Between the Many and the One: Anticolonial Federalism and Popular Sovereignty

• Published date: 01 April 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211018534
• Author: Nazmul S. Sultan
• Date: 01 April 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211018534

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(2) 247 –274

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211018534

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Article

Between the Many and

the One: Anticolonial

Federalism and Popular

Sovereignty

Nazmul S. Sultan1

Abstract

Recovering a marginal body of pluralist political thought from early twentieth-

century India, this article explores how the question of popular sovereignty

shaped the federalist reconfiguration of the anticolonial democratic

project. The turn to federalism was facilitated by the Indian reckoning with

Hegel in the late nineteenth century, which led to the diagnosis that the

universality ascribed to monist sovereignty relies on a “unilinear” theory

of development. Through a sustained engagement with British pluralist

and American progressive thought, Indian federalist thinkers eventually

developed a many-willed conception of the people. In so doing, they hoped

to overcome the denial of Indian peoplehood on the ground of its lack of

national unity and historical backwardness. However, the alternative source

of sovereignty the federalists pointed to—plural and many-willed—stood in

tension with their simultaneous pursuit of a people speaking in one voice. In

this way, the constitutive tension of the pluralist conception of sovereignty

came strikingly alive in the colonial world.

Keywords

Anticolonial political thought, federalism, popular sovereignty, pluralism,

developmentalism

1Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Corresponding Author:

Nazmul S. Sultan, Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, St. Andrews Street, Cambridge,

CB2 3BU, UK.

Email: ns837@cam.ac.uk

1018534PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211018534Political TheorySultan

research-article2021

248 Political Theory 50(2)

Introduction

For most of the nineteenth century, Indian political thinkers took representa-

tive government to be the professed goal of their political movement (Bayly

2012, 161-187; Mantena 2016, 301–308). While there was plenty of discon-

tent concerning the imperial present, the institutional framework of parlia-

mentary representation, grounded in the principle of popular sovereignty,

appeared to be a relatively stable set of ideals for the still-distant postcolonial

future. This vision of the postcolonial future faced an ambitious challenge

from a group of federalist political thinkers in the first quarter of the twentieth

century. Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968), a leading figure in the turn to

pluralist federalism, observed that the form of representative democracy that

became consolidated in nineteenth-century Europe took the centralized and

unitarian state to be synonymous with popular sovereignty. Echoing his con-

temporary European pluralists, Mukerjee (1923, 11) characterized this cen-

tralized form of sovereignty as monist. Yet, with an emphasis distinct from

his European counterparts, Mukerjee also located the source of the expan-

sionist drive of modern European empires in the logic of monist sovereignty

(1923, 65–67; see also Mukerjee 1922b). Specifically, he suggested that the

projection of representative government and centralized statehood as the ulti-

mate goal of all non-European political developments had been crucial to the

nineteenth-century legitimation of imperial rule. This constituted the broader

anticolonial stake of the critique of monist sovereignty.

For Mukerjee and his colleagues, it was time for anticolonial politics to

simultaneously turn to a “multilinear” theory of historical development and

to a many-willed conception of popular sovereignty. They found the germs of

a pluralist theory of popular sovereignty in the history of village republics in

Asia. Only a federal arrangement, they argued, could accommodate a democ-

racy of many peoples. Their vision was also radically different from the mod-

ern centralized federalism associated with the American founding (on

centralized federalism and its American origins, see Riker 1987). Nor did

they merely aspire to institute a decentralized form of federalism among self-

governing states. The Indian federalists sought to ground sovereignty on the

small scale of village republics, which would then be brought together in a

loose federalist association. As a marker of multilinear developmental trajec-

tories, the federation of village republics, they hoped, would be a testament

to the possibility that the historical trajectory of Europe need not be repeated

in the anticolonial pursuit of popular sovereignty (Mukerjee 1923, 116).

Though Indian pluralist thought developed in critical dialogue with

European—especially British—pluralism, its origin lay in Mukerjee’s

mentor, B. N. Seal’s (1864–1938) arresting critique of Hegel in the late