Sovereignty, Federation, and Constituent Power in Interwar India, ca. 1917–39

Federation, writes Frederick Cooper, was a potential "route out of empire."¹ Cooper's account of French West African leaders' efforts to transform the French Empire into a federation demonstrates that the territorial nation-state was not the inevitable telos of empire. The French Union was inspired by the ideal that colonial subjects could become citizens, and that a hierarchical empire could be refashioned into a democratic federation. For Cooper, and others such as Gary Wilder, federal and nonnational imaginaries offered the potential for cosmopolitan and emancipatory futures that transcended narrow nationalist frameworks.² The French Union was one of many projects of federation attempted within European overseas empires between the end of the First World War and the mid-1960s.³ Each pushed imperial constitutionalism into uncharted and consequential directions. In the British Empire, interwar efforts to create an all-India federation were followed by postwar federations in Malaysia, Central Africa, East Africa, the West Indies, and South Arabia.⁴ For the British and for many of their colonial subjects, federation offered a flexible and capacious framework for reforming the variegated sovereign landscapes of empire, and for imagining a wide array of political futures within and beyond empire. This article takes Cooper and Wilder as provocations to revisit ideas of sovereignty and federation in interwar India, and, in particular, to think about the ways in which federal and nonnational projects informed the development of Indian republicanism.

The closest analogy to the French Union was the British Commonwealth of Nations, imagined as a global community of free and equal states united under the aegis of the British Crown. The Commonwealth, although only sparsely codified after the First World War, was a legacy of nineteenth-century visions of transforming the British Empire into a global federation.⁵ In the case of India and Pakistan, equality within the Commonwealth came only after, and because of, national independence.⁶ For nearly three decades prior to 1947, however, federation was the dominant and most plausible model for reforming Britain's sprawling Indian Empire. An Indian federation was, ultimately, the alternative to a partitioned India. Federalism provided for Indians and the British alike a common language for elaborating questions of rights, democracy, and sovereignty.⁷ Political imaginaries in interwar India, Manu Goswami reminds us, were often nonnational and internationalist in orientation, what she aptly calls "an open-ended constellation of contending political futures."⁸ Ideas of federation were particularly open to appropriation by Indians across the political spectrum, offering at times radical future-oriented breaks and, at others, an entrenchment of a conservative status quo.

This article focuses on official projects of federation in interwar India and, in particular, the central role played by ideas of sovereign kingship in the federal plans put forth by the British. These efforts culminated with the "Federation of India" envisioned by the 1935 Government of India Act. Federation sought to codify the Raj's uncodified, plural, and ambiguous imperial regime of sovereignty. As a result, the nearly six hundred "princely" or Indian States had a highly consequential influence over the course of India's constitutional development. "These minor states—sovereign but subordinated," writes Eric Beverley, "occupied a vast legal gray area in which they were neither colonial territories nor full-fledged states with complete self-determination."⁹ The central problem for official, and many nonofficial, plans of federation was bringing the "two Indias"—the British Indian provinces and the Indian States—into a shared and written constitutional arrangement. Karuna Mantena has recently argued that if anticolonial nationalism ultimately departed from federal futures based on the imperial form and ideal, "nowhere was this reversal felt more sharply than in relation to the fate of India's princely state system and the aborted attempt to build an all-India federation upon it."¹⁰ The roots of Indian federation in the princely-state system, Mantena notes, has been "rarely remarked upon."¹¹ This article seeks to make up for this lacuna.

Official projects of federation aimed to entrench and institutionalize dynastic kingship in the Indian States, develop responsible government in more autonomous British Indian provinces...