Wavell's era provides the backdrop for the finale which so historically, and tragically, unfolded under his successor and the last British viceroy, Mountbatten. No understanding of Mountbatten's era and the last days of the Raj in India could be complete without a deeper and proper understanding in all its complexities, of the Wavell's time as the second-last viceroy of India (October 1943-March 1947).
A sweeping, brilliantly vivid history of the sudden end of the British empire and the moment when America became a world superpower. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Winston Churchill's famous statement in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn, pugnaciously affirmed his loyalty to the world-wide institution that he had served for most of his life. Britain fought and sacrificed on a worldwide scale to defeat Hitler and his allies-and won. Yet less than five years after Churchill's defiant speech, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian Independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. As the sun set on Britain's Empire, the age of America as world superpower dawned. How did this rapid change of fortune come about? Peter Clarke's book is the first to analyze the abrupt transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana. His swiftly paced narrative makes superb use of letters and diaries to provide vivid portraits of the figures around whom history pivoted: Churchill, Gandhi, Roosevelt, Stalin, Truman, and a host of lesser-known figures though whom Clarke brilliantly shows the human dimension of epochal events. The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire is a captivating work of popular history that shows how the events that followed the war reshaped the world as profoundly as the conflict itself.
India’s interim government, in office from 2 September 1946 till August 1947, was a unique coalition of the Indian National Congress, All-India Muslim League, and non-Congress and non-League political figures—all presiding over a British/British-trained state apparatus during a period of political transition. These eleven months were packed as much with the events surrounding the formal exit of the empire as its informal continuance; as much with the anticipation of Partition as its alternatives. Though it stands at a juncture of India as a colony and a dominion, it has been overlooked by colonial and postcolonial historiography of that interval, given its sole identification with Partition/Independence. India in the Interregnum moves beneath and beyond this understanding in order to, first, restore identity to the interim government—and its provincial counterparts—and investigate their work, and, second, recover the legacy of the interim government in the formation of contemporary India.
Between 1858 and 1947, twenty British men ruled millions of some of the most remarkable people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the Indian Mutiny to the cruel religious partition of India and the newly formed and named Pakistan, the Viceroy had absolute power, more than the monarch who had sent him. Selected from that exclusive class of English, Scottish and Irish breeding, the aristocracy, the Viceroys were plumed, rode elephants, shot tigers. Even their wives stood when they entered the room. Nevertheless, many of them gave everything for India. The first Viceroy, Canning, exhausted by the Mutiny, buried his wife in Calcutta before he left the subcontinent to die shortly afterwards. The average Viceroy lasted five years and was granted an earldom but rarely a sense of triumph. Did these Viceroys behave as badly as twenty-first century moralists would have us believe? When the Raj was over, the legacy of Empire continued, as the new rulers slipped easily into the offices and styles of the British who had gone. Being 'British' was now a caste. Viceroys is the tale of the British Raj, the last fling of British aristocracy. It is the supreme view of the British in India, portraying the sort of people who went out and the sort of people they were on their return. It is the story of utter power and what men did with it. Moreover, it is also the story of how modern British identity was established and in part the answer to how it was that such a small offshore European island people believed themselves to have the right to sit at the highest institutional tables and judge what was right and unacceptable in other nations and institutions.
