thugs in the Moslem and Hindu camps.’56 Saklatvala brings us directly back to this chapter’s opening question: what constitutes a failure? We might frame our answer in terms of Banerjee’s (2010) understandings of the failures of imperial citizenship. First, the RTC ‘narrativized failure’ in various ways. The previous chapter showed how the conference was represented as failing to represent India in London. In this chapter two further narratives were presented, of the pervasive sense of failure accompanying the re-presentation of the RTC in the Palace of Westminster, and of the internal and external conference narratives that anticipated and then diagnosed failure. Second, we can ask how the RTC has functioned as a ‘failed narrative’. R. J. Moore (1974, viii), author of the most comprehensive account of the RTC and its context, opened his book by declaring the conference a failure. This was because of Congress’s failed engagement, because of the lack of Hindu–Muslim agreement, because the princes did not agree to immediate federation and because the National Government disregarded Indian freedoms and concerns. We can accept these four diagnoses. But what if we follow Lindahl and Rehn (2007) and ask to whom these failures were useful, and how they were used? Who gained by having the conference not succeed? Congress did not want the form of politics it had decried to prosper, while neither Hindu nor Muslim delegates found their constituencies willing to countenance compromise. The princes had realised that federation was not the easy solution to balancing the threats of Crown paramountcy and Congress domination of a responsible centre, while the Conservative members of government could not have right-wing politicians and newspaper editors branding the reformist conference a success. How, then, was the RTC failure used, and to what end? Congress could justify its non-participation by declaring the conference to be dead as a

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door nail. Ambedkar, after his defeat over the revised Communal Award, declared the outcome a failure for the depressed classes, while Muslim delegates could decry the failure to solve the minorities question despite securing a satisfactory deal under the award (Page 1982, 254). Indian Liberals denounced the collapse of the conference method and so distanced themselves from this flagship of their conciliatory politics, while Labour in Britain boycotted the final session and so dismissed the results. The princes could suggest the conference failed despite their best efforts, playing for the loyalty of their people while professing their loyalty to the Crown. Finally, for the Tories the failure of loftier ambitions gave the Government of India Bill its best shot at making it through the Commons. Everyone, it seems, had something to gain by pitching the RTC as a failed conference. This reading allows and reminds us to recognise that the RTC has not only functioned as a failed narrative. Bridge (1986) insisted that the conference succeeded in crafting a means of holding India to the empire, while Copland (1997) condemned retrospective readings of the conference’s blueprint for princely federation as being always defunct. Likewise, Moore (1974), after condemning the RTC as a failure, also diagnosed the reasons for the failure of Congress’s tactics. In this view both consultation and civil disobedience emerged out of and collapsed back into failure. Concluding with Banerjee’s third prompt, I believe these conclusions mark the way the RTC has, to date, ‘failed narrative’. Through becoming a sign of failure, it has become an abstract and vacuous signification. This book has sought to return the conference to life, and to space.

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12 CONCLUSION SQUARING ROUND TABLES

So, what happened at the Round Table Conference (RTC)? The answer to that question depends upon our assumptions about how interwar diplomatic politics functioned and about how much of that functioning was recorded. One model, premised on the machinations of grand and petty sovereigns, would use the archive to unveil an overarching, ideological strategy. Being a secret strategy, its archive would necessarily be dispersed and fragmented. We have read, for instance, of the master of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, indiscreetly sharing Sankey’s admission that Hailey was feeding him positions to take to the Federal Structure Committee. Benthall likewise confided to his diary that Hailey and his Government of India advisors had come to the conference with a complete scheme devised and fed it to Sankey and others. This hints at a strategy being played at the conference, but was the conference itself a rigged host? We have seen that it functioned as an unfree, unequal but effective space, yet can we evidence a self-conscious and pre-figured scheme on these lines? Some documents could be read in that light. Sir Claude H. Hill had joined the Indian Civil Service in 1887 and rose to appointment in the Viceroy’s Executive Council. In the spring of 1918, he helped organise the Delhi ‘War Conference’ with leading Indian politicians, including Gandhi. After retiring in 1921 he returned home and later became the lieutenant governor of the Isle of Man. From this position he wrote to MacDonald on 11 August 1930, two months before the RTC opened, claiming that down to his experience in 1918 ‘I doubt anyone else has had a similar opportunity of studying the psychology of a heterogeneous gathering of the Indian intelligentsia’.1 He encouraged an opening discussion with a pre-set

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agenda, suggesting that ‘many of the speeches will be extreme, and foolish; and probably wholly unconstructive. They will, however, be mutually destructive in so far as they are impracticable. But it is of real importance that a full opportunity be given for their utterance’. The British heads of committee should be sure of the outcomes they wanted before their work began as ‘it is almost certain that, if complete freedom of discussion in subCommittee is allowed, the different interests represented will find that their different aspirations and demands [are] incompatible with an agreed scheme’. The chairman would then step in with his pre-drafted proposals that could be steered through any criticism in the final plenary. MacDonald replied on 13 August that ‘as a matter of fact I am in touch with the India Office, and a programme pretty much on your lines is being worked out’.2 There is, however, enough well-considered ambiguity in MacDonald’s reply to frustrate any conspiracy theorist. Hill’s ‘lines’ also included an agenda agreed by the opening plenary and ministers chairing committees, both of which came to pass. If we should be sceptical of assuming an omnicompetent organising genius behind the conference, we should also be sceptical of accounts which fail to acknowledge the tactics and strategies at play. For example, Benn’s message to Irwin on 15 January 1931, at the end of the first session: [Jayakar] had been informed that he would meet very clever men who were very diplomatic and would twist him around their finger without his knowing what was going on. I was particularly struck by this, because it was almost verbatim what Hirtzel told me about the Brahmins who were coming over. As it turned out, neither of us had tried to twist the other round his little finger, and I don’t think the standards of Machiavellian intelligence which both sides suspected really existed at all.3

In his slow turn towards influencing the conference agenda and his delight that communal discord at the conference was showing the British in a different light, especially in the United States, Benn was not without his own Machiavellian intelligence. Nor was Sir George Schuster, who later reflected back on his advisory activities at the conference and what the event enabled to emerge. On 21 November 1930 he had written to Irwin explaining precisely how the idea of federation had transformed the opening days of the conference: ‘It is indeed remarkable that everyone grasps at it

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as something which creates a new situation and enables them to get away from embarrassing declarations of the past’ (Schuster 1979, 106). This would save the British from awkward conversations about Dominion status and could allow the Conservatives to commit to more radical schemes than they would previously have considered. It was, therefore, lucky that neither the Simon Report nor the Government of India’s despatch had made more of plans for an all-India federation, for it had to appear new. All that the search for orchestrating geniuses gets us to at the conference is a general sense of principals, on all sides, with which people approached the event and then adapted to its rich opportunities and spaces. That is, the conference was not a space of censored speech, effaced ideological orchestration or of grand and petty sovereigns, directing the drafting and talking. Rather, it was a space of compelled speech and circulatory norms, statistics and encounters through which elite and subaltern attendees and staff forged a proposal for the future of India which most people agreed was a conspicuous failure.

GEOGRAPHIES OF THE ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE THE CONFERENCE IN LONDON This book has made the case for exploring the RTC through four historical geographies. Geographical imaginations of India, both international and provincial, facilitated the imperial logic of deferral. Dominion status and dyarchy both lapsed from view at the conference, with federation proposed as the route to the former and the solution to the failures of the latter. India was also imagined, by the organisers and most delegates, as a communal place and a communal problem that needed to be solved before a federal structure could be devised. The conference infrastructure, in terms of politics, people and place, was shown to have hardwired inequality and privilege into the structure of the RTC. The supposedly free and open conference method was shown to have been set in advance and undermined by the Government of India’s advisors. The staffing of the conference benefitted the wealthy and the well connected. And St James’s Palace, and then the House of Lords, provided palatial technologies through which the British directed proceedings and communicated their version of events to the world.

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London was the unnamed but dominant delegate at the conference. The state used its resources to attend to the needs of delegates, providing them with shelter and social amusements and education. This entertainment was political, showing off the imperial capital, but also de-politicising, in that it aimed to wear down delegates’ anti-colonial hostility via a never-ending cycle of luncheons, dinners and cocktails. In the wider city delegates could use their own funds to augment government subsidies, taking us to spaces of sleep and socialising well beyond St James’s. Homes were also places where conferencing took place, whether through occasional at-homes or through the domestic spaces that became political headquarters. The latter spaces were dominated by often well-known women, including Nancy Astor, Muriel Lester and Sarojini Naidu. This book has also detailed, where possible, the other nameable women who worked the conference circuit, figures including Ruth Hocking, Nora Yasin, the Begum Shah Nawaz and Mrs Subbarayan. These named figures only hint at the un-renumerated and un-acknowledged conference labour provided by female spouses, friends, secretaries, hosts and journalists. The final geography was a representational, though no less real or embodied, one. The sheer un-representativeness of the delegates was resisted through petitions and protests on the streets of London and its printed pages. And, finally, the conference was read through the lens of failure, focusing on its much-denuded final session and on the chorus of opinion which sang, in many voices and languages, of the failed conference. Running across these four sections has been a recurrent interest in the governmentalities at play and the subaltern experiences we can draw from the archive. In terms of the former, the RTC has allowed us to explore the scalar sovereignty through which the state (from dominion and dyarchy to federation) was being re-configured, and the provincial politics of communalism through which, as Muhammad Ali put it, ‘We divide and you rule’. The conference method saw the desires of the government confronted by the bureaucratic governmental rationalities of the India Office and the technocratic expertise of London’s conference experts. In St James’s Palace the science and art of government came together in the printing, filming, recording and table-making that assembled the phenomenon of modern conferencing. This art extended into conducting the private lives of delegates, through a social centre and diary and through attending to their sleeping and eating. But these were governmentalities which were also brought to London by the delegates and successfully mobilised by them,

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whether through extravagant princely feasts or the ascetic frugality of a Mahatma in Bow. Four approaches to subalternity have also been tracked across the book. In terms of non-elite Indian subaltern subjects, their limited presence has been noted through telegrams and petitions, and as staff, waiters and wives. Even the wealthiest of delegates were geopolitically subaltern in Britain, having to endure cack-handed attempts at British hospitality, the colour bar in terms of accommodation or club entry, and racist commentaries. Delegates also, however, used attendance to craft assertive subaltern geopolitics, explaining their nationalism to London audiences, crafting alternative spaces and forms of politics, and campaigning in Britain with a freedom they could not in India. A third sense was that of the mostly British but often-female diplomatic subaltern staff, whether the police, clerical support or Gandhi’s devoted followers at his residential and office headquarters. Finally, and most ubiquitously, were the subaltern spaces in which we have shown that conferencing activity took place. These expand the range of spaces in which diplomacy is traditionally located, even if these spaces do not seem socially subaltern. They range from the Maharaja of Bhopal’s Upper Brook Street abode to hotel rooms, Arya Bhavan in Belsize Park to Malaviya’s flat, the lounge of Chesterfield Gardens, the full range of Indian restaurants and Lyons’ cafés, to the green spaces of Hyde Park and, just possibly, the Robing Room of the House of Lords.

