The Central Legislative Assembly was the

lower house A lower house is the lower chamber of a bicameral legislature, where the other chamber is the upper house. Although styled as "below" the upper house, in many legislatures worldwide, the lower house has come to wield more power or otherwise e ...

of the Indian Legislature, the legislature of

British India The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance in South Asia. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one form or another ...

. It was created by the Government of India Act 1919, implementing the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms. It was also sometimes called the Indian Legislative Assembly and the Imperial Legislative Assembly. The

Council of State A council of state is a governmental body in a country, or a subdivision of a country, with a function that varies by jurisdiction. It may be the formal name for the cabinet or it may refer to a non-executive advisory body associated with a head ...

was the upper house of the legislature for India. As a result of Indian independence, the Legislative Assembly was dissolved on 14 August 1947 and its place taken by the Constituent Assembly of India and the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan including East Bengal (modern-day

Bangladesh Bangladesh, officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, eighth-most populous country in the world and among the List of countries and dependencies by ...

Composition

The new Assembly was the lower house of a bicameral

parliament In modern politics and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government. Generally, a modern parliament has three functions: Representation (politics), representing the Election#Suffrage, electorate, making laws, and overseeing ...

, with a new

as the upper house, reviewing legislation passed by the Assembly. However, both its powers and its electorate were limited. The Assembly had 145 members who were either nominated or indirectly elected from the provinces. The Legislative Assembly had no members from the princely states, as they were not part of British India. On 23 December 1919, when King-Emperor George V gave royal assent to the Government of India Act 1919, he also made a proclamation which created the Chamber of Princes, to provide a forum for the states to use to debate national questions and make their collective views known to the Government of India.

Nominated members

The nominated members were officials or non-officials and nominated by the Government of India and the provinces.

Officials

There were a total of 26 nominated officials out of which 14 were nominated by the Government of India from the Viceroy's Executive Council,

and from the Secretariat. The other 12 came from the provinces. Madras, Bombay and Bengal nominated two officials while United Provinces, Punjab, Bihar & Orissa, Central Provinces, Assam and Burma nominated one each.

Non-officials

There were a total of 15 nominated non-officials out of which 5 were nominated by the Government of India representing five special interests namely Associated Chambers of Commerce, Indian Christians, Labour interests, Anglo-Indians and the Depressed Classes. The other 10 non-officials were nominated from the provinces namely two from Bengal, United Provinces and Punjab and one each from Bombay, Bihar & Orissa, Berar and the North West Frontier Province.

Elected members

Initially, of its 142 members, 101 were elected and 41 were nominated. Of the 101 elected members, 52 came from general constituencies, 29 were elected by

Muslim Muslims () are people who adhere to Islam, a Monotheism, monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God ...

s, 2 by

Sikh Sikhs (singular Sikh: or ; , ) are an ethnoreligious group who adhere to Sikhism, a religion that originated in the late 15th century in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, based on the revelation of Guru Nanak. The term ''Si ...

s, 7 by Europeans, 7 by landlords, and 4 by business men. Later, one seat each was added for Delhi, Ajmer-Merwara and the North West Frontier Province. The constituencies were divided as follows: The Government of India Act 1935 introduced further reforms. The Assembly continued as the lower chamber of a central Indian parliament based in

Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, but spread chiefly to the west, or beyond its Bank (geography ...

, with two chambers, both containing elected and appointed members. The Assembly increased in size to 250 seats for members elected by the constituencies of

, plus a further 125 seats for the Indian Princely states. However, elections for the reformed legislature never took place.

Inauguration

The Central Legislative Assembly met in the Council Hall and later to the Viceregal Lodge in Old Delhi both of which are now located in Delhi University. A new "Council House" was conceived in 1919 as the seat of the future Legislative Assembly, the Council of State, and the Chamber of Princes. The foundation stone was laid on 12 February 1921 and the building was opened on 18 January 1927 by Lord Irwin, the Viceroy and Governor-General. The Council House later changed its name to Parliament House, or '' Sansad Bhavan'', and was the home of the

Parliament of India The Parliament of India (ISO 15919, ISO: ) is the supreme legislative body of the Government of India, Government of the Republic of India. It is a bicameralism, bicameral legislature composed of the Rajya Sabha (Council of States) and the Lok ...

