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.