Dyarchy: Democracy, Autocracy and the Scalar Sovereignty of Interwar India

The 1919 Government of India Act instituted sweeping constitutional reforms that were inspired by the concept of dyarchy. This innovation in constitutional history devolved powers to the provinces and then divided these roles of government into reserved and transferred subjects, the latter of which would be administered by elected Indian ministers. Recent scholarship has been reassessing the local biopolitical potential unleashed by the 1919 Act. In this paper I revisit dyarchy at the national scale to show how this All-India revisioning of Indian sovereignty was actually negotiated in relation to its imperial and international outsides and the exigencies of retaining governmental control inside the provinces. This paper will propose a constitutional historical geography of dyarchy, focusing on three scales and the forms of comparison they allow. First, Lionel Curtiss political geometries and the international genealogies of his federalist aspirations are explored. Secondly, the partially democratic level of the province is shown to have been rigorously penetrated by, and categorically subordinated to, the central tier of colonial autocracy, which orchestrated a political geography of exclusion and exception. Finally, rival conceptions of time and sequentiality will be used to examine the basis for nationalist criticisms and exploitations of dyarchys reconfigurations of democracy, biopolitics, and the vital mass of the people.

elections Table1: devolution and division under dyarchy. 10 In this paper I would like to join the small but growing ranks of those arguing that it is time to reappraise dyarchy. This is not to argue for or against the efficiency with which it fulfilled its destiny of self-destruction, or facilitated the training of Indian bureaucrats in self-government. Rather, I would like to suggest that if we approach dyarchy with an eye to its scales of operation we can see it in a new light. Just as commentators saw at the time, dyarchy triangulated autocracy, bureaucracy and democracy in new and exciting ways. It presented the possibility of a government that was attuned to the affective demands of its peoples, and it presented opportunities for nationalist politics because (not in spite) of the imperial scalar sovereignty that it embodied. 11 After introducing some of the debates about dyarchy and how to write a constitutional history, this paper will propose a constitutional historical geography of dyarchy, focusing on three scales and the forms of comparison they allow. This will draw upon geographical debates about scale which suggest that we refuse to think of scales as natural, focusing on them rather as effects of specific networks and of the nominalist power of naming. 12 First, this paper will explore the vertical ontologies that structured dyarchy, through reading Lionel Curtis's political geometries and the international genealogies of his federalist aspirations. Secondly, the democratic level of the province, at which Indian ministers would debate and administer certain functions of government, will be shown to have been rigorously penetrated by, and categorically subordinated to, the central tier of colonial autocracy, which matched geographies of "backwardness" with exceptional "degrees of exclusion". Finally, rival conceptions of time-scale and sequentiality will be used to suggest that the imperial approach to constitutional reform was 'out of time '. 13 This was due to the autocratic inability to comprehend the nationalist reconfiguration of democracy, biopolitics, and the vital mass of the people. 14 In a 1928 text with which this paper will conclude, Shah and Bahadurji's earlier insistence on the affective and vitalist irrelevance of the colonial state was re-articulated, because political government: "…involves an appreciation of collective thoughts, social forces, political energies, and not of these alone, but also of vague moods and unvocal feelings which are always facts for politics and may, at any time, become facts in politics." 15

Approaching Dyarchy and Constitutional History
My use of a scalar analysis does not so much bring a new perspective to bear on dyarchy as both critically engages its inherent logic and disentangles it from a historiographical spat. The latter focuses on the "Cambridge School" and its analysis of the 1919 reforms in the explicitly scalar terms of Locality, Province and Nation. 16 A common, though not uniform, assertion in this literature was that nationalist politics depended not on regional uniformities of kith and kin but on the struggle for influence and political patronage that the scalar structure of dyarchy allowed: "In other words they were vertical alliances, not horizontal alliances." 17 One of the key figures in the group, Anil Seal, made two persuasive arguments about dyarchy: that Indian politics was an interconnected system working at several levels; and that the Government of India had much to do with linking those levels. 18 This, however, provided the platform for a series of suggestions which contributed to these writings being branded as a new imperial school of historiography. Regarding the "ramshackle coalitions" of nationalism, for instance, Seal suggested that: "Its unity seems a figment. Its power appears as hollow as that of the imperial authority it was supposedly challenging. Its history was the rivalry of Indian and Indian, its relationship with imperialism that of the mutual clinging of two unsteady men of straw." 19 This view was branded by the subaltern studies collective, in the early 1980s, as a re-articulation of colonial historiography, which could only view nationalism as responding to colonial structures and stimuli. In an early, wide ranging review of the Cambridge school, Gyanendra Pandey had suggested that Seal's use of scalar levels was practically meaningless as it failed to recognise the coconstitution of, for instance, the provincial level by that of the districts, the tehsils, Delhi or London. 