India, Aug. 11 -- Britain had set June 1948 as its exit deadline from India. Instead, the Union Jack came down 10 months earlier, on August 15, 1947 - a date the last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, appears to have picked on impulse to fold his own wartime triumph into the birth of a new nation.

By early 1947, British rule in India was unravelling. And the British proposal on transfer of power, called the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, had failed to broker an agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League. Muhammad Ali Jinnah's call for Direct Action Day on August 16, 1946 - a mobilisation to press the League's demand for a separate Pakistan - set off communal violence in Calcutta that spread to Noakhali in eastern Bengal (now in B...