Partition: The Story of Indian Independence and the Creation of Pakistan in 1947 By Barney White-Spunner
The year 1947 involved three different but connected events in the Indian subcontinent: independence and the end of foreign rule, the reduction of the British Empire to a quarter of its previous size, and the division of India and Pakistan into separate nations. Barney White-Spunner, a former commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade during the 2001 occupation of Afghanistan and later of British troops in Basra in Iraq, approaches the last of these – Partition – from, in his own words, ‘a soldier’s perspective’. It is where he uses his military knowledge to analyse critical choices made at this time that his book is most valuable. Less successful is his depiction of the operation of Indian society, and of the politicians who drove the process of converting a popular movement for freedom into a world historical event. They are sketched cursorily, as are Churchill and Attlee, who took the key...
I’m afraid this isn’t one of our four free articles available in full, which are set out in the first two rows of the ‘Magazine’ page.
Please click here to find them.
To buy a digital version of this issue for just £2.99, click here
