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

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СКАЧАТЬ for their second meeting, Delhi was already gasping in the first searing blast of India’s hot season. Under the sun’s white glare the bright dhak trees in the Moghul Gardens seemed to emit sparks, and an orange rind shrivelled into a crisp parchment minutes after it was peeled. The only fresh glade in the city was Louis Mountbatten’s study. The reverence for detail which had led him to paint the study had also led him to make sure it was equipped with the best air-conditioner in Delhi, a machine that allowed him to work in a refreshing 75 degrees.

      Its presence was nearly responsible for a catastrophe. Passing with brutal abruptness from Delhi’s furnace heat into the chilly study, Gandhi, the implacable foe of technology, got an unhappy introduction to the blessings of air-conditioning. Seeing his half-naked guest trembling, Mountbatten rang for his ADC who arrived with his wife.

      ‘My God,’ exclaimed Edwina Mountbatten, ‘you’ll give the poor man pneumonia!’

      She rushed to the machine, snapped it off, threw open the window, then hurried off to get one of her husband’s old Royal Navy sweaters to cover Gandhi’s shaking shoulders.

      When Gandhi was finally warm again, Mountbatten took his guest on to the terrace for tea. A brace of servants brought Mountbatten his in a bone white china service stamped with the viceregal crest. Manu, who had accompanied Gandhi, laid out the spare meal she’d brought along for him: lemon soup, goat’s curds and dates. Gandhi ate it with a spoon whose handle had been broken above the ladle and replaced by a piece of bamboo lashed to its stub with a string. The battered tin plates in which it was served, however, were as English as the Sheffield sterling of the viceregal service. They came from Yeravda prison.

      Smiling, Gandhi proffered his goat’s curds to Mountbatten. ‘It’s rather good,’ he said, ‘do try this.’

      Mountbatten looked at the yellow, porridge-like sludge with something less than unalloyed delight. ‘I don’t think really I ever have,’ he murmured, hoping that those words might somehow discourage his guest’s effort at generosity. Gandhi was not, however, to be so easily dissuaded.

      ‘Never mind,’ he replied, laughing, ‘there’s always a first time for everything. Try it now.’

      Trapped, Mountbatten dutifully accepted a spoonful. It was, he thought, ‘ghastly’.

      The preliminaries of their conversations ended there on the lawn and Mountbatten got down to a process that had invariably taxed his predecessors’ patience and good temper, negotiating with Gandhi.

      The Mahatma had, indeed, been a difficult person for the British to deal with. Truth, to Gandhi, was the ultimate reality. Gandhi’s truth, however, had two faces, the absolute and the relative. Man, as long as he was in the flesh, had only fleeting intimations of absolute truth. He had to deal with relative truth in his daily existence. Gandhi liked to employ a parable to illustrate the difference between his two truths. Put your left hand in a bowl of ice-cold water, then in a bowl of lukewarm water, he would say. The lukewarm water feels hot. Then put the right hand in a bowl of hot water and into the same bowl of lukewarm water. Now the lukewarm water feels cold; yet its temperature is constant. The absolute truth is the water’s constant temperature, he would observe, but the relative truth, perceived by the human hand, varied. As that parable indicated, Gandhi’s relative truth was not a rigid thing. It could vary as his perceptions of a problem changed. That made him flexible but it also, to his British interlocutors, sometimes made him appear a two-faced, cunning Asiatic. Even one of his disciples once exclaimed to him in exasperation: ‘Gandhiji, I don’t understand you. How can you say one thing last week, and something quite different this week?’

      ‘Ah’, Gandhi replied, ‘because I have learned something since last week.’

      India’s new Viceroy moved, therefore, into serious talk with Gandhi with trepidation. He was not persuaded that the little figure ‘chirping like a sparrow’ at his side could help him elaborate a solution to the Indian crisis, but he knew he could destroy his efforts to find one. The hopes of many another English mediator had foundered on the turns of his unpredictable personality. It was Gandhi who had sent Cripps back to London empty-handed in 1942. His refusal to budge on a principle had helped thwart Wavell’s efforts to untie the Indian knot. His tactics had done much to frustrate the most recent British attempts to solve the problem, that of the Cabinet Mission whose plan was supposed to serve as Mountbatten’s point of departure. Only the evening before, Gandhi had reiterated to his prayer meeting that India would be divided, ‘over my dead body. So long as I am alive, I will never agree to the partition of India.’

      If a reluctant Mountbatten was driven to the decision to partition India, he would find himself in the distasteful position of having to impose his will on Gandhi. It was not the elderly Mahatma’s body he would have to break, but his heart.

      It had always been British policy not to yield to force, he told Gandhi, to open their talks on the right note, but his non-violent crusade had won and, come what may, Britain was going to leave India. Only one thing mattered in that coming departure, Gandhi replied. ‘Don’t partition India,’ he begged. Don’t divide India, the prophet of non-violence pleaded, even if refusing to do so meant shedding ‘rivers of blood’.

      Dividing India, Mountbatten assured Gandhi, was the last solution he wished to adopt. But what alternatives were open to him?

      Gandhi had one. So desperate was he to avoid partition that he was prepared for a Solomonic judgment. Give the Moslems the baby instead of cutting it in half. Place three hundred million Hindus under Moslem rule by asking his rival Jinnah and his Moslem League to form a government. Then hand over power to that government. Give Jinnah all India instead of just the part he wanted.

      Mountbatten was ready to grasp at any straw to avoid partition. The suggestion had an Alice in Wonderland ring to it, but then so had some of Gandhi’s other ideas and they had worked.

      ‘Whatever makes you think your own Congress Party will accept?’ he asked Gandhi.

      ‘Congress,’ Gandhi replied, ‘wants above all else to avoid partition. They will do anything to prevent it.’

      What, Mountbatten asked, would Jinnah’s reaction be?

      ‘If you tell him I am its author his reply will be: “Wily Gandhi”,’ the Mahatma said, laughing.

      Mountbatten was silent for a moment. There was much in Gandhi’s proposal that seemed unworkable. He was not prepared to commit his own prestige to it at this early juncture. But neither was he going lightly to dismiss any idea that might hold India together.

      ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you can bring me formal assurance that Congress will accept your scheme, that they’ll try sincerely to make it work, then I’m prepared to entertain the idea.’

      Gandhi fairly flew out of his chair at his words. ‘I am entirely sincere,’ he assured Mountbatten. ‘I will tour the length and breadth of India to get the people to accept if that is your decision.’

      A few hours later, an Indian journalist spoke to Gandhi as he walked towards his evening prayer meeting. The Mahatma, he thought, seemed ‘to bubble with happiness’. As they approached the prayer ground, he suddenly turned to the newsman. With a gleeful smile, he whispered: ‘I think I’ve turned the tide.’

      ‘Why, this man is trying to bully me!’ an unbelieving Louis Mountbatten thought. Operation Seduction had come to a sudden halt at the rock-like figure planted opposite him. With his khadi dhoti whirled about his shoulders like a toga, his bald head glowing, his scowling demeanour, the man jammed into that chair looked to the Viceroy more like a Roman senator СКАЧАТЬ