Born in Lahore, having moved to Delhi as a student at the time of Partition, joining later the Indian Civil Service from which he retired as Secretary to Government of India in 1985, SS Gill is eminently qualified to write on the subject he has chosen. Two earlier books by him, Dynasty - A Political Biography of the Leading Ruling Family of Modern India and the Pathology of Corruption have been well received. Gill writes with ease and warns the reader that there might be "large gaps" in the narrative as it is neither a biography nor a history of the Freedom Movement of India. He is considerate enough to confide in the reader that "writing the book was not an easy task, and reading it may not be a comfortable experience."

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A book such as the one under review consists of arguments and supporting narration. We start with one of the principal theses of the author which can be summed up as follows: It is wrong to state that Gandhi liberated India; the ground reality is that territorial colonialism, with the end of the Second World War, had ceased to be a "viable enterprise". Sir Stafford Cripps told the British Parliament on March 1947 that Britain had "two alternatives" - either to maintain her hold over India by a "considerable reinforcement of troops" or to transfer power. "The first alternative had been judged impossible… We in Britain had not the power to carry it out." Briefly, the Titan gave up as he was too exhausted.

In support of his main thesis, Gill advances another argument: Apart from the Gandhian method, India had two other options, one of using revolutionary violence and the other waiting for the completion of the "incremental constitutional reform" which commenced in 1861. Referring to the constitutional path, the author argues that Gandhi's Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movement "retarded this process as they were highly confrontationist and created bad blood from the British point of view." As regards the path of revolutionary violence, "it is quite conceivable that the revolutionary course pursued under an inspiring leadership would have kept communalism under check and, hopefully, averted the country's partition." The author makes the point that the constitutional approach might have prevented the partition or at least avoided the holocaust. In other words, the author is advancing the thesis that it was Gandhi's method which might have delayed independence and made the horrors of partition unavoidable.

It is important to examine the thesis with cold logic and objectively. The thesis of the Exhausted Titan has been advanced earlier too, for example, by Michael Edwards in The Myth of Mahatma (Constable and Company, London, 1986). The argument can be easily disposed off. Gill says that territorial colonialism had become a nonviable enterprise and quotes Cripps to the effect that "a reinforcement of troops" was required to hold India. Gill should have paused to ask why more troops were required and why had territorial colonialism ceased to be viable. The unstated premise is that an awakened India could not have been held without additional troops. Who was responsible for India's awakening? I have talked to people older than Gill and they have told me that there was a time when more people in more parts of India had enthusiastically shouted "Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai" than "Bharat Mata ki Jai" for the reason that India as a political entity came into being as a result of the struggle for independence waged under Gandhi. If some of the British officials had their way, India might have disintegrated into a number of independent countries even before Vallabhai Patel had the opportunity to integrate the princely states in the masterly way he did.

While Gill has concluded that colonialism ceased to be viable by the end of the Second World War, the fact remains that many countries got their independence only in the 60s and even later; Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the two Congos, Ivory Coast, Gabon, and Benin gained independence in 1960, followed by Algeria and Burundi (1962), Gambia (1965), Fiji (1970), Bahrain (1971) and Brunei (1984).

The decolonization process took a long time and any attempt to explain it as an inevitable and automatic consequence of the Second World War is historically untenable. Post hoc ergo procter hoc is not an uncommon fallacy.

The author's arguments about the constitutional path and the revolutionary path, remind one of Blaise Pascal who said, "Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed." We start with an attempt to decipher the intentions of the British establishment:

• August 14, 1917, London. The British Cabinet was discussing the declaration to be made by the Secretary of State for India Montague in the House of Commons. Ex-Viceroy Curzon explained his objections to the use of the word "self-government," because Indians would expect it to happen within a generation, 'while the cabinet probably contemplated an intervening period which might extend to 500 years.' "Self-government" was missing from the declaration. It is true that some Indians who shared Gill's faith in the goodness of the British and even others mistook the Curzonian expression "responsible government" whereas he only meant "government by responsible men" as explained by his biographer.
• 1929, New Delhi. The Viceroy, Lord Irwin, issued a statement to the effect that 'the natural issue of India's constitutional progress,' as contemplated in Montague's declaration of August 1917, was 'the attainment of dominion status.' All the 'experts' on India including former Viceroys and Secretaries of State - Birkenhead, Peel, Winterton, Simon Austen, Chamberlain and Crewe - were scandalized by the specific reference to the dominion status for India. The Labour government was put on the defensive.
• In 1930, the Simon Commission in its report, studiously avoided 'dominion status.'
• Gill is all praise for the federal structure of the 1935 Act. Sir Samuel Hoare who piloted the bill in the Commons confided in his Conservative colleagues, that the federal structure could be a handy instrument to yield 'a semblance of responsible government and yet retain in our hands the realities and verities of British control.'
• 1939. The Viceroy Linlithgow, (who had been the Chairman of the Joint Select Committee of the British Parliament for constitutional reforms), reminded Zetland, the Secretary of State for India: "After all, we framed the constitution as it stands in the Act of 1935, because we thought that was the best way - given the political position in both countries - of maintaining British influence in India. It is no part of policy, I take it, to expedite the constitutional changes for their own sake, or gratuitously to hurry the handing over of controls to Indian hands at any faster pace than we regard as best calculated on a long view to hold India to the Empire."

