Did the War Give Us Freedom? — How India Became Free: Part 7 of 12

1The Claim, Stated at Its Strongest

What people say

"India did not win freedom. Britain gave it up. By 1945 Britain was bankrupt, exhausted, and could no longer afford an empire. A Labour government came in that did not want India anyway. The British simply handed over the keys and went home. Gandhi's spinning wheel and prayer meetings had nothing to do with it. Even the British Prime Minister who signed the papers said afterwards that Gandhi's contribution was minimal, and that what really frightened them was Bose's army and the naval mutiny. The whole story of the nonviolent freedom struggle is a myth invented by the Congress to justify ruling India."

That is the claim in its strongest form and I have not softened it. It contains several separate assertions, and the reason arguments about it never end is that people treat them as one thing when they are five.

1.Britain was financially broken by the war.Testable with numbers.

2.Britain could no longer rely on the forces that held India.Testable with events.

3.The British left for those reasons and said so privately.Testable with their own documents.

4.A British Prime Minister confirmed that Gandhi was irrelevant.Testable as a quotation.

5.Therefore the Indian mass movement contributed little.This is a conclusion, not a fact, and it is

I will take them in that order, and then add two tests that the claim never applies to itself: why the British left in 1947 rather than in some other year, and what happened to the other European empires that were equally broke at the same moment.

Very. This part of the claim is true, and it is more dramatic than most people realise.

2The Money: How Broke Was Britain?

The great reversal

Britain entered the Second World War as the largest creditor nation in the world and came out of it as the largest debtor nation in the world. Its external sterling liabilities stood at roughly£3. 4 billionby 1945. National wealth had been consumed, overseas assets sold, and the merchant fleet devastated.

Then two more blows landed.

Lend Lease was cancelled abruptlyby the United States in August 1945, days after the Japanese surrender, leaving Britain with no means of paying for imports.
The Anglo American loan of December 1945,about 3. 75 billion dollars, came with a condition: sterling would have to be made convertible. When Britain complied in July 1947, there was a run on the pound within weeks and convertibility had to be suspended. That crisis happened in the very weeks when India was becoming independent.

And the winter of 1946 to 1947 was the coldest in living memory, with coal shortages, power cuts and factories closed. Britain in 1947 was a country that could not heat its own homes.

The part that matters most: Britain owed India

This is the fact that turns the whole imperial relationship upside down, and it is not widely known in India.

During the war, India supplied Britain with food, textiles, materials and above all soldiers, on an enormous scale. Britain could not pay in real money, because sterling had been made inconvertible in 1939. So the debts piled up as credits held in London, calledsterling balances.

Figure	Detail
India's sterling	About£1, 138 million, roughly 35. 8 percent of Britain's total external liabilities. Some
balances by the end of	estimates of the blocked balances run higher, up to about £1. 5 billion. India's was by far
1945	the largest single holding of any country.
What that meant	The colony was now the creditor and the imperial power was the debtor.
How it was paid for	The Reserve Bank of India printed rupees to fund the purchases. The result was severe
inside India	wartime inflation borne by ordinary Indians. In real terms Indians had already paid for the debt before it was ever repaid.
The settlement	Under an interim agreement of 14 August 1947, only £35 million was released immediately, with the bulk of about £1, 160 million to be released in negotiated instalments over years.

India had stopped being profitable

For most of the imperial period India paid for itself and for a great deal else besides. The Indian Army was financed from Indian revenues and used across Asia and Africa for British purposes. That arrangement was the economic engine of the empire.

During the war it broke. Britain agreed to meet the costs of Indian forces used outside India, so the army that had been an asset became a liability. By 1945 holding India cost money instead of making it. Once that is true, a great deal of the argument for staying disappears, and the Treasury in London knew it.

VerdictTrue

Britain was financially broken, India's sterling balances were the largest single component of Britain's external debt, and India had stopped being a profitable possession. Anyone who denies this is not arguing with a nationalist narrative, they are arguing with the Bank of England. But hold on to one question, because Chapter 7 turns on it:being broke explains why an empire cannot afford to expand. It does not automatically explain why it lets go of what it already holds. Broke empires very often fight harder rather than leaving, and we will look at four that did.

If I had to name the single mechanism by which British rule in India ended, it would not be the money. It would be this.