20 The Cambridge scalar framework, in a point Pandey attributed to Ranajit Guha, excluded recognition of those groups beyond the Raj's all-India constitutional reforms. 21 Pandey insisted that the peasant did have an intellectual life, and asked whose history we should seek to write; effectively a clarion call for the subaltern studies collective he helped to establish. For its chief, Ranajit Guha, subaltern politics was an autonomous domain with its own forms of collective political action, beyond state structures or elite nationalists: "Mobilisation in the domain of elite politics was achieved vertically whereas in that of subaltern politics this was achieved horizontally". 22 The brilliant success of the subaltern studies school in shifting our attention to the non-elite, to politics beyond the state, and, later, to nationalism as discourse and practice, removed constitutional reform from many scholarly agendas. 23 While recent years have witnessed a turn to engaging with governmentality, sovereignty, state economy and urban politics, dyarchy remains under considered. 24 This may be because of a residual connection to the damned Cambridge school, or possibly an effect of the belief that the study of the "national" as a scale must reinforce either the colonial apparatus of the Raj, the subaltern-suppressing geographical imagination of an elite nationalism, or the empirical over-generalisations of imperial geography, history or anthropology. 25 This is not to say that dyarchy has been totally ignored. Earlier accounts situated it within longer administrative and governmental histories, its effects on taxation and financial responsibility, and the political economy of its time. 26 More recent approaches have tended to focus on transferred subjects and the way in which this created provincial possibilities for experimentation. 27 But these do not tackle dyarchy as constitutional reform. 28 To do this, we have to ask what constitutional history is, and how we might write it? By its chronologies? Or the places in which it was enforced or escaped? Do we imagine its international intellectual histories or its national and endogenous lives? Do we focus on the ways by which dyarchy increased the capacity of the government to tax, as part of a drive for financial responsibility? Do we accept its own disciplinary lens (of the juridical and the legislative) or can we examine it as lived and actualised governmental rationalities, or as a mentality within its own textual historiography? A governmentality methodology will frame the paper that follows, trying to think about the scalar effects of dyarchy in practice, after engaging with some of the huge literature that emerged around dyarchy at the time. If dyarchy has been forgotten from the 1980s onwards, it seemed to be upon everybody's minds in the 1920s. Then, as now, the question was: how does one investigate a constitution?
The 1919 Government of India Act had, in implementing dyarchy, provisioned for a commission into its effects ten years henceforth. Nationalist demands for reform had led to this enquiry starting a year earlier than planned, in the form of the catastrophically white Simon 'Indian Statutory Commission'. The seventeen volume report that followed exhaustively dissected dyarchy. In so doing it also faced the challenge of how to investigate a constitution. The Government of India's memorandum to the commission suggested that: "An account of the working of the system may be either a chapter of political history, an administrative record or a conspectus of constitutional life and progress." 29 The first two were said to exist and that the actual working of the constitution would not be outlined. The constitutional conspectus that was provided, however, consisted of four ascending assessments, of: the relations of the representative legislature to the executive; the influence of the legislature on the executive; the superintendence of the Government of India over provincial governments; and the obedience of the Government of India to the Secretary of State for India, via the United Kingdom Parliament. The form of investigating a constitution, for the government, directly mimicked the scalar structure of dyarchy itself; from the provinces, to the national capital, to the imperial capital.
Some Indian commentators agreed that it was impossible to tell the entire institutional history of a political system, but suggested that Acts of Parliament were only the "bare skeletons" into which the "breath of life" came from other sources. 30 Going beyond the government's constitutional conspectus, another thorough review of dyarchy in "theory and practice" insisted that it be reviewed in terms of the vitality of the people, insisting that constitutional history be written in terms of biopolitics as much as of sovereignty: "We have naturally to look to other things as well for forming a just estimate, and these are the economic condition of the people, their resources, their fighting strength against famines and the ravages caused by epidemics, as also their position in the sphere of education, the educational facilities open to them, and above all the share they enjoy in moulding and directing the policy of their Government." 31 These perspectives and their approaches to temporal scale will be returned to in the concluding section, having explored the colonial governmental, not just constitutional, rationalities at play within dyarchy. But it is clear that the perspectives above represent internal, national views on what was often viewed as an imperial, international question. 32 In Arthur Berriedale Keith's otherwise national-scale constitutional history of India, for instance, the final chapter was given over to the ramifications of "Dominion status" that India had been promised in 1919, as part of the dyarchy debates, and then denied. 33 At that stage "Dominion status" had meant little in India, but it had much greater significance for imperial federalists, to whose international networking dyarchy owed its origins.

