ABSTRACT
There is now a significant literature on ‘decolonization’ – a term evidently coined from the perspective of the colonial metropole. As a post-war political process, it is usually defined as ‘the surrender of external political sovereignty, largely Western European, over colonized non-European peoples, plus the emergence of independent territories where once the West had ruled, or the transfer of power from empire to nation-state’.5 So on the one hand, decolonization incorporates the story of the dismantling of European empires or ‘the retreat from empire’, as John Darwin would put it.6 On the other hand, it is conceptualized as an essentially elitist process, ‘European settlers and officials withdrawing while transferring power to indigenous leaders’.7 As a result this process also implied continuity; as D.A. Low has argued, the process of ‘contraction of England did not just entail the saga of independence’, it also left behind successor polities with ‘innumerable
Nicholas Mansergh’s 12 volumes of documents from India Office Records, treats this event of Indian independence either as a simple ‘transfer of power’ from European to indigenous elites, or just as the beginning of the collapse of the British Empire, setting a precedent or model for the subsequent orderly withdrawal of other imperial powers.10 This Commonwealth vision of decolonization – which is also a very statist vision – therefore sees in the history of post-colonial India more evidence of continuity than any fundamental epistemological rupture. This is supposedly manifested in the pageantry, rituals, regalia and the institutions of governance, and above all, in its supposedly uninterrupted linear movement towards political modernity.11