THE CONFERENCE IN INDIA There was no direct route from the recommendations of the RTC to the Government of India Act of 1935 (Muldoon 2009). Hoare had to battle the bill through the House of Commons, against bitter resistance from Churchill and the diehards (Bridge 1986, 92–110). The proposals were scrutinised by a parliamentary joint committee, which invited many of the conference delegates back to London in an advisory capacity. Viceroy Willingdon was also fighting to keep the princes committed to federation, sending through to London their requests and demands (Copland 1997, 144–182). The act as passed was the longest statute in British parliamentary history to that point (Purushotham 2020b, 425). Further concessions were demanded after the act was passed, though none were enough to immediately persuade the required number of princes to accede to an allIndia federation.

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Provincial autonomy was enacted, however. The act had been passed without the Indian National Congress’s (INC’s) support but at the 1936 Lucknow Congress Nehru agreed to contest provincial elections so as to bring down the system from within (Bridge 1986, 145). Congress won 711 of the 1,585 available seats in the 1937 national election, although Nehru, Patel and others did not seek office. They chose, instead, to direct Congress ministers from without the colonial state which, for Bridge (1986, 145), established an alternative centre of political power. This foretaste of a radical, Congress-controlled centre was enough to dissuade the princes and Muslim leaders from considering federation in the near future. Though at the provincial level a success for Congress, for the colonial and British state the 1935 act here had failed. The 1935 act did not, however, fail for the central state, which emerged from the RTC with its core powers reserved behind an upscaled dyarchy. Minorities also found themselves safeguarded, and the communal governmentality through which the population was ruled and divided was yet further embedded. The wrangling in the Minorities Committee in London had given a foretaste of the embedding of previously fluid identities into rigid territories. Corbett’s map (Figure 3.3) of a proposed new Punjab both anticipated the visuality of the border-making process and approximated many of the actual borders that would be settled by yet another under-qualified British man sixteen years later (compare with the map in Spate [1948, 8]; also see Chester [2008]; Fitzpatrick [2019]). Partition was not arrived at by the conference method, however, despite repeated attempts to bridge the increasingly unbridgeable divides between Congress, Muslim and Hindu leaders at meetings, conferences and via the backstage diplomacy trialled extensively in London. Partition was, instead, accepted and declared by a bankrupt post-war British state. But it also emerged in and through the alternative to conferenced constitutionalism which was created on the eve of independence. In response to the perceived failure of the RTC and the 1935 act to produce a viable and democratic future for India, in 1936 Congress had committed to establishing a constituent assembly (Purushotham 2020b, 426–427). This, rather than the conference method, would be the means through which anti-colonial popular sovereignty would dictate the nature of the post-colonial state. Various RTC attendees would serve on the 300-person assembly, which sat from December 1946 to November 1949, including adviser K. T. Shah and delegates Shiva Rao, Jinnah and Zafrullah

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Khan (who both withdrew after partition) and, most famously, Ambedkar, who played a key role in drafting the constitution of independent, federal India. Attention has recently come to rest on how so many articles from the 1935 act, resulting from the RTC, found their way into the independent constitution. Of the constitution’s 395 articles, approximately 250 were taken directly, or with minor changes, from the 1935 act (Brecher 1959, 421). Arvind Elangovan (2016, 67; also see Elangovan [2019]) has shown how Shiva Rao’s brother, B. N. Rau, argued for the constitutionality of the act and worked directly to translate many of its clauses into a draft constitution for independent India. Against those who argue for the radical break from colonial history that the constitution instituted, others therefore point to the continuity with the colonial regime. Yet Sandipto Dasgupta (2014, 229) has refused this dichotomy, showing that ‘a break from the colonial past required, even demanded, maintaining certain continuities with the same. The continuity was meant to be constitutive of the break.’ Rau represented the bureaucratic necessity of using a colonial state to draft and implement a new constitution. In his later work Dasgupta (forthcoming) has also shown how Congress moved from a revolutionary claim on sovereignty to an administrative vision of governance as they edged closer to becoming the first independent Indian government. Despite Congress’s opposition to the concept, Nehru became prime minister of a British dominion in 1947 (also see De [2019]). Dasgupta (forthcoming) has also shown that, for all the anti-colonial condemnation of the RTC method as anti-democratic, the constituent assembly method had some striking similarities to it. The discussions were held in private, without interruptions from the public; the members of the assembly were selected, not elected; and participatory forums were not consulted (like the RTC, assembly debates were inflected and informed by much broader discussions, see Shani [forthcoming]). As such, the RTC can stake a claim to have directly influenced the independent constitution via its shared articles, roughly two-thirds, with the 1935 act. But the RTC also influenced the constituent assembly, directly through its shared members, but also indirectly through the not-wholly democratic method devised by Congress. Congress was, of course, its own sort of perpetual conference, converging annually at the national scale, just as the League of Nations had done internationally in Geneva. While Congress averred from the

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conference method nationally, it continued to exploit the art of international conferencing to embed its status as the world’s most prominent anti-colonial and then post-colonial nation.

ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE GEOGRAPHIES The Round Table has been approached here through its geographies: imaginary, infrastructural, urban and representational; governmental and subaltern; British and Indian. But how can we place the RTC in a broader, international network of conference geographies? What are its comparators? And how do we think comparatively about its successes and its failings? One undoubted frame is that the Round Table was the earliest and most significant event in the 1930s–1960s global federal moment (Fejzula 2021; Pillai 2016). Any attempt to directly connect the abortive federal plan which emerged from the RTC with other more radical and innovative dreams of colonial and post-colonial federations quickly falters, however. Unlike the plans for confederation within the French Empire (Cooper 2014; Wilder 2015), the Indian model was fervently statist, with Hindu and eventually Congress leaders demanding a strong central state, so as to incorporate the princes, monitor communal discord and crush any incipient communist movements (Prakash 2018). Rather, the RTC emerges, in this lens, as a model for later forms of colonial federation that sought to manage the transition to post-colonialism so as to secure imperial interests (Collins 2013). As Adom Getachew (2019, 125) has described in detail regarding the British Empire, anti-(neo)colonial ambitions for federal sharing of sovereignty after independence, for Kwame Nkrumah and African Union or Eric Williams in the British West Indies, eventually morphed into a federal statism. Misjudging the attachments of and to sovereignty, these experiments in post-colonial federalism were also judged to have failed (Getachew 2019, 140). Another frame, however, is that pursued throughout this book, which is to look at conferences as lived spaces that made new national and international worlds. The British had successfully fought to defend colonial India from international investigations and had hand-picked RTC delegates and structured the conference to dissuade internationalist aspirations or debates. But the conference method itself was deeply internationalist, being

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explicitly based on the League of Nations model, while a large number of delegates had served in Geneva and the league was appealed to throughout (Legg 2020a). The RTC exposed Indian delegates to the imperial capital, but also to the cosmopolitanism of liberal internationalism and even, through the writings and campaigning of Saklatvala and colleagues, to the devastating critiques of radical internationalism. In this sense the conference contributed to India’s growing expertise and influence in the international sphere. This was a continuation of its experience at the league, where India would continue to be represented by government-chosen delegates throughout the 1930s. Only at the San Francisco conference in the spring of 1945, which laid the foundations of the United Nations (UN), were government delegates accompanied by a dual Congress delegation. This was headed by Nehru’s sister Vijayalaksmi Pandit, who had also represented India at the Institute of Pacific Relations Conference at Virginia in early 1945, alongside ex-RTC delegate Shiva Rao (Ankit 2015). It should also be noted that two advisors at the RTC took up prominent international roles during India’s transition to independent status. British Indian delegation advisor G. S. Bajpai served as India’s representative in Washington between 1941 and 1946, and then as the head of Nehru’s Department of External Affairs. The princely states advisor K. M. Panikkar also accompanied Pandit to the UN in India’s first delegation and was later appointed by Nehru as ambassador to China, Egypt and then France. But India’s international presence was also a continuation of the more intimate sorts of networking and diplomacy practised at the RTC. These had also been experimented with via alternative internationalisms, such as radicalism at the League against Imperialism Congress in Brussels in 1927 (which Nehru attended; see Louro [2018]) and feminism at the AllAsian Women’s Conference in Lahore in 1931 (Mukherjee 2017). If Nehru reacted against the conference method as a means of drawing up India’s new national constitution, committing instead to the constituent assembly method, at the scale of the international he and others committed to re-work the conference method into a tool of liberation and non-alignment. Nehru invited delegates to the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi in April 1947, which was presided over by Sarojini Naidu (Stolte 2014). It fostered consciousness of a ‘third world’ between communism and capitalism and beyond the representation solely of heads of state (Thakur 2019). Recent scholarship (Lewis and Stolte 2019; Legg et al. 2021) has added depth and

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range to the number of such anti-colonial non-aligned conferences that took place before and after the much more famous Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955 (Lee 2010; Shimazu 2014; Pham and Shilliam 2016). Not all of these conferences ended in success, nor did they have lasting effects in terms of legislation, resolutions or upturning the global order. But what they did was create new spaces of international politics, sociability and affect that worked against western stereotypes of orientalist, backward and autochthonous natives, born of the soil and limited to their regional homelands. These, instead, were men and women who were emerging from internationalism and who were recrafting it in more intellectual and innovative ways than western liberal or imperial graspings at the international could manage or comprehend. Delegates were inspired by radical internationalists but also by the quieter strands of anti-colonial liberal internationalism pioneered by figures such as Sapru, Sastri and Subbarayan. For post-1940s delegates the capitalist world system, the imperial order and cold war geopolitics were their oppressive squares; their circles were anti-colonial, anti-imperial and non-aligned ones which made fresh claims on liberalism and liberty – dynamos driven by freedom, questioning and agency. Each conference squared these circles in their own ways and could be studied as examples of anti- and post-colonial paradoxes, political philosophies and sociological framings. This book has, instead, proposed an historical geographical model for studying conferences as lived spaces which put abstractions to work and brought them to conflictual life. It has drawn our eye to the micro, embodied and technological workings of the conference method, as implemented and resisted by elite and subaltern diplomats. In widening the range of spaces in which we seek out diplomacy, it has presented to us a phantasmagorical conference city, flitting between palaces, flats and tearooms. And it has performed a post-mortem of failure which invites us to revisit the ritual sacrifice of the Indian conference that everybody needed but nobody could want.

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NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1. ‘Spaces of Internationalism’, https://spacesofinternationalism.omeka. net/, accessed 6 August 2021; and ‘Conferencing the International’, University of Nottingham, https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/ groups/conferencing-the-international/index.aspx, accessed on 6 August 2021.

NOTE ON CONVERSIONS, SPELLINGS AND ABBREVIATIONS 1. ‘Currency Converter: 1270–2017’, The National Archives, https://www. nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/, accessed on 6 August 2021.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1. ‘How much depends for the whole of the British Empire on the issue of your consultations!’ The legend lists the ‘notable personalities’ depicted, starting with the Maharaja of Bikaner in the top left, as Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Sir Charles Innes, HH the Nawab of Bhopal, Mr M. A. Jinnah, Lord Reading, HH Maharaja of Patiala, Sir A. C. McWatters, Sir Md. Shafi, HH the Aga Khan, Sir Malcolm Hailey, Mr M. R. Jayakar, Sir A. P. Patro and Mr H. G. Haig. Illustrated Weekly of India, 30 November 1930.

