Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 30 Russell Square
Birkbeck, 30 Russell Square, room 101
Birkbeck’s Centre for the Study of Internationalism welcomes you to a panel discussion about Stephen Legg’s new book, Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London. The book studies 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.
Our panel of experts will explore Legg’s argument that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. The discussion will examine arguments about the spatial politics of the conference, and revisit the question posed in the book, about who gained through the representation of the conference as a failure.
Discussants: Rohit De (Department of History, Yale), Ornit Shani (Department of Asian Studies, Haifa), Tripurdaman Singh (Institute of Commonwealth, London), Stephen Legg (Department of Geography, Nottingham), chaired by Jessica Reinisch (Director of the Centre for the Study of Internationalism, Birkbeck)
Contact name:
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology