Describing Britain's calamitous exit from its Indian empire in 1947, the novelist Paul Scott wrote that in India, the British "came to the end of themselves as they were" - that is, to the end of their exalted idea about themselves.

Scott was among those shocked by how hastily and ruthlessly the British, who had ruled India for more than a century, condemned it to fragmentation and anarchy; how Louis Mountbatten came to preside, as the last British viceroy of India, over the destiny of some 400 million people.