Compare all the above with our author's confident assertion: "There is every reason to believe that the dynamics of the reform process could not be frozen at the level of the 1935 Act, and the grant of Dominion Status was the next logical step. And as argued earlier, the grant of full independence in the mid-forties had become inevitable in any case." A comment is in order: At least one reader has not been able to locate in the book the argument referred to by the author.

Another major thesis of Gill is that Gandhi signally failed in his endeavor to promote Hindu-Muslim unity. "In 1924, when large-scale riots followed the withdrawal of Non -cooperation, he wrote, 'We shall have to go for tapasya, for self-purification, if we want to win the hearts of the Mussalmans.' Here the word 'we' shows that he is speaking as a Hindu, trying to win the hearts of the 'other' party. Also it implies that Hindu hearts are in the right place and only Muslim hearts need to be won over." Gill has not understood the context, Gandhi was addressing himself to Hindus and not speaking as a Hindu. Since Gandhi has asked the Hindus to do tapasya, it follows that the author's deduction that Gandhi meant that the Hindu hearts were in the right place is unwarranted and the whole sentence is even self-contradictory.

A word about the narration. As part of the narration of events leading to the Quit India movement, we are told, "All of a sudden Gandhi seemed to have become more agitated and impatient than anybody else. He told Louis Fischer in the beginning of June, 'I have become impatient… I may not be able to convince the Congress… I will go ahead nevertheless and address myself directly to the people'." It is necessary to recall that after the failure of the Cripps mission, the Viceroy ordered the local officials in the area facing a possible Japanese attack to carry out a scorched earth policy that would impede any Japanese advance. As an official in Calcutta harbor recalls, "(Scorched earth) orders came through to collect and immobilize all bicycles… Then it was the turn of country boats. Cycles (although counted in thousands) were not numerous in this riverain district, but boats were there by (many) thousands, and they were the lifeblood of the community…" In March 1942, when Rangoon fell, the British evacuated their nationals by air and left the Indians to fend for themselves. There was a distinct possibility that Japan might invade India. It was against this background that the Congress under Gandhi passed the Quit India resolution that called for an immediate end to the British rule on the understanding that a free India would do everything in its power to support the Allied war effort. In brief, the author's narration is neither logically complete nor historically adequate.

Our author has used quotations without giving the full context. For example, he has lifted out of context Gandhi's words, "The Muslim as a rule is a bully, and the Hindu as a rule is a coward." Any interested reader might refer to Anand T Hingoorani's book To the Hindus and Muslims summarising Gandhi's writings, available at the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Library at Teen Murthi. Briefly, Gandhi was speaking in the context of the Multan riots where in one case Hindu men ran away leaving in the lurch their women and children and Gandhi made the point that the men, if they did not have it in them to practice the nonviolence of the strong, should have defended their family by whatever means at their disposal. Gill finds fault with Gandhi for what he said about the Hindu men and accuses Gandhi as speaking as a Hindu and advocating violence against the Muslims. To put it mildly, this was not expected of the author who had made use of the Nehru Memorial Library as mentioned in his Acknowledgements.

We are living in an age when it is fashionable to be ignorant of history. President Bush seeking support from Moslem countries in his war against terrorism asks them to join in a crusade. My niece, 18, born of Indian parents and brought up in the US once told me that she had no idea of history. Ignorance of history is spreading at an alarming rate even among the adults in India, especially among the middle class. As a society, we have not taken the trouble to inculcate in our people curiosity about the past. Lack of historical knowledge can engender pernicious attitudes. Let me give an example: My driver told me that Muslims and Christians are "guests" in our country and they are welcome so long as they behave; once they start to misbehave, they should be shown their place. I asked him how long the Muslims had been in India. He did not know and hazarded the guess that they had been in India for one hundred years at the maximum.

Apart from ignorance of history, there is another pernicious tendency, namely to simplify and to falsify it. It has been said that a historian is even more powerful than the Almighty as the former can change the past which the latter cannot.

Indira Gandhi once said that one's ability and willingness to understand Gandhi is a measure of one's maturity. Gill's book should be read as he has articulated with clarity and put in one place what a growing number of middle class Indians enchanted by globalization have been feeling for some time. To get a balanced picture, it should be read along with at least three other books:

B.R.Nanda's The Making of a Nation
Ranbir Vohra's The Making of India
Raja Rao's The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi

How would have Gandhi reacted to Gill's book? The Mahatma, with that famous toothless smile, would have agreed with Gill in toto and recited from the Gita:

He that laboreth rightly for love of me, shall finally attain;
If in this thine faint heart fail, bring me thy failure.

But the question for the people of India to introspect upon is: Whose was the failure? His or ours?
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