India in the Interregnum: Interim Government, September 1946–August 1947

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India's interim government, in office from 2 September 1946 till August 1947, was a unique coalition of the Indian National Congress, All-India Muslim League, and non-Congress and non-League political figures-all presiding over a British/British-trained state apparatus during a period of political transition. These eleven months were packed as much with the events surrounding the formal exit of the empire as its informal continuance; as much with the anticipation of Partition as its alternatives. Though it stands at a juncture of India as a colony and a dominion, it has been overlooked by colonial and postcolonial historiography of that interval, given its sole identification with Partition/Independence.

India in the Interregnum moves beneath and beyond this understanding in order to, first, restore identity to the interim government-and its provincial counterparts-and investigate their work, and, second, recover the legacy of the interim government in the formation of contemporary India.

Rakesh Ankit teaches history and international politics at Loughborough University, Leicestershire, United Kingdom.

My doctoral research was on the early international dimensions of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, against -the twin backdrops of the end of empire and the beginning of the Cold War. Employing these prisms, it looked at the evolution of this regional episode involving an erstwhile princely state into a sub- continental saga of undeclared war and diplomacy. It covered the two- decade period from 1945 to 1966, but towards the end of my research and through the course of writing my thesis, I was constantly struck by the strange amalgamation of individuals and institutions, structures and processes, and networks and agents, which populated the India of late 1940s and amidst whom the dispute emerged and evolved.

In particular, the aptly titled and peculiarly constituted Interim Government, in office from 2 September 1946, and its eleven provincial counterparts, in office from spring 1946, seemed to determine many aspects of both the epilogue to the Empire and the prologue to partition/independence of British India. Participated in by the major Indian political parties and propped up by the British state civil, police, and military apparatus, this miscellany of ideologically diverse, adversarial groups seemed ripe and relevant for an excavation. Oddly overlooked by the historiography of the period, given that this interregnum was overshadowed by what came before and after, its liminal image appeared to me as twice more important: first, as reflecting the afterlife of imperial India and second, as representing the precursor of independent India. The eleven months from September 1946 to August 1947, in my realization, were packed with critical elements of the formal exit of the empire alongside the imperial durabilities as well as the vital signs of the coming Partition and its aftermath.

Recent writings on Partition have increasingly become fittingly people-oriented, as against the earlier preferences for politics, processes, personalities, and policies. Nineteen forty-seven was, all said and done, a people's tragedy, and attempts are being made, with renewed vigour, to probe, elucidate, document, exhibit, archive, and memorialize individual stories of voluntary and involuntary participation in that tide of affairs. Given this historiographical turn, the governmental arrangement that framed this period of transition is in danger of being almost entirely for- gotten on all sides: British, Indian, and Pakistani. The incredibly diverse participants, both those who went on to have alternative public careers as well as those who did not, their life and work then has been overlain by later narratives.

This book, then, first and foremost, aims to recover the last government of British India, which paved the way for its independent successor, from the relegation to the heap of history. Rather than looking at its existence as just another evidence of and event on the road to Partition, it seeks to restore identity to the Interim Government, and especially its considerable body of work, whose legacies reshaped much that fol lowed in its wake. The questions this book asks and attempts to answer are: How did the Interim Government impact on the Indian state? How did its intentions and actions affect the Indian society? What was its experience for its participants and observers alike? Second, apart from this acknowledgement of who, what, and how of those eleven months, the book also tackles the harder social and economic questions of why. Above all, this is a book about alternatives, multiplicities, pluralities, diversities, and contrasts of experiences, hopes, fears, achievements, failures, and frustrations.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages