Sixty years after the end of the Raj, nothing seems odder about the strange story of British rule in India than that it concluded without violence - nothing odder except, perhaps, for the personality of the man who did more than anything else to drive the British out, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Considering how deeply rooted the British were in India after 350 years, it is extraordinary that they were able to leave as peacefully as they did. Partition brought on a sectarian Armageddon that left 14.5 million uprooted and more than half a million dead in inter-religious massacres. But as far as the British were concerned, whatever the fate of their former subjects, they themselves were able to march out of the Gateway of India without a shot being fired. Indeed, by the end, the two sides had become so close that Lady Mountbatten, the wife of Britain’s last viceroy, was having an affair with the first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru: the two lovers were even photographed openly holding hands as they visited refugee camps together.