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2. It was decided at the first sessions that a separate RTC for Burma was required. This was held from 27 November 1931 to 12 January 1932, although it is not the subject of this volume. 3. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34. 4. ‘Round Tables and Square Facts’, The Observer, 18 January 1931. 5. ‘Squaring the Round Table’, Morning Post, 19 January 1931. 6. ‘Squaring the Circle’, The Listener, 17 June 1931. 7. ‘The Indian Round Table Conference’, Indian and Colonial Journal, 3 January 1931. 8. ‘Geometry of the Round Table Conference’, Indian and Colonial Journal, 17 January 1931. 9. Ibid.; emphasis in original. 10. BL/ IOR/L/PJ/6/2009, file 3387, undated note on file. 11. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/2, letter by R. J. S. Stopford, 13 January 1931.

CHAPTER 2: DOMINION AND DYARCHY 1. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/58, quoted in a memorandum by Benn, 14 November 1930. 2. Hansard, House of Commons debate, 26 January 1931, vol. 247, col. 695. 3. UM/RMD/1/11/5. 4. Ibid. 5. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E.220/75; emphasis in original. 6. Gazette of India Extraordinary, 31 October 1929, 163–165. 7. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E.240/75. The second note is dated November 1929. 8. Ibid.; emphasis in original. 9. Ibid. 10. UKNA/PRO/30/69/344. 11. Ibid. 12. ‘Autocracy to Govern India’, Daily Telegraph, 14 November 1930. 13. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C.152/6. 14. ‘Indian Attitudes’, The Graphic, 8 November 1930, 252. 15. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/58. 16. Ibid. 17. UKNA/PRO/30/69/578ii. 18. Ibid.

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NOTES TO PAGES 48–58

19. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C.152/6. 20. NAI/Note on the Press, n45 of 1930: United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, for the week ending 8 November 1930. 21. Maharaja of Alwar, ‘The Princes and Dominion Status’, Asiatic Review, January 1930, 10–12. 22. Ibid., 12. 23. UKNA/PRO/30/69/1528. 24. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E.346/9. 25. CSAS/Benthall/Box 7. 26. BL/Eur.Mss./E.346/9. The interview notes are undated but took place before the RTC opened. 27. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 5 October 1930. 28. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34. 29. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 17 November 1930 and 28 November 1930. 30. UKNA/PRO/30/69/578. 31. ‘India and Dominion Status’, Daily Mail, 1 January 1931. 32. ‘Indians to Rule India Plan: How Dominion Should Be Built’, Daily Herald, 13 January 1931. 33. UM/RMD/1/11/18. 34. Ibid. 35. ‘Gandhi’s Peace Terms: Dominion Status at Conference’, Daily Telegraph, 19 August 1930. 36. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C.359. 37. ‘Mr Gandhi’s Case: India a “Completely Free” Partner’, Daily Express, 16 September 1931. 38. UO/Sankey/C.538. The letter is undated but followed on from Gandhi’s trip to Chichester, which took place on 10 October 1931. 39. NAI/Reforms/1930/142/30-R. 40. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/50. 41. UKNA/PRO/30/69/578ii; emphasis in original. 42. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/9. The interview is undated but took place before the RTC started. 43. BL/IORL/Eur.Mss./C152/27. 44. E. C. Bentley, ‘A Minister in India’, The Times, 27 October 1930. 45. ‘The Tiger and the Cat’s Meat’, Daily Mail, 18 January 1931. 46. UO/Sankey/C.539. 47. Parliamentary Archives, Palace of Westminster, London/Papers of John Campbell Davidson/DAV/198.

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48. ‘A Defence of Dyarchy’, Times of India, 20 November 1930. 49. UM/RMD/1/11/8. 50. NAI/Reforms/1930/65-R. 51. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/58. 52. ‘Has Britain Lost Art of Governing?’, Daily Telegraph, 17 January 1931. 53. ‘Indian Dangers and Discontents’, Manchester Guardian, 21 January 1931. 54. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/38. 55. CSAS/Benthall/Box7/Diary 1929–1933, 10 December 1930. 56. BL/IOR/E364/3. 57. ‘Responsibility at the Centre’, Manchester Guardian, 5 January 1931. 58. BL/IOR/Mss.Eur/E220/34. 59. Ibid. 60. ‘For the British Bloodsucker Only’, Daily Worker, 8 January 1931. 61. ‘Fears for India’, Daily Herald, 9 January 1931. 62. ‘Vague Talk in Cloudland’, Daily Mail, 20 January 1931. 63. Ibid. 64. ‘India and the Great Decision’, Observer, 21 January 1931. 65. ‘Federal Scheme for India’, Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1931; ‘Indians to Rule India Plan’, Daily Herald, 13 January 1931.

CHAPTER 3: COMMUNITY

1. NAI/Reforms/1929/Notes 66. 2. Ibid. 3. ‘Minorities in India’, The Times, 18 December 1930. 4. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 26 October 1930. 5. NLA/Sapru/23/Jayakar diary entry, 2 November 1930. 6. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 3 November 1930. 7. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 4 November 1930. 8. NLA/Sapru/23/Jayakar diary entry, 5 November 1930; NMML/Moonje diary entry, 5 November 1930. 9. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 11 November 1930. 10. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 12 November 1930. 11. NLA/Sapru/23. 12. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 14 November 1930. 13. NLA/Sapru Papers/23/Sapru to Raji, 14 November 1930.

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14. ‘Moslems and Hindus: Quarrels over the Conference’, Daily Telegraph, 15 November 1930. 15. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 16 November 1930. 16. NAI/1930/Reforms/147/1930-R. 17. Ibid. 18. NLA/Sapru/23. 19. ‘Moslems Warn Hindus: No Talk on Separate Electorates’, Daily Telegraph, 29 November 1930. 20. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6 21. UO/Sankey/E284. 22. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 23. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 5 December 1930. 24. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 9 December 1930. 25. Ibid. 26. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 10 December 1930. 27. ‘Hindu and Moslem: The Deadlock’, The Times, 11 December 1930. 28. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 11 December 1930. 29. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34. 30. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 13 December 1930. 31. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34. 32. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 13 December 1930. 33. NAI/1930/Reforms/147/30-R. 34. ‘Hindu Dispute with Mohammedans: Negotiations Now Abandoned’, Daily Telegraph, 17 December 1930. 35. CSAS/Benthall/Box 7. 36. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 37. ‘Indian Minority Safeguards’, Daily Telegraph, 18 December 1930. 38. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 39. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 13 December 1930. 40. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 23 December 1930. 41. NAI/1930/Reforms/147/30-R. 42. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 43. ‘Moslem Claims: Pressure on Delegates’, The Times, 31 December 1930. 44. NAI/1930/Reforms/147/30-R. 45. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 46. ‘Hindu-Moslem Clash: Premier’s New Appeal Last Night: “Settle It among Yourselves”’, Manchester Guardian, 2 January 1931. 47. NAI/Reforms/1930/173/30-R.

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48. ‘Round-Table Conference: Hindu–Muslim Problem’, The Times, 5 January 1931. 49. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 50. CSAS/Benthall Papers/Box 7. 51. ‘Hindu and Muslim: A Fresh Offer’, The Times, 14 January 1931. 52. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 53. Ibid. 54. ‘Stillborn’, Morning Post, 14 January 1931. 55. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 56. NAI/Reforms/1930/173/30-R. 57. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34. 58. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 59. BL/IOR/D714/11. 60. BL/IOR/L/I/1/1440. 61. UKNA/CAB/27/469. 62. UO/Sankey/C539. 63. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 28 September 1931. 64. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F138/13. 65. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 2 October 1931. 66. NLA/Sapru Papers/30. 67. ‘India’s Future: Failure of the Round Table’, Sunday Times, 15 November 1931; ‘Premier to Settle Vexed India Problem’, Daily Express, 14 November 1931; ‘Policy of “Divide and Rule” Wins Again at Round Table Conference’, Daily Worker, 14 November 1931. 68. With thanks to Justin Jones and Faisal Khalil for explaining that the couplet was from a famous ghazal by the Persian poet Hafiz Sherazi (1315–1390). It was based on a Qur’anic verse condemning human folly in attempting to carry God’s message, when the heavens and earth had proven incapable. A more literal translation than that of Sir Abdul Qaiyum would be thus: ‘The heavens were unable to derive the strength to carry the weight of God’s message. My name was instead drawn by chance, with “Madman” inscribed against it.’ 69. NMML/Horace Alexander Papers/Agatha Harrison Correspondence. 70. ‘Premier Meets Gandhi’, Daily Sketch, 14 September 1931. 71. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 18 September 1931. 72. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 20 September 1931 and 27 September 1931. 73. NLA/Sapru/29. 74. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F178/28.

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75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 2 October 1931. 78. NLA/Sapru/30. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F178/28. 82. Ibid. 83. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 5 October 1931. 84. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F178/28. 85. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 7 October 1931. 86. NLA/Sapru/30. 87. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 9 October 1931. 88. NLA/Sapru/30. 89. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 10 October 1931. 90. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 13 October 1931. 91. CSAS/Benthall/ Box 2. 92. Ibid. 93. ‘A New Punjab: Meeting Communal Claims’, The Times, 15 October 1931. 94. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E240/1. 95. Ibid. 96. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 16 October 1931. 97. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 17 October 1931. 98. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 20 October 1931. 99. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/7. 100. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F178/29. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 4 November 1930 and 6 November 1930. 104. NLA/Sapru/30.

CHAPTER 4: THE CONFERENCE METHOD 1. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/49(vi). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid.

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4. Ibid., private telegrams from Irwin to Benn, 26 March 1930, 16 May 1930 and 22 May 1930. 5. ‘Gandhi’s Outburst: Indian Conference “Unreal”’’, Daily Express, 18 September 1931. 6. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/49(vi), Confidential India Office typed memo, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, 3 February 1930. 7. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/49(vi). 8. BL/IOR/L/PJ/9/2, Advance Copies of Opinions of Local Governments on the Report on Constitutional Reforms, 56. 9. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/49(vi), Confidential India Office typed memo, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, 3 February 1930. 10. Ibid. 11. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6, Benn to Irwin, 20 June 1930. 12. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 13. Ibid. 14. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/58/BDG(30)6. 15. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/51(i). 16. Ibid. 17. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/58/BDG(30)3. 18. ‘Agenda of India Conference: Committee Chosen to Prepare It’, Daily Telegraph, 6 November 1930. 19. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/59, BDG(30)3. 20. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6, Benn to Irwin, 31 October 1930. 21. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/58/BDG(30)6. 22. Ibid. 23. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34, Hailey to Irwin, 14 November 1930. 24. NAI/Reforms/1933/55/33-R. 25. ‘Clearing the Air on India: No Scrapping of Round Table Results: Why Lord Sankey Must Go East’, News Chronicle, 28 February 1931. 26. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/68(iii). 27. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/76(ii). 28. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/34. 29. ‘The Method of Conference’, The Times, 2 October 1931. 30. Ibid. 31. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./D714/10. No date was provided with the note; the file materials concern May–December 1930. 32. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/58. 33. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E240/80.

