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

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СКАЧАТЬ only child of Bomber William Talbot and Margaret Adelaide Talbot, the Royal Horse Brigade, Born Delhi 14 December 1862. Died Delhi 17 July 1863.’

      In Asigarh, two stones side by side offer for eternity the measure of what England’s glorious imperial adventure meant to many an ordinary Englishman. ‘19 April 1845. Alexander, 7-month-old son of Conductor Johnson and Martha Scott. Died of cholera,’ reads the first. The second, beside it, reads: ‘30 April 1845, William John, 4-year-old son of Conductor Johnson and Martha Scott. Died of cholera.’ Under them, on a larger stone, their grieving parents chiselled a last farewell:

       One blessing, one sire, one womb

       Their being gave.

       They had one mortal sickness

       And share one grave

       Far from an England they never knew.

      Obscure clerks or dashing blades, those generations of Britons policed and administered India as no one before them had.

      Their rule was paternalistic, that of the old public schoolmaster disciplining an unruly band of boys, forcing on them the education he was sure was good for them. With an occasional exception they were able and incorruptible, determined to administer India in its own best interests – but it was always they who decided what those interests were, not the Indians they governed.

      Their great weakness was the distance from which they exercised their authority, the terrible smugness setting them apart from those they ruled. Never was that attitude of racial superiority summed up more succinctly than by a former officer of the Indian Civil Service in a parliamentary debate at the turn of the century. There was, he said, ‘a cherished conviction shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest, by the planter’s assistant in his lonely bungalow and by the editor in the full light of his presidency town, from the Chief Commissioner in charge of an important province to the Viceroy upon his throne – the conviction in every man that he belongs to a race which God has destined to govern and subdue’.

      

      The massacre of 680,000 members of that race in the trenches of World War I wrote an end to the legend of a certain India. A whole generation of young men who might have patrolled the Frontier, administered the lonely districts or galloped their polo ponies down the long maidans was left behind in Flanders fields. From 1918 recruiting for the Indian Civil Service became increasingly difficult. Increasingly, Indians were accepted into the ranks both of the civil service and the officer corps.

      On New Year’s Day 1947, barely a thousand British members of the Indian Civil Service remained in India, still somehow holding 400 million people in their administrative grasp. They were the last standard bearers of an elite that had outlived its time, condemned at last by a secret conversation in London and the inexorable currents of history.

      

^* Although Mountbatten didn’t know it, the idea of sending him to India had been suggested to Attlee by the man at the Prime Minister’s side, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps. It had come up at a secret conversation in London in December, between Cripps and Krishna Menon, an outspoken Indian left-winger and intimate of the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru. Menon had suggested to Cripps and Nehru that Congress saw little hope of progress in India so long as Wavell was Viceroy. In response to a query from the British leader, he had advanced the name of a man Nehru held in the highest regard, Louis Mountbatten. Aware that Mountbatten’s usefulness would be destroyed if India’s Moslem leaders learned of the genesis of his appointment the two men had agreed to reveal the details of their talk to no one. Menon revealed the details of his conversation with Cripps in a series of conversations with one of the authors in New Delhi in February 1973, a year before his death.

^* Wavell too had recommended a time limit to Attlee during a London visit in December 1946.

TWO

       ‘Walk Alone, Walk Alone’

       Srirampur, Noakhali, New Year’s Day, 1947

      Six thousand miles from Downing Street, in a village of the Gangetic Delta above the Bay of Bengal, an elderly man stretched out on the dirt floor of a peasant’s hut. It was exactly twelve noon. As he did every day at that hour, he reached up for the dripping wet cotton sack that an assistant offered him. Dark splotches of the mud packed inside it oozed through the bag’s porous folds. The man carefully patted the sack on to his abdomen. Then he took a second, smaller bag and stuck it on his bald head.

      He seemed, lying there on the floor, a fragile little creature. The appearance was deceptive. That wizened 77-year-old man beaming out from under his mudpack had done more to topple the British Empire than any man alive. It was because of him that a British Prime Minister had finally been obliged to send Queen Victoria’s great-grandson to New Delhi to find a way to give India her freedom.

      Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an unlikely revolutionary, the gentle prophet of the world’s most extraordinary liberation movement. Beside him, carefully polished, were the dentures he wore only when eating and the steel-rimmed glasses through which he usually peered out at the world. He was a tiny man, barely five feet tall, weighing 114 pounds; all arms and legs like an adolescent whose trunk has yet to rival the growth of his limbs. Nature had meant Gandhi’s face to be ugly. His ears flared out from his oversized head like the handles of a sugar bowl. His nose buttressed by squat, flaring nostrils thrust its heavy beak over a sparse white moustache. Without his dentures, his full lips collapsed over his toothless gums. Yet Gandhi’s face radiated a peculiar beauty because it was constantly animated, reflecting with the quickly shifting patterns of a magic lantern his changing moods and his impish humour.

      To a century fraught with violence, Gandhi had offered an alternative, his doctrine of ahimsa – non-violence. He had used it to mobilize the masses of India to drive England from the sub-continent with a moral crusade instead of an armed rebellion, prayers instead of machine-gun fire, disdainful silence instead of the fracas of terrorists’ bombs.

      While Western Europe had echoed to the harangues of ranting demagogues and shrieking dictators, Gandhi had stirred the multitudes of the world’s most populous area without raising his voice. It was not with the promise of power or fortune that he had summoned his followers to his banner, but with a warning: ‘Those who are in my company must be ready to sleep upon the bare floor, wear coarse clothes, get up at unearthly hours, subsist on uninviting, simple food, even clean their own toilets.’ Instead of gaudy uniforms and jangling medals, he had dressed his followers in clothes of coarse, homespun cotton. That costume, however, had been as instantly identifiable, as psychologically effective in welding together those who wore it, as the brown or black shirts of Europe’s dictators.

      His means of communicating with his followers were primitive. He wrote much of his correspondence himself in longhand, and he talked: to his disciples, to prayer meetings, to the caucuses of his Congress Party. He employed none of the techniques for conditioning the masses to the dictates of a demagogue or a clique of ideologues. Yet, his message had penetrated a nation bereft of modern communications because Gandhi had a genius for the simple gesture that spoke to India’s soul. Those gestures were all unorthodox. Paradoxically, in a land ravaged by cyclical famine, where hunger had been a malediction for centuries, the most devastating tactic Gandhi had devised was the simple act of depriving himself of food – a fast. СКАЧАТЬ