ABSTRACT
The half-century preceding the departure of the British from India had seen a series of reforms, evolved by the British and leading logically and explicitly to Indian independence; the growth of divisions within India which led to the partition of 1947; and a growing awareness of world politics, in which, nevertheless, the new rulers were, for the most part, but imperfectly versed. In the nineteenth century India, though less closed to the outside world than China or Japan, had a view of the world which was overshadowed by the British presence; and the principal episode of the century was the Sepoy Revolt or Mutiny of a part of Britain’s subjects against British rule. This view was changing by the end of the century. The Russian advance towards Afghanistan; Curzon’s preoccupation with the north-western frontier and Tibet; the extension of British Indian power into the Middle East; the alliance of Britain with Japan in 1902, followed by Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905; revolutions in Turkey, Iran and China – all these turned the Indian mind – or part of it – outward. Although in 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru was the only member of his cabinet with any claim to expert knowledge of foreign politics, his colleagues and many others among his compatriots had grown up with the feeling that, if India’s special problem was the defeat of the British raj, there were also other problems and other powers to be reckoned with. Even though many Indians misjudged the nature of the problems, deceiving themselves with the belief that their cause was the British presence and their cure would be the British departure, this mistake was a matter of misinterpretation and not of cloistered ignorance. Within India nationalism, which was one of the by-products of the Hindu and Muslim intellectual revivals of the nineteenth century and took visible shape in the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885, was inevitably anti-British. Like most nationalist movements, it came to be divided into more and less militant factions (led by B. G. Tilak on the one hand and G. K. Gokhale and then M. K. Gandhi on the other), but, unlike others, it was also divided in a more enduring way before the day of victory. As independence approached, the ability of Hindu and Muslim to live together diminished until it proved impossible to maintain a single successor state to the British raj and at independence the two great religious communities feared and hated each other as much as they feared or hated the British.
