Between the Many and the One: Anticolonial Federalism and Popular Sovereignty

Abstract

Recovering a marginal body of pluralist political thought from early twentieth-century India, this article explores how the question of popular sovereignty shaped the federalist reconfiguration of the anticolonial democratic project. The turn to federalism was facilitated by the Indian reckoning with Hegel in the late nineteenth century, which led to the diagnosis that the universality ascribed to monist sovereignty relies on a “unilinear” theory of development. Through a sustained engagement with British pluralist and American progressive thought, Indian federalist thinkers eventually developed a many-willed conception of the people. In so doing, they hoped to overcome the denial of Indian peoplehood on the ground of its lack of national unity and historical backwardness. However, the alternative source of sovereignty the federalists pointed to—plural and many-willed—stood in tension with their simultaneous pursuit of a people speaking in one voice. In this way, the constitutive tension of the pluralist conception of sovereignty came strikingly alive in the colonial world.

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

“…Finally, while South Asian intellectual history has glancingly touched on Darwinism, evolutionism, and organicism in the subcontinent's anticolonialisms, commentaries tend either to be somewhat episodic (Kapila 2007a;Klausen 2014;Sartori 2003) or to center their chauvinistic, racialized, or exclusionary uptake (Goswami 2004;Sultan 2021). By contrast, I've aimed here to read Darwinism and evolutionism as a semantic field for anticolonial articulations of social development, sovereignty, and self-rule.…”

“…Another strand of nationalists-Bipin Chandra Pal, Radhakamal Mukerjee, and C.S. Das-invoked a multilinear view of progress to undercut colonial historicism and advance federalist visions of Indian self-government (Sultan 2021). Drawing on Walter Rodney's critique of colonial underdevelopment, David Temin demonstrates the ways that "context-sensitive developmental theories could be of use for anticolonial politics in analyzing both structures of domination and strategies of resistance" (2022, 7).…”

“…Overall, then, organicism responded to the quandary of how to constitute the "people" as subjects of sovereign authority rather than objects of development (Sultan 2020). Without minimizing its problematic featuresnot least, the homogenization of Indian pluralismorganicism was plied into the "struggle to authorize swaraj in the name of the people" (82) by incarnating a cohesive body in which to invest political sovereignty.…”

“…Darwinism and evolutionism, I contend, grounded not only critiques of Eurocentrist chauvinisms, but also the (re)constructive ambitions of Indian nationalists. Finally, while South Asian intellectual history has episodically touched on Darwinism's traces in turn-of-century nationalisms (Dalton 1982;Kapila 2007a;Sartori 2003;Sultan 2021;Bayly 2011;Klausen 2014), it has not, to my knowledge, delved into the distinctive ways that evolutionist paradigms inflected subcontinental anticolonialism, as I endeavor to do here.…”

“…Second, the western focus occludes the array of non-western critiques, analyses, and responses to these exact dilemmas, by those subject to them. Indian anticolonialists developed rich theorizations of their political past, present, and future in navigating the paradoxes of anticolonial sovereignty (Sultan 2020) and envisioning political futures ranging from various federalisms (Mantena 2016;Sultan 2021;Parasher 2022), to autonomy within an imperial confederacy (Bayly 2011;Mantena 2016), to militant culturalisms (Chaturvedi 2022;Kapila 2021), to communist radicalism (Kaviraj 1986;Manjapra 2010). Each in its own way wrestled with the dilemma of developmentalism in conceptualizing India's progress beyond the limits of European modernity.…”