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This book aims to recount the story of India’s freedom struggle to its beneficiaries, the present generation. The material impoverishment of India was a great evil. But far worse was the effect of political thraldom on the minds and hearts of the Indian people. A movement of social and political regeneration began in the nineteenth century which reached its inevitable conclusion on 15 August 1947 with the Constituent Assembly of India. The ‘tryst with destiny’ that led to this fulfilment may have been made formally in 1930, but India’s freedom was not the fruit of a mere seventeen years of struggle. Through good and ill-fortune alike, India has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. Those ideals were remembered on the night that India regained its freedom.

The day India attained independence, 15 August 1947, was a moment when an entire nation stepped out from the old to the new. In his stirring independence-eve speech, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru gave utterance to the soul of that nation. Reviewing the struggles of the past, summing up the joys and the sorrows of the present, he turned his eyes chiefly to India’s glorious ‘future that beckons’. Nehru noted the work that must be done. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. Free India has made great strides towards the achievement of these four goals. The first great task of independent India was to frame for herself a Constitution. This responsibility rested upon the Constituent Assembly.

This chapter looks at two pivotal states of South Asia: India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan gained their independence in 1947. India succeeded in placing its armed forces under firm and virtually unchallenged state control right from the beginning of independence. However, civil–military relations in Pakistan have been far more “eventful.” The chapter makes three arguments. First and most important, by the end of the first postcolonial decade, the patterns for the drastically different military politics of India and Pakistan were already set. Second, of the numerous reasons for the evolution of different civil–military relations in the two countries, several lie in the circumstances of the 1947 Partition and in the immediate post-Partition period. Third, the British colonial period left behind profound legacies, most of which have positively influenced military affairs in the Subcontinent. The chapter also addresses Bangladesh—from its independence in 1971 to the military take-over in 2007—and what sets its military politics apart from Pakistan's.

This chapter highlights the concept of the Economics Administration of the Bizone, during 1947–8, which was striving to be a system of improved planning and resource allocation, combined with the long-awaited currency reform. This system did not lead to the liberalization being demanded by neo-liberals such as Walter Eucken or Wilhelm Röpke, even though it was considered to be more flexible and at the same time more consistently applied throughout West Germany. There were differences in opinion over major issues to be resolved such as free market, employment, and the market-splitting scheme. The free-price mechanism was considered to be the real cure for currency reform, only if the Allies played their part by providing credits for imported goods. Kromphardt's market-splitting scheme has been elaborated. The success of the system of rationing proposed by Kromphardt depended on the allocation rights (Bezugsrechte) which would run through the entire economy, from the consumer to the first producer. The Beirat memorandum, dated 18 April 1948 ,stressed that the currency reform, when it came, could make sense only when combined with a fundamental reform of the existing system of economic controls, with the reintroduction of the price mechanism in the economy being the major recommendation of the report.

This chapter discusses the legal aspects concerning the bribery of Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) and Members of Parliament (MP) in India. Under the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, it is not an offence to bribe an MLA or MP. This was not so even under Prevention of Corruption Act 1947. These acts were enacted to penalize the offer to and receipt or demand of a bribe by a minister, a civil servant, or a voter as these were considered public servants. However, a Constitution bench of five judges to the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that MLA is not a public servant and not covered by anti-corruption law. In addition, the Salmon Commission held that an MLA does not perform a public duty and that membership of parliament does not constitute public office for the purposes of the common law.

In Chapter 9, the author describes the first logistical campaign of the First Indochina War, which encompassed the struggles of both the French and the Viet Minh to build the combat and support forces needed to carry out their respective strategies. The operations during the period (LEA in 1947 and the battle of Route Coloniale 4 in 1950) are described as foreshadowings of the battles to come.

This chapter presents extracts from the British Cabinet Mission’s statement on 16 May 1946; the Cabinet Mission’s memorandum on Indian states, treaties, and paramountcy; the Indian Independence Act of 1947; the Government of India Act, 1935, as adapted on 15 August 1947 by the India Order; and the white paper on Jammu and Kashmir, Government of India. The chapter also details the instrument of accession of the state of Jammu and Kashmir that was signed by Maharaja Hari Singh on 26 October 1947; Maharaja’s letter to the Governor-General of India, Lord Mountbatten, and the Governor-General’s letter in reply; Maharaja’s Emergency Administration Order on October 30, 1947 appointing Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah as the head of the administration; Maharaja’s proclamation on 5 March 1948 appointing a popular interim government; and the proclamation entrusting Yuvaraj Karan Singh with all the Maharaja’s powers on 9 June 1949.

This chapter discusses the repercussions of the 1947 New Look designs of Christian Dior. These designs stimulated the return of corsets to fashion prominence. This New Look quickly spread to the United States and England, and had its fair share of supporters and critics. It determines that the sportswear trade, along with the corset industry, enjoyed a sudden increase of profits during this time. The discussion notes that women only wore to wear the most extreme versions of the corset on special occasions, like proms and debutante balls. The chapter concludes that it is this specialized use of the corset that intensified the fetishized quality of corsetry, which is still very visible in modern times.

