Dyarchy: democracy, autocracy and the scalar sovereignty of interwar India

The 1919 Government of India Act instituted sweeping constitutional reforms that were inspired by the concept of “dyarchy”. This innovation in constitutional history devolved powers to the provinces and then divided these roles of government into reserved and transferred subjects, the latter of which would be administered by elected Indian ministers. Recent scholarship has been reassessing the local biopolitical potential unleashed by the 1919 Act. In this paper I revisit dyarchy at the national scale to show how this “All-India” re-visioning of Indian sovereignty was actually negotiated in relation to its imperial and international outsides and the exigencies of retaining governmental control inside the provinces. This paper will propose a constitutional historical geography of dyarchy, focusing on three scales and the forms of comparison they allow. First, Lionel Curtis’s political geometries and the international genealogies of his federalist aspirations are explored. Secondly, the partially democratic level of the province is shown to have been rigorously penetrated by, and categorically subordinated to, the central tier of colonial autocracy, which orchestrated a political geography of exclusion and exception. Finally, rival conceptions of time and sequentiality will be used to examine the basis for nationalist criticisms and exploitations of dyarchy’s reconfigurations of democracy, biopolitics, and the vital mass of the people

This is not a pipeline

Review of: Andrew Barry (2013) Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Wiley-Blackwell: Londo

An international anomaly? Sovereignty, the League of Nations, and India's princely geographies

This paper examines India's experiences as the only non-self-governing member of the League of Nations as a means of addressing the broader question: where was the international? As the only non-self-governing member of the League, India's new international status exposed both its external, more imperial, as well as its internal, more colonial, anomalies. This paper examines, first, the Indian anomaly from the ‘inside out’, looking at India's representation and silencing at Geneva, and how Indian commentators assessed India's external status in the League. Secondly, it considers the Indian anomaly from the ‘outside in’, by exploring colonial tensions that the internationalism of the League provoked relating to India's internal political geography. The League posed taxing questions about the Government of India's decision to exclude international law from the spaces between British and Princely India, examined here through the example of trafficking in women and children. In exploring India's anomalous situation two broader approaches are deployed. The first is a scalar methodology, which shows how the concepts of the national and international operated at various scales, with India's burgeoning sense of nationhood taking one of its many shapes in the international sphere, while the internationalism of the League seeped into the national fissures between British and Princely India. Secondly, the paper approaches these questions through the lens of sovereignty. Moving beyond associations with the juridical and the territorial, it explores sovereignty as: representational (diplomacy); governmental (administration), theoretical (political philosophy), political (anti-colonialism), territorial (political geography) and contractual (international law)

Decolonialism

This piece opens with some reflections on the geographies of postcolonial scholarship and encourages us to trace out colonial durations in our lives and in the provocations we face. Two examples are given, from the International Conference of Critical Geographers and the Nottingham Citizens’ Hate Crime Commission, before reflecting on ‘decolonialism’ might mean for geography

Global governance and place making: India, internationalism and empire in 1930s London

In this paper I argue that two core components of contemporary British human geography curricula (global governance and place making) can and should be taught together. I also argue that materials from the past provide valuable teaching tools in the present. As such, this paper also makes the case for historical geography. It does this through examining historical phases of what is now called globalisation. It introduces geographical perspectives on imperialism and internationalism, two variants of interwar, modern globalisation. It introduces India as a key site in British history, but argues that we can understand large scale processes like globalisation through small sites of place-making, such as international conferences. The Round Table Conference of 1930-32, during which Indian leaders came to London, is presented as an example of a space and time in which place-making and global governance came together