The decades-long campaign to end British rule over the Indian subcontinent, which drew on mass nonviolent resistance, constitutional agitation, armed revolt, and the organizational genius of the Indian National Congress to produce independence in August 1947 — accompanied by the Partition of British India into two states, India and Pakistan, and the largest forced migration in human history, in which approximately one to two million people were killed and fifteen million displaced.
India did not simply become independent. It broke apart. The movement that united millions in resistance to British rule could not hold together the diverse communities it had mobilized. Independence came in August 1947 simultaneously with Partition — the division of the subcontinent along religious lines into India and Pakistan — and with a catastrophe of communal violence that killed between one and two million people and displaced fifteen million more. The British left. The killing was done by Indians against Indians. Understanding the independence movement means understanding both the extraordinary achievement and the catastrophic failure that arrived together.