SUMMARY:

The article examines the concept and meaning of federation in late colonial India broadly and anticolonial nationalism’s engagement with federation. Was federation a break with the past or continuity with empire? The author argues that the emergence of political movements within the princely state of Hyderabad were antimonarchical and threatened the integrity of the Hyderabad state. She examines how, in the interwar period, a dynamic anticolonial nationalist movement led by Nehru and Gandhi confronted and negotiated with what they clearly saw as alternative political imaginaries arising from uneven forms of rule instituted by British colonial rule – imaginaries that had to be disciplined by the Indian National Congress’s own version of a sophisticated anticolonial nationalism. The prospects of federation were compromised by the reluctance of hundreds of princely states to give up their sovereignty. It became clear that the federation proposals from the princes and their administrators did not harbor emancipatory politics, and hence the state’s people’s movements supported an alternative political scenario. This was a vision of a federated Indian union that prioritized the extension of citizenship rights to Hyderabad’s peoples and the building up of institutions for a robust representative government over securing a sovereign political status of Hyderabad.