Race, Sovereignty, and the Lineages of Federalism in South Asia, 1900-1950

Abstract

The age of national self-determination, which conventionally establishes the system of post-imperial nation-states, begins with the founding of the League of Nations after the First World War. The development of responsible government in British India in 1919 — particularly the principle of “dyarchy” or dual government run in the provinces jointly by Indians and the British — is thought to be a progressive, if inadequate, measure in this era of self-determination. But it has not been noticed that the same imperial officials who formulated dyarchy had previously segregated and disenfranchised non-whites in South Africa. This dissertation maps the hitherto unnoticed connections between race, sovereignty, and structures of federalism in British India. I show that imperial administrators like Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr– who racially segregated the city of Johannesburg and later formed the “Round Table” group – devised the “federal” structure of British India from 1919 to 1935, keeping financial and military power in white hands while transferring the burden of administration to Indians in provincial administrations. At the same time, I analyze how anticolonial federalist politics—expressed in vernacular pamphlets, cartoons, and literary and artistic works— challenged this racial logic of governance and developed competing models of sharing sovereignty across cultural differences. These two lineages of federalism, racial-imperial and anticolonial, I argue, continued after decolonization, transforming a colonial relation of racial inequity to a post-colonial relationship of constitutional inequity between the center and the provinces. The structure of federalism in colonial India, put bluntly, was a story of whites ruling the center and Indians ruling the provinces: a system that I call “racialized devolution.” Arguing against the conventional view of Indian federalism as merely “asymmetric” or “scalar” sovereignty, I uncover how segregationist practices were reworked to thwart the power of Indian provinces. The first half of this dissertation, focussing on the period between 1900 and 1930, maps the imperial and anticolonial lineages of federalism in South Asia. In the first three chapters, I examine the role of the color line in colonial India; the connected making of racialized devolution in South Africa and British India; and the anticolonial challenge to dyarchy by Indian leaders, especially Chitta Ranjan Das in Bengal. The second half of the dissertation analyzes various fields of federal relations between 1930 and 1950: racial capitalism and the making of federal finance in the aftermath of the Great Depression, focussing on the role of central bankers like Henry Strakosch and Otto Niemeyer; the question of provincial sovereignty, especially in relation to the princely states, in the Government of India Act of 1935; and the perpetuation of inequity between the center and the states in the 1950 constitution of India. In connecting racial segregation in South Africa with federalism in colonial India, my work charts out a new history of political exclusion in modern South Asia. Historians of South Asia have not noticed the relations of racialized devolution encoded in the federal structures of the world’s largest democracy, while global histories of race and federation have mostly left India out of their accounts. By analyzing hitherto-unexplored archives of private papers, institutional records, and vernacular archives of anticolonialism, my project places racial inequity at the center of the debate over space, sovereignty and federalism in colonial and post-colonial South Asia.