India After Gandhi (134 page)
Read India After Gandhi Online
Authors: Ramachandra Guha
Tags: #History, #Asia, #General, #General Fiction
3. A
PPLES
IN
THE
B
ASKET
| Pothan Joseph, ‘Mountbatten Quits India’, Swatantra, 19 June 1948. | |
| Brian Hoey, Mountbatten: The Private Story (London: Pan Books, 1995), pp. 3, 4,201. | |
| Denis Judd, ed., A British Tale of Indian and Foreign Service: The Memoirs of Sir Ian Scott (London: Radcliffe Press, 1999), p. 147. | |
| See Penderel Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy ’ s Journal (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). | |
| The books I have in mind are Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1951); H. V. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain – India – Pakistan (London: Hutchinson, 1969); Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, Freedom at Midnight (New Delhi: Rupa, 1975); and Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten: The Official Biography (London: Collins, 1985). For an early revisionist view, see Leonard Mosley, The Last Days of the British Raj (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961). | |
| Ziegler, Mountbatten, p. 424. | |
| V. P. Menon, Integration of the Indian States (1956; reprint Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1997). There have been some fine studies of individual princely states, and of British policy towards the Maharajas. However, no one since Menon has attempted an analytical overview of the demise of the princely order, with its (often profound) implications for the history of independent India. | |
| For a brilliant brief survey of British relations with princely India, see K. M. Pannikar, Indian States, Oxford Pamphlet on Indian Affairs, no. 4 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1942). See also the essays in Robin Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in Indian Princely States (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). | |
| Quoted in Mario Rodrigues, Batting for the Empire: A Political Biography of Ranjitsinhji (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003). | |
| Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgames of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 227. | |
| W. H. Morris-Jones, ‘The Transfer of Power, 1947: A View from the Sidelines’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 1982, pp. 17–18. | |
| S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 1: 1889 – 1947 (London: Cape, 1975), p. 359. | |
| See Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel: A Life (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Press, 1991), pp. 408–11; SPC, vol. 5, passim. | |
| The phrase was coined by Pannikar, and is the underpinning of his classic Asia and Western Dominance (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959). | |
| ‘Maharaja of Bikaner’s Appeal to the Princes’, appendix 2 to SPC, vol. 5, pp. 518–24. This appeal was almost certainly drafted by K. M. Pannikar. | |
| Penderel Moon to Major Billy Short, 29 March 1947, Mss Eur F179/16, Short Papers, OIOC. | |
| A representative view is that of the last head of this department, Sir Conrad Corfield. See his ‘Some Thoughts on British Policy and the Indian States, 1935–47’, in C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright, eds, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), pp. 527–34. | |
| Menon to Sir P. Patrick (under-secretary of state for India), 8 July 1947, in TOP, vol. 12, pp. 1–2. | |
| SPC, vol. 5, pp. 536–8. | |
| TOP, vol. 12, pp. 36, 51. | |
| Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, p. 140. | |
| ‘Press Communiqué of an Address by Rear-Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma to a Conference of the Rulers and Representatives of Indian States’, TOP, vol. 12, pp. 347–52. | |
| See TOP, vol. 12, pp. 585–8; Hodson, The Great Divide, pp. 369f. | |
| The words are those of Vallabhbhai Patel, from his statement to the princes of 5 July 1947. See SPC, vol. 5, p. 537. | |
| ‘Satyagraha Movement in Mysore’, Swatantra, 27 September 1947; H. S. Doreswamy, From Princely Autocracy to People ’ s Government (Bangalore: Sahitya Mandira, 1993), chapter 9. | |
| Menon, Integration of the Indian States, pp. 153–4, 179. | |
| See E. M. S. Namboodiripad, ‘Princedom and Democracy’, New Age, August 1956 (a review article on V. P. Menon’s Integration of the Indian States). | |
| Robert Trumbull, As I See India (London: Cassell and Co., 1952), pp. 76–7. | |
