Hi! This is about a particular time and place, but I wrote an answer a good while back about how the British imagined the course of their Empire (particularly India). TL;DR: They knew in their rational minds that India had to be independent eventually, but to actively consider "leaving" India seemed ideologically impossible to most colonizers in leadership positions, even well into the 20th century.

To quote the end of my answer: "the majority opinion in the time we are talking about among the leaders of the United Kingdom was that it was not only within the capacity but it was the moral obligation of the British to continue to "lead" India for as long as possible, ostensibly until some mythical time when the Indians were "ready" to rule themselves"... which the British even in the 20th century imagined to be at least 100 years in the future.

My answer only goes up to the 1920s, and things had changed (obviously) by the 1940s, especially as a result of the massive drain of the Second World War on British resources (not to mention unwillingness to fight a potential uprising). I welcome anyone who would like to fill in this history, since that's outside my own area!