Political lives at sea: working and socialising to and from the India Round Table Conference in London, 1930–1932

Abstract

This paper presents new ways of thinking about both the spatial relationality of a political event, and a mobile perspective on interwar imperialism, anti-colonialism and Indian nationalism. Between 1930 and 1932 over one hundred delegates from India visited London to participate in the three sessions of the Round Table Conference, which determined India’s constitutional future within the British Empire. This conference informally began, and continued, at sea, during the two to three week journey between India and Britain. The steamships that the delegates travelled in are portrayed here as places of work, drawing especially on the diaries of the Hindu nationalist Dr B.S. Moonje, but also of social observation and tension, illustrated through the coverage of M.K. Gandhi’s spiritual journey. Through these seaborne political lives the conference itself was anticipated and digested across the watery expanses between Europe and India.