India's last Viceroy beat Britain's deadline by ten months

On 20 February 1947, Clement Attlee’s government announced that Britain would transfer power in India “into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June, 1948”, and named Rear-Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma to succeed Lord Wavell as Viceroy. Mountbatten became the last Viceroy of India — and handed over power about ten months ahead of that deadline.

The deadline and the man were announced together. The statement read in the House of Lords said Mountbatten would be “entrusted with the task of transferring to Indian hands the responsibility for the government of British India.” Wavell, who had pressed London for a firm exit plan, was recalled.

The official record shows how fast the timetable then folded in on itself:

• 20 February 1947: The June 1948 deadline is announced and Mountbatten is named Viceroy.
• 3 June 1947: Attlee tells the Commons that the main Indian parties have “favourably received” a plan offering Dominion status to “one or two successor authorities” — partition — and that Britain is willing to “anticipate the date of June 1948” with legislation to transfer power that year.
• 18 July 1947: The Indian Independence Act receives royal assent, setting 15 August as “the appointed day” on which the dominions of India and Pakistan would be created.
• 15 August 1947: The viceroyalty ends, and Mountbatten becomes the first Governor-General of the Dominion of India.
• June 1948: He leaves; on 23 June MPs are already calling him “the late Governor-General of India”.

The detail most accounts skip

The Act did not assume two separate heads. Its section 5 said that, until either dominion legislated otherwise, “the same person may be Governor-General of both the new Dominions” — a door left open for one British appointee to straddle the new border. In the event Pakistan’s Governor-General was its founding leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Mountbatten served India alone.

So the man sent to meet a June 1948 deadline did leave India in June 1948 — just in a different job, after power had already passed. The midnight handover itself took place almost a year earlier than London had planned.