Round Table Conference seating arrangement with photographs

Round Table Conference seating arrangement with photographs

This seating plan for the divisive ‘Minorities Committee’ shows how the divisions between Round Table delegates were mapped on to a conference table. The Committee had been established to deal with the ‘reservations and safeguards’ demanded by the British and Indian governments before constitutional progress could be agreed. This amounted to guaranteeing that religious and ethnic minorities would be protected, an insistence that many critics identified as classic imperial ‘divide and rule’. The orchestration of the committee table would have confirmed this interpretation. In the bottom-right sat British officials, while on the other side of the Chairman (the Prime Minster) sat Gandhi and his supporters. Hindu and Sikh delegates were on the left; labour, untouchable, Christian and women’s representatives at the top; and Muslim delegates to the right. This document comes from the papers of the Prime Minister’s Personal Secretary, FG Laithwaite, and suggests that the photographs were used to prepare him in advance for the dozens of delegates he would have to negotiate, and remember. In other sketches, Laithwaite drew lines of sight from the Prime Minister’s place on the table to the ordered list of speakers, such that he might introduce them without scouring the table for the correct name and face.

Mss Eur F138/13, reproduced with permission of the British Library