THE QUESTION OF REPRESENTATION

In the previous chapter representation was approached as a question of sovereignty and of politics, of representing India in Britain and of representing dissenting views in the streets and pages of London. In this chapter representation is studied in two senses. The first is a literal re-presentation of the Round Table Conference (RTC). Its third and final session was smaller, shorter, had a much-curtailed conference method and took place not in the Palace of St James but in the Palace of Westminster.

The second sense is of that developed in art history, cultural studies, the new cultural geography and myriad other disciplines in the 1980s and 1990s. Here the interest is in the relationship between the signifier and the signified, how culture transmits signs which convey meaning and power (Duncan and Ley 1993). Postcolonial studies not only pioneered some of the most influential developments in the turn to representation but also reacted to criticisms of its elitism and detachment in the 2000s by engaging in the turn to studies of materiality and embodiment. While clearly inspired by emphases on material spaces and complex individual lives, this book also supports the recent case made for the ongoing centrality of representation to postcolonial studies and beyond (Jazeel 2019). As such, rather than telescoping in from the imperial scale of dominion to end on the micro scale of the body, this volume concludes with the vital significance of representation to how the RTC worked and how it is viewed. This brings us to the representation of the conference as a failure and several questions that arise from it.

First, what does it mean to fail? Colin Feltham (2014, 17) has explored some of the philosophical nuances of failure, which usually implies a breakdown, malfunctioning or underperformance of some kind. This does, however, suggest that the antecedent was working, or at least was a non-failure. This was emphatically not the case for the RTC. The Simon Commission had proved to be a disaster and Congress had vowed to disown its recommendations; after the Nehru Report, collaboration between the Muslim League and Congress had broken down; the princes were bridling at the potential outcomes of the Butler report; and Liberals were sensing that the British commitment to Dominion status was lapsing.

On 1 May 1930, Secretary of State for India Benn wrote a private latter to Viceroy Irwin, six months after the latter had announced that Indian representatives would be invited to a Round Table Conference (RTC) in London. In it he suggested that having set the conference date and the method of selection of personnel, it was time to turn to the difficult question of what the functions of the conference were supposed to be. As the quote above suggests, from the outset the conference promised to be a phantasmagorical technology, one that would successfully attract Indian delegates via the most limited of British commitments. It would be a machine whose design would protect the British from extending beyond both their desires and intentions. Benn suggested that his ‘happy mean’ would exist between two extremes visions of how the conference would function. At one pole was a virtual RTC that would merely examine and comment upon the Simon Report. An opposite virtual conference would be that of the Gandhi’s veteran supporter C. F. Andrews, whom Benn had met the day before, who suggested that the role of the British was simply to record the agreement reached by Indian delegates in London and to then pass these agreements through parliament. Benn suggested that the task for himself and Irwin was to pursue a conference ‘line’ between these poles, which would entice both Indian and British political opponents to the round table.

After a month’s work, Benn wrote to Irwin on 29 May regarding the conference’s terms of reference, suggesting that ‘I have no doubt at all that, fundamentally, this is the key of the situation, and if I had had any doubt, it would have been removed by the torrents of advice which I have been receiving on this point’.

A HOSPITABLE CITY?

The social city in which the Round Table Conference (RTC) was inaugurated in 1930 represented and reproduced the ambiguities and anxieties wracking the nation and the empire. The ‘roaring’ 1920s had seen the British Empire reach its zenith in terms of extent but had also fostered the anti-colonial sentiment that was calling it into question. As the consequences of the financial crash of 1929 played out across the country, unemployment mounted, finances were in crisis and, a month ahead of the RTC opening, unemployed demonstrators clashed with mounted police at the House of Commons, Hyde Park, High Holborn and Bow (see Figure 4.1). While London was still one of the world’s great social scenes, there were fears that it, too, was past its heyday. During the Naval Conference in the spring of 1930 the journalist and author Valentine Williams imagined how blasé London, as described above, would be viewed by visiting delegates and their staff. How would they square the Rolls Royces and jewels of the West End with beggars on the street and unemployment statistics in the newspapers?

This was part of a broader representational crisis facing 1930s London. Anna Cottrell (2018) suggests that novels and photographs of 1930s London played on the anxiety that its much vaunted cosmopolitanism was derivative, of France and America, and increasingly penetrated by synthetic middle-class spaces of leisure and recreation. Elitist commentators could dismiss as substitutes for real life the new, brightly lit streets of the West End, bounded by Bond Street, Oxford Street, Kingsway and the Strand. Yet in its mass entertainments, affordable eateries and shady spots for night-time escapades others saw nuanced negotiations of modernity in London’s ‘pleasure district’ (McWilliam 2020).

