The final countdown

June 7, 1947: The historic meeting at which Viceroy Lord Mountbatten disclosed Britain’s “partition” plan for India. With him are Jawaharlal Nehru, Lord Ismay, Adviser to the Viceroy, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES The year 1947 was a watershed in the modern history of the Indian subcontinent. Although the river of historical time turned in rather different directions eight decades ago, most historians of modern India continue to till the floodplains of colonialism. The study of independent India remains a historiographical frontier evoking limited interest in the imperial centres of academia.Birth of a Nation aims to fill a gaping hole in the historiography of decolonisation and the making of the modern Indian republic. Unlike the Partition, historians have yet to fully explain how hundreds of princely states scattered across the subcontinent were integrated into independent India. The standard overarching account remains V.P. Menon’s Integration of the Indian States, published in 1956. Josy Joseph’s book does not tell this entire story but rather focusses on “the three anxious weeks leading up to 15 August 1947”. The book begins with Joseph’s discovery of newly declassified records in the National Archives of India, a massive collection he has mined extensively. The result is a thoroughly researched and readable account of this momentous period.The political edifice of the Raj had rested on two pillars: the “provinces” directly ruled by the British and the indirectly controlled “states” that were nominally under the rule of Indian princes. The political relationship between the British and the states was subsumed under the notion of “paramountcy”.Birth of a Nation aims to fill a gaping hole in the historiography of decolonisation and the making of the modern Indian republic. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement Birth of a Nation: The Twenty Days that Made IndiaBy Josy JosephContextPages: 264Price: Rs.799A conveniently hazy and ill-defined term, paramountcy included a system of British “Residents” in the states, control over their external policy, and the regulation of succession within the states. In practice, the claims of the princes to sovereignty were steadily whittled down. Their powers over key communication and infrastructure, monetary policy, and even valuable pieces of territory were taken over by the government of India. The steady haemorrhaging of real sovereignty was compensated for by the ornamental splendours of royal titles, salutes, and imperial durbars. During the First World War, the major princely states vied with one another to demonstrate their fealty to the King-Emperor, dispatching their own troops and parting with considerable sums to support the imperial war effort.The Raj, for its part, responded to the rise of anti-colonial nationalism in the interwar years by creating a “Chamber of Princes” and eventually proposing a “federation” with the states under the Government of India Act, 1935. Under this scheme, the provinces would automatically join the federation while the states would have the choice to accede by signing an instrument of accession that laid down the federal legislative powers that would apply thereafter to the states. As the nitty-gritties of this roseate vision became clearer, the Chamber of Princes began a step-by-step withdrawal from the idea of a federation. Eventually, the outbreak of the Second World War handed them a reprieve.The Partition PlanAfter the war, the British Cabinet Mission sent to consider India’s political future stated that with independence for British India, paramountcy would cease to operate: all rights surrendered by the states would revert to them. The states would have to fill this void by entering a “federal relationship” or “particular political arrangements” with the successor government or governments. Over the following year, however, the problem of the states receded to the background as India’s unity and partition became the most important and urgent matters. When the Partition Plan was announced on June 3, 1947, it tersely stated that British policy would be governed by the Cabinet Mission’s memorandum.At this point, Joseph’s account gets into its stride. The Congress and the Muslim League were at loggerheads on the question of the states. The former insisted that the states had to join either India or Pakistan, while the latter maintained that they could remain independent. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s reasoning was straightforward. Given a Pakistan with partitioned Punjab and Bengal, it was important to redress the overall balance with India by encouraging some states to join Pakistan and others to remain independent.In fact, some of the larger states needed no encouragement from Jinnah. The Dewan of Travancore, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the Nawab of Bhopal announced their decision to remain independent and sovereign entities. Fearing a “Balkanisation” of India, the Congress leadership issued a stern statement emphasising that the states could not remain independent.A new Department of States was set up in the Indian government with Vallabhbhai Patel as Minister and V.P. Menon as Secretary. Menon was a dab hand in constitutional matters and in good standing with both the senior Congress leadership and Lord Mountbatten. Menon came up with the simple yet ingenious idea of getting the states to accede via the instrument of accession in the Government of India Act (1935), but by limiting the scope of accession and the Union government’s powers to only three subjects: foreign affairs, defence, and communication. Patel assured the princes that “in other matters we would scrupulously respect their autonomous existence”.Equally important was Patel and Menon’s move to enlist Mountbatten to their cause. In an important speech to the Chamber of Princes on July 25, 1947, Mountbatten urged the princes to eschew dreams of independence and join either India or Pakistan on the basis of two considerations: geographic contiguity and religious composition of their populace. Accession on three subjects would leave them with maximum internal sovereignty. Without Mountbatten’s potent mix of royal charisma, blandishment, and subtle bullying, it is difficult to imagine the princes agreeing to accede in short order. Joseph gives a vivid account of the ensuing weeks of hectic parleying punctuated by some dramatic events such as the Maharaja of Jodhpur threatening to shoot Menon (apparently in jest, though Menon thought otherwise); the serious attempt to assassinate the Dewan of Travancore, C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer; and the rings of intrigue run by Bhopal and Hyderabad.In the event, all but three states—Junagadh, Hyderabad, Jammu and Kashmir—acceded to India by August 15, 1947. Joseph rightly holds that the princely states were “no mere relics” and that their accession to India demands historical explanation. Yet, he seems to overstate the case in suggesting that things could have gone rather differently had, for instance, the Dewan of Travancore not been attacked and hence thrown in the towel. In fact, with the withdrawal of British power, the princes had lost their major backstop. Indian leaders, especially Jawaharlal Nehru and Patel, were determined to allow no independent existence for the states. The ultimate arbiter of the states’ future, as the cases of Junagadh, Hyderabad, and Kashmir would show, was the new Indian government’s control over the coercive apparatus of the departed Raj.Birth of a Nation ends on August 15, 1947. Yet the resolution of these three states’ situation would last well into the following year. Furthermore, the relationship of the acceded states with the Union of India would continue to evolve as Patel and Menon worked steadily to tighten their grip on the states and force them to cede many more powers, never mind their bland assurances to the contrary. Let us hope that Joseph has a sequel in the works, which could take the story up to the inauguration of the Indian republic in 1950. Srinath Raghavan is the author of Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India (Penguin Random House, 2025).Also Read | States & the UnionAlso Read | Path to Partition: A witness account