A massive work on the crucial last stages of the Indian saga on independence, by one of the key players in the civil establishment, who worked assiduously and diplomatically to nudge such formidable personages as Nehru, Patel, Mountbatten, indirectly Jinnah and the British government, into the only practical alternative. This book is a companion to the equally massive volume on the integration of the native states (the nawabs and rajahs). The formidable size of these volumes is more than justified by the sheer magnitude of the forces unleashed and the strength of the contending interests. I may be mistaken, but what comes out is the sheer impracticality of the three-tier scheme offered by the cabinet Mission, and the obstinacy (some may even call it bloody-mindedness in the British sense) of the Viceroy Wavell, in insisting that the Cabinet Mission scheme could be accepted either in full or rejected, but that provinces would have to come into the Union whole or not at all. Thankfully, the rather obdurate soldier was replaced by a more seasoned statesman Mountbatten, who quickly realized that a united Hindu-Muslim union was just not feasible, and who saw the merits in Menon's suggestion of a clean break between the two communities, as urged by Jinnah, but with the rider that 'contiguous' areas populated by the other community would be allowed to withdraw. On the whole, among the prominent leaders, it appears that Jinnah had the clearest handle on the limits of political possibilities, although he was unreasonable in insisting that the entire provinces should be included in his Pakistan, denying the sizable non-Muslim minority districts the option to stay out. Even Gandhi's first advice to Mountbatten, that he should throw out the existing ministries and invite Jinnah to form a new government, smacks of a completely uncalled for red herring, a form of teasing which Mountbatten was tough enough to ignore. Even today, the Hindutva protagonists keep harking back to an undivided India (sometimes including neighboring polities which they imagine were once part of Greater India), not realizing that it is an unrealistic and impracticable ideal. This volume, and the companion volume on the native states, are surely essential reading for the active layman (who cannot hope to access the archives) to understand the genesis and history of Partition and the communal problem in the subcontinent. ( )