until 19th September 2023, having been converted into a museum. The Assembly, the Council of State, and the Chamber of Princes were officially opened in 1921 by King George V's uncle, the Duke of Connaught and Strathearn

Elections

The first elections to the new legislatures took place in November 1920 and proved to be the first significant contest between the Moderates and the Non-cooperation movement, whose aim was for the elections to fail. The Non-cooperators were at least partly successful in this, as out of almost a million electors for the Assembly, only some 182,000 voted. After the withdrawal of the non-cooperation movement, a group within the

Indian National Congress The Indian National Congress (INC), colloquially the Congress Party, or simply the Congress, is a political parties in India, political party in India with deep roots in most regions of India. Founded on 28 December 1885, it was the first mo ...

formed the Swaraj Party and contested the elections in 1923 and 1926. The Swaraj Party led by Motilal Nehru as the leader of the Opposition was able to secure the defeat, or at least the delay, of finance bills and other legislation. However, after 1926, the members of the Swaraj Party either joined the government or returned to the Congress which continued its

boycott A boycott is an act of nonviolent resistance, nonviolent, voluntary abstention from a product, person, organisation, or country as an expression of protest. It is usually for Morality, moral, society, social, politics, political, or Environmenta ...

of the legislature during the Civil Disobedience Movement. In 1934, the Congress ended its boycott of the legislatures and contested the elections to the fifth Central Legislative Assembly held that year. The last elections to the assembly were held in 1945. The electorate of the Assembly was never more than a very small fraction of the population of India. In the British House of Commons on 10 November 1942, the Labour MP Seymour Cocks asked the Secretary of State for India Leo Amery "What is the electorate for the present Central Legislative Assembly?" and received the written answer "The total electorate for the last General Election (1934) for the Central Legislative Assembly was 1,415,892."

Important events

*In March 1926, Motilal Nehru demanded a representative conference to draft a constitution conferring full

Dominion A dominion was any of several largely self-governance, self-governing countries of the British Empire, once known collectively as the ''British Commonwealth of Nations''. Progressing from colonies, their degrees of self-governing colony, colon ...

status on India, to be enacted by the parliament. When this demand was rejected by the Assembly, Nehru and his colleagues walked out of the house.Jawaharlal Nehru, ''Jawaharlal Nehru: an autobiography, with musings on recent events in India'' (1936) *On 8 April 1929, the Indian revolutionaries Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw a bomb into the corridors of the Assembly in order to show their discontent and frustration against the British government's decision to enact the Trade Disputes Bill and the Public Safety Bill. The bomb explosion was followed by a shower of leaflets citing their reasons and ideology behind the act and few gunshots in the air, shouting "''Inquilab Zindabad!''" ("Long Live the Revolution!"). A few members were injured such as George Ernest Schuster (the finance member of the Viceroy's Executive Council), Sir Bomanji A. Dalal, P. Raghavendra Rau, Shankar Rao and S. N. Roy. The revolutionaries surrendered themselves and the weapon without any resistance as per plan instead of escaping. On 12 June 1929 they were sentenced to Penal transportation for the bombing, having defended the case themselves. *Due to the return of the Congress in 1934 as the main opposition, there was a sharp increase in the number of government defeats in the Assembly. In a British House of Commons debate on 4 April 1935, the Secretary of State for India, Samuel Hoare, stated that "The number of divisions in the Legislative Assembly since the recent elections and up to the 25th March in which Government have been successful is five. The number of adverse divisions in the same period is seventeen." Henry Page Croft then asked "Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether the Government would have been successful on any occasion without the support of the nominated members?" Hoare replied "I could not answer that question without looking into the figures, but in any case I see no reason to differentiate between one class of member and another." *In 1936 during the Arab revolt in Palestine, Indian troops were sent there. In the Assembly, the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, disallowed all questions and resolutions which asked him to express the concern of Indian Muslims about the position of Arabs in Palestine. *On 27 February 1942, during the Second World War, the Assembly held a secret session to discuss the war situation.

Presidents of the Assembly

The presiding officer (or speaker) of the Assembly was called the President. While the Government of India Act 1919 provided for the President to be elected, it made an exception in the case of the first President, who was to be appointed by the Government. The Governor-General appointed Frederick Whyte, a former Liberal member of the British House of Commons who had been a parliamentary private secretary to

Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 (Winston Churchill in the Second World War, ...

