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

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СКАЧАТЬ reached out, took the offending minute off Mountbatten’s desk and slowly tore it up.

      A lone light bulb, its contours speckled with carbonized insects, hung from the hut’s ceiling. Naked to the waist, Gandhi squatted on a straw mattress on the cement floor. The others, talking excitedly, were gathered around him. Dark eyes sparkling with awe and glee, the urchins of the Bhangi sweepers’ colony, the foetid slum of the Untouchables who swept Delhi’s streets and cleaned out her toilets, stared through the window at their prophet.

      The men crowded about Gandhi would be the leaders of a free India. They were there in that blighted slum, its air reeking from the stench of the human excrement rotting in its open sewers, its inhabitants’ faces crusted with the sores of a hundred diseases, because Gandhi had decided to pass his Delhi sojourn there. The struggle for the oppressed of Hindu society, its Untouchables whom he called Harijans – Children of God – had rivalled the struggle for national freedom in Gandhi’s heart.

      Untouchables constituted a sixth of India’s population. Supposedly condemned by their sins in a previous incarnation to a casteless existence, they were readily identifiable by the darkness of their skin, their cringing submissiveness, their ragged dress. Their name expressed the contamination which stained a caste Hindu at the slightest contact with them, a stain which had to be removed by a ritual, purifying bath. Even their footprints in the soil could defile some Brahmim neighbourhoods. An Untouchable was obliged to shrink from the path of an approaching caste Hindu lest his shadow fall across his route and soil him. In some parts of India, Untouchables were allowed to leave their shacks only at night. There, they were known as Invisibles.

      No Hindu could eat in the presence of an Untouchable, drink water drawn from a well by his hands, use utensils he’d soiled by his touch. Many Hindu temples were closed to them. Their children were not accepted in schools. Even in death they remained pariahs. Untouchables were not allowed to use the common cremation ground. Invariably too poor to buy logs for their own funeral pyres, their corpses were usually consumed by vultures rather than flames.

      In some parts of India they were still bought and sold like serfs along with the estates they worked. A young Untouchable was generally assigned the same value as an ox. In a country of social progress, they enjoyed only one privilege. Whenever an epidemic struck down a sacred cow, the Untouchable who carted off the rotten carcass was allowed to sell the meat to his fellow outcasts.

      Since his return from South Africa, Gandhi had made their cause his. His first Indian ashram had nearly failed, because he had welcomed them into its folds. He massaged them, nursed them. He had even insisted on publicly performing the most demeaning act a caste Hindu could accomplish to demonstrate his loathing of Untouchability; he had cleaned out an Untouchable’s toilet. In 1932, he had nearly died for them, fasting to thwart a political reform which he feared would institutionalize their separation from Indian society. By always moving around India as they did, when they were able to travel, in third-class railway carriages, by living in their slums, Gandhi was trying to force them to remain conscious of their misery.^*

      In a few months, weeks even, most of the men around Gandhi would be government ministers occupying the enormous offices from which the British had run India, crossing Delhi in chauffeur-driven American cars. He had deliberately obliged them to make this pilgrimage to one of India’s worst slums to give them a Gandhian reminder of the realities of the nation they would soon govern.

      It was India’s political realities, however, that occupied those men this evening. It was suffocatingly hot and to ease its miseries Gandhi was using his air-conditioner, a wet towel wrapped like a turban around his bald head. To his distress, the tempers of his followers were as warm as the night around them.

      When, a few days earlier, Gandhi had fervently assured Mountbatten that the Congress Party was prepared to do anything to prevent partition, he had been wrong. His error was the measure of the slowly widening gulf between the ageing Mahatma and the men around him, the men he had developed as the leaders of the Congress Party.

      For a quarter of a century, those men had followed Gandhi. They had thrown off their western suits for his khadi, moved their fingers to the unfamiliar rhythms of the spinning-wheel. In his name they had marched into the flailing lathis of the police and the gates of British jails. Quelling occasional doubts, they had followed him on his improbable crusades to the improbable triumph now beckoning: independence wrested from the British by Gandhian non-violence.

      They had followed him for many reasons, but above all because they saw that his unique genius for communicating with the soul of India could draw mass support to their banner. The potential differences between them had been submerged in the common struggle with the British. Now, in that hot Delhi night, those differences began to emerge as they debated Gandhi’s plan to make Jinnah Prime Minister. If they refused to endorse his scheme, Gandhi argued, the new Viceroy might find himself driven into a corner from which the only escape would be partition. Walking from village to village in Noakhali and later Bihar, applying his ‘ointment’ to India’s sore spots, Gandhi had understood infinitely better than those political leaders in Delhi the tragedy partition might produce. He had seen in the huts and swamps of Noakhali what havoc communal fury, once unleashed, could wreak. Partition, he argued, risked unleashing those passions, not dampening them. Desperately he begged his followers to accept his idea as perhaps their last chance to keep India united and to prevent that tragedy.

      He could not budge Nehru and Patel. There was a limit to the price they were prepared to pay to keep India united and handing over power to their foe, Jinnah, transgressed it. They did not share Gandhi’s conviction that partition would inevitably lead to terrible violence. Broken-hearted, Gandhi would have to report to the Viceroy that he had not been able to carry his colleagues with him. The real break was still some distance ahead, but Gandhi and those men he’d so patiently groomed were fast approaching a parting of the ways. The culmination of Gandhi’s crusade was now drawing near, and it would end as it had begun, in the stillness of his soul.

      There was no need for the air-conditioner whirring in the viceregal study that April afternoon. The chill emanating from the austere and distant leader of the Moslem League was quite sufficient to cool its atmosphere. From the instant he’d arrived, Mountbatten had found Mohammed Ali Jinnah in a most frigid, haughty and disdainful frame of mind.

      The key member of the Indian quartet, the man who would ultimately hold the solution to the sub-continent’s dilemma in his hands, had been the last of the Indian leaders to enter the Viceroy’s study. A quarter of a century later, an echo of his distant anguish still haunting his voice, Louis Mountbatten would recall, ‘I did not realize how utterly impossible my task in India was going to be until I met Mohammed Ali Jinnah for the first time.’

      Their meeting had begun with an unhappy gaffe, a gaffe poignantly revealing of the meticulous, calculating Jinnah to whom no gesture could be spontaneous. Realizing he would be photographed with the Mountbattens, Jinnah had carefully memorized a pleasant little line to flatter Edwina Mountbatten, who he was sure would be posed between the Viceroy and himself.

      Alas, poor Jinnah! It was he and not Edwina who wound up in the middle. But he couldn’t help himself. He was programmed like a computer, and his carefully rehearsed line just had to come out. ‘Ah,’ he beamed, ‘a rose between two thorns.’

      Inside the study, he began by informing Mountbatten he had come to tell him exactly what he was prepared to accept. As he had with Gandhi, Mountbatten interrupted with a wave of his hand. ‘Mr Jinnah,’ he said, ‘I am not prepared to discuss conditions at this stage. First, let’s make each other’s acquaintance.’

      Then, with his legendary charm and verve, Mountbatten turned the focus of Operation Seduction on the Moslem leader. Jinnah froze. To that aloof and reserved man СКАЧАТЬ