Guru Nanak had gifted the Sikhs with an ideology. Guru Angad had given them the Gurmukhi script. Guru Arjan Dev coalesced the hymns authored or collected by the Gurus and made them a people of the book. Guru Govind Rai created the Khalsa identity with its five symbols (Panj Kakke). Maharaja Ranjit Singh's conquests gave them the pride of race. British insistence on recruiting only keshdhari Sikhs encouraged the Khalsa to assert their distinct identity. The trend accelerated since the revolt of 1857, when John Lawrence reversed the initial successes of the rebels with the recovery of Delhi with forces from the Punjab. Sikhs were co-opted by the British with the clever broadcast of the Guru Tegh Bahadur myth that the Sikhs would be able to avenge the martyrdom of the Guru in Delhi with the help of a white race. Since then the Sikhs formed the backbone of the British Indian army and all their political influence flowed out of this military connection. The unexpected Congress concession of weightage to the Muslims in the Lucknow Pact of 1916 awakened the Sikhs to the necessity of the defence of Khalsa interests. Their vociferations compelled the British to concede a 19 per cent weightage for the Sikhs in the Montagu-Chelmsford Act of 1919. Gandhi appreciated the indispensable nature of Sikh support for the success of the British military machine. His attempt to subsume the Akali movement under the umbrella of the Non-Cooperation movement in the 1920s against the British and again his attempt to win over the Sikhs for his Civil Disobedience movement during the Lahore Congress in 1929 reflected this shrewd political sense. Sikhs continued to wrench concessions both from the British and the Congress as long as the Pax Britannica had any chance of survival. But as the negotiations for decolonization quickened after the end of the Second World War, the magic of Sikh arms could no longer work miracles for their slender numbers. While British statesmen from Cripps to Attlee – all burnt gallons of midnight oil thinking of an acceptable settlement of the Hindu-Muslim impasse, no one paid much attention to the pathetic quest of Sikh leaders since 1940 to work out an acceptable formula for readjusting the borders of the Punjab to accommodate the birthplace of the Gurus or the canal colonies, worked through long years of Sikh toil. This book traces the history of Sikhs in India, from the formation of a distinct Sikh identity, to their struggle for political representation in the pre-indedenpence era and their quest for an independent state. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
This study on Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee will help the readers understand the circumstances under which he assumed the leading role in the carving out the province of West Bengal from the littoral that was soon to become the province of East Pakistan. The role of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee in demanding the separation of the Hindu majority districts in the western half of Bengal from the proposed East Pakistan has not been studied so far or documented. The ‘Right’ historians today try to view it as a great triumph for the Hindus while ‘Secular’ ones try to paint Syama Prasad as an ‘arch communalist’. Underlying both versions of the story is an assumption that the partition of Bengal was a much sought after goal pursued by Syama Prasad. Yet an impassioned examination of the actual documents show that Syama Prasad tried to work out a formula for the co-existence of the Hindus and the Muslims till the very last. Only when all attempts, including that of Mahatma Gandhi in the dark days of the Noakhali riots, failed to dissuade the Muslim League from trying to push the subcontinent towards partition that Syama Prasad launched his drive for the separation of the western districts of Bengal from East Pakistan. Partition was the bane of the Hindu Mahasabha. They had called a hartal on 3 July 1947 to register their disapproval of the idea. But once partition gained acceptance at all levels, beginning from the Congress to the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, Syama Prasad saw no alternative to making the best of a bad bargain and pushed for partition. The bloodbath of 16 August 1946 in Calcutta and the reprehensible violation of Hindu women in Noakhali the following October cast the die. He took a leaf out of Master Tara Singh's plans in the Punjab for the regrouping of the provinces by isolating the non-Muslim population from the Muslim majority zones. The Congress Working Committee took the same line passing a resolution on 8 March 1947 in favour of the isolation of the non-Muslim areas in the Punjab from the predominantly Muslim ones. This strengthened Syama Prasad’s case for the partition of Bengal. However, this was a last resort measure failing all other options. Please note: This title is co-published with Manohar Publishers, Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
The popular image of the British Raj-an era of efficient but officious governors, sycophantic local functionaries, doting amahs, blisteringly hot days and torrid nights-chronicled by Forster and Kipling is a glamorous, nostalgic, but entirely fictitious. In this dramatic revisionist history, Jon Wilson upends the carefully sanitized image of unity, order, and success to reveal an empire rooted far more in violence than in virtue, far more in chaos than in control. Through the lives of administrators, soldiers, and subjects-both British and Indian-The Chaos of Empire traces Britain's imperial rule from the East India Company's first transactions in the 1600s to Indian Independence in 1947. The Raj was the most public demonstration of a state's ability to project power far from home, and its perceived success was used to justify interventions around the world in the years that followed. But the Raj's institutions-from law courts to railway lines-were designed to protect British power without benefiting the people they ruled. This self-serving and careless governance resulted in an impoverished people and a stifled society, not a glorious Indian empire. Jon Wilson's new portrait of a much-mythologized era finally and convincingly proves that the story of benign British triumph was a carefully concocted fiction, here thoroughly and totally debunked.