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NOTES TO PAGES 113–123

34. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/9. 35. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/3. 36. Ibid. 37. ‘India To-Day: The Conference Begins’, The Times, 12 November 1930. 38. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./D714/11, n.d., between April and August 1931. 39. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/49. 40. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./D714/10. 41. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/55. 42. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C.152/6, Benn to Irwin, 5 November 1930. 43. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/30. No date. 44. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. NAI/Reforms/1930/173/30-R. 53. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34. 54. Ibid. 55. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34. 56. CSAS/ Benthall/Box 7. 57. NAI/Reforms/1930/147/30-R. 58. NAI/Reforms/1931/12/III/31-R. 59. NAI/Reforms/1931/56/31-R. 60. ‘Near the End of Round Table Farce’, Daily Worker, 3 January 1931. 61. C. P. Dutt, ‘A Cover for the Bayonet in India: The Purpose of the Round Table’, Daily Worker, 3 January 1931. 62. ‘Save India! Lord Rothermere’s Call’, Daily Mail, 19 January 1931. 63. ‘Politicians Plan Great Betrayal: Shall We Lose India? A Thousand Times No!’, Daily Mail, 19 January 1931; emphasis in original. 64. Fenner Brockway, ‘The Round Table Conference’, United India, November 1930. 65. Fenner Brockway, ‘That Round Table Conference: What Is Happening behind the Scenes’, Daily Worker, 2 January 1931. 66. ‘Round Table’, United India, August 1930. 67. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E238/56(b).

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68. ‘Gandhi’s Outburst: Indian Conference “Unreal”’, Daily Express, 18 September 1931. 69. ‘Gandhi Watches London’, News Chronicle, 19 September 1931. 70. UKNA/CAB/27/469. 71. CSAS/Benthall/Box 7. 72. NMML/Sir P Thakurdas Papers/107(iii). 73. ‘Speeding Up the Conference Plan’, Times of India, 16 March 1932. 74. University of Cambridge, University Library/Templewood Papers/VII/1. 75. ‘RTC Procedure’, Times of India, 21 June 1932. 76. NAI/Reforms/1932/211-R. 77. Ibid. 78. ‘Reforms Procedure Suggestions’, Times of India, 20 July 1932. 79. NAI/Reforms/1932/211-R. 80. NMML/NM Joshi Papers/65. 81. Ibid. 82. NAI/Reforms/1932/194-R. 83. ‘The Final Conference’, Times of India, 26 October 1932. 84. BL/L/PJ/12/426. 85. ‘India Round Table’, The Times, 18 November1932. 86. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E240/2.

CHAPTER 5: STAFFING THE CONFERENCE

1. BL/IOR/L/PJ/57. 2. NAI/Foreign and Political/1930/394-P. 3. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/63. 4. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2008. 5. NAI/Reforms/1931/56/31-R. 6. Ibid. 7. NMML/Horace Alexander Papers/Agatha Harrison Correspondence. 8. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./D714/10, 158–161. 9. BL/IOR/PO/6/51(v). 10. Bikaner/Pad 377/File 1622. 11. NAI/Foreign and Political/Establishment-Branch/1930/50(2)-E. 12. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/49. 13. ‘An Apostle of Federalism’, The Listener, 5 October 1932. 14. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/3.

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NOTES TO PAGES 137–155

15. Ibid.; emphasis in original. 16. NAI/Reforms/1930/173/30-R. 17. Ibid. 18. NMML/Moonje diary entry; and BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./Photo/Eur.095. 19. BL/IOR/L/I/1/1330. 20. NAI/Reforms/1931/56/31-R. 21. NAI/Reforms/1932/203-R. 22. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2015. 23. ‘A13 Subaltern Diplomacy’, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, https://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/a-governanceadministration/a13-subaltern-diplomacy.html, accessed on 24 May 2021. 24. ‘Carpenters and Housemaids’, News Chronicle, 3 September 1931. 25. Ibid. 26. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 28 October 1930. 27. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12/426. 28. Ibid. 29. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/73. 30. Ibid. 31. BL/IOR/L/PJ/7/212. 32. Ibid. 33. NAI/Foreign and Political/1932/161-F.O/32. 34. NMML/Moonje diary entries, 13 October 1931, 14 October 1931 and 19 October 1931. 35. CSAS/Benthall/12. 36. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/62. 37. ‘India Talks to End To-Day’, Daily Express, 24 December 1932. 38. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/62. 39. Ibid. 40. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/37. 41. CSAS/Benthall/Box 2. 42. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C539. 43. ‘Large Scale Indian Oratory’, Manchester Guardian, 24 September 1931. 44. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/54. 45. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C539. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. IOR/BL/Eur.Mss./C539. 49. BIK/pad 371/serial 6279.

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50. BIK/pad 377/serial 1622. 51. ‘Echoes of the Town’, Daily Sketch, 2 January 1931. 52. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F178.

CHAPTER 6: THE SPEECH FACTORY

1. UKNA/Works/19/248. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. ‘Installing the Post Office’, News Chronicle, 3 September 1931. 5. ‘Conferencing the International’, University of Nottingham, https://www. nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/conferencing-the-international/ representations/official-delegate-whos-whos.aspx, accessed on 24 May 2021. 6. ‘Round Table Conference: St. James’s Palace Arrangements’, The Times, 6 November 1930. 7. Harold B. Pereira, ‘Where the Conference Is Being Held’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 7 December 1930. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. UKNA/Works/19/248. 11. ‘The Oval Table Conference’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 2 November 1930. 12. UKNA/Works/19/248. 13. Harold B. Pereira, ‘Where the Conference Is Being Held’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 7 December 1930. 14. ‘Around the Oval Table’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 30 November 1930. 15. UKNA/Works/19/248. 16. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/54. 17. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/62. 18. Ibid. 19. NAI/Reforms/1930/75/III/30-R. 20. NAI/Reforms/1930/179/30-R. 21. ‘The Inaugural Ceremony’, Daily Telegraph, 12 November 1930. 22. ‘Our London Correspondence’, Manchester Guardian, 24 September 1931. 23. ‘Britain Calling’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 18 October 1931.

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24. ‘India Talks to End To-Day’, Daily Express, 24 December 1932. 25. NMML/Moonje/20/I. 26. Ibid.; emphasis in original. 27. NMML/Moonje/20/II. 28. NMML/Moonje /20/I. 29. NMML/Moonje/20/II. 30. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/2. 31. NLA/Sapru/23. 32. NLA/Sapru/24. 33. Ibid. 34. NAI/Reforms/1930/63/30-R. 35. Ibid. 36. NAI/Reforms/1930/83-30-R. 37. NAI/Reforms/1931/5-31-R. 38. NAI/Reforms/1931/7-31-R. 39. NLA/Sapru/ 24. 40. NAI/Home(Public)/1931/49/31-Public. 41. NAI/Reforms/1931/32/31-R. 42. NAI/Reforms/1931/23/31-R. 43. NAI/Reforms/1931/7/II-31-R. 44. UKNA /Works/19/248. 45. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2015. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. BIK/pad 371/serial 2343. 49. Ibid. 50. Parliamentary Archives, Palace of Westminster, London/OOW/12/15. 51. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/3. 52. NMML/Moonje diary entries, 12 December 1930, 19 October 1931 and 21 October 1931. 53. BIK/pad 371/serial 6280. 54. NMML/Moonje diary entries, 10 December 1930 and 12 January 1931. 55. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. The photographs appeared in ‘A Farewell Banquet’, The Graphic, 24 January 1931. 56. NMML/Moonje diary entries, 10 December 1930 and 20 October 1931. 57. ‘Round-Table Conference’, The Times, 6 November 1930. 58. ‘The King and India Conference’, Daily Telegraph, 29 October 1930. 59. ‘Indians at the Palace’, The Times, 10 November 1930.

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357

60. ‘The King’s Microphone 1930’, British Pathé, https://www.britishpathe. com/video/the-kings-microphone, accessed 23 August 2021. 61. ‘The King’s Inspiring Words Encircle the Earth’, Evening Standard, 12 November 1930. 62. ‘Moulding the Future of India’, Daily Telegraph, 13 November 1930. 63. ‘Engagements’, Times of India, 24 December 1930. 64. ‘The Londoner’s Diary’, Evening Standard, 13 November 1930. 65. ‘Mr MacDonald on the Conference’, The Times, 21 January 1931 66. ‘Broadcasting’, The Times, 20 January 1931. 67. ‘Premier to Broadcast Work of RTC’, Times of India, 16 January 1931. 68. ‘Broadcast by ’Phone from Britain’, Daily Herald, 5 September 1931. 69. ‘Gandhi Speaks to America’, Morning Post, 14 September 1931. 70. ‘Talking of Mechanised Music’, The Graphic, 5 May 1930. 71. UKNA/PRO/30/69/1527. 72. ‘Gramophone Records of the King’s Speech’, The Times, 15 November 1930. 73. Ibid. 74. NAI/Home(Poll)/1931/218. 75. UKNA/PRO/30/69/1526. 76. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 77. Ibid. 78. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/66(ii). 79. Ibid. 80. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 81. ‘The Round-Table Conference: Sound Film of Closing Speeches’, The Times, 23 January 1931. 82. UKNA/PRO/30/69/1526. 83. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 84. NAI/Home(Poll)/1931/218. 85. Ibid. 86. UKNA/PRO/30/69/1526. 87. ‘Talkie’s Supreme Value for England’, News Chronicle, 16 February 1931.

CHAPTER 7: A HOSPITABLE STATE? 1. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/27. 2. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./D714/10, 143. 3. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/34.

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4. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/68. 5. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/51. 6. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/54. 7. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 24 October 1930. 8. Cartoon, Evening Standard, 17 November 1930, 12. 9. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 10. G. Mueeinuddin, ‘Colour Prejudice and Mixed Marriages’, United India, June 1929. 11. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/54. 12. NAI/[Confidential] Note on the Press, n47 of 1930, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, for the week ending 22 November 1930. 13. BL/IOR/P/PJ/12/363. 14. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 15. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 24 October 1930. 16. Ibid. 17. ‘Indian Delegates’, Daily Telegraph, 28 October 1930. 18. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 19. Ibid. 20. NAI/[Confidential] Note on the Press, n45 of 1930, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, for the week ending 8 November 1930. 21. ‘Another Monument to Indian Slavery’, United India, August 1930. 22. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F178/29. A letter to Dr K. S. Datta from High Commissioner Bhupendra Nath Mitra, 30 November 1931. 23. ‘The Queen at India House’, The Times, 30 October 1930. 24. BL/IOR/L/PJ/2015. 25. Lady Chatterjee, ‘New Women in India’, The Graphic, 19 July 1930. 26. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 27. ‘Reception at India House’, The Times, 7 November 1930. 28. ‘When East Met West’, Daily Express, 8 November 1930. 29. ‘India’s Place in Art History’, The Times, 7 November 1930. 30. BL/IOR/L/PJ/2015. 31. ‘Curzon Collection of Easter Art’, The Times, 28 October 1930. 32. ‘Reception’, The Times, 23 December 1930. 33. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 34. ‘Vincent, Frank Arthur Money, (23 October 1875–21 October 1950)’, Who’s Who and Who Was Who, https://doi.org/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013. U232969.

