India's Independence and British Archives
Declassified British archives from 1971 reveal how Wavell, Auchinleck, and London's India Office actually debated and decided to leave India.
In 1971, the British government declassified a trove of documents from the final years of the Raj: letters, reports, and minutes exchanged between Viceroy Field Marshal Viscount Wavell, Commander-in-Chief General Sir Claude Auchinleck, provincial governors, and intelligence officials on one side, and Secretary of State Lord Pethick Lawrence and the India Office in London on the other. Dr. Kalyan Kumar De spent years working through these records and built from them a history of India's independence as the British themselves experienced and debated it.
What the documents reveal is the administrative and military logic behind the decision to leave India — not as it was presented in the official narrative, but as it was actually processed by the men responsible. De's selection of correspondence traces the pressures, calculations, and communications that led to the accelerated transfer of power, with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army operating as a constant reference point in the internal British assessment of how much longer they could hold on.
For historians and general readers alike, this is rare primary-source material organized by someone who knows what to look for in it.
This book is a seminal work of historical research by Dr. Kalyan De and is based on authentic documents from the British archives, declassified in 1971. These documents are in the form of carefully selected letters, reports and minutes exchanged between the main protagonists of the British Raj in India - the Viceroy Field Marshal Viscount Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Indian Army General Sir Claude Auchinleck and other functionaries, such as the Governors of various states and the Intelligence Department on the one hand and Secretary of State for India, Lord Pethick Lawrence and other functionaries of the British administration in London on the other, leading to their ultimate decision to leave India as early as possible.
