ABSTRACT

This chapter suggests that the new impetus provided to provincial administrative arenas under the constitutional reforms of the interwar period meant that considerations of community and number were perhaps even more important at the provincial level. It provides a number of significant insights into why the advent of liberal democracy in India, framed around the individual rights-bearing citizen, failed to eradicate, and in many cases entrenched in new ways, the importance of community for citizens' interactions with the state. Maharashtra's non-Brahmans joined the provincial Congress Party in increased numbers during the 1930s, notwithstanding its past association with Brahman elites. The chapter reveals the increasing significance of number, within a system of government that was gradually democratising, allowed the Marathas to abandon their demands for separate electorates during the interwar period, in favour of the creation of a separate province for Marathi speakers. Consequently, the significance of community and number came to be linked to control over administrative territory.