THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND SOUTH ASIA now able to capture the imagination of the Muslim peasantry by promising emancipation from 'Hindu/landlord' oppression; and the language of class mobilisation began to develop bitter communal overtones10. A society brutalised by famine provided the context in which these ideas were imbibed and acted upon, leading ultimately to communal carnage in Bengal, which resulted in riots elsewhere11. No doubt, the rise of the Communist sponsored Tebhaga movement, comprising poorer segments of the rural population, challenged the dominant communal overtone of peasant mobilisation in Bengal but the communally charged political environment engulfed the Tebhaga movement and restricted it to particular regions of Bengal. This unique movement petered out under the pressure of the tumultuous events centering around partition. While the political differences and dithering within the leadership of the Communist Party over the final goal of the movement contributed as well to its gradual eclipse12. The Second World War also brought to the fore the changes taking place within the edifice of the colonial state.13 The army, police and bureaucracy came under severe pressure in the period, and the wartime experience fundamentally modified the attitudes of the employees of all three services. While there can be no doubt that the seeds of these changes could be located in the Congress's emphatic election victory of 1937, the impossibility of isolating the party in an inevitably momentous postwar constitutional settlement made Indian officials extremely nervous about alienating Congress leaders. Indeed, a wide range of historical sources - such as memoirs by officials and contemporary military intelligence - underline the increasing links between the various nationalist parties and the colonial officialdom at all levels of the administration. This wartime shift of political loyalties possibly explains why and how the Congress was able to consolidate its regime in India with great rapidity even after the tumultuous events of the partition. Thus, apart from the Second World War one needs to grasp the inter-connections between wartime developments and the British decision to withdraw from the Indian empire in 1947. The question that needs to be addressed is how and why the political and social trends between 1939 and 1945, accelerated decolonization. This is in contradistinction to the dominant historiography, which while documenting the impact of war on nationalist mobilisations, on high level political negotiations and on the problems of governability, has tended to reduce complicated events and developments into a single