3The Army: The Thing That Actually Decided It

How a few people ruled a subcontinent

At its height, British India was administered by an Indian Civil Service of roughly a thousand covenanted officers, of whom a growing proportion were Indian, and held by an army that was overwhelmingly composed of Indians commanded by British officers. The police were Indian. The clerks were Indian. The soldiers were Indian.

Part 1 explained how carefully the British had rebuilt that army after 1857 so that it could never combine against them. That machine was the foundation of everything. Remove its reliability and the entire structure has nothing to stand on.

During the war it expanded to abouttwo and a half million men, the largest volunteer army in history. Then the war ended, and that vast force began to demobilise into a country in political ferment.

When	What Happened
November	The INA trials at the Red Fort.As Part 5 described, the British tried three officers, one Hindu,
1945	one Muslim and one Sikh, for treason. The trials turned into the largest political mobilisation
onwards	since 1942, with Congress and the Muslim League on the same side of the defence. Serving Indian soldiers followed the trials closely. The government was forced to commute the sentences.
January	Mutinies and strikes among Royal Air Force personnel in India over demobilisation, which
1946	Indian personnel watched with interest.
18 to 23	The Royal Indian Navy mutiny.It began at Bombay over food, conditions and racial insult, and
February	became political within a day. It spread to 78 ships and more than twenty shore establishments
1946	and involved over 20, 000 ratings, reaching Karachi, Madras, Calcutta, Cochin and the Andamans. Ships flew the Congress, League and Communist flags together. Bombay's workers struck in sympathy and the city saw days of street fighting in which over two hundred civilians were killed. The mutiny was called off after three and a half days on appeals from Sardar Patel and from the League.
February	A signals strike at Jabalpur, unrest in Indian Army units, and police strikes in Bihar and Delhi.
and March
1946

1945 and 1946: the instrument fails Why this was the end

Consider the position of the Commander in Chief, Claude Auchinleck, in early 1946. He had to answer a question that had never previously needed asking: if a mass movement began again, would the Indian Army obey an order to fire on it?

His assessment, and that of his commanders, was that the loyalty of Indian officers and men could no longer be assumed, that the INA prosecutions were themselves corroding it, and that a serious confrontation risked breaking the army as an institution. That is why the INA sentences were commuted despite the convictions.

Now put that beside the arithmetic. Suppressing India by force would require British troops. Britain in 1946 was demobilising, could not afford what it had, and had a war weary electorate that had just voted overwhelmingly for a government promising houses and a health service. There were no divisions to send, no money to pay them and no political will to try.

In the simplest words

The British ruled India with Indian soldiers. In 1946 they realised they could no longer be sure those soldiers would shoot Indians for them. Once that is true, everything else is just paperwork.

VerdictTrue, And More Important Than The Money

The reliability of the Indian armed forces was the load bearing wall of British rule, and between the INA trials and the naval mutiny it cracked. This part of the claim is not only correct, it is understated in most Indian textbooks. Note carefully what this proves and does not prove.It proves that Bose and the INA had an enormous effect, mostly after Bose was dead. It does not prove that the mass movement was irrelevant, because the reason Indian sailors and soldiers were politically charged in 1946, and the reason two hundred thousand people came out in Bombay to support them, was twenty five years of mass politics. An army does not become unreliable in a vacuum.

Rule 5 from Part 1: compare the public words with the private ones. For this period we have an unusually complete private record.

4What the British Said to Each Other in Private

Wavell

Lord Wavell was Viceroy from October 1943 to March 1947 and kept a detailed journal. Its tone across those years is not the tone of a man handing over a gift. It is the tone of a man reporting that a position is no longer tenable.

His recurring themes are consistent and they are worth listing plainly:

The British administrative machine in India was worn out, understaffed and ageing, with recruitment to the services having effectively stopped.
Britain lacked the military strength to hold India against a serious civil disturbance, and could not get it.
Therefore a decision had to be taken and a date fixed, because drifting would end in a collapse rather than a transfer.

In 1946 he prepared what became known as the Breakdown Plan: a scheme for a phased British withdrawal, province by province, if negotiations failed. London found it defeatist and it contributed to his replacement by Mountbatten. But the fact that a serving Viceroy was drafting an evacuation plan in 1946 tells you the real state of British confidence.

The Cabinet

Attlee's government announced on 20 February 1947 that Britain would transfer power by June 1948 and that Mountbatten would replace Wavell. The reasoning inside government, visible in the Cabinet papers, combined three things: the impossibility of holding India by force, the impossibility of financing it, and the fear that without a fixed date the situation would deteriorate into a general breakdown for which Britain would be blamed and in which British lives would be lost.