This chapter focuses on the prevailing methods and themes in Indian cinema after 1947. In this period, the mythological and social melodramatic-centred films of the early 1930s and 1940s were preceded by Independence melodrama and heightened moral polarization—a transformation that found its root within the emerging notion of an independent nation. Indian films dealt with social experiences dominating this period by allegorising them into familial terms and themes. One of the most significant Indian filmmakers of this period was Raj Kapoor, who incorporated social and governmental conflicts within the folds of familial conflict. Class conflict, political advocacy and conflict, and the concept of an independent nation were embedded within familial conflict, oedipal conflict, romance and sacrifice, and in metaphors and allegories.

Focusing on the figure of the abducted woman during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, this chapter analyzes not only the impact of communal violence on citizens as gendered but also the ways in which turmoil and horror allowed the nation-state to imagine and portray itself as the protector of a more rational, fundamentally purified, and by implication masculine, social order. It explores how hearsay and rumor tainted subsequent government fact-finding commissions and search-and-recovery operations, and highlights the ways in which elements of myth (dating back to epic depictions in the Ramayana and Mahabharata) and popular narrative or film circulated in an imaginary of social and sexual disorders that “created the conditions of possibility in which the state could be instituted as essentially a social contract between men charged with keeping male violence against women in abeyance”. It argues that the very demand for and mutual insistence on legislation intended to restore women to their families of origin sanctified a sexual contract as the counter-part of the social contract.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to explore standards of review in WTO dispute resolution. It discusses dispute resolution under GATT 1947 and rule-oriented WTO dispute resolution. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The notion of standard of review, and thus a somehow limited panel review of allegedly inconsistent measures and practices at the domestic level, developed under the GATT 1947. This going hand-in-hand with the process of juridification of dispute resolution, panels found themselves increasingly in a position to elaborate on the appropriate standards of review applicable in a specific case. This chapter expounds standards of review as developed during the GATT 1947 years and traces the Uruguay Round negotiations in this regard. It then discusses developments in the official rule-making process, as regards new proposals and revisions, since the creation of the WTO.

This chapter notes that, up to the end of General Agreement on Kennedy Round of Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the large number of GATT disputes over agricultural restrictions and subsidies influenced GATT negotiations on agriculture only marginally. The ‘GATT 1947 bicycle’ rolled and created the necessary political momentum for liberalizing domestic market-access barriers. The chapter gives detailed evidence how, during the Tokyo Round as well as during the Uruguay Round, the large number of agricultural dispute settlement proceedings influenced the bargaining power, negotiating positions, the final contents, and progressive development of the 1979 and 1994 Agreements on Subsidies as well as the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture. A large number of dispute settlement findings established violations of export subsidy reduction commitments under the Agreement on Agriculture of the subsidy disciplines in the Agreement on Subsidies and clarified the contested meaning of certain World Trade Organization rules.

This chapter tells the story of the transformation of the Imperial Record Department of the colonial Government of India into the National Archives on the independence. But the story is also a continuation of the tale of rivalry between Sarkar and Sardesai and their younger Puna and Calcutta opponents on questions of access to and control of historical sources. This was a battle that Sarkar and Sardesai lost. The final section of the chapter charts Sarkar’s life in its last decade or so and his gradual eclipse in discussions of Mughal history after independence. The discussion is linked to previously-raised issues about “public” and “cloistered” lives of the discipline of history, thus connecting back to issues taken up in the Introduction.

This introductory chapter discusses the evolving image of the motorcyclist during the early half of the twentieth century, taking into account the cultural and historical factors that have shaped the postwar image of the motorcyclist as outlaws. Sensationalist portrayals in the media only account for a small portion of a much larger political machine that had churned out the motorcycle culture as it is recognized today—be it through the influence of the 1969 movie Easy Street or via postwar anxieties, but especially through the 1947 motorcycle rally in the sleepy town of Hollister, California. The increasing attention motorcyclists received at Hollister came in the wake of nearly two decades of nationwide instability and uncertainty characterized by massive unemployment, dislocation, and war.

This chapter examines the 1947 HUAC hearings on Communist infiltration in Hollywood. Through these public hearings, HUAC, the Motion Picture Alliance, and the FBI achieved a transformation in the types of films Hollywood produced. For example, HUAC—particularly committee member Richard Nixon—intimidated the studios into pledging to produce anti-Communist propaganda films. Moreover, the emerging Hollywood blacklist served not just to purge radical individuals from employment but also their suspect ideas from the screen. Indeed, although HUAC's move away from investigating film content initially angered J. Edgar Hoover, his FBI and its allies in the Motion Picture Alliance soon came to appreciate the blacklist as the most effective means of altering film content.