For two and a half years, independent India still had a British-style governor-general
India did not become a republic on independence day. From 15 August 1947 until 26 January 1950 it was a dominion within the Commonwealth, with Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, staying on as its first governor-general. In that short interlude the country absorbed hundreds of princely states and wrote its constitution.
Britain's postwar Labour government under Clement Attlee, exhausted by the war and long sympathetic to Indian self-rule, decided late in 1946 to leave, promising to hand over power by June 1948 at the latest. Talks between the Indian National Congress and Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League stalled over partition, and communal violence spread. Mountbatten, arriving as viceroy in March 1947, pushed the timetable forward, and in June leaders representing Congress, the League and the Sikhs accepted division. Pakistan came into being on 14 August 1947 and India the next day, with Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister and Vallabhbhai Patel as his deputy.
Whether rushing the handover was wise is still argued. Supporters say it forced politicians to take responsibility for disorder Britain could no longer contain; critics think another year of preparation might have made the transfer less violent. The Radcliffe boundary award was published only on 17 August, after independence. Most demographers estimate that between 14 and 18 million people crossed the new borders as refugees and that more than a million died. Mahatma Gandhi's campaigning for calm, including in Delhi from October 1947, did much to reduce the bloodshed, but he was later killed by a Hindu extremist.
Patel took charge of folding the princely states, previously ruled by Indian monarchs under British paramountcy, into the new union, using incentives and occasionally pressure through 1947 and much of 1948. Most joined smoothly; Junagadh, Hyderabad and above all Jammu and Kashmir proved difficult, the last becoming a lasting dispute with Pakistan. Mountbatten gave way in June 1948 to C. Rajagopalachari.
The constitution drafted in these years drew heavily on Britain's Government of India Act 1935, with borrowings from the American and Irish constitutions, and it abolished untouchability. The challenges were stark: a 1949 committee put average annual income at about Rs. 260, and the 1951 census found literacy of 23.54 percent among men and 7.62 percent among women.
Source: Dominion of India