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359

35. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2012. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. The description is from the 1981 grade II listing of the building by Historic England: ‘8, Chesterfield Gardens W1’, British Listed Buildings, https:// britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101066266-8-chesterfield-gardens-w1-westend-ward#.Xs--kzpKjD5, accessed 28 May 2020. 39. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2012. 40. Ibid. 41. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2015. 42. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2012. 43. Ibid. 44. BIK/pad 234/serial 7729. 45. ‘India Conference’, Yorkshire Post, 18 October 1930. 46. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12/426. 47. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 48. Ibid. 49. NMML/Moonje diary entries, 5 November 1930 and 21 November 1930; UKNA/PRO/30/69/1529 and PRO/30/69/1529; BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6, 26 December 1930; ‘Colonel Gidney’, The Times, 14 January 1931; ‘Lord Burnham Entertained’, Morning Post, 16 January 1931. 50. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 18 October 1930. 51. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 23 October 1930. 52. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 24 October 1930. 53. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 22 May 1931. 54. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 20 November 1930. 55. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/54. 56. Ibid. 57. NLA/Sapru/24. 58. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2012. 59. BIK/pad 373/serial 7646. 60. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2012. 61. NAI/Reforms/1931/99/31-R. 62. NMML/PC Mitter Papers/29; NMML/Moonje Papers 20(II) and 21 (II); BIK/pad 373/serial 7647. 63. ‘Pilgrimage to Indian Reformer’s Tomb’, The Times, 15 December 1930. 64. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/63.

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65. Fenner Brockway, ‘The Round Table Conference’, United India, November 1930.

CHAPTER 8: SOCIAL LONDON 1. Valentine Williams, ‘What Do They Think of London?’, The Graphic, 1 February 1930. 2. ‘Tussles between Police and Unemployed’, Daily Sketch, 1 October 1930. 3. ‘Hospitalities to the Indian Princes’, Manchester Guardian, 1 December 1930. 4. ‘The London Summer’, The Graphic, 24 May 1930. 5. Marianne Mayfayre, ‘Little Season Ends in Brilliant Whirl of Entertaining’, Daily Telegraph, 13 December 1930. 6.  ‘Current Social Events’, Indian Magazine and Review, no. 678 (November 1930). 7. BIK/pad 361/serial 8275. 8. BIK/pad 371/serial 6279. 9. BIK/pad 362/serial 7881. 10. BIK/pad 371/serial 6280. 11. BIK/pad 362/serial 7881. 12. BL/IOR/L/PJ/6/2008. 13. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/3. 14. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C576/1-88, 343. 15. Ibid., 370. 16. BIK/pad 371/serial 6280. 17. ‘The New Park Lane’, Evening Standard, 19 December 1930. 18. UKNA/PRO/30/69/1529. 19. ‘Hospitalities to the Indian Princes’, Manchester Guardian, 1 December 1930; NMML/Sir P. Thakurdas Papers/132. 20. Personal correspondence with Jennie De Protani, archivist at the Athenaeum, 16 December 2016. 21. BIK/pad 234/serial 7729. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. NMML/PC Mitter Papers/29. 25. ‘League of Nations Union’, Eastbourne Chronicle, 8 November 1930.

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361

26. ‘Awakening of India’, Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1930. 27. ‘Prince Arthur on India’, Daily Telegraph, 16 November 1930. 28. BL/IOR/L/I/1/48, file 16/3. 29. ‘The Gandhi Society, London’, United India, November 1930 and December 1930. 30. ‘The Gandhi Society, London’, United India, February 1931. 31. Ibid. 32. BL/IOR/C152/6, Benn to Irwin, 13 November 1931. 33. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 34. ‘Mariegold in Society’, The Sketch, 26 November 1930. 35. BIK/pad 333/serial 6281. 36. ‘Round Table Conference’, The Times, 22 October 1930. 37. ‘The Indian Princes’, The Times, 4 November 1930. 38. Royal Archives, Windsor/MRH/MRH/GV/FUNC/229. 39. ‘Indian Ladies Take Tea at Buckingham Palace’, Evening Standard, 16 December 1930. 40. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/63. 41. CSAS/Benthall/Box 7. 42. Ibid. 43. ‘Luncheons: Countess Peel’, The Times, 14 January 1931. 44. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/3. 45. ‘Dinners’, Daily Telegraph, 11 December 1930. 46. ‘Dinners’, The Times, 22 January 1931. 47. ‘India Thanks Her Hosts’, Daily Telegraph, 14 January 1931. 48. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 49. ‘King Sees RTC Members at Buckingham Palace’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 25 December 1932. 50. ‘Luncheon and Dinner Parties’, Morning Post, 12 October 1931. 51. BIK/pad 6294/serial 370. 52. BIK/pad 7724/serial 368. 53. ‘For India’s Princes’, Daily Telegraph, 16 November 1930. 54. Untitled column piece, Daily Telegraph, 18 December 1930. 55. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 28 November 1930. 56. ‘Echoes of the Town’, Evening Standard, 15 January 1931. 57. ‘Mahraja of Alwar Dead’, Malaya Tribune, 21 May 1937. 58. UKNA/PRO/30/69/1526. 59. Ibid.

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NOTES TO PAGES 243–253

60. Untitled column piece, Daily Telegraph, 17 December 1930. 61. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/2. 62. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 63. UKNA/PRO/30/69/578. 64. ‘A Maharajah’s Anniversary Banquet’, The Graphic, 27 December 1930. 65. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E220/3. 66. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 18 November 1930. 67. ‘Maharaja of Alwar’s Assurance’, Daily Telegraph, 6 January 31; ‘Maharaja of Alwar in the City’, Daily Telegraph, 10 January 1931. 68. ‘Hostess to Dine in Purdah’, Sunday Times, 18 January 1931. 69. ‘Indian Princes and Empire: Purdah Mystery at Banquet’, Daily Telegraph, 20 January 1931. 70. Untitled column piece, Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1931. 71. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 7 January 1932. 72. ‘Indian Restaurants’, United India, January–February 1932. 73. United India, November 1930. 74. Indian and Colonial Journal, 3 January 1931. 75. United India, November 1930. 76. Indian and Colonial Journal, 3 January 1931. 77. Ibid. 78. United India, January–February 1932; Indian and Colonial Journal, 14 March 1931. 79. United India, January–February 1932. 80. ‘Shafi’s Restaurant’, Making Britain, http://www.open.ac.uk/research​ projects/makingbritain/content/shafis-restaurant, accessed 16 March 2021. 81. United India, March 1930. 82. United India, May 1930. 83. United India, December 1930. 84. United India, February 1931. 85. ‘Firework Thrown into Restaurant’, News Chronicle, 21 September 1931. 86. ‘Veeraswamy’s’, Making Britain, http://www.open.ac.uk/research​projects/ makingbritain/content/Veeraswamy’s, accessed 16 March 2021. 87. NMML/Moone diary entry, 30 November 1930; ‘Local News’, Indian and Colonial Journal, 3 January 1931. 88. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 4 November 1931. 89. ‘Indian Congress League’, United India, June 1932. 90. NMML/Moonje diary entries, 24 October 1930, 8 December 1930, 6 January 1931 and 7 January 1931.

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363

91. ‘Lyons’ Popular Café’, Evening Standard, 19 June 1929. 92. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 11 December 1930.

CHAPTER 9: AT HOMES 1. NMML/PC Mitter Papers/29. 2. CSAS/Benthall/box 7. 3. Confirmed by email with Zahur Shahnawaz, the Begum’s grandson, on 3 June 2021. 4. ‘Empire Women at Luncheon’, The Graphic, 25 October 1930. 5. ‘A Regiment of Women Hostesses’, The Graphic, 26 June 1930. 6. ‘Cops and the Women’, The Graphic, 22 March 1930; ‘Symphony in Living Bronze’, The Graphic, 19 April 1930; ‘1830 – “A Mouse!”: 1913 – “A Baby!”’, The Graphic, 24 November 1930. 7. Parliamentary Archives, Palace of Westminster, London/ST/223/45. 8. A photograph of unnamed Indian wives of RTC delegates at a reception in Piccadilly’s Lyceum Club appeared in the Illustrated Weekly of India, 28 December 1930. 9. ‘The Empire Disappointed’, Evening Standard, 14 November 1930; ‘“Bachelor” Miss Ishbel’, Evening Standard, 14 November 1930. 10. ‘Miss Ishbel Macdonald Filmed’, Evening Standard, 21 September 1930. 11. ‘Little Season Ends in Brilliant Whirl of Entertaining: A Palace Party – Week of Balls  – Miss MacDonald’s Dinner Gown’, Daily Telegraph, 13 December 1930. 12. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./G111/3. 13. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6, private letter from Wedgwood Benn to Lord Irwin, 4 November 1930. 14. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. The references are to Rameshwari Nehru, whose husband was Jawaharlal Nehru’s cousin but was far from ‘extreme Left’; Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s wife had died in 1929, the reference is to his sister Fatima Jinnah; Lady Hydari was the wife of the Hyderabad representative Sir Akbar Hydari. 15. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6, Wedgood Benn’s, India Office diary entry, 13 November 1930. 16. BIK/pad 369/serial 6108; pad 370/serial 6290; and pad 373/serial 7647. 17. UKNA/PRO/30/69/1526; PRO/30/69/1527; PRO/30/69/1528; and PRO/​ 30/69/1529.

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18. NMML/PC Mitter Papers/29. 19. ‘Echoes of the Town’, Daily Sketch, 9 December 1930. 20. ‘Touches of the Gorgeous East in London’, Evening Standard, 9 October 1931. 21. ‘Another Party for Indian Princes’, Evening Standard, 12 December 1930. 22. ‘Dinners and Receptions: Lady Astor’, The Times, 12 December 1930. 23. ‘Echoes of the Town’, Daily Sketch, 18 December 1930. 24. ‘Grandeur among the Show-cases’, Evening Standard, 18 November 1931. 25. ‘Women’s Rights’, The Times, 18 December 1930. 26. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 20 November 1930. 27. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 10 December 1930. 28. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 11 December 1930. 29. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 18 December 1930. 30. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 17 September 1931. 31. Ibid. 32. ‘No Theatres for Gandhi’, Evening Standard, 7 September 1931. 33. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 11 November 1931. 34. ‘Kingsley Hall, Bow’, Architects Journal, 16 July 1930. 35. ‘Two Homes for Gandhi’, Evening Standard, 4 September 1931. 36. ‘Broadcast by ’Phone from Britain’, Daily Herald, 5 September 1931. 37. ‘Current Topics’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 4 October 1931. 38. ‘Gandhi’s English Woman Disciple’, Evening Standard, 2 Setember 1931. 39. CSAS/Benthall/box 2. 40. ‘Two Homes for Gandhi’, Evening Standard, 4 September 1931. 41. CSAS/Benthall/box 2. 42. ‘Mr Gandhi Moves’, Yorkshire Post, 18 September 1931. 43. ‘Mr Gandhi Going to the West End’, News Chronicle, 21 September 1931. 44. CSAS/Benthall/box 2. 45. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F178/29. 46. NAI/Home(Poll)/1932/14/30-KW. 47. ‘Indian National Leaders of Note’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 25 October 1931. 48. ‘Two Women of India’, Yorkshire Post, 15 September 1931. 49. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C576. 50. Copper or aluminium cooking utensils. 51. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C576, 346–347; emphasis in original.

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52. IOR/Eur.Mss./C576/89-174i. 53. CSAS/Benthall/box 2.