International connections and vertical scale
Inspired, in part, by Britain's experiences in the Boer Wars (1880-81 and 1899-1902), calls for a radical overhaul of the Empire came to be passionately articulated by the "Round Table" campaigners. Many of these men had been educated at Oxford, worked with Lord Milner in South Africa, and were convinced of the need for British imperial world influence, which was felt to be a force for good and for peace. 34 The only solution they could envisage was an imperial federation: "… a Commonwealth of Nations each independent but committed to a transcendent form of British liberal, democratic government in which a constitutional monarchy would be retained." 35 Defence, foreign and colonial policies would be transferred from Westminster to a peripatetic imperial parliament, while internal government would be more fully devolved (a division that would resurface in dyarchy). For one of the key members of the Round Table, Lionel Curtis, this movement was the logical outcome of the move towards self-government in the Dominions (the white settler colonies of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). 36 India, however, presented a headache for the Round Table: "It occupied a half-way house between the settlement colonies, which enjoyed responsible government, and the dependencies, governed by British fiat, and deemed by London unlikely to progress towards autonomy in the near or distant future." 37 Yet its estimated contribution of 1200000 men to the 1914-18 war effort led to uncontainable Indian demands for political reward and steps towards self-government; as such the 1919 Government of India Act must be recognised as itself a relict and product of the World War. 38 In an attempt to address this imperial constitutional dilemma, Curtis visited India in 1916 and ended up staying for a year and a half, promoting his emerging plans for dyarchy to Sir Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India who had made an independent announcement on Indian dialogue in 1917 following united nationalist demands for increased self-government after the war. 39 The Montagu-Chelmsford report of 1918 differed from Curtis's dyarchy in many respects, but it enshrined his key proposals, which informed the British legislation that would have to be implemented by the Government of India. There were thoroughgoing geographies to Curtis's world view, which found their way through to governmental debates over the proposals. One was a networked geography of connections and international comparisons, the other was an epistemological grid which named the problem that India faced as one of vertical versus horizontal divisions of government.

Networking Indian constitutional reform 40
In her biography of Curtis, Deborah Lavin suggested that he had perfected public relations before the profession existed. 41 A vital part of this was his networking; his tireless campaigning to embed his ideas and ideals into the minds and practices of the key players in wartime constitutional problem-solving. 42 His global career and imperial federalist scope also created a second form of networking that brought international comparisons and components into his solutions to the Indian conundrum.
Curtis had suggested the idea of adapting imperial federalist structures to those internal to India and had convinced an ex-member of the Bengal Executive Council, Sir William Duke, to write a discussion paper applying the proposal to Bengal. 43 46 Though Montagu's dyarchy was not identical to Curtis's, his principles had doubtlessly established an influential framework. These principles emerged from Curtis's inherently comparative and global mind-set: "America with its population of one hundred millions transacts its business through no less than forty-nine governments, national and provincial; Germany with sixtyeight millions has over thirty such governments; Canada with eight million has nine; Australia with five millions has seven; and South Africa with six millions has five. The United Kingdom with its forty-five millions has but one, and that Government has also to control interests common to peoples including more than a quarter of the human race, who are scattered over the whole surface of the globe." 47 What was obvious from Curtis's principles and proposals was how closely he viewed India as part of an imperial, federal network. In introducing the Duke Memorandum of 1916 it was made clear that the Round Table group had developed an interest in Indian self-government only to the extent that it would be a pre-requisite of contributing to an Imperial Parliament. 48 Curtis's outward gaze discriminated between international takes on the national question, dismissing (Wilsonian) "selfdetermination" as a principle of political conduct lacking in the practicalities of application. 49 In his proposal of June 1917, in which he considered how India's national move towards dyarchy could be devised, Curtis appraised international political structures and contrasted their relations between central and local governments. Canadian central-provincial relations (dictated by successive British North America Acts) were said to be closer than those in Australia and the United States of America but not as close as in South Africa. The model that emerged from this comparison was that certain powers and revenues would be assigned to provincial governments which derived their authority from the electorates of each province, all other powers and revenues being reserved to central Government, who supplemented provincial revenues with grants. A summative metaphor was plucked from an even higher plane to describe the Canadian model and it was from these broader scales that Curtis's more abstract scalar imagining of the Indian problem of provincial selfgovernment and the nature of its solution emerged: "It is a solar system in which each body revolves on its own axis and travels in its own orbit, while the power which keeps them in due relation to each other and the central body is that of the constitution. The planets are each moved by an impetus of their own. They are not impelled by the sun, but by the power of the system in which they revolve." 