Mountbatten then moved the date forward to August 1947, which is a subject for Part 8.

What is and is not in the record

Two things are worth stating precisely.

What is not there:any suggestion that Britain was leaving out of goodwill, or because it had been persuaded by the moral force of nonviolence, or because it had decided India was ready. The sentimental version of the story is not supported by the British papers at all.

What is there, constantly:anxiety about mass movements, about the reliability of Indian forces, about the administrative machine, about world opinion, and about the cost. In other words, the British record supports the hard headed reading of why they left. It also, on every page, treats the Congress as the fact that has to be dealt with, which is not how you write about an irrelevance.

This is the factor nobody argues about because nobody mentions it. An empire is not held by soldiers alone. It is held by clerks, magistrates and district officers, and by 1946 there were not enough of them left.

5The Machine That Stopped Working

How thin it always was

The Indian Civil Service, the steel frame of British India, never exceeded about twelve hundred officers at any time. Roughly a thousand men, spread across a subcontinent of nearly four hundred million people, ran the districts, sat as magistrates, collected the revenue and were the government as far as most Indians ever saw it.

It worked because it was accepted, and because below it sat a vast Indian structure of deputy collectors, clerks, constables and village officials who did the actual work. The moment either the acceptance or the Indian layer beneath became unreliable, the frame had nothing to hold up.

Recruitment stopped.The London examinations for the Indian Civil Service were suspended after the 1939 intake. The last competitive examination was held in January 1943, and its successful candidates joined in October 1944. For most of the decisive decade, the service was not replacing itself.
The remaining officers aged and thinned.Men worked through the war without leave, in a service with no new entrants, running famine relief, war supply and then the suppression of a national uprising.
The service was now roughly half Indian.At Partition the cadre stood at about 980 officers, of whom around 468 were European and over 500 were Indian. Think about what that means for a government intending to hold India against its own population. Half your district officers belong to the population you would be holding it against.
The subordinate services were breaking.Police strikes in Bihar and Delhi in 1946, the signals strike at Jabalpur, and widespread indiscipline in the lower ranks meant the layer that actually enforced the state's will was itself in dispute with it.

What the war did to it Why this settles the argument about coercion

People debate whether Britain could have held India by force in 1946. The debate usually gets conducted in terms of troops and money. But suppose Britain had found the divisions and the funds. Who would have issued the orders in the districts, sat as the magistrate, signed the detention papers and led the police party?

The answer, in more than half the cases, would have been an Indian officer of the Indian Civil Service, with a family, a community and a future in an independent India that everyone could now see coming. Wavell's journal returns to this repeatedly: the machine was worn out, it was not being replenished, and it could not be asked to do very much more.

In the simplest words

By 1946 the British in India had no money, an army they could not trust, and an administration that was half Indian, exhausted and had not hired anybody for seven years. You cannot rule a country with an organisation in that condition. Not because it is wrong, but because it will not physically work.

This single quotation does more work in Indian internet argument than any other sentence about the freedom movement. So let us do to it exactly what this book was created to do.

The Quotation A Sit Circulates

That in 1956 the former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, on a visit to Calcutta, told the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court that the real reasons for the British departure were the Indian National Army and the naval mutiny, which had destroyed the loyalty of the Indian armed forces, and that when asked about Gandhi's role, Attlee answered with a slow smile and the wordminimal.

6The Attlee Quotation, Tested

Where it actually comes from

Trace it back and here is what you find.

The source is a letter written by Justice Phani Bhusan Chakravartti, who was indeed Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court from 1952 to 1958, and who was acting Governor of West Bengal at the time of Attlee's visit. The letter was written on 30 March 1976 and sent to the publisher of the historian R. C. Majumdar, and it was printed as an appendix in a Bengali volume of Majumdar's.

The problems, in order of seriousness

1.It is not Attlee's words. It is one man's memory of a private conversation.There is no tran‐

2.It was written twenty years after the conversationis said to have taken place, and nine years

3.It appeared in an appendix to a memoir, not in an archive, not in a contemporaneous letter,

4.There is no corroboration anywhere.Attlee wrote memoirs, gave interviews and left papers.

