On the morning of 26 July 1945, while London still smouldered from the Blitz, a formally dressed man approached Buckingham Palace, the regal building in the heart of the City of Westminster that still carried the scars of multiple German bombings on it.
VE (Day) celebrations had barely faded when Conrad Corfield arrived to receive his knighthood, unaware that he would soon become one of the last men standing against India’s unity.
It wasn’t just a day of great significance for Corfield. By that evening Winston Churchill, having led Britain through the war with a mix of pragmatism and rhetorical brilliance, called on the King to tender his resignation after an unexpected, humiliating defeat in the elections. Later the same day Clement Attlee, leader of the victorious Labour Party, met the King and was invited to form the next government. Each of those events would have a dramatic impact on the fate of South Asia....
Within months, he would be caught up in one of history’s most significant moments, working actively to fracture the subcontinent even as the world’s largest democracy emerged.
As head of the all-powerful Political Department, operating from the splendid Viceroy’s House atop Raisina Hill in New Delhi, Corfield commanded a shadow colonial empire: residents and political agents across India to coordinate with princely states, archives bursting with royal secrets and an unwavering conviction that ‘India’s soul resided in its princely courts’.
Scattered across the personal archives of Indian rulers, official papers and obscure personal recollections, we uncovered the deep-seated loyalties of this vast network of British elites to the Indian ruling families..... Corfield, groomed to be loyal to the princely states, was at the heart of this network, wielding power and influence that could not be easily discounted.
He was not just the primary contact for the princely states but also the custodian of centuries of communication between the princely states and the Empire, as well as the keeper of numerous scandals and secrets of the ruling families. When history was rushing in, what was he to do with those records of secrets, scandals, family gossip and power tussles of hundreds of royals? It was a question that would trouble Corfield through that summer.
Born in Amritsar where his father was the principal of a missionary school, his earliest memories were ‘shot through with the sound of Indian voices.’ He was sent to England for schooling, went to World War I in uniform and returned twenty years later to India, in 1921, as a civil servant. A darbar he attended in Lahore as a young aide made a lasting impression on him of the ‘only Indians who at that time had real power’.
‘I was struck by their individuality,’ Corfield wrote of the princes. ‘Dressed for the Durbar, they represented the ancient history and culture of India. Their independent attitude was a pleasant contrast to the subservience of many who served the Raj. Was I right in thinking that the real India existed in their territories rather than in the Provinces of British India? My instinct said I was.’
In his new role, Cornfield was custodian of thousands of confidential files detailing royal scandals—murders, affairs, plunder, illegitimate heirs—that could easily shatter the legitimacy of various princes. And so, at a Residents Conference during the second week of April 1947, he ordered their destruction.
His order specified that records of the Crown’s Representative before 1880 were already stored in the Imperial Records, and instructed that the records of later years also be deposited there. The government had destroyed 92 per cent of the records from the 1913–1921 period. For most of the remaining records, Corfield had a simple solution: destroy them....
The Crown Representative could not hand over to the government of an independent India papers containing information on the private lives of rulers and the internal affairs of their states, or documents not vetted for such sensitive information, (his) note added...
For the Political Department, it was time to repay old favours because without the loyal support of the Indian ruling families, the Empire would not have survived in South Asia for so long. Through many mutinies and two World Wars, the Indian princely states stood by the British, committing their money, military and other resources.
Another proposal to hand over the Crown Representative’s Police (CRP), which after Independence became the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), to the states and not to free India’s government, was a potential landmine. If implemented, the proposal would have given the states military capabilities while depriving the fledgling Union of a force capable of maintaining law and order. This decision, however, would be reversed later.
The urgency implicit in Corfield’s instructions stemmed from the revised timetable for Independence. The original schedule called for the withdrawal of the Crown’s political agents by autumn of 1947, and of all Residents by the end of that year. The department was to be wound up by March 1948. These timelines were on the basis of the June 1948 deadline for British withdrawal, announced by Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Once the deadline was brought forward to August 1947, the Political Department had to accelerate its plans. The vetting of files could not be completed by August, and so Corfield’s people embarked on a file-burning spree.
Excerpted with permission from Westland Books.