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

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СКАЧАТЬ and his wife an England he had not known for forty years, the England his years in British jail had almost eradicated from his memory, that open and welcoming England he had known as a schoolboy. The Mountbattens delighted in Nehru’s charm, his culture, his quick humour. To the horror of his staff, Mountbatten had even spontaneously decided to ride through Singapore’s streets in his open car with Nehru at his side. His action, his advisers had warned, would only dignify an anti-British rebel.

      ‘Dignify him?’ Mountbatten had retorted. ‘It’s he who will dignify me. One day this man will be Prime Minister of India.’

      Now, his prophecy had been realized. It was to his position as Prime Minister of India’s interim government that Nehru owed the honour of being the first of India’s four leaders to enter Mountbatten’s study.

      For Jawaharlal Nehru, the conversation beginning in the Viceroy’s study was just the latest episode in a continuing dialogue with his country’s colonizers that had occupied most of his life. Nehru had been a pampered guest in the best country houses in England. He had dined off the gold service of Buckingham Palace and the tin plates of a British prison. His interlocutors had included Cambridge dons, Prime Ministers, Viceroys, the King Emperor – and jail-keepers.

      Born into an eastern aristocracy as old and as proud as any produced by India’s British rulers, that of the Kashmiri Brahmins, Nehru had been sent to England at sixteen to finish his education. He spent seven gloriously happy years there, learning Latin verbs and cricket at Harrow, studying science, Nietzsche and Chaucer at Cambridge, admiring the reasoning of Blackstone at the Inns of Court. With his gentle charm, elegant manners, rapidly expanding culture, he had enjoyed an extraordinary social success wherever he went. He moved easily through the drawing-rooms of English society absorbing with the sponge of his still malleable personality the values and mannerisms he found there. So complete was the transformation wreaked by those seven years in England that, on his return to Allahabad, his family and friends found him completely de-Indianized.

      The young Nehru soon discovered, however, the limits of his de-Indianization. He was blackballed when he applied for membership in the local British Club. He might have been a product of Harrow and Cambridge, but to the all white, all British – and devotedly middle-class – membership of the Club, he was still a black Indian.

      The bitterness caused by that rejection haunted Nehru for years and hastened him towards the cause which became his life’s work, the struggle for Indian independence. He joined the Congress Party, and his agitation on its behalf soon qualified him for admission to the finest political training school in the British Empire, British jails, where Nehru spent nine years of his life. In the solitude of his cell, in prison courtyards with his fellow Congress leaders, he had shaped his vision of the India of tomorrow. An idealist immersed in the doctrines of social revolution, Nehru dreamed of reconciling on the soil of India his two political passions: the parliamentary democracy of England and the economic socialism of Karl Marx. He dreamed of an India freed alike of the shackles of poverty and of superstition, unburdened of capitalism, an India in which the smoke stacks of factories reached out from her cities, an India enjoying the plenitude of that Industrial Revolution to which her colonizers had denied her access.

      No one might have seemed a more unlikely candidate to lead India towards that vision than Jawaharlal Nehru. Under the cotton khadi he wore in deference to the dictates of Congress, he remained the quintessential English gentleman. In a land of mystics, he was a cool rationalist. The mind that had exulted in the discovery of science at Cambridge never ceased to be appalled by his fellow Indians who refused to stir from their homes on days proclaimed inauspicious by their favourite astrologers. He was a publicly declared agnostic in the most intensely spiritual area in the world, and he never ceased to proclaim the horror the word ‘religion’ inspired in him. Nehru despised India’s priests, her sadhus, her chanting monks and pious sheikhs. They had only served, he felt, to impede her progress, deepen her divisions and ease the task of her foreign rulers.

      And yet, the India of those sadhus and the superstition-haunted masses had accepted Nehru. For thirty years he had travelled across India haranguing the multitudes. Clinging to the roofs and sides of tramways to escape the slums of India’s cities, on foot and by bullock cart in the countrysides, his countrymen had come by the hundreds of thousands to see and hear him. Many in those crowds could not hear his words nor understand them when they did. For them, it had been enough however just to see, over the ocean of heads around them, his frail and gesticulating silhouette. They had taken darshan, a kind of spiritual communion received from being in the presence of a great man and that had sufficed.

      He was a superb orator and writer, a man who treasured words as a courtesan jewels. Anointed early by Gandhi, he had advanced steadily through the ranks of Congress eventually to preside over it three times. The Mahatma had made it clear that it was on his shoulders that he wished his mantle to fall.

      For Nehru, Gandhi was a genius. Nehru’s cool, pragmatic mind had rejected almost all of Gandhi’s great moves: civil disobedience, the Salt March, Quit India. But his heart had told him to follow the Mahatma and his heart, he would later admit, had been right.

      Gandhi had been, in a sense, Nehru’s guru. It was he who had re-Indianized Nehru, sending him into the villages to find the real face of his homeland, to let the fingers of his soul touch India’s sufferings. Whenever the two men were in the same place, Nehru would spend at least half an hour sitting at ‘Bapuji’s’ feet, sometimes talking, sometimes listening, sometimes just looking and thinking. Those were, for Nehru, moments of intense spiritual satisfaction, perhaps the closest brush his atheist’s heart would ever have with religion.

      Yet so much separated them: Nehru, the religion-hating atheist; Gandhi, to whom an unshakeable belief in God was the very essence of being: Nehru, whose hot temper had made him a notably imperfect soldier of non-violence, a man who adored literature and painting, science and technology, the very things Gandhi ignored or detested as being responsible for much of mankind’s misery.

      Between them a fascinating father-son relation grew up, animated by all the tensions, affections and repressed guilt such a relationship implied. All his life, Nehru had had an instinctive need for a dominant personality near him, some steadying influence to whom he could turn in the crises engendered by his volatile nature. His father, a bluff, jovial barrister with a penchant for good Scotch and Bordeaux, had first filled that role. Since his death, it had been Gandhi.

      Nehru’s devotion to Gandhi remained total, but a subtle change was overtaking their relationship. A phase in Nehru’s life was drawing to a close. The son was ready to leave his father’s house for the new world he saw beyond its gates. In that new world, he would need a new guru, a guru more sensitive to the complex problems that would assail him there. Although he was perhaps unaware of it as he sat in the Viceroy’s study that March afternoon, a vacuum had opened in the psyche of Jawaharlal Nehru.

      Much had changed in the world and in their own lives since Nehru and Mountbatten had met for the first time, but the undercurrent of mutual sympathy which had warmed their earlier encounter soon made itself felt in the Viceroy’s study. It was not surprising that it should. Although Mountbatten, of course, did not know it, Nehru was partially responsible for his being there.

      Besides, there was a great deal to bind the scion of a 3000-year-old line of Kashmiri Brahmins and the man who claimed descent from the oldest ruling family in Protestantism. They both loved to talk and expanded in each other’s company. Nehru, the abstract thinker, admired Mountbatten’s practical dynamism, the capacity for decisive action that wartime command had given him. Mountbatten was stimulated by Nehru’s culture, the subtlety of his thought. He quickly understood that the only Indian politician who would share and understand his desire to maintain a link between Britain and a new India was Jawaharlal Nehru.

      With his usual candour, the Admiral СКАЧАТЬ