50 Naming the problem: the vertical and the horizontal "In the first of these studies, the chain of authority was traced from the Imperial Cabinet in London to Delhi and Simla, thence to the capital of the province, to the city which forms the centre of the division, to the country town which forms the centre of the district, and finally, to the village which constitutes the typical unit of Indian society. But let it be realized that in all these cities and towns there dwells but one-tenth of the total population of India. The remaining nine-tenths live in purely rural surroundings, and draw their subsistence directly or indirectly from tillage of the soil." 51 From the solar system to a federal world, from imperial London to an Indian village, Curtis invoked the full nominalist power of place-naming and the scaling of politics to advance his cause. It was the scalar geography of Empire that Curtis identified as the problem to be tackled in devising dyarchy: "Wherever the imperial problem... is met, it may invariably be traced to some failure to separate local from imperial issues." 52 He turned his experience of the dominion problem to an analysis of the internal political geographies of India, and came up with a solution involving some ingenious political geometry. While abstract, Curtis insisted that this solution should not be separated from the realities of Indian life. He acknowledged that all Indian provinces were different, but suggested that they were all constructed on a "common plan", so carried out a detailed series of studies of the functioning of Sir James Meston's United Provinces (UP). As the quote above suggests, these studies linked the soil of India straight "up" to the Imperial Cabinet in Downing Street. His UP study provided further detail of its divisions into: 48 districts of a million souls each; each of these into subdivisions, which contained one or two tahsils, which were grouped around the town selected as the centre of the districts, "like the petals of a rose"; tahsils were divided into parganas supervised by kanugos, who supervised the patwaris who compiled data for land revenue assessment, including the villages: "Here at last we come to the natural unit of Indian society, the corpuscle made of human atoms, from which the body politic of India is composed." 53 In attempting to imagine how this complex reality might be politically reconfigured into a generalizable abstraction, Curtis claimed inspiration from "one of the ablest administrators in the country" who felt that the solution was to introduce reform on "horizontal" not "vertical" functional lines: "… it should not be beyond the wit of constitutional experts to frame a scheme of advance along the road of horizontal lines of increasing popular control over all the functions of government instead of vertical lines separating particular functions and without reaching a chasm that must be crossed in one bound." 54 For such an abstractly spatial programme it is surprising that Curtis did not help readers visualise his plan. Instead he adopted a militaristic metaphor for explaining his strategy for protecting imperial sovereignty within a system of colonial administrative reform. The army, he suggested, had both a military fighting corps and a technical corps, responsible for logistics and infrastructure: "These collateral services are divided, so to speak, from each other by vertical lines. Each separate service, however, is also divided into two principal grades by a horizontal line." 55 Vertical lines here separate functions which sit on the same level. Horizontal lines divide a level from that above or below it; in the army metaphor this would denote commissioned officers above, and the rank and file below.
The general staff of the army was drawn from both technical and regimental staff. For Curtis, this was how the central Government of India functioned; a tier above the diverse provinces, separated by a horizontal line. Some of these provinces (corps) would be subject to the direct control of Government of India (general staff), and this power had to be retained. What Curtis was suggesting was the importance of retaining ultimate political sovereignty by refusing a total devolution of power, 56 Table 2 The system would, instead, favour a horizontal transfer of responsibility, a right to left movement of vertical lines, increasing from local self-government (LSG) to weightier responsibilities and facilitating tutorship in the arts of government, as below: Table 3 The trick, however, was to combine the two movements such that certain subjects could be maintained for either imperial, executive control or local scale, administrative control, hence the reservation () or exclusion () of certain subjects for certain levels, and the negotiation of other subjects at certain scales (~): Table 4 Proposals by the Viceroy, inspired by Curtis and amended by the central government, were circulated to the existing provincial governments in 1918. As Robb has recounted in detail, the plans got thoroughly 'riddled' by the central government, but received even harsher treatment in the provinces. 58 The Governor of Bengal, for instance, ridiculed the rolling out of a governmental machinery that was "…without precedent in the history of the world." 59 In the face of near total condemnation from the provinces Chelmsford circulated a defensive memo in March 1919, cowritten with his executive council including Meston, insisting that Indians must learn to govern themselves. If the constitutional mould into which this progression flowed was distinctive rather than English, no one had a better suggestion than dyarchy: "It is a novelty in constitutions; and none of us can prophesy the manner of its growth." 60 However, it was claimed that there were universal tests of administrative machinery: its smoothness of friction in working; its burdensomeness on the people or the reverse; its educative value, and its capacity for further development. Dyarchy passed these practical tests, and also passed a series of additional theoretical tests, which were structured around the political geometry used by Curtis (although the vocabulary was rotated by 90 degrees; "horizontal" schemes now referred to wholesale transfers of power down a vertical hierarchy): "It is possible to take a particular group of functions and hand it over to the new authority; this we may call the vertical method of division. It is also possible to entrust the new authority with subordinate powers in all functions; this we may call the horizontal method of division… On exclusively theoretical considerations accordingly our conclusion is against the horizontal division of functions.

