politics of urban space within imperial and international frames. He has analyzed these spaces and frames through drawing upon theoretical approaches from memory scholarship, postcolonialism, political theory and governmentality studies. He published the co-edited volume (with Deana Heath) South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings (2018). Some of his other publications are Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (2007), Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (2014) and the edited collection Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011).
Legg applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London, and reported the following:
This book fails the Page 99 Test but is on the cusp of it working brilliantly. Between the introduction and conclusion (both subtitled “Squaring Round Tables”) the book features four sections, each divided by a title page. Page 99 is one of these and features only the text “II CONFERENCE INFRASTRUCTURES”. Though low on content, this is the precise point of a gear change in the book. Section I (GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS) focuses on the weightier issues at the heart of the early-1930s conference that this book focuses on: what would India’s future place in the British Empire be? Would it be as a commonwealth dominion? How had the 1920s constitutional experiment with devolution played out? How would Muslim and Hindu religious communities be managed in any new constitution? Page 98 summarises the failure to overcome religious divisions at the conference and looks forward to the work that follows.Visit Stephen Legg's website.
From page 98:...‘Communal Award’, issued in 1932 (and discussed in Chapter 10). The conference method had failed.The rest of the book focuses, in contrast, on the conference as a lived space, and page 99 is the exact dividing line between the earlier and latter foci. The INFRASTRUCTURES are those of method (how the conference was organised), staff (who helped the delegates do their work) and place (how the Tudor Palace of St James was turned into a modern conference venue). Later sections look at London as a conference city, and how the Round Table Conference was represented. I examine why it is that the conference was unanimously branded a failure, despite it having such wide-ranging impacts. I argue that the conference was, effectively, sacrificed, so that actors from across the political spectrum could ditch their earlier commitments and move on. So, the conference failed but, in its own way, it worked. It therefore fits, I suppose, that page 99 both fulfils and frustrates Ford Madox Ford’s test.
This chapter has traced the arc of this failure, through opening informal conferencing to the formation of the committee. This formal body failed at the first and second sessions to produce concord, after which informal conferencing continued to work away at a compromise that many felt the conference had been designed to prevent. Informal meetings were a part of the broader conference throughout, as later examples of the delegates’ social centre (Chapter 7), dining and residing (Chapter 8), and domestic entertainments (Chapter 9) will illustrate. But the minorities question was the one most directed to informal politicking and with the least successful results. The account above has privileged the records of Moonje, due to his significance and his diligent diarising. This risks presenting a view of an over-communalised Indian delegation. But for a conference premised on discussion and concord, influential and intransigent delegates could and did cause major disruption. As such, the minorities question split the method, spaces and people of the conference. This had been predicted by many of those at the conference, but also by many beyond it. On 21 October 1931 Sapru’s Liberal Federation colleague D. G. Dalvi wrote to him from Bombay, capturing the despondency of the second session, but also the darting between formal and informal spaces:
The communities meet, discuss a little in the open meeting, sharp differences manifest themselves and then, they retire behind the pardah to adjust their differences. No question of importance is treated as finally solved. One aspect is handled, dropped awhile and another is taken in hand.
--Marshal Zeringue
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