The Crisis of Nationalism: Round Table Conference, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Possibility of an All-India Federation

Presenter:

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Abstract

This paper is a close-reading of the archive around the Round Table Conference (1930-32), the first all-India conference held in London to debate the constitutional future of India, in which representatives of both Indias—princely states and British provinces—sat together for the first time. The RTC, which took place in a moment of profound churning in domestic and global politics, marked the formal inauguration of the Indian federal project under the aegis of Indian princes, minorities, liberals, and other “non-national” groups. This paper reads the RTC archive along with more recent theoretical works on constitutional patriotism, political emotions, and intellectual history to show that “common patriotism” rather than nationalism was the common ground on which India’s federal future was conceived and debated. In so doing, the paper introduces constitutional patriotism as a political category and builds its co-constitutive relationship with the rise of federalist ideas in interwar India.