CHAPTER 10: PETITIONS AND PROTESTS

1. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F178/29. 2. NAI/Reforms/1930/145/1/30-R. 3. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6, Benn conference diary entry, 19 December 1930. 4. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E240/2. 5. For instance, C. Sorajbi, ‘Gandhi Interrogated’, Atlantic Monthly, April 1932, 453–458. 6. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./F165/180. 7. Ibid. 8. UKNA/PRO/30/69/578. 9. Ibid. 10. NAI/Reforms/1930/176/30R. 11. NAI/Reforms/1930/29/30-R(Pt II). 12. Ibid. 13. NAI/Reforms/1931/15/31-R. 14. Ibid. 15. NAI/Reforms/1931/16/III/31-R. 16. NAI/Reforms/1931/35/31-R. 17. NAI/Reforms/1932/KW.III/32-R. 18. NMML/PC Mitter papers/134. 19. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 18 September 1931. 20. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 16 October 1931. 21. NMML/Moonje Papers/20(I). 22. NMML/Moonje Papers/21(II). 23. NAI/Reforms/1932/174/32. 24. Ibid. 25. NAI/Reforms/1932/174/II/32-R. 26. Ibid. 27. NMML/Moonje/20(I). 28. Ibid. 29. NAI/Home(Poll)/1931/201. 30. ‘Song about Gandhi Barred: Lord Chamberlain Acts at 11th Hour’, Evening Standard, 13 September 1931.

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31. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12/363. 32. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12 finding aid. 33. ‘Mr Saklatvala’s Fireworks’, Times of India, 20 October 1930. 34. NLA/Sapru/23, copy of a letter with unnamed recipient. 35. NMML/Moonje diary entry, 2 October 1931. 36. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12/363. 37. Ibid. 38. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12/426. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12/364. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. ‘Disaffiliation of London Branch’, United India, October–November 1931. 49. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12/364. 50. ‘Editorial’, Indian and Colonial Journal, 3 January 1931. 51. ‘To the Indian RTC Delegates’, Indian and Colonial Journal, 3 January 1931. I am indebted to Mark Bradley for this translation. 52. ‘Indian National Congress League’, United India, November 1930. 53. G. L. Puri, ‘Indians in British Isles’, United India, December 1930. 54. ‘The “Round Table”’, United India, February 1931. 55. ‘Communism, Congress-ism and Commonwealth-ism’, United India, August 1930. 56. ‘Communists Control the “Congress”’, United India, November 1930. 57. ‘So-Called London “Congress Branch”’, United India, June–July 1931. 58. S. Saklatvala, ‘The Indian Round Table Conference’, Labour Monthly, February 1931. 59. ‘Guarding the Fakir Gandhi’, Daily Worker, 11 September 1931. 60. ‘Welcome for Gandhi To-Day’, Daily Worker, 12 September 1931. 61. ‘Gandhi Arrives for Round Table’, Daily Worker, 14 September 1931. 62. ‘Increased Imperialist Repression in India’, Daily Worker, 2 December 1931. 63. ‘The Round Table’, Daily Worker, 2 December 1931. A ‘truckler’ suggests someone who acts with servility and an unworthy motive.

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CHAPTER 11: FAILURE

1. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12/426. 2. BL/IOR/R/2/633/270. 3. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/81. 4. UO/Sankey/E286, diary entry, 21 November 1932. 5. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/62. 6. BL/IOR/L/PO/6/91. 7. BIK/pad 632/serial 7881. 8. BIK/pad 370/serial 7173. 9. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E240/2. 10. ‘Round-Table Conference’, Manchester Guardian, 26 November 1932. 11. UO/Sankey/E286, diary entries, 28 November 1932 and 29 November 1932. 12. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E240/2. 13. UO/Sankey/E286, diary entry, 8 December 1932. 14. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E240/2. 15. BL/IOR/Q/RTC/61. 16. UO/Sankey/E286, diary entry, 24 December 1932. 17. ‘Round Table Progress’, The Spectator, 16 December 1932. 18. ‘India Parley Hussle’, Daily Mail, 24 December 1932. 19. ‘Auspicious Conclusion of India Conference’, Sunday Times, 25 December 1932. 20. ‘The Round Table and After’, Manchester Guardian, 27 December 1932. 21. ‘The Next Steps in Framing Future of India’, Daily Telegraph, 27 December 1932. 22. ‘India Round Table’, Daily Herald, 15 December 1932; ‘India’s Fate’, Daily Herald, 17 December 1932; ‘Round Table Ends Today’, Daily Herald, 24 December 1932. 23. ‘Round Table, Again!’, United India, November 1932. 24. ‘Round Table, Its Achievements’, United India, January–February 1933. 25. ‘Round Table Sham Ends’, Daily Worker, 27 December 1932. 26. ‘The Round Table Conference’, Daily Worker, 29 December 1932. 27. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6. 28. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/2. 29. NAI/Reforms/1930/147/30-R. 30. NAI/Reforms/1930/173/30-R. 31. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/27. 32. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/2.

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33. UKNA/PRO/30/69/578. 34. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E240/1. 35. UO/Sankey/E285. 36. CSAS/Benthall Papers/Box 2. 37. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./E346/7. 38. UO/Sankey/E285. 39. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C539. 40. BL/IOR/Eur.Photo/096. 41. ‘Does England Realise?’, Daily Mail, 21 January 1931. 42. ‘Indian Peace Talks’, The Times, 2 September 1930; ‘Peace Parley Outlook’, Daily Telegraph, 3 September 1930. 43. ‘Round Table Conference’, Daily Telegraph, 27 October 1930. 44. ‘The “Round Table”’, United India, February 1931; original emphasis. 45. ‘Editorial’, Saturday Review, 3 October 1931. 46. ‘Crisis at the Round Table’, News Chronicle, 6 October 1930. 47. ‘Gandhi’s Fresh Failure’, Daily Mail, 9 October 1931. 48. ‘Gandhi’s Great Failure’, Weekend Review, 17 October 1931. 49. ‘Round Table Conference’, Daily Telegraph, 2 January 1931. 50. Ramsay MacDonald, ‘The Round Table Conference’, The Listener, 28 January 1931. 51. ‘The Conference Ends’, Sunday Times, 18 January 1931. 52. ‘Mr Gandhi’s Admission’, Manchester Guardian, 9 October 1931. 53. ‘India in the Vortex’, New Leader, 3 October 1931. 54. BL/IOR/L/PJ/12/364; contrast with ‘Increased Imperialist Repression in India’, Daily Worker, 2 December 1931. 55. ‘Why the Round Table Conference Is Not a Failure at All’, Daily Worker, 11 November 1931.

CHAPTER 12: CONCLUSION 1. UM/RMD/1/11/13. 2. Ibid. 3. BL/IOR/Eur.Mss./C152/6.

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INDEX

Adelphi Theatre, 279 Adeney, K., 19 Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective (2018), 10 Agarwalla, H., 208 Agra, 3 Ahmed, R., 144, 195, 232, 242, 305 Alexander, H., 89, 280 Ali, M., 26, 80, 324, 337 All-Asian Women’s Conference, Lahore, 342 All India Congress Committee, 173 All India Women’s Congress, 259 Alwar, Maharaja of, 48–49, 51–52, 157, 224, 241, 243–246, 253 Ambassador’s Court, 162 Ambedkar, B. R., 65, 71, 87–88, 97, 172, 174, 210, 219, 294, 297, 299 depressed classes, 26, 78 Desai’s record, 91 informal negotiations, 86 Tapestry Room, 90 American Fox Film Corporation, 187 Amulree, B., 199 Anderson, K., 141

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Andrews, C. F., 54, 89, 101, 254, 279–282 Ankit, R., 342 Armoury Room, 164–165, 186 Armstrong, E., 259 Army and Navy Club, 230 Ashmead-Bartlett, E., 327 Astor, N., 6, 34, 256–257, 268–274, 282, 337 Astor, W., 270 at-homes, 216, 222, 256, 263–268, 284, 286, 317, 337 Bajpai, B. S., 115, 133–134, 139, 141, 177, 205 Baker, H., 200 Baldwin, S., 46, 55–56, 113, 137 Balfour Declaration (1926), 39, 43 Banerjee, S., 316, 332 Barns, M., 181, 197–198, 227, 284, 319, 328–329 Barron, H., 260 Basu, A., 259 Bataille, G., 315 Beaud, O., 20

INDEX 

Beck, E. J., 265 Bell, D., 20 Bengal Chamber of Commerce, 152–153 Benn, W. W. all-white Simon Commission, 105 attorney general, 74 Britain’s Indian guests, 195 British and Indian history, 168 conservative commentators and delegates, 81 Dominion status, 15 hospitality, 194 India Office, 112 Indian delegates in London, 101–102 Indian government outlining plans, 177 Machiavellian intelligence, 335 Maharaja of Alwar, 182 Minorities Committee, 79 National Government in 1931, 22 plenary conference meeting, 80 Reforms Office, 173 social centre, 211–213 technological infrastructure, 187 ‘Three Party co-operation and its limits’, 112 Women’s Committee, 262 Benthall, E. C., 28, 49, 61, 76, 79, 94, 120, 147, 152–153, 237, 255–256, 279–280, 283, 326 Bhopal, Nawab of, 71, 219 Bhopal House agreement, 72, 77 Bikaner, Maharaja of, 1–2, 23, 51, 71–72, 195–196, 224, 231, 240, 318 archive, 16, 28, 70, 230

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387

accommodation, 135, 156, 195, 233 conference interventions, 175, 181, 234–235, 263 Birkenhead, Lord, 14 Birla, G. D., 83, 94, 96, 125, 153 Bond Street, 222 Bonerjee, W. C., 195 Brailsford, H. N., 277 Bridge, C., 13–14, 16, 18–19, 126, 249, 333, 338–339 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 183, 185 British Colonial and Imperial Conferences, 9 British Commission on Indian and Burma Affairs, 194 British Commonwealth, 1, 37–39, 50, 52, 54, 205 British Communist Party, 121 British Empire Club, 230 British Empire Exhibition, 203 British Empire League, 232 British Federation of University Women, 232 British Foreign Office, 259 British India, 2–3, 13, 15, 112, 137 and all-India federation, 2, 18, 20 conference delegation, 21, 23–26, 70–72, 107, 130, 138, 147, 162 Dominion status, 47, 49 hotel accommodation, 224 and Indian States, 16, 114 Minorities Committee, 77, 79 provincial constitutions, 107 socializing 79, 193, 209, 239, 248–249 United Kingdom, 37 British Indian Union, 232

388 INDEX British paramountcy, 13–14, 135, 175, 332 British Sportsmen’s Club, 243 Britton, F., 233 Brockway, F., 122, 220, 233, 253 Brown, P. H., 152–153, 279, 326 Brown, S., 133 Buckingham Palace, 161, 182, 228–229, 235, 239, 317 Bureau of Public Information in India (1920–1926), 180 Burton, A., 10, 195 Butler, R. A. H., 14, 133, 141 Butler report, 15, 315 Cain, P. J., 229 Carlton Club, 230 Carlton Hotel, 70–71, 224, 240 Carr, H., 91 Carter, R. H. A., 108, 140, 146, 154, 172, 204–205, 216, 326 Cavalry Club, 230 Central Legislative Assembly, 14 Central Press Photographers, 181, 183 Chakrabarty, D., 7, 39, 291 Chamberlain, D., 201 Chamber of Princes (1926–1930), 180 Chapman, E., 154 Chatterjee, Abdul, 247 Chatterjee, Atul, 195, 197, 200 Chelmsford, Lord, 14, 45 Chesterfield Gardens, 204, 207–209, 211–212, 236, 255, 260, 263 ‘Chief ’s Fund’, 130 Chintamani, C. Y., 73, 180 ‘chronocenosis’, 40 Churchill, W., 22, 41, 47, 121–122, 338