.Ajita Ranjan Mukherjea, ''Parliamentary Procedure in India'' (Oxford, 1983), p. 43Philip Laundy, ''The Office of Speaker in the Parliaments of the Commonwealth'' (Quiller, 1984), p. 175 Sachchidananda Sinha was the Deputy President of Assembly in 1921. Ganesh Vasudev Mavlankar was the last President of the Assembly till the Assembly came to an end on 14 August 1947. He became the first Speaker of the Constituent Assembly of India, and in 1952 the first Speaker of the ''

Lok Sabha The Lok Sabha, also known as the House of the People, is the lower house of Parliament of India which is Bicameralism, bicameral, where the upper house is Rajya Sabha. Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha, Members of the Lok Sabha are elected by a ...

'', the lower house of the

.Subhash C. Kashyap, ''Dada Saheb Mavalankar, Father of Lok Sabha'' (Published for the Lok Sabha Secretariat by the National Publishing House, 1989), pp. 9–11)

Notable members

*Labour Interests: N. M. Joshi *Depressed Classes: M. C. Rajah, N. Sivaraj *Bihar & Orissa: Madhusudan Das, Sachchidananda Sinha, Nilakantha Das, Anugrah Narayan Sinha *Assam: Khan Bahadur Gulam Mostofa Chowdhury *Bengal: Khwaja Habibullah, Kshitish Chandra Neogy, Gurusaday Dutt, Satyendra Chandra Mitra, Abdullah Al-Mamun Suhrawardy, Amarendra Chatterjee, Renuka Ray. *Bombay: Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, Seth Harchandrai Vishandas, Vithalbhai Patel, N. C. Kelkar, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, M. R. Jayakar, Wahid Baksh Bhutto, Sir Jehangir Cowasji, Bhulabhai Desai, Abdullah Haroon, Homi Mody, Keshavrao Jedhe, Narhar Vishnu Gadgil, Narasimha Chintaman Kelkar *Central Provinces & Berar: Hari Singh Gour, Seth Govind Das, B. S. Moonje, M. S. Aney, Narayan Bhaskar Khare, Barrister Ramrao Deshmukh, Rao Bahadur Dinkarrao Rajurkar *Delhi: Asaf Ali *Madras: T. V. Seshagiri Iyer, P. S. Kumaraswamy Raja, P. S. Sivaswami Iyer, Muhammad Habibullah, T. Rangachari, R. K. Shanmukham Chetty, A. Rangaswami Iyengar, M. Ct. M. Chidambaram Chettyar, S. Srinivasa Iyengar, Tanguturi Prakasam, Madabhushi Ananthasayanam Ayyangar, V. V. Giri, Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, S. Satyamurti, N. G. Ranga, Kasinathuni Nageswara Rao, Addepally Satyanarayana Murthy, T. S. Avinashilingam Chettiar, C. N. Muthuranga Mudaliar, T. S. S. Rajan, Sami Venkatachalam Chetty, Ramakrishna Ranga Rao of Bobbili, Kasturiranga Santhanam *NWFP: Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum, Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan *Punjab: Lala Lajpat Rai, Mian Sir Muhammad Shah Nawaz, Bhai Parmanand *United Provinces: Motilal Nehru, Madan Mohan Malaviya, C. S. Ranga Iyer, H. N. Kunzru, Ghanshyam Das Birla, Bhagwan Das, Govind Ballabh Pant, Sri Prakasa, Muhammad Yamin Khan, Mohammad Ismail Khan, Ziauddin Ahmad, Liaquat Ali Khan, Rafi Ahmed KidwaiPaul R. Brass, ''Kidwai, Rafi Ahmad (1894–1954), politician in India'' in the ''

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography The ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (''DNB'') is a standard work of reference on notable figures from History of the British Isles, British history, published since 1885. The updated ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (''ODNB'') ...

'' (2004)

Dissolution

As per the Indian Independence Act 1947, the Central Legislative Assembly and the Council of States ceased to exist and the Constituent Assembly of India became the central legislature of India.

References

{{Legislatures of India National lower houses Defunct lower houses