Authoritarian Shadows: Indian Independence and the Problem of Democratisation

On 15 August 1947, nearly two hundred years of British colonial rule came to an end in the Indian subcontinent. The anti-colonial movement reaped its political harvest, after decades of political mobilisation. Great Britain, weakened by the Second World War, lost its most precious colony. In place of the colonial Indian empire, two new nation states – India and Pakistan – emerged through a sanguinary Partition. Indian Independence stood out as a beacon for the global process of decolonisation. Barely two decades later, almost everywhere nation-states emerged from erstwhile colonial empires, which sought their legitimate place amongst the fronts and hierarchies generated by the world order of the Cold War. All of us are aware of the magnitude of this major moment of the twentieth century. In hindsight now, after a gap of seven decades, it becomes clearer that many histories lie buried under this history – not merely in the sense of a plurality of perceptions and experiences, but also in terms of a multilayeredness of the historical process itself. Deeper layers and undercurrents of Indian decolonisation are unravelled only gradually as the present confronts us with new questions.