ABSTRACT
The dissolution of British imperial authority and power with the partition and independence of India in 1947 was as remarkable an event of modern times as the founding of British empire in the Indian subcontinent earlier. The age of imperialism heralding British political and economic dominance in nineteenth-century India coincided with the vitality and strength of the Victorian mentality which had stirred the imagination of the average Briton with the vision and glory of ‘the zenith of imperial fabric . . . the hymn of ever-widening empire on whose bounds the sun never set’.1 But the winds of change had been blowing over Great Britain itself, setting in motion forces which transformed social relations beyond recognition between the two world wars. Nonetheless, every Briton who came to India from the Viceroy down to the young district officer, a member of the steel frame, was expected to keep the colonial system going unimpaired. The tensions generated by the observance of the colonial virtues, embedded in the myth and imagery of invincibility and prestige of the ruling classes in India, were often ignored. Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative leader, however, was able to recognize the qualitative change of the newly emerging world. He observed: ‘There is a wind of nationalism and freedom blowing round the world and blowing as strongly in Asia as anywhere in the world’, and questioned Winston Churchill and other party members who were opposed to the policy of reforms in India. ‘What have we taught India for a century?’ he asked and answered himself, ‘we have preached English institutions, and democracy and all the rest of it’.2