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civil disobedience movement, 64, 102, 111, 319 clerical labour, 147–152 Cleveland, C., 210–211 clubland, 229–233 Coatman, J., 16, 57–58, 108, 123, 134, 136, 141, 176 Cohen, J. L., 20 Collins, F. S., 153–154, 169 Collins, M., 20 colonial conferences, 8 colonial democracy, 6, 7 Columbia Gramophone Company, 186 Commonwealth Assurance Company Limited, 299 Communal award, 66–67, 294, 300–302, 319 ‘communal disorders’, 67 communalism, 67, 77, 172, 301, 325, 337 communal question, 5, 66, 74, 76, 78, 82, 87, 126, 296, 300, 324 ‘conference method’, 5, 9, 15, 21, 23, 64, 66, 72, 76, 86, 97–98, 111–114, 123, 128, 132 abandonment, 125–129 League of Nations, 103 sub-committees, 107 29 August 1930, 107 under attack, 121–125 conference photography, 181 Congress–Muslim agreement, 91 Congress of Vienna (1815), 10 Conservative Party, 22, 46 Baldwin, S., 113 Research Department, 137, 198 Conservative Shadow Cabinet, 61 consultants, 12

INDEX 

Cooper, F., 20 Copland, I., 13, 18, 241, 333 Corbett, G., 94, 95, 133–134, 139, 141, 172, 204–205 map, 339 Corpus Christi College, 117, 334 cost approximate cost, RTC, 131 first conference session, 130 private accommodation, 204 welfare officers and social club, 213 West End restaurants, 206 Cottrell, A., 222 Council of the National Liberal Federation, 127 Council of the Royal Institute of Public Health, 232 Cox-McCormack, N., 277–278, 284 Crankshaw, E. N. S., 202 Crerar, J., 120 Criminal Investigation Department (CID), 203 Croft, W. D., 141, 146 Croydon airport, 186, 198 Croydon Airshow, 199, 323 Curtis, L., 6, 14, 38 dyarchy plan, 56 Curzon, Lord, 40, 47 Daily Express, 123–124, 147, 201 Daily Herald, 63, 271, 276, 278, 322 Daily Mail, 22, 57, 63, 122, 321, 327 Daily Sketch, 29, 89, 124, 267, 269 Daily Telegraph, 60, 76, 173, 183, 199, 209, 240, 243, 246, 254, 261, 321, 327, 329 Daily Worker, 63, 121, 123, 322, 331 Dalvi, D. G., 98

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389

Dara, G. S., 322, 340 Darbhanga’s birthday party, Maharaja of, 182, 240–242 Datta, S. K., 158, 197, 219, 226, 234, 276–277 Davidson, J. C. C., 110, 285, 329 Dawson, G., 195 Dawson, V., 108, 137–138, 141 De, R., 13, 31, 40, 63, 293, 340 Declaration of 20 August 1917, 55 depressed castes, 26, 59, 65, 78, 88, 90, 154–155, 286, 292, 294–295, 297, 299–302, 333 Desai, M., 277 Deshmukh, C. D., 329 ‘Devalee-Id’ (Diwali and Eid), 233 Devonshire House, 217 Dewan of Mysore, 49 ‘Dominion Self-Government’, 175 Dominion status, 1, 7–8, 15, 38–40, 43–54 constitutional relationship, 53 ‘forbidden phrase’ of, 50 Paris Peace Conference, 42 Dorchester Hotel, 89–90, 93, 223–224, 228, 274 Dunnett, J. M., 137, 176, 178 Dutt, C. P., 121 Dutt, P. K., 203 dyarchy, 6, 14, 19, 31, 38–40, 54–64 British Parliament, 56 colonial version of federation, 39 federation, 54 London, 56–60 Montagu’s 1917 declaration, 55, 104 New Delhi’s Reforms Office, 55 powers of government, 38 RTC, principles of, 60–64

390 INDEX East India Association at London’s Caxton Hall, 59 East India Company governance, 13, 19 East India United Services Club, 230 Eaton Square in Belgravia, 327 Edward VII, King, 235 Edward VIII, King, 183 88 Knightsbridge, 280–287 Elangovan, A., 340 Emerson, H., 173 Empire Parliamentary Association, 253 Engine Court, 161, 162 ‘English Delhi’ capital, 200 Entertaining Gandhi, 275 Evening Standard, 183, 194–195, 235, 241, 261, 267–268, 279 Excelsior (movie) Theatre, 183 expenditures and receipts, 214 failure, types of, 315 Federal Finance Committee, 110 Federal India, 135 Federal Structure Committee (FSC), 31, 52, 79, 82–83, 85, 110, 117, 121, 180, 274, 319, 325, 334 federalism, 2, 8, 17, 19–21, 23, 28, 136, 341 federation, 2–5, 7, 12, 14, 16–21, 23, 30–31, 39–41, 48–49, 51–54, 59–61, 63, 80, 98, 102, 117, 232, 243, 261, 312–313, 324, 336, 341 Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1914, 275 Feltham, C., 315 feminist international relations studies, 258

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Fitze, K. S., 135, 137 Friary Court, 162 Gandhi–Irwin Pact of 1931, 19 Gandhi, M. K., 1, 30–31, 34, 83, 86, 94–96, 123–125, 146, 180, 185, 226, 285, 325–326 ‘blank cheque’ attitude to Muslim demands, 90 British and Indian governments, 66 British public opinion, 139 communal parties, 69 congress representative, 3 civil disobedience, 5 Desai, M., 157 Dominion status, 53 Muslim delegation, Aga Khan apartment, 90 Ganga Singhji Trust Archives, Maharaja of, 28 Gangulee, N., 17 Garvin, J. L., 4 Gaynor, E. C., 138 Geddes, P., 217 Gentlemen’s clubs, 233 ‘geographical imaginations’, 31, 38, 65, 336 George, King, 1, 71, 175, 185 Getachew, A., 341 Gidney, H., 27, 247 Godfrey, G., 76, 79, 237, 255 Gokhale, G. K., 330 Goschen, V., 59 Government Hospitality Fund, 202 Government of India Act 1858, 13 1919, 6, 13–14, 38, 61, 137 1935, 2, 7, 13, 17, 329, 338

INDEX 

governmentalities, 11, 31, 67, 128, 132, 291, 337–339 Graham Pole, D., 194 Graphic (magazine), 29, 47, 182, 186, 241–242, 244–245, 259 Green, A. S., 136 Grosvenor House, 223 Gwyer, M., 132 Haig, H., 72, 78, 115–116 Hailey, M., 1, 4, 43, 75, 115–118, 193 Hall, K., 180 Halliday, F, 10 Harper’s Bazaar (magazine), 231 Harris, H. W., 190 Harrison, A., 89, 134, 280, 283 Headmistress’ Association, 232 Heath, A. E., 185 ‘hegemonic’/‘imperial’ internationalism, 10 Henderson, A., 117 Herren, M., 141–142, 246 Hill, C. H., 334 Hindu Mahasabha (1927–1935), 26 Hirtzel, A., 104–106 His Master’s Voice (HMV) Gramophone Company, 186 Hoare, M., 260 Hoare, S., 61, 96, 103, 113, 124, 133, 265, 316, 318–320, 326, 338 1930, 239 1935, 18, 265 1932, 22, 96, 103, 125–128, 140, 146 1931, 124, 132 Hocking, R., 149, 154–156, 337 Hopkins, A. G., 229 hotel accommodation, 89, 197, 223–233

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391

House of Commons, 75, 168, 175, 177–178, 198, 221, 269, 292, 338 House of Lords, 3, 168, 183, 317, 336 Hunt, J. D., 275 Hydari, A., 18, 23, 186, 234 Hyde Park Hotel, 224, 232, 264 Illustrated Weekly of India, 1, 29, 164, 173, 206, 239 Imperial Conference, 52 1917, 37 1930, 26, 39–40, 139 1926, 45 Imperial War Conference (1917), 8 Independent Labour Party, 6, 253 India conference, 338–341 India House, 201 Indian and Colonial Journal, 5–6, 247–248, 310 Indian Civil Service, 334 Indian Conciliation Group, 89, 97, 127, 280, 291 Indian Crisis, The, 247 Indian Daily Mail, 254 Indian delegation at the Imperial Conference (1926), 139 Indian Diaries, 56 Indian High Commission, 195, 200, 203, 264 Indian Home Department, 44 Indian Magazine and Review, 222 Indian National Congress (INC), 1, 195, 232–233, 251, 253, 305–306, 309, 311, 323, 331, 339 Indian/princely states, 1–2, 14, 16–19, 21, 41, 44, 73, 77, 110, 138, 145, 173, 186, 299, 342

392 INDEX Indian petitions Delhi, 295–298 Indian Civil Service advisors and secretaries, 292 Indian individual/collective opinion, 293 London, 298–300 representations, 293 statements, 294 Willingdon, 293 Indian restaurants, 246–254 Indian States Enquiry Committee, 110 Indian States People’s Conference, 303 Indian Statutory Commission, 14 Indian Student Associations, 253 Indian Students Hostel, 227 Indian Students’ Loan Fund, 200 Innes, C., 115–116 international conferences, 9, 10, 53, 104, 134, 139–141, 153, 179, 190, 281 International Labour Conferences, 139, 200 International Sportsmen’s Club, 230 internationalism, 9–11, 23, 103, 259, 342–343 Iqbal Literary Association, 264 Irwin, Lord, 4, 15, 44, 56–57, 59, 74, 101, 104, 106, 110, 135–136, 176, 182, 188, 193 Isaacs, R., 137 Ismail, M., 18, 23 Jadhav, B. V., 152 James, C., 258 Jan, M., 155

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Jayakar, M. R., 26 Jehangir, C., 71, 254 Jinnah, M. A., 1, 73–74 joint social secretaries, 141, 146, 211, 306 Joshi, N. M., 127, 145, 224, 255 Joyce, A. H., 140, 156, 179 Junior Army Navy Club, 230 Junior Constitutional Club, 230 Keith, A. B., 17–18, 23, 49 Kelen, E., 29–30, 285–286 Kelkar, N. C., 302, 323 Kensington Palace Mansions, 224, 257 Kerr, P., 6, 271 Kershaw, L., 106, 110, 161, 205 Keyes, T., 18 Khan, A., 69–70, 71, 73, 86, 88, 154, 201, 219, 224, 226, 239, 261, 326, 329 King, E., 1 ‘King’s Microphone’, 183–184 Kingsley Hall, 146, 158, 185, 274–280 Krishna Menon, V. K., 330 Labour Party, 319 Lacey, P., 53 Ladies Carlton Club, 204, 232 Laithwaite, J. G., 83, 133 Lancaster House, 202 Landau, L. L., 186 Lansbury, G., 161 Latifi, A., 115, 139–141 League against Imperialism, 9 League of Nations, 9, 23, 38, 42, 48, 53, 74, 103, 107, 139, 141, 183, 186, 190, 231–232, 259, 295, 340–342

