Round Table Conference Geographies : Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London

Explores the spaces and events of the interwar Round Table Conference which drafted the blueprint for colonial India's constitutional future. This geographical analysis explores the imaginations, infrastructures, urban spaces and contestations of the meeting.

Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India''s constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India''s future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference''s three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city, and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.