Dewan Chaman Lall: From Trade Unions to the Indian Union, 1946–1966
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230231203771 |
| Author | Rakesh Ankit |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
Dewan Chaman Lall: From
Trade Unions to the Indian
Union, 1946–1966
Rakesh Ankit1
Abstract
This article is about the afterlife of Dewan Chaman Lall’s interwar internationalism. Exploring the trajec-
tory of his public career from 1946, it shows how Lall, an Oxford-educated trade unionist, and an ally
of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, took a nationalist turn in his later political interven-
tions on/after (a) Partition of British India, (b) the dispute on the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir,
and (c) on the government of India’s worsening border relations with the People’s Republic of China.
Simultaneously, his understandings on issues like press freedom/official secrets, evacuee property
exchange/sale, Sikh linguistic autonomy and labour/capital equation turned status quo-ist. By putting
together his contributions on these national questions and juxtaposing them vis-à-vis his earlier avatar,
this article also signifies the shift that took place in the perspectives of those who, like Lall, hitherto
enveloped by empire, emerged in nation-statehood post-1945.
Keywords
Dewan Chaman Lall, Jawaharlal Nehru, British India, trade union, partition politics
Introduction
Dewan Chaman Lall (1892–1973), poet-legislator, and trade unionist in late-colonial India, was a diplo-
mat, and state interlocutor in independent India. This latter period of his public life throws up interesting
vignettes of the passage from society to state for, arguably, an entire political generation of the interwar
(1919–1939) years. It is this transition from pursuing a simpler anti-imperial impulse to personifying
complex national interests, which is under focus in this tracing of Chaman Lall’s public life post-1945
that connects its general themes and particular experiences by using the mode of ‘life history’. These
stand apart from both those like Minoo Masani (1905–1998), who was a communist in 1931, a Congress
Socialist in 1934, Indian ambassador to Brazil in 1948–1949, and a liberal by 1959 (Shah, 2001,
pp. 1–32), and Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–1979), who remained an internationalist social-democrat
throughout, whether inside/outside of party-politics (Prasad & Prasad, 2021).
Original Article
Studies in Indian Politics
11(2) 192–204, 2023
© 2023 The Author(s)
Article reuse guidelines:
in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india
DOI: 10.1177/23210230231203771
journals.sagepub.com/home/inp
1 Loughborough University, Loughborough, England, UK
Corresponding author:
Rakesh Ankit, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, England, United Kingdom.
E-mail: rakeshankit@outlook.com
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