5.There is an error in the letter itself.It refers to Attlee by a title he did not hold at the relevant

What can be verified

To be fair to the claim: Attlee did visit India in 1956 and was in Calcutta in October of that year, and Chakravartti did hold the offices described. The setting is real. What cannot be verified is the conversation, and above all the single word on which the whole thing rests.

VerdictNot Verified. It Should Not Be Used As Evidence.

It fails Rule 1 of this book. There is no primary source: no transcript, no contemporaneous note, no corroboration in the papers of a man who left extensive papers. It is a recollection recorded twenty years later, after the death of the person quoted, in an appendix to a memoir. And now the important part, which people on both sides get wrong. Discarding this quotation doesnotweaken the argument about the INA and the naval mutiny. That argument stands on far better evidence: the actual mutiny of 20, 000 ratings on 78 ships, the commutation of the INA sentences, and the assessments of the Commander in Chief. Chapter 3 established it without needing Attlee at all. Equally, discarding it does not prove that Gandhi's contribution was large. That has to be argued on its own evidence, which is what Chapter 9 does. The lesson is the one this book keeps repeating:a true argument can be defended with a false document, and when the document collapses it takes the credibility of the argument with it. If your case is good, do not attach it to a quotation you cannot source.

Here is the test that the economic explanation never applies to itself, and it is the one that breaks it.

7Why 1947 and Not 1930 or 1960?

Britain had been broke before

If poverty alone produces withdrawal, then Britain should have left India in the early 1930s. It was in the middle of the Great Depression, it abandoned the gold standard in 1931, unemployment was around three million, and it faced a civil disobedience movement that put tens of thousands in jail.

What did it do? It arrested Gandhi, banned the Congress, ruled by ordinance, and then wrote the Government of India Act of 1935, a constitution designed to keep ultimate power in British hands for another generation. Being broke produced repression and a delaying constitution, not departure.

And other empires were just as broke in 1945

This is the decisive comparison, and it is why I think the pure economics argument fails.

In 1945 France was not merely broke, it had been occupied and physically wrecked. The Netherlands had been occupied and stripped. Both were far worse off than Britain.

Empire	Condition In 1945	What It Did
Netherlands in	Occupied, ruined,	Fought a colonial war from 1945 to 1949, sending over 100, 000
Indonesia	dependent on American aid	troops, before conceding independence.
France in	Occupied, bankrupt,	Fought from 1946 to 1954 and lost at Dien Bien Phu. Hundreds of
Indochina	politically shattered	thousands dead.
France in Algeria	Still recovering	Fought from 1954 to 1962, a war that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed the Fourth Republic.
Portugal in	Europe's poorest	Held on until 1974 and fought three simultaneous colonial wars for
Africa	country	thirteen years.
Britain in Kenya	The same bankrupt	Fought a counterinsurgency in Malaya from 1948 to 1960 and
and Malaya	Britain	suppressed the Mau Mau in Kenya through the 1950s with mass detention. Kenya became independent in 1963.

Read that table again, because it settles something. Bankrupt empires do not automatically go home. Frequently they fight, for years, at ruinous cost, including the very same bankrupt Britain in other colonies at the very same time.

So what was different about India?

Four things, and they have to be taken together.

1.The instrument of coercion was Indian and had become unreliable.France in Indochina

2.There was an organised alternative government waiting.This is the contribution that gets

3.British rule in India had already lost its argument.Twenty five years of mass movements

4.The political conditions in Britain had changed.Labour won a landslide in July 1945. The

VerdictHalf True, And The Missing Half Is The Whole Point

TRUEthat Britain was bankrupt, that India had become a cost rather than a source of profit, and that the war was the immediate trigger for the timing. FALSEthat bankruptcy alone explains a withdrawal, because four other equally bankrupt empires, including Britain in other colonies, chose to fight instead, some of them for decades. The accurate statement:the war made British rule unaffordable and the army unreliable. The mass movement made it illegitimate and, crucially, provided the alternative government that made a peaceful handover possible instead of a fifteen year colonial war. Neither factor alone produces August 1947.

8What Happened to the Other Empires

A short chapter, because the table does the arguing.

