ABSTRACT
After 1914, the study o f India’s history becomes increasingly preoccupied w ith political events and especially w ith charting the route to independence in 1947.2 An older W hig tradition, invented to accompany the landmarks it described, pur ported to show that the transfer o f pow er was the culmination o f a sequence o f well-judged constitutional reforms that set India on a progressive path toward liberal democracy. In more recent years, this interpretation has given way to an alternative which rejects the view that the road to independence consisted o f a series o f ordered steps, w hether designed on high by imperial masterminds or hew n at ground level by dedicated nationalist leaders, and stresses instead the complexity o f relationships among diverse political interests in Britain and India, and the uncertainty o f their trajectory. In reaction to the element o f uncritical self-approval that m arked the older tradition, the newer approach emphasises the hard-headed bargaining that lay behind the idealised version o f a stately procession towards independence; in har m ony with the ‘excentric’ theory o f imperialism, current thinking also allows room for the role o f independent or semi-independent influences on the periphery. This aspect o f recent historiography can be seen in the w ork produced by the school o f ‘subaltern studies’, w hich has questioned perceptions o f India’s vast diversity formulated and represented by elites in Delhi and London, and has explored the many alternative worlds that existed in the provinces, underlining in the process the distinction betw een the ideals o f policy and the realities o f everyday practice.3
