Kemper Lectures
THE TRANSFER OF POWER IN INDIA
Philip S. Ziegler, April 24, 1988
Philip S. Ziegler, April 24, 1988
President Saunders, Professor Davis, Ladies and Gentlemen, I feel profoundly honoured to have been invited to give the Seventh Crosby Kemper Churchill Memorial Lecture. When I consider the eminence of those who have preceded me, I feel not merely honoured but alarmed. My alarm is not alleviated by the fact that the subject which I have chosen, ‘The Transfer of Power in India’ is not one in which the presiding genius of this assembly, Sir Winston Churchill, appears to greatest advantage. It would indeed not be an exaggeration to say that India as an element in Churchill’s career is mercifully unique; as being a theme on which he was invariably consistent, and almost equally invariably wrong.
It is now a little over 40 years since that moment in August 1947 when power was transferred in the Indian subcontinent and two new nations, some 450 million human beings, found their independence (the word ‘some’ is used advisedly; statistics in India have an awe-inspiring imprecision – no one would argue if one were to put the figure 20 or 30 million less or more.) Two generations of Indians and Pakistanis have not known what it was to live under the British raj, only the most elderly of surviving elder statesmen exercised any authority before their countries took charge of their own affairs. It is a moot point when if ever one is able to survey the past with anything approaching objectivity, but by now it should at least be possible to look back on those years immediately following the Second World War without being swayed too markedly by those passions and prejudices which are bred by personal participation. The Transfer of Power in India is ripe for reassessment; and Indian historians being no less enterprising, ingenious and energetic than those of their nations, there has been no shortage of real or self-styled ‘authorities’ from the subcontinent as well as from Britain and the United States, who are ready and eager to contribute to the task.