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Those who kindly invited me to give this lecture showed some resistance to its sub-title. I insisted on 'a view from the sidelines' because I wished to emphasize that my remarks would be based on my own presence at the events of 1947 and confined to those matters with which I had direct acquaintance. This is still largely true: mine is in part an undisguisedly personal tale. But the matter is rather more complicated. For one thing, while I was certainly a spectator I was also able for a couple of months in 1947 to scamper on to a segment of New Delhi's field of fateful play, even to get a touch or two of the ball, before returning to my place on the terraces. But for the purpose of this lecture I could not content myself with recollections; I have, as it were, examined the slow re-plays of the television cameras. In trying to match my memories, diaries and letters from 1947 with the files at India Office Records, there have, I confess, been phases of bewilderment on the way to such modest and provisional enlightenment as I can offer. It is not simply that in the 34 years the world has moved on, the perspective has changed; that is a problem which the historian's whole skill is devoted to overcome. The difficulty is aggravated when the spectator cum minor actor in the drama of yesteryear puts on the historian's robe; for not only the world but he with it has changed.

WHEN WESTERNERS FIND INDIANS BAFFLING AND EXASPERATING Indians have an explanation: it is because they bring an 'either-or' a proach to people who like to operate in terms of 'both-and', they see contraries and inconsistencies where Indians are aware only of complexity and compatibility. Without entering into a discussion of this as a general view, it is tempting to say that it could furnish an explanation of the curiously mixed and paradoxical character of the authoritarian regime which has been emer ing over the past eighteen months from that country's so-called 'Emergency'. Tempting but less than convincing, for several reasons: the forms of authoritarianism in the world are already amply varied; it remains to be seen how far Mrs Gandhi's mixture is viable; above all, it is a mixture which looks and feels pretty strange to many Indians too.