The Indian constitution was poised to create a new map of power, transforming the relationship between existing state agencies and new authorities. This chapter demonstrates how the individuals staffing the state apparatus were not mere spectators, passively following the constitution-making process, but actors who actively sought to influence, change, or resist the emerging constitutional order through both public and private channels. The success of the future constitution of India required a smooth transition of the organs of the colonial state to the postcolonial order. Turning their loyalty and ambitions to the new state and its constitutional order was not an obvious outcome in 1947. The chapter examines how provincial legislators sought to guard their autonomy; how the higher judiciary endeavoured to protect their judicial independence; the contested constitutional status of Delhi; and finally, how the ‘neutral’ bureaucracy who were managing the process of constitution making actively sought to defend their own jurisdiction and interests at the time. This process, which paralleled the integration of territories, led to the functional integration of the units of the state.

The book concludes by examining reformers’ visions for political integration between metropole and colony, which required both the Indianization of the exclusive Indian Civil Service and parliamentary representation for taxed Indian subjects. These proposals, however, generated conflict within the East India Association and exposed fractures between the radical agitators and the retired officials who had begun to swamp the organization. Gesturing to the afterlife of India reformism, the epilogue further identifies the factors that led to the decay of East India Association’s intra-imperial network and offers a reexamination of the 1908 sedition trial of Indian nationalist B. G. Tilak in which the accused copiously referenced reformist polemic to legitimize his agitation.

The book concludes by examining reformers’ visions for political integration between metropole and colony, which required both the Indianization of the exclusive Indian Civil Service and parliamentary representation for taxed Indian subjects. These proposals, however, generated conflict within the East India Association and exposed fractures between the radical agitators and the retired officials who had begun to swamp the organization. Gesturing to the afterlife of India reformism, the epilogue further identifies the factors that led to the decay of East India Association’s intra-imperial network and offers a reexamination of the 1908 sedition trial of Indian nationalist B. G. Tilak in which the accused copiously referenced reformist polemic to legitimize his agitation.