The Quit India Movement Signified A Climatic Phase Of The Indian Struggle For Freedom. This Book Chronicles The Event In Some Detail.

The Quit India Movement of 1942 is a milestone in India's struggle for freedom. This densely researched volume deals with the developments in the multi-facet upsurge during the World War II. The close interactions between historical forces that stood behind Gandhi, the Conservatives, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress Socialist Party encompassing various revolutionary units have been for the first time, fruitfully examined, from the clinical perspective of an unbiased historian. Clearly formulated, analytically argued and elegantly presented, the work offers a refreshing insight into the epic struggle and its social dynamics. The author's notes and references include a wide selection from private papers and records from the Cambridge University Library and in the India Office Record Room and Library. The interesting aspect of the exercise is a natural blend of source material in the narrative without being pedantic or obtuse.

Gandhi's Quit India Movement of 1942 was the climax of a nationalist revolutionary movement which sought independence on India's own terms. Indian independence was attained through revolution, not through a benevolent grant from the British imperial regime. "The British left India because Indians had made it impossible for them to stay." The bases for Francis Hutchins' thesis are new facts from hitherto unused sources: interviews with surviving participants in the movement, private papers from the Gandhi Memorial Museum and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, documents in the National Archives of India. In particular, he has studied the secret records of the British government, recently made available, which reveal for the first time the extent of the revolutionary movement and Britain's plans for dealing with it. Of the British records Hutchins says, "No other regime has left such careful documentation of its strategies or compiled such extensive records revealing the way in which it was overthrown." Even though England had always proclaimed its hope that India would one day become independent, the tacit assumption was that this was a remote eventuality. Only after Gandhi's Quit India Movement did Britain's political parties resign themselves to the necessity to leave quickly, whether or not they believed India was "ready." Obscured by censorship in India and by preoccupation with World War II, the significance of Gandhi's revolutionary technique was not appreciated at the time. Hutchins' impressive analysis uses the Indian case to develop a general theory of the revolutionary nature of colonial nationalism.