Having gotten to Britain, the delegates, advisors and secretaries set to their conference work. The following chapters will make it clear how much the conference depended upon the spaces and capabilities of London as a national and imperial capital. This chapter will focus on the conference’s direct infrastructure. It opens by considering the formal heart of the conference, St James’s Palace. Rather than take this site for granted, it will be shown to have been a composite of buildings, material infrastructures and objects (tables, but also toilets). As a working space it will be explored as an assemblage of architecture, furniture and office stationery but also of texts that thoroughly connected the palace to London and to the world. The relational construction of the conference palace was further enhanced by the role of communication infrastructures which turned it into a global site of imperial projection via the press, photography, telegrams, radio broadcasts and filming for national and global cinema screens. As such, while one form of conference mobility involved getting people to London and getting their messages out to the world, another facilitated the movement of people, objects and representations into, around and out of a Tudor palace in the district of St James’s (Figure 6.1).

THE PALACE

St James’s Palace was constructed in the 1530s for Henry VIII and figured in pivotal moments in British royal history (K. Scott 2010). In 1558 Mary Tudor signed the treaty there that surrendered Calais to the French; in 1588 Elizabeth I set out from St James’s to address her troops at Tilbury in the face of the Spanish Armada; while every monarch used it as a residence between the Palace of Whitehall fire of 1698 and Queen Victoria’s formal move to Buckingham Palace in 1837. From this time on, St James’s was used as an official residence for some royals, including the Prince of Wales. But it was also an increasingly open royal palace, being used for ceremonials and public audiences and having rooms made available for the meetings of charitable organisations in the twentieth century. In 1912 it hosted its first conference, which was organised by the Foreign Office concerning the end of conflict between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Balkan States (K. Scott 2010).

AN INHOSPITABLE CITY?

The breakout story of the first conference session was the acceptance of the principle of all-India federation by the princes. This had taken many by surprise, including the viceroy, who had been assured by the princes before they left for London that they opposed immediate moves towards federation. On 23 November, however, he wrote to his father of his surprise that the princes had become ‘the most earnest champions of speedy action in this direction’. He could only speculate that the princes were acting ‘apparently under some influence that is still rather obscure to me’. Similarly, in an undated note from the undersecretary of state for India’s files reflecting on the princes’ activities after arriving in London, it was suggested that their opinions were ‘in a process of evolution as a result of contact with one another, and with the British Indian delegates, and it would be a rush to prophecy how they may develop by the time the conference meets’.

On 14 November 1930, two days after the conference opened, Hailey had written to Irwin suggesting that the princes had ‘yielded to the general afflatus which prevails in London, owing to the deliberations of the Imperial Conference, followed by those of the Indian Conference, and have determined to take a much more definite hand in the proceedings than we could have expected’. For Hailey, London had an ‘afflatus’, some communication of almost divine knowledge or poetic inspiration. But where did it come from? In later discussions between Irwin, Round Table Conference (RTC) delegates and Gandhi in New Delhi, the latter gave his backing to the idea of a conference session in the Indian capital. Speaking on 21 March 1931, he suggested that ‘by its sittings the Conference will both affect its surrounding atmosphere and be affected by it’.

This RTC afflatus, or atmosphere, had many components (Legg 2020b). It was constituted by the sense of a free conference, by the dozens of expert delegates and staff who made the conference work and by the splendour and efficiency of St James’s Palace. But it was also, to a large degree, a product of the conference taking place in the imperial and national capital.

So, what happened at the Round Table Conference (RTC)? The answer to that question depends upon our assumptions about how interwar diplomatic politics functioned and about how much of that functioning was recorded. One model, premised on the machinations of grand and petty sovereigns, would use the archive to unveil an overarching, ideological strategy. Being a secret strategy, its archive would necessarily be dispersed and fragmented. We have read, for instance, of the master of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, indiscreetly sharing Sankey’s admission that Hailey was feeding him positions to take to the Federal Structure Committee. Benthall likewise confided to his diary that Hailey and his Government of India advisors had come to the conference with a complete scheme devised and fed it to Sankey and others. This hints at a strategy being played at the conference, but was the conference itself a rigged host? We have seen that it functioned as an unfree, unequal but effective space, yet can we evidence a self-conscious and pre-figured scheme on these lines? Some documents could be read in that light.

Sir Claude H. Hill had joined the Indian Civil Service in 1887 and rose to appointment in the Viceroy’s Executive Council. In the spring of 1918, he helped organise the Delhi ‘War Conference’ with leading Indian politicians, including Gandhi. After retiring in 1921 he returned home and later became the lieutenant governor of the Isle of Man. From this position he wrote to MacDonald on 11 August 1930, two months before the RTC opened, claiming that down to his experience in 1918 ‘I doubt anyone else has had a similar opportunity of studying the psychology of a heterogeneous gathering of the Indian intelligentsia’. He encouraged an opening discussion with a pre-set agenda, suggesting that ‘many of the speeches will be extreme, and foolish; and probably wholly unconstructive. They will, however, be mutually destructive in so far as they are impracticable. But it is of real importance that a full opportunity be given for their utterance’. The British heads of committee should be sure of the outcomes they wanted before their work began as ‘it is almost certain that, if complete freedom of discussion in sub-Committee is allowed, the different interests represented will find that their different aspirations and demands [are] incompatible with an agreed scheme’.