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

a state of their own was formally articulated for the first time on four and a half pages of typing paper in a nondescript English cottage at 3 Humberstone Road in Cambridge. Its author was a forty-year-old Indian Moslem graduate student named Rahmat Ali, and the date at the head of his proposal was 28 January 1933. The idea that India formed a single nation, Ali wrote, was ‘a preposterous falsehood’. He called for a Moslem nation carved from the provinces of north-west India where the Moslems were predominant, the Punjab, Kashmir, Sind, the Frontier, Baluchistan. He even had a name to propose for his new state. Based on the names of the provinces that would compose it, it was ‘Pakistan – land of the pure’.

      ‘We will not crucify ourselves,’ he concluded in a fiery, if inept metaphor, ‘on a cross of Hindu nationalism.’

      Adopted by the body that was the focal point of Moslem nationalist aspirations, the Moslem League, Rahmat Ali’s proposal gradually took hold of the imagination of India’s Moslem masses. Its progress was nurtured by the chauvinistic attitude of the predominantly Hindu leaders of Congress who remained determined to make no concession to their Moslem foes.

      The event which served to catalyse into violence the rivalry of India’s Hindu and Moslem communities took place on 16 August 1946, just five months before Gandhi set out on his penitent’s march. The site was the second city of the British Empire, a metropolis whose reputation for violence and savagery was unrivalled, Calcutta. Calcutta, with the legend of its Black Hole, had been a synonym for Indian cruelty to generations of Englishmen.

      Hell, a Calcutta resident had once remarked, was being born an Untouchable in Calcutta’s slums. Those slums contained the densest concentration of human beings in the world, foetid pools of unrivalled misery, Hindu and Moslem neighbourhoods interlaced without pattern or reason.

      At dawn on 16 August, howling in a quasi-religious fervour, Moslem mobs had come bursting from their slums, waving clubs, iron bars, shovels, any instrument capable of smashing in a human skull. They came in answer to a call issued by the Moslem League, proclaiming 16 August ‘Direct Action Day’, to prove to Britain and the Congress Party that India’s Moslems were prepared ‘to get Pakistan for themselves by “Direct Action” if necessary’.

      They savagely beat to a sodden pulp any Hindus in their path and stuffed their remains in the city’s open gutters. The terrified police simply disappeared. Soon tall pillars of black smoke stretched up from a score of spots in the city, Hindu bazaars in full blaze.

      Later, the Hindu mobs came storming out of their neighbourhoods looking for defenceless Moslems to slaughter. Never, in all its violent history, had Calcutta known 24 hours as savage, as packed with human viciousness. Like water-soaked logs, scores of bloated corpses bobbed down the Hooghly river towards the sea. Others, savagely mutilated, littered the city’s streets. Everywhere, the weak and helpless suffered most. At one crossroads, a line of Moslem coolies lay beaten to death where a Hindu mob had found them, between the poles of their rickshaws. By the time the slaughter was over, Calcutta belonged to the vultures. In filthy grey packs they scudded across the sky, tumbling down to gorge themselves on the bodies of the city’s 6000 dead.

      The Great Calcutta Killings, as they became known, triggered bloodshed in Noakhali, where Gandhi was; in Bihar; and on the other side of the sub-continent in Bombay.

      They changed the course of India’s history. The threat the Moslems had been uttering for years, their warnings of a cataclysm which would overtake India if they were denied their own state, took on a terrifying reality. Suddenly, India was confronted by the awful vision that had sickened Gandhi and sent him into the jungles of Noakhali: civil war.

      To another man, to the cold and brilliant lawyer who had been Gandhi’s chief Moslem foe for a quarter of a century, that prospect now became the tool with which to pry India apart. History, beyond that written by his own people, would never accord Mohammed Ali Jinnah the high place his achievements merited. Yet, it was he, more than Gandhi or anyone else, who held the key to India’s future. It was with that stern and uncompromising Moslem Messiah, leading his people to another man’s Promised Land, that Queen Victoria’s great-grandson would have to contend when he reached India.

      In a tent outside Bombay in August 1946, he had evaluated for his followers in the Moslem League the meaning of Direct Action Day. If Congress wanted war, he declared, then India’s Moslems would ‘accept their offer unhesitatingly’.

      Pale lips pressed into a grim smile, his piercing eyes alight with repressed passion, Jinnah had that day flung down the gauntlet to Congress, to the British.

      ‘We shall have India divided,’ he vowed, ‘or we shall have India destroyed.’

      

^* The Moslems had also been subtly penalized in the two or three decades after 1857 for the role their community had played in the Indian Army Mutiny.

THREE

       ‘Leave India to God’

       London, January 1947

      ‘Look,’ said Louis Mountbatten, ‘a terrible thing has happened.’

      Two men were alone in the intimacy of a Buckingham Palace sitting-room. At times like this, there was never any formality between them. They sat side by side like a couple of old school friends chatting as they sipped their tea. Today, however, a special nuance enlivened Mountbatten’s conversational tone. His cousin King George VI represented his court of last appeal, the last faint hope that he might somehow avoid the stigma of becoming the man to cut Britain’s ties with India. The King was after all Emperor of India and entitled to the final word on his appointment as Viceroy. It was not to be the word the young admiral wished to hear.

      ‘I know,’ replied the King with his shy smile, ‘the Prime Minister’s already been to see me and I’ve agreed.’

      ‘You’ve agreed?’ asked Mountbatten. ‘Have you really thought it over?’

      ‘Oh, yes,’ replied the King quite cheerfully. ‘I’ve thought it over carefully.’

      ‘Look,’ said Mountbatten. ‘This is very dangerous. Nobody can foresee any way of finding an agreement out there. It’s almost impossible to find one. I’m your cousin. If I go out there and make the most deplorable mess, it will reflect very badly on you.’

      ‘Ah,’ said the sovereign, ‘but think how well it will reflect on the monarchy if you succeed.’

      ‘Well,’ sighed Mountbatten, sinking back into his chair, ‘that’s very optimistic of you.’

      He could never sit there in that little salon without remembering another figure who used to sit in the chair across from his, another cousin, his closest friend, who had stood beside him on his wedding day at St Margaret’s, Westminster, the man who should have been King, David, Prince of Wales. From early boyhood, they had been close. When in 1936, as Edward VIII, David had abdicated the throne for which he had been trained because he was not prepared to rule without the woman he loved, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten had haunted the corridors of his palace, the King’s constant solace and companion.

      How ironic, Mountbatten thought. It was as David’s ADC that he had first set foot on the land he was now to liberate. It was 17 November 1921. India, the young Mountbatten had noted in his diary that night, ‘is the country one had always heard about, dreamt about, read about.’ Nothing on that extraordinary royal tour would disappoint his youthful expectations. The Raj was at its zenith then, and no attention was too lavish, no occasion too grand for the heir to the imperial throne, the Shahzada Sahib, and his party. They travelled in the white and gold viceregal train, their journey a round of parades, polo games, tiger hunts, moonlit rides on elephants, banquets and receptions of unsurpassed elegance proffered by the crown’s staunchest allies, the Indian princes. Leaving, Mountbatten