Autocratic Political Geographies
While the majority of contemporary discussions around the idea of dyarchy focused on the division of subjects and the theoretical and practical possibilities of dual tiers of government, undergirding the official response to the 1917 announcement was another concern: its re-triangulation of bureaucracy, democracy and autocracy. 63 Curtis suggested that Indian Civil Servants, contradicting their insistence on the "multifarious diversity of conditions in India", were obsessed with the idea of treating India as one uniformity: "This iron uniformity is the natural product of a highly centralized autocracy imposed on a vast country from without." 64 In addition to the racial and linguistic diversity of India, which orientalists and indologists had pored over for centuries, the reforms of dyarchy acknowledged and encouraged a social and political heterogeneity that confronted the government with a democratic material "beneath" it that it needed to control. 65 This would require an apparatus of scalar sovereignty that was networked (putting the central into the local) and nominalist (defining what the local was).

Networks of exclusion
While to imperial cartographers India appeared as one, to colonial cartographers a singular body of These exclusionary arguments regarding civilisation were combined with those of physical geography and up-scaled in the case of Assam, for which an argument was made concerning almost the entire province: "The justification for treating Assam in a special manner must be sought not so much in its area, which as we have mentioned is almost equal to that of Bengal, as in the very large proportion of this area which lies in the hills and is peopled by primitive tribes, and the consequent smallness of the area, with its correspondingly small population and revenues, which can be compared in the matter of general progress and advancement with the rural tracts of other provinces. The problem is also complicated by the cleavage, geographical as well as religious, social and political, between the two valleys which comprise the more advanced portion of the province. The Assam valley is mainly Hindu and animistic. In the Surma valley Muslims are also in a majority." 72 What we see emerging in post-war constitutional discourse is the much older "colonial geography" which had delineated the Himalayan hill lands (of supposedly primitive tribes) from the (supposedly more civilised and integrated) plains by an "inner line". 73 This had been formalised in the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873 and fed straight in to the dyarchy debates. That many of these uplands contained tea plantations in which workers were treated with abnormal violence, and whose voices were best kept silent, cannot have been far from the official mind in the crafting of these exclusions. 74 To reinforce the point a large map of the province was provided, marking out in "These tracts cover a wide area. They are very sparsely populated and their inhabitants belong to a variety of more or less savage tribes. The district is a mass of hill, ravine and cliff, covered with dense bamboo, tree and creeper jungle. It is a scheduled district and is also de-regulationized. Legislation is effected by Regulation and no inhabitants of the district at present have a vote in council elections. It is clearly a typically backward area which should be wholly excluded." 76 This was not, however, a representation accepted by all Darjeeling inhabitants. There was, actually, a substantial educated and vocal population who had petitioned Secretary of State Montagu in person on 7 th December 1917 during his tour, asking to be separated from Bengal under the reforms. 77 Roughly 90% of the people were said to be of the "Mongol family of nations", large numbers of whom (especially the Gurkhas) had supplied men during the War. The phrase was that of local Political Officer C.A. Bell, who concluded that "they are no more related to the Indians than are the Burmese" and many seemed to view the Bengal government as a lowland, alien coloniser of the hillsmen. 78 This was, in part, a result of colonial policy that encouraged Nepalese settling of Darjeeling so as to protect this area, treasured for its significance in terms of economic, political and health geographies, from the disruptive anti-colonial nationalism emerging in Bengal. 79 The petition had requested separation from Bengal and direct control from Delhi, with some degree of selfgovernment. Exclusion could here function as a means of liberation rather than abandonment, though the intricacies of this case would continue to unfurl in the coming years. learn that it has been proposed to grant the new Reform Scheme to them only partially and that they have been classed among backward tracts." 82 They objected that they were in no way inferior to any other community, requested the full application of the reforms, and insisted that their previous petition to Montagu "… was merely for the creation of a new hilly Province of their own but not for exclusions from the Reform Scheme." Similar sentiments were expressed by the loyalist Darjeeling Hillmen's Association in a letter to the Viceroy on 20 th February. 83 The hillsmen were, rather than backward, an "advanced tract", full of people as vigorous as any under the Government of India, with a higher than average literacy rate for the province, who were keen to contribute to the welfare of India and the British Empire. Against this British affinity, the hillsmen were said to differ from the people of Bengal in terms of geography, race, history, religion and language: "It is only the accident of the common British domination during the last few decades which has linked us together politically." Union with Bengal under the reforms would allow the "plainsmen" to swamp the hills while the hillsmen were said, for unexplained reasons of health, to be unable to work in the plains. 84 The Nadia District Association was even more explicit in a resolution from June that year. The exclusion of Darjeeling from the Reforms was a movement started by European planters, which they suggested was aiming to create an "Ulster in Bengal". This responded to a joint resolution by the Some recent studies have viewed mountains as areas in which imperial sovereignty struggled to ascend, or as places to which colonised populations could migrate to escape state reforms. 87 Yet in Darjeeling constitutional reforms were exacting in their exceptions and geography, while local residents fought to pull in reform, not to push it out. This is because the reforms were viewed to be democratic ones, bringing with them enfranchisement and voice, not just the capacities for tax, census, and surveillance. But embedded within the reforms was, both in the open and in secret, the nominalist power of autocracy which insisted upon its sovereign capacity to distinguish between, and name, the local and the central, the insignificant and the imperial.