Word	What it means
India and Pakistan	August 1947	No anti colonial war. The catastrophe was Partition violence between Indians, which is Part 8.
Burma	January 1948	Negotiated, following the Aung San Attlee agreement.
Ceylon	February 1948	Negotiated and peaceful.
Indonesia	December 1949	Four years of war against the Dutch.
Vietnam	1954	Eight years of war against France, then a further twenty years of war.
Malaya	1957	Twelve years of counterinsurgency.
Ghana	1957	Negotiated after mass agitation.
Algeria	1962	Eight years of war, hundreds of thousands dead.
Kenya	1963	Mau Mau insurgency and mass detention through the 1950s.
Angola and	1975	Thirteen years of war against Portugal.
Mozambique

Two observations.

First, India went early.It was among the first major territories out, and its example accelerated everything that followed. Ghana's Nkrumah, Kenya's Kenyatta and the American civil rights movement all borrowed directly from the Indian method, and said so.

Second, India went without an anti colonial war.That is extraordinarily rare and it is the single strongest piece of evidence for the value of what Gandhi built. It should be said in the same breath that India then suffered a horror of a different kind in 1947, but that horror was inflicted by Indians on Indians, and the argument about whose fault it was is Part 8.

Here is my own judgement, clearly labelled as judgement. The facts in the previous chapters are not mine to shape. This chapter is an argument, and you are entitled to weigh it differently.

9The Honest Division of the Credit

Factor	What It Actually Did	My Weighting
The Second World	Removed Britain's ability to pay for India, turned the	The largest single factor inwhen,
War and the	colony from an asset into a liability, destroyed the	and a major factor inwhether.
economic collapse	imperial system worldwide, and set the timing.
The mass movement	Destroyed the legitimacy of British rule in Indian,	The largest single factor in
from 1920 to 1942	British and world opinion. Built a mass organisation capable of taking over the state. Made coercion politically expensive at every step. Politicised the population from which the army and police were drawn.	whether it could be a handover rather than a war, and a major factor in the timing.
The INA, the trials	Broke the assumption that the Indian armed forces	Decisive at the end, and
and the mutinies	would always obey. This was the immediate mechanism of collapse in 1946.	disproportionately effective for its size. Bose achieved more dead than alive.
The revolutionaries	Kept the security state expensive and afraid,	Real but indirect. They never
from 1905 to 1935	produced the emotional charge that constitutional politics could not, and supplied the martyrs around which mass feeling formed.	came close to seizing power and did not claim they could.
The collapse of the	Recruitment suspended from 1939, a service half	Underrated. It is the reason
administrative	Indian by 1947, exhausted officers and striking	coercion was not merely
machine	police. Even with troops and money, there was nobody left to govern with.	expensive but impossible.
International	American pressure on Britain during and after the	Significant, and usually
pressure	war, the new United Nations, and the emerging competition with the Soviet Union for the sympathies of colonised peoples.	underrated in Indian accounts.

The five factors What Gandhi specifically contributed

Since the claim names him, let me answer about him precisely. Four things, none of which is spiritual.

1.He built the machine.The four anna membership, the language based provincial committees,

2.He made rule illegitimate rather than merely resented.Resentment is normal in an empire

3.He kept it from becoming a war Britain could win.A violent insurgency in the 1920s or

4.He made the movement mass rather than elite.The politicisation of ordinary Indians is why

VerdictFalse

The claim only looks plausible if you define contribution as forcing a British surrender in a single decisive act. By that definition, nobody contributed anything, because no such act occurred. Not Gandhi, not Bose, not the revolutionaries. Once you ask the real questions, the answers are clear. Who made British rule morally unsustainable? Who built the organisation that received power? Who made sure that when the moment came there was a government in waiting rather than fifteen years of insurgency? Those are Gandhi's, and they are not small. And here is the fair concession, which Gandhi's defenders should make openly:the mass movement did not, on its own, drive the British out. Quit India was crushed. Between 1942 and 1945 the Congress achieved nothing at all, because it was in prison. The war and the collapse of the army were what made 1947 happen when it did. Anyone who tells the story as though Gandhi walked to the sea and the empire fell over is telling you a fairy tale, and fairy tales are exactly why the opposite claim has become so popular.

Where We Have Reached

The claim we started with has come apart into its true and false pieces.

Britain was broke.True, and India was its largest creditor.
The Indian armed forces had become unreliable.True, and this was the decisive mechanism.
The British said so privately.True, and their papers contain no trace of the sentimental version of the story.
A British Prime Minister confirmed Gandhi was irrelevant.Not verified, and the source will not bear the weight placed on it.
Therefore the mass movement contributed little.False, and the evidence is what happened to every empire that faced no such movement.

