Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

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СКАЧАТЬ minutes later, back in civilian clothes, Mountbatten settled at his desk. As he did, his jamadhar chaprassi, his office footman, walked in in his gold turban bearing a green leather despatch box which he ceremoniously set in front of the Viceroy. Mountbatten opened it and pulled out the document inside. It was a stark confirmation of the power which he had just inherited, the final appeal for mercy of a man condemned to death. Fascinated and horrified, Mountbatten read his way through each detail. The case involved a man who had savagely beaten his wife to death in front of a crowd of witnesses. It had been so thoroughly combed, passed through so many appeals, that there were no extenuating circumstances to be found. Mountbatten hesitated for a long minute. Then, sadly, he took a pen and performed the first official act of his Viceroyalty.

      ‘There are no grounds for the exercise of the Royal prerogative of mercy,’ he noted on the cover.

      Before setting out to impose his ideas on India’s political leaders, Louis Mountbatten sensed he had first to impose his own personality on India. India’s last Viceroy might, as he had glumly predicted at Northolt Airport, come home with a bullet in his back, but he would be a Viceroy unlike any other India had seen. Mountbatten firmly believed, ‘it was impossible to be Viceroy without putting up a great, brilliant show.’ He had been sent to New Delhi to get the British out of India, but he was determined they would go in a shimmer of scarlet and gold, all the old glories of the Raj honed to the highest pitch one last time.

      He ordered all the ceremonial trappings suppressed during the war to be restored: ADCs in dazzling full-dress, guard-mounting ceremonies, bands playing, sabres flashing, ‘the lot’. He loved every splendid moment of it, but a far shrewder concern than his own delight in pageantry underlay it.

      The pomp and panoply were designed to give him a viceregal aura of glamour and power, to provide him a framework which would give his actions an added dimension. He intended to replace the ‘Operation Madhouse’ of his predecessor by an ‘Operation Seduction’ of his own, a mini-revolution in style directed as much towards India’s masses as the leaders with whom he would have to negotiate. It would be a shrewd blend of contrasting values, of patrician pomp and common touch, of the old spectacles of the dying Raj and new initiatives prefiguring the India of tomorrow.

      Strangely, Mountbatten began his revolution with the stroke of a paint brush. To the horror of his aides, he ordered the gloomy wooden panels of the viceregal study in which so many negotiations had failed, to be covered with a light, cheerful coat of paint more apt to relax the Indian leaders with whom he’d be dealing. He shook Viceroy’s House out of the leisurely routine it had developed, turning it into a humming, quasi-military headquarters. He instituted staff meetings, soon known as ‘morning prayers’, as the first official activity of each day.

      Mountbatten astonished his new ICS subordinates with the agility of his mind, his capacity to get at the root of a problem and, above all, his almost obsessive capacity for work. He put an end to the parade of chaprassis who traditionally bore the Viceroy his papers for his private contemplation in green leather despatch boxes. He did not propose to waste his time locking and unlocking boxes and penning handwritten notes on the margins of papers in the solemn isolation of his study. He preferred taut, verbal briefings.

      ‘When you wrote “may I speak?” on a paper he was to read,’ one of his staff recalled, ‘you could be sure you’d speak, and you’d better be ready to say what was on your mind at any time, because the call could come at two o’clock in the morning.’

      It was above all the public image Mountbatten was trying to create for himself and his office that represented a radical change. For over a century, the Viceroy of India, locked in the ceremonial splendours of his office, had rivalled the Dalai Lama as the most remote God in Asia’s pantheon. Two unsuccessful assassination attempts had left him enrobed in a cocoon of security, isolating him from all contact with the masses he ruled. Whenever the Viceroy’s white and gold train moved across the vast spaces of India, guards were posted every 100 yards along its route 24 hours in advance of its arrival. Hundreds of bodyguards, police and security men followed each of his moves. If he played golf, the fairways were cleared and police posted along them behind almost every tree. If he went riding, a squadron of the Viceroy’s bodyguard and security police jogged along after him.

      Mountbatten was determined to shatter that screen. First, he announced he and his wife or daughter would take their morning rides unescorted. His words sent a wave of horror through the house, and it took him some time to get his way. But he did, and suddenly the Indian villagers along the route of their morning rides began to witness a spectacle so unbelievable as to seem a mirage: the Viceroy and Vicereine of India trotting past them, waving graciously, alone and unprotected.

      Then, he and his wife made an even more revolutionary gesture. He did something no Viceroy had deigned to do in two hundred years: visit the home of an Indian who was not one of a handful of privileged princes. To the astonishment of all India, the viceregal couple walked into a garden party at the simple New Delhi residence of Jawaharlal Nehru. While Nehru’s aides looked on dumb with disbelief, Mountbatten took Nehru by the elbow and strolled off among the guests, casually chatting and shaking hands.

      The gesture had a stunning impact. Thank God,’ Nehru told his sister that evening, ‘we’ve finally got a human being for a Viceroy and not a stuffed shirt.’

      Anxious to demonstrate that a new esteem for the Indian people now reigned in Viceroy’s House, Mountbatten accorded the Indian military, two million of whom had served under him in South-East Asia, a long overdue honour. He had three Indian officers attached to his staff as ADCs. Next, he ordered the doors of Viceroy’s House to be opened to Indians, only a handful of whom had been invited into its precincts before his arrival. He instructed his staff that there were to be no dinner parties in the Viceroy’s House without Indian guests. Not just a few token guests; henceforth, he ordered, at least half the faces around his table were to be Indian.

      His wife brought an even more dramatic revolution to the viceregal dining table. Out of respect for the culinary traditions of her Indian guests, she ordered the house’s kitchens to start preparing dishes which, in a century of imperial hospitality, had never been offered in Viceroy’s House, Indian vegetarian food. Not only that, she ordered the food to be served on flat Indian trays and servants with the traditional wash basins, jugs and towels to stand behind her guests so they could, if they chose, eat with their fingers at the Viceroy’s table, then wash their throats with a ritual gargle.

      That barrage of gestures large and small, the evident and genuine affection the Mountbattens displayed for the country in which their own love affair had had its beginnings, the knowledge that the new Viceroy was a deliverer and not a conqueror, the respect of the men who’d served under him in Asia; all combined to produce a remarkable aura about the couple.

      Not long after their arrival the New York Times noted, ‘no Viceroy in history has so completely won the confidence, respect and liking of the Indian people.’ Indeed, within a few weeks, the success of ‘Operation Seduction’ would be so remarkable that Nehru himself would tell the new Viceroy only half jokingly that he was becoming a difficult man to negotiate with, because he was ‘drawing larger crowds than anybody in India’.

      The words were so terrifying that Louis Mountbatten at first did not believe them. They made even the dramatic sketch of the Indian scene Clement Attlee had painted him on New Year’s Day seem like a description of some tranquil countryside. Yet the man uttering them in the privacy of his study had a reputation for brilliance and an understanding of India unsurpassed in the viceregal establishment. A triple blue and a first at Oxford, George Abell had been the most intimate collaborator of Mountbatten’s predecessor.

      India, he told Mountbatten with stark simplicity, was heading for a civil war. Only by finding the rapidest of resolutions to her problems was he going to save СКАЧАТЬ