Naming the local as imperial
"For the first time the principle of autocracy, which had not been wholly discarded in earlier forms, was definitely abandoned; the conception of the British Government as a benevolent despotism was finally renounced; and in its place was substituted that a guiding authority whose role it would be to assist the steps of India along the road that, in the fullness of time, would lead to complete Self-Government within the Empire." 88 In 1928 the Allahabad High Court Advocate Sir Kishen Mehra was still suggesting that, through dyarchy, the Government of India had abandoned autocracy and radically reconfigured its bureaucracy, the Indian Civil Service, around democracy. He added the rider to the statement above, however, that the government retained powers of supervision and, if necessary, intervention. The latter provided, for some, evidence that dyarchy was but a cloak for ongoing imperial autocratic sovereignty, while others argued that it's powers of supervision so structured dyarchy against effective democracy that it didn't merit the name. For such arguments, the devil is in the detail, only some demonstrative examples of which can be sketched below.
Within a few years of its application dyarchy had proven so controversial that an official investigation was established. 89 Its failure to adequately criticise the working of the 1919 Act led to a supplementary Minority Report of dispute. 90 The 1919 Act was here criticised for both its power to prevent certain subjects from being voted upon or discussed in either central or local chambers (the inbuilt, everyday powers of supervision, discussed below), and its exceptional powers, regarding: 91 1. Expenditure: "Special powers are reserved to the Governor-General enabling him to authorise in cases of emergency such expenditure as may, in his opinion, be necessary for the safety, tranquillity or interests of British India or any part thereof." 2. Ordinances: "The Governor-General has also the power, in cases of emergency, to pass ordinances for the leave and good government of British India to operate for a period of six months at a time." 3. Certification: "The Governor also has the power of preventing the introduction of any bill if he certified that the bill or part of it affects the safety or tranquillity of his province or any part of it or of another province, and upon such certification the proceedings are dropped." This report reflected (and no doubt stimulated) popular commentary against the working of dyarchy.
Attention was drawn not only to the embedding of autocracy within the system, but to the particularly verticalist and scalar powers of intervention that this autocracy wielded. Criticisms targeted, for instance: the ability to recall a devolved and transferred subject into a "reserved" subject if it was not dealt with satisfactorily; the total lack of responsibility in central government "But in practice it is very difficult to determine exactly where the just control of general principles ends, and the petty, vexatious, meddlesome interference in detail begins. It may quite conceivably happen that what is normally a detail, which had best be left to the local Government, might in exceptional circumstances, assume the dignity of a great principle… And yet it must be said that the history of the last century or so all over the world shows the struggles of imperialism-if one may so describe the centralising tendencies-against provincialism, resulting in the indisputable victory of the former." 94 Yet it was not just through occasional exceptional incidents of overrule or centralising victory over the local that dyarchy's democratic potential was undermined. The everyday, normal, structures of dyarchy had also fundamentally worked to undermine the spread of democratic praxis. The size of the official block (as opposed to the elected ministry) in provincial councils meant that elected ministers often had to rely on the official vote, leading to loss of support for elected members, who were deemed to have too quickly become government "lackeys". 95 The reservation of subjects at the provincial level provided the central government with a direct route in to provincial politics, hence undercutting the supposedly radical devolutionary powers of dyarchy. Government officials in the Indian Civil Service refused to cooperate with Indian ministers, while the division of subjects into reserved and transferred subjects was said to be unworkable, especially given the lack of a divided purse (ie split budgets, rather than official controlled budgets). 96 Even the Majority Reforms Enquiry Report agreed on this point: "The division of subjects into reserved and transferred subjects is of the very essence of dyarchy, and dyarchy must be held responsible for any failure in the working of the constitution which can be directly attributed to the administration of a transferred subject impinging upon the administration of a reserved subject or vice versa." 97 However, to judge Dyarchy on these terms would be to cede too much to a juridico-political view of government, and to circumscribe the "constitution" of India to an arm of the governmental apparatus. In one sense a narrative like that above does work to undercut the power of the colonial state, showing that it was continually at war within itself, that it was resisted even within its own Enquiries, and that public commentaries quickly picked up on the contradictions of the autocratic democracy on offer. But dyarchy was designed to fail in two senses. First, reserved subjects were designed to be transferred over time such that Dyarchy would consume itself (the 1935 Act is viewed by many as the realisation of this fate). 98 But the second was that the system was rigged so that democratic challenges to the still autocratic Government of India were unlikely (due to official weightings in the chambers) to succeed and could be easily overridden by the Executive should they emerge.