INDEX 

League of Nations and Imperial Conferences, 23 League of Nations model, 341–342 Leicester Square, 168 Lely, P., 165 Lester, M., 158, 256, 273, 275–276, 293, 337 Lewis, W. H., 55, 60, 78, 109, 115, 120, 135, 137, 172, 261–262 Lewis, S. L., 10, 342 Lindahl, M., 315, 332 Listener, 329 Locarno Treaties in London (1925), 186 London, H. S., 164 London Mosque, 264 London News Agency Photos, 181 London protests British government, 303 in the street, 304–310 on the page, 310–313 RTC sessions, 303 Lothian, Marquess of, 6–7, 22–23, 92, 110, 125, 128, 133, 158, 271–273, 320 Lothian’s Franchise Committee, 7, 133, 110 loudspeakers, 182 Low, D., 28, 194–195 Lucknow Pact (1916), 13–14, 68 MacDonald, R., 132–133, 174, 186, 325, 329, 334–335 archives of, 83 Cabinet India Committee, 125 Dominion status, 52 House of Commons, 75 Independent Labour Party, 6

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393

‘informal and unofficial’ consultations, 87 Minorities Committee, 27, 66, 86, 88 Simon Report, 59 St James’s Palace, 78 Wall Street Crash, 22 Wedgwood, W., 15 MacDonald, I., 260–262 MacGregor, H., 140, 179, 186–187 Madan film theatre network, 189 ‘Maharaja’s Servants’ Party’, 157 Mahmood, M., 243–244 Making of Federal India, The, 17 Malaviya, M. M., 86 Manchester Guardian, 61–62, 136, 173, 319, 321 Mantena, R., 20 Marconiphone company, 183 Marlborough Club, 230 Marshall, A. E. T., 206 McGregor, H., 73 McIlroy, D. L., 261 McNally, S. J., 155 McWatters, A. C., 115–116 Mears, G., 135 Mehta, M., 135 Menon, R. S. V. P., 138 Minorities Committee, 22, 66, 77–98, 138, 317, 339 Mitra, B. N., 317 Mitter, P. C., 236 Mody, H. P., 224 Montagu, E. S., 14, 19, 38, 56, 57 Montagu’s 1917 declaration, 54–55 Monteath, D. T., 146, 168, 195 Moonje, B. S., 26, 28–29, 50, 52, 69, 71–72, 74–76, 90–91, 93–94, 96,

394 INDEX 174–175, 194, 199, 210–211, 251, 253–254, 272–273, 299 Moore, R. J., 1, 13, 15, 18, 22, 26, 44, 50, 70, 82, 95, 105, 110, 114, 187, 300–302, 332 Morning Post, 4, 79, 239 Movietone News, 186, 188 Mozumdar, N. D., 208 Mukherjee, S., 257 Muslim-majority provinces, 67 Naidu, S., 27, 83, 88–90, 157–158, 219, 226, 234, 256, 269, 272, 280–284, 337, 342 Nair, S., 194 Natesan, G. A., 177 National Government, 6, 22, 82, 96, 103, 114, 124, 320, 332 National Indian Association, 222–223 National Liberal Club, 230–231 National Portrait Gallery, 181 Nawaz, B. S., 27, 79, 157, 178, 224, 257, 262, 267–268, 271, 337 Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), 28 Nehru Report of 1928, 16, 19, 43, 69, 315 New Delhi Legislative Assembly, 78 News Chronicle, 124, 142, 190 News, P., 183 Newspaper Proprietor’s Association, 181 Nicholson, A. P., 49 North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), 68–69, 72, 107, 118, 138, 331

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Observer, 4, 63, 269 O’Dwyer, M., 104 Old Queen’s Street, 137 Oudh Akhbar (newspaper), 48, 199 Overseas League, 232 Owens, P., 257 Oxford Street, 222 Page, D., 67 Palace of Westminster, 1, 147, 168, 267, 314 Pan-African Congress, 9 Pandit, V., 342 Panikkar, K. M., 16, 18, 39, 42, 53, 135, 224, 342 Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), 9, 42 Park Lane Hotel, 238, 261–262, 264 Pascall, J., 217 Patel, V. J., 1 Patro, A. P., 50, 56, 59, 218, 230 Paul, K. T., 226 Paul, P. G., 89–90 Peel, E., 236, 321 Percy, E., 110 Pereira, H. B., 164 Petrie, D., 145 Philadelphia International Exposition, 203 pilgrimages, 189 plenary sessions, 2, 50, 59, 72, 79–80, 88, 107, 177, 187 Polak, H., 279–281 political hostess, 256 political wives, 264 Port of London Authority, 217 Pratap (newspaper), 197

INDEX 

Provincial Constitutions Sub-Committee, 117, 138 Publicity Advisory Committee, 180 publicity officers, 179 Punjab Association, 264 Punjabee Society of London, 264 Purushotham, S., 20–21, 338 Quakers, 155 Queen Anne’s Room round table, 143 Rama Rao, B., 140 Ramaswami Sastri, V. S., 325 Ramaswamy, C. P., 59 Ramaswamy, S., 3 Rao, S., 145 Rathbone, E., 127 Rau, B. N., 340 Rau, R., 260 Reform Club, 230 Reforms Office, New Delhi, 55, 67, 78, 80–81, 109, 115, 120, 126–127, 133, 137, 172, 176–177, 210–211, 295, 297, 300, 324 Rehn, A., 315, 332 Reid, R. N., 295 Reith, J., 183 ‘responsible government’, 14–15, 38–39, 42–45, 48, 50, 52, 54–56, 63, 79–81 Reynolds, L. W., 115–116, 138 Rhodes, C., 204–205 Rietzler, K., 257 Rothermere, Lord, 22, 122 Roxy Theatre on Broadway, 190 Roy, A., 162 Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, 27–28

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395

Royal Automobile Club, 206, 230–231 Royal Institute for International Affairs, 182, 230–231 Roy, S. N., 260 Rumbold, H., 141 Rushbrook-Williams, L. F., 73, 135–136, 180, 260 Russell, E., 137 safeguards, 4, 17–19, 48, 50, 54, 59, 61–62, 74, 78–81, 88, 97, 125, 137, 189, 255, 294–296, 301, 311, 319–320, 322–323, 325, 339 Saklatvala, S., 34, 121, 304–313, 331–332, 342 Salomon, E., 29, 182 Sankey, Lord, 52, 61, 83, 317–319 Sapru, T. B., 1–2, 16, 18, 23, 26, 28, 39, 49–51, 71–74, 76–77, 89–90, 92, 98, 107, 134, 136, 172, 194, 199, 224, 228, 230, 235, 300, 305, 318–320, 322, 324, 326–327, 343 sarai (travellers’ sanctuary), 277 Sastri, S., 23, 45, 73–74, 76, 79, 90, 93, 107, 134, 230, 235, 239, 300, 324–326, 330, 343 Saturday Review, 328 Savoy Hotel, 50, 224, 233, 239, 241, 243, 267, 274 Schuster, C., 132 Schuster, G., 46–47, 335 Scott, F., 42 Seal, P. B., 197 secretariat-general, 134, 140–141, 155, 299, 329 Secretary of State for India, 14–15, 22, 38, 43, 47, 55, 96, 101, 103–104,

396 INDEX 108, 114, 116, 133, 140, 193, 202, 326 self-government, 6, 14, 19, 22, 31, 38–39, 40, 42–43, 48–49, 52, 55, 78, 82, 123, 165, 175, 233, 302–303 Selvam, P., 71, 86, 92 Sepoy Mutiny, 13 Setalvad, C., 71 Shafi, M., 1, 52, 74 Shafis, 239, 249–253 Shah, K. T., 339 Shah, Sultan Mahomed, 26 Siddiq, M., 138 Simon Commission, 16, 105, 140, 194, 315 Simon, J., 14, 61, 136, 217 Simon Report, 14, 19, 45, 59, 101, 105–106, 173, 295 Singh, U., 27, 71, 79, 90, 92–93, 95, 107, 224, 235, 241, 325 Sinha, M., 38 Sladen, J. M., 141 Sluga, G., 258 social secretaries, 219 Sorabji, C., 294 Spectator (magazine), 182, 232, 265, 321 stationery, 170–171 stenographers, 12, 138, 153, 204 Steward, G. F., 140, 179 St James’s Palace, 130, 142–143, 160, 222 ‘blue-book’ proceedings, 173 Boudoir/King’s Retiring Room, 162 Earl of Cromer, 161 first floor of, 164 ground floor of, 163 Guard Rooms, 161

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Henry VIII, 159 Naval Conference, 161, 179 Pereira’s art historical interests, 165 Picture Gallery, 165 Queen Anne’s Drawing Room, 162, 165 ‘speech factory’, 173 Throne Room/Drawing Room, 162, 165 Stolte, C., 10, 342 Stoneman, W., 181 Stopford, R. J., 28, 49, 56, 61, 113, 136–137, 141, 175, 181, 226, 243–244, 324–326 subaltern, 11–12, 29, 246 attendees, 29, 336 diplomats, 141–148, 154, 169 geopolitics, 11, 338 Indian visitors, 195, 197 labour, 169, 213 Subaltern Studies Collective, 11, 132, 142 Suez Canal, 11 Sunday Dispatch, 122 Sunday Times, 321 Swarajist (self-rule) Party, 16, 43 Sydenham, Lord, 57, 60 Sylvester, C., 257–258 Tagore, R., 294 Tambe, S. B., 26 Tapestry Room, 143 Taraporevala, B. D., 172 technical or expert advisors, 115 Telegraph, 72 texts, 172–179 ‘the Cabinet wives’, 262

INDEX 

‘The Oval Table Conference’, 166 Thompson, J., 58 Times, 11, 57, 78, 94, 114, 195, 202, 327 Times of India, 59, 125, 126–127 Toole, F., 228 translators, 12 Travers, R., 293 Tudor, M., 159–160 typists, 12, 147, 151, 155 United India, 247, 328 United Provinces Liberal Association, 126 Veblen, T., 315 Veerasawmy’s India Restaurant, 206, 211, 215, 247, 251–253 Venkatarama Sastri, T. R., 326 Viceroy Hardinge, 55 Victoria and Albert Museum, 202 Vincent, F. A. M., 146, 194, 199, 203–206, 210–213, 215–217, 219, 251, 260, 306, 323 Visram, R., 227

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397

Wall Street Crash, 22 ‘War Conference’, Delhi, 334 War Office, 133 Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922), 139 Webb, B., 259 Weekend Review, 328 Westminster Friends Meeting House, 155 William Morris decorations, 163 Williams, E. M., 153–154 Williams, V., 221, 224 Willingdon, V., 109, 128, 318–319, 338 Women’s National Liberal Federation Ball, 261 Wood, C., 50 World Economic Conference (1927), 204 Wren, C., 163 Yasin, N., 249, 337 Yorkshire Post, 206, 280, 282 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 226–227

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FIGURE 1.4  Kelen’s depiction of the ‘Indian Round Table Conference 1930–31’ Source: Emery Kelen, BL/P1524, reproduced under Orphan License OWLS000291.

FIGURE 9.5  Mahatmaji by Emery Kelen Source: Indian Round Table Conference, 1930–1931; Derso and Kelen Collection, MC205, Public Policy Papers, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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