Scalar, Spectacular, and Subaltern Sovereignty: Colonial Autocracy, Democracy, and Interwar India

Abstract

This chapter opens by introducing three recurring characteristics of contemporary debates regarding sovereignty in colonial India. The first concerns scale, the way in which the sovereignty of the Government of India was positioned between that of the Indian village and the imperial capital in London. The second concerns spectacle, the accentuated role of the visual and of violence in the Raj. The third debate emerges from subaltern studies and regards the popular sovereignty of the Indian non-elite. These three types of sovereignty will be shown to have been renegotiated at the Round Table Conference which took place over three sittings in London between 1930 and 1932. A new federal hybrid of autocracy and democracy was devised, a new spectacle of interwar colonial sovereignty was manufactured, and vying claims were made to speak not only of but for Indian subalterns.