The central government thus bid its future in India on the stakes of reserved subjects. Tellingly, in official and un-official circles these came to be referred to as "law and order" subjects, while transferred subjects were referred to as those of "nation building". 99 The state's failure to grasp the significance of the latter in part explains its inability to grasp the vital material upon which the mass nationalist movements of the 1920s were based. In conclusion I will suggest that this was a failure to appreciate the scale of the local and the provincial, but also to appreciate the time-scale of democracy and biopolitics in interwar India.

Sequences and Scales of Democracy
The challenge throughout this paper has been to speak of the international, imperial and Indian Congress members did under the banner of the Swarajist Party, though they then also divided into "workers" and "wreckers" within the system. Some feared that the sight of powerless Indian ministers would undermine voter confidence in the system, breeding irresponsibility. 101 But in other senses participation in provincial assemblies formed the habits and conducts of adversarial politics: unpicking government budgets; stirring up public controversies; providing voices for religious and ethnic minorities; and even boycotting the bureaucracy of the state, which could be seen as an intense engagement with the politics of dyarchy, not its abandonment: "It was a conscious act of refusal which was, in itself, a determined expression of the will of the electorate." 102 Beyond the formally political, dyarchy also created financial and policy spaces for innovation and experimentation. The Minority Report drew attention to such efforts in Madras in terms of appointing village officers, proposing new universities, granting free school meals to poorer children while also calling for economy in other types of expenditure to fund these outlays. 103 Others drew attention to the social reform bills that the limited but popular mandate allowed provincial governments to pass, regarding sexual or religious reform, in ways that the central government could not contemplate due to the risk of political controversy. 104 These were the subjects of nation building. As the quote with which this paper opened suggested, the British may well have been able, in the 1920s, to provide better policemen, engineers, financiers, diplomats, lawyers or soldiers. But what of teachers, nurses, municipal committees, and community workers, "…which go to make good government as against efficient government, which help to uplift an entire people"? 105 The point was made at length and with great force by "Kerala Putra" a pseudonym for KM Pannikar.