| See speeches at Jaipur, Gwalior and Bikaner in Time Only to Look Forward: Speeches of Rear Admiral The Earl Mountbatten of Burma, as Viceroy of India and Governor-General of the Dominion of India, 1947 – 8 (London: Nicholas Kaye, 1949), pp. 76–8, 91–3, 102–4. | |
| These paragraphs summarize a story told over several hundred pages in Menon, Integration of the Indian States. | |
| Menon to V. Shankar (private secretary to Vallabhbhai Patel), 9August 1949, in G. M. Nandurkar, ed., Sardar’ s Letters – Mostly Unknown: Post-Centenary, vol. 2 (Ahmedabad: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Smarak Bhavan, 1981), pp. 74–6. | |
| As told to me by C. S. Venkatachar, who succeeded V. P. Menon as secretary of the Ministry of States. | |
| Hodson, The Great Divide, pp. 367–8. | |
| The Travancore story has been principally reconstructed here from TOP, vol. 12, pp. 76–7, 203–4, 232–3, 281–2, 298–9, 335–6, 414, 421–2, 453; supplemented by A. Sreedhara Menon, Triumph and Tragedy in Travancore: Annals of Sir C. P. ‘ s Sixteen Years (Kottayam: Current Books, 2001), esp. pp. 231–53. But see also A. G. Noorani, ‘C. P. and Independent Travancore’, Frontline, 4 July 2003, and K. C. George, Immortal Punnapra-Vayalar (Thiruvananthapuram: Communist Party of India, 1975). | |
| The best, presumably, was Jawaharlal Nehru. | |
| Draft letter dated 18 July 1947 from Nawab of Bhopal to Lord Mountbatten, Mss EurD1006 (Major A. E. G. Davy Papers), OIOC. | |
| My account of the Bhopal case is based on TOP, vol. 12, pp. 144–5, 291–7, 436–8, 644, 671–2; Copland, The Princes of India, pp. 235–6, 253; Hodson, The Great Divide, pp. 365, 375; Menon, Integration of the Indian States, pp. 118–19. | |
| TOP, vol. 12, pp. 603–4, 659–62, 767; Menon, Integration of the Indian States, pp. 116–18; K. M. Pannikar to Vallabhbhai Patel, undated, but probably from late July 1947, in G. M. Nandurkar, ed., Sardar’ s Letters – Mostly Unknown, II: Birth Centenary, vol. 5 (Ahmedabad: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Smarak Bhavan, 1978), pp. 55–6. | |
| R. M. Lala, ‘Junagadh’, the Current , 27 September 1950; Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, pp. 191–2; Mosley, Last Days, pp. 181–3. | |
| Shah Nawaz was the father of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and grandfather of Benazir Bhutto, both future prime ministers of Pakistan. | |
| Patel’s feelings on Junagadh are described in Malcolm Darling to Guy Wint, 7 December 1947, Box 60, Darling Papers, CSAS. | |
| ‘Report by Secretary,Ministry of States, on Junagadh’, in SPC,vol. 7, pp. 688–95. | |
| This account is principally based on Menon, Integration of the Indian States, pp. 124–49;Hodson, The Great Divide, pp. 427-40. | |
| Rafi Ahmed, ‘Hyderabad Politics’, Swatantra, 29 November 1947. | |
| K. M. Munshi, The End of an Era (Hyderabad Memoirs) (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1957), pp. 10–11. | |
| TOP, vol. 12, pp. 31–2, 87; ‘Viswamitra’, ‘Monckton and Mountbatten’, Swatantra, 15 May 1948. | |
| Coupland, quoted in V. B. Kulkarni, K. M. Munshi (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1983), p. 117; Patel,quoted in Munshi, End of an Era, p. 1. | |
| Lucien D. Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration: Political Developments in Hyderabad State (1938 – 1948) (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000), esp. chapter 5. | |
| Amit Kumar Gupta, The Agrarian Drama: The Leftists and the Rural Poor in India, 1934 – 51 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996), pp. 291–317, 412–22 etc. | |
| See Swami Ramananda Tirtha, Memoirs of Hyderabad Freedom Struggle (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1967), pp. 181–2. | |
| Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration, p. 178. | |
| See TOP, vol. 12, pp. 613–15. | |
| Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration, pp. 230, 235; ‘Viswamitra’, ‘Monckton and Mountbatten’. | |
| See TOP, vol. 12, p. 121. | |
| Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration, pp. 208–10. | |
| ‘Conflict in Hyderabad’, The Times , April 1948, clipping in Theodore Tasker Papers, Mss Eur D798/30–36, OIOC. | |
| Wilfrid Russell, Indian Summer (Bombay: Thacker and Co., 1951), p. 210. | |
| C. H. V. Pathy, ‘A Close-up of Syed Kasim Razvi’, Swatantra, 29 May 1948. | |
| Avivid account of the society and politics of Hyderabad, c. 1947–8, is contained in Asokamitran’s novel The Eighteenth Parallel , translated from the Tamil by Gomathi Narayanan (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993). |
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