The war opened the door. The mass movement decided who walked through it, and whether the walk took one year or fifteen and cost a hundred thousand lives or a million.

Which brings us to the terrible irony of this book. India got out of colonial rule without an anti colonial war, and then, in the space of a few months, suffered a catastrophe as bad as most colonial wars, inflicted by Indians on each other.

Part 8 is about how that happened, month by month, from the Cabinet Mission of March 1946 to the Radcliffe Line of August 1947.

Dat E	Event
1939	London examinations for the Indian Civil Service suspended. The service stops replacing itself.
1939	Sterling made inconvertible. India's war supplies to Britain begin accumulating as sterling balances.
January 1943	Last competitive examination for the Indian Civil Service.
1943	Bengal famine. British moral authority collapses.
July 1945	Labour wins the British general election. Attlee becomes Prime Minister.
August 1945	Lend Lease cancelled abruptly. Britain has no means of paying for imports.
End of 1945	India's sterling balances stand at about £1, 138 million, roughly 35. 8 percent of Britain's external liabilities.
November 1945	INA trials begin at the Red Fort.

Dat E	Event
December 1945	Anglo American loan of about 3. 75 billion dollars, conditional on sterling convertibility.
January 1946	Royal Air Force strikes and mutinies in India.
18 to 23	Royal Indian Navy mutiny. 78 ships, over twenty shore establishments, more than 20, 000
February 1946	ratings. Over two hundred civilians killed in Bombay street fighting.
March 1946	Cabinet Mission arrives in India. See Part 8.
1946	Wavell prepares the Breakdown Plan for a phased British withdrawal.
Winter 1946 to	The coldest British winter in living memory. Fuel crisis and industrial shutdown.
1947
20 February	Attlee announces transfer of power by June 1948 and the appointment of Mountbatten.
1947
July 1947	Sterling convertibility introduced and suspended within weeks after a run on the pound.
14 August 1947	Interim sterling balances agreement. £35 million released immediately of about £1, 160 million owed.

Word	What it means
Sterling balances	Money owed by Britain to countries that had supplied it during the war, held as blocked credits in London because sterling was not convertible. India held the largest amount.
Convertibility	The ability to exchange a currency freely for others, especially for dollars. Britain suspended it in 1939, restored it in July 1947 under American pressure, and suspended it again within weeks.
Lend Lease	The American programme supplying war materials to allies. Cancelled abruptly in August 1945.
Ratings	Naval personnel below officer rank. The Royal Indian Navy mutiny was a mutiny of ratings.
Breakdown Plan	Wavell's 1946 scheme for a phased British evacuation of India if negotiations failed.
Commander in Chief	The head of the armed forces in India. Claude Auchinleck held the post from 1943.
Counterinsurgency	Military and police operations to suppress an armed independence movement, as in Malaya and Kenya.
Indian Civil Service	The senior administrative service of British India, never more than about twelve hundred officers, about half Indian by 1947.
Decolonisation	The process by which European empires gave up or lost their colonies, mainly between 1945 and 1975.

Marcelo de Paiva Abreu, "Britain as a debtor: Indian sterling balances, 1940 to 1953",Economic History Review, and related scholarship on the sterling balance negotiations.
Bank of England archive material on wartime finance and the sterling area.
Interim agreement on sterling balances between the United Kingdom, India and Pakistan, 14 August 1947.
Records of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, February 1946, including the ship and personnel figures and the subsequent commission of inquiry.
Proceedings and outcome of the Indian National Army trials at the Red Fort, November 1945 to 1946, and the commutation of sentences.
Lord Wavell,The Viceroy's Journal, edited by Penderel Moon, for the private assessments of 1944 to 1947 and the Breakdown Plan.
British Cabinet papers and the Transfer of Powerdocument series, 1942 to 1947.
Clement Attlee's statement to the House of Commons, 20 February 1947.
Letter of Justice Phani Bhusan Chakravartti, 30 March 1976, as printed in an appendix to a volume by R. C. Majumdar, together with the published examinations of its reliability.
Records of the Indian Civil Service, including recruitment suspension after 1939, the final examination of January 1943, and the cadre composition at Partition of about 980 officers, roughly 468 European and over 500 Indian.
Standard histories of decolonisation for the comparative dates and costs in Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Malaya, Kenya and the Portuguese territories.

Author's Note