Pannikar was an administrator and diplomat who also published political commentaries, popular histories, historical geographies, and studies in Malayalam literature, often focusing on constitutional reform and the Princely States. In his 1928 book on the workings of dyarchy he reflected upon nineteenth century India, when political government meant only "efficient administration", not the social life of the people or the "vague moods and unvocal feelings" mentioned at the start of this paper. 106 Politics had changed by the 1920s, he suggested, but the colonial state had completely failed to keep up: "People now clamour for social reform, that is the interference of the State in the customs and institutions of the people. Their complaint now is that the British Government does not lend its support to the efforts that are being made to re-order society. And this is but natural. So long as the State was merely a tax-collecting machine, ensuring peace and safety, freedom for the individual could not mean anything else… But the State has long ago ceased to be a mere tax-collecting machine. Modern life makes a superimposed state an impossibility. A state has to educate, legislate, and control a man in a hundred other ways… "With this changed conception of the functions of the State, comes the new idea of liberty as the right of men to order his own state, especially as it is an organisation which interferes in so much of his life. Liberty now is not freedom from state control but the right to control the state. This, as we have seen, arises from the growth of the functions of executive government. A state which does not educate, which does not enforce sanitation, fight diseases, regulate conditions of work &c., will not now be considered civilised. This enlargement of functions necessarily involved limitation of individual freedom and group autonomy. The Hindu can no longer be allowed to refuse being vaccinated, on the plea of religious scruples-because small-pox among one section involves danger to the life of others-than he can refuse to pay taxes." 107 Pannikar did not simply say that dyarchy had failed, though many commentators reached this conclusion. 108 Rather, Pannikar was suggesting that the British were out of time in India. This was not just a question of their time being up; rather, they were out of synch with the state, and the nation, that their constitutional reforms had helped take shape. The return view by many British saw Indian claims for democracy and self-government as out of sequence. In June 1917 Viceroy Chelmsford had insisted that the fault of the 1909 Morley Minto reforms was that they had skipped a whole stage of political evolution, and that this had to be undergone before further powers could be granted. 109 This was a question of democratic transition, but it was also a question of presumed functional links between different components of modernity. The Burmese, for instance, had initially been excluded from constitutional reform "…due to its people being in a separate stage of political development." 110 Capitalist industrialisation, urbanisation, secular politics, and reorganised family structures were all related components for increased democratisation. This was part of the "symmetrical" thinking that Sudipta Kaviraj has identified as a prevalent western view of modernisation. 111 While some elements might be introduced into a society earlier or later, they would, and must, eventually emerge to constitute a proper replication of European modernity.
The alternative view outlined by Kaviraj, and consistent with Pannikar's provincial reading of Europe, was that the sequence in which the components of modernity emerged was important. Different origins and conditions of development of the components of modernity meant that Indian democracy was emerging in radically different conditions and sequences to that of Britain. India was, in Pannikar's words, part of "modern life", in which it was already acknowledged that a "civilised" state had to go beyond tax collecting and policing to education, sanitation, disease control and labour protection. Yet the dyarchy model was bound to a progressivist conception of temporal evolution along the lines of western modernity and democracy, dictating that the reserved subjects of "law and order" (Pannikar's "efficient administration" of the 19 th century) had to be learnt before those of "nation building" (Pannikar's society-changing and interventionist state). The duration of this tutorship would depend upon the success with which the transferred subjects were administered. As the ex-Viceroy Lord Curzon dryly commented shortly before the Montagu reforms announcement of August 1917: "When the cabinet used the expression 'ultimate self-government' they probably contemplated an intervening period of 500 years." 112 But many Indians were building a nation, irrespective of their tutorship, within the constitutionally reformed framework of the colonial state. This nation was forming within an internal, private, traditional sovereign realm beyond the external, public, modernity of colonialism. 113 But it was also taking shape in the scalar domain of the province, at which politicians were crafting new forms of nationalist political engagement, whether between wrecking or working with the assemblies, or between financial austerity and social experimentation. If it was argued that the hill lands and jungles of India represented a past, unsuited to modern democracy and governmentality, then the province represented a possible Indian future. Here sovereignty would not be "reserved" to a political elite but would be, supposedly, "transferred" to the people via thoroughgoing provincial biopolitics. In practice, provincial reform plans were often frustrated by lack of finance or of partisan coalitions strong enough to get the plans actualised, both of which were logical and intentional outcomes of the embedding of autocracy within the putatively democratic frames of dyarchy.
As such, this paper has drawn attention to the politics of networks (Curtis's comparative constitutionalism and his networking, and the government's exclusionary provincial networks of democracy) and nominalism (naming the connections between London and the village, or of where is local or imperial) that exposed the non-naturalness of scale in British India. But Pannikar and Kaviraj also alert us to questions of time-scale and sequence, of disrupting the chronopolitics of western democracy, but this was in part done through re-articulating the spatial-scale of the province. 114 Following the 1935 Government of India Act the 1937 elections saw Congress come to dominate many provincial governments, reducing the experimental space of play in the name of a nationally coherent vision of a developmental state. 115 Although this system is and was referred to as "provincial autonomy" the central state retained its "vertical" connections to London, its various reserved subjects, its excluded areas, and its powers of intervention, representing a refined form of dyarchy that provided a vital genealogical link between post-war constitutional reform, post-colonial federation, and the politics of vague moods and unvocal feelings.  6 The Oxford English Dictionary lists "dyarchy" as an erroneous linguistic form for "diarchy", defined as "A government by two rulers. Also spec[ifically] the system of provincial government in India established by the Government of India Act of 1919". The system was also referred to variously as "dual" or "bicameral" government. A similar system of dual government had existed in early east India company Bengal, until 1773, with the British retaining supreme authority and the diwani administration managing day to day affairs, referred to by some retrospectively as the Bengal dyarchy (with thanks to Rohit De for this point).