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

came when the Mahatma himself offered to give him a salt and water enema.

      At sun-up, Gandhi began to wander the village, talking and praying incessantly with its inhabitants. Soon he developed a tactic to implement his drive to return peace and security to Noakhali. It was a typically Gandhian ploy. In each village he would search until he’d found a Hindu and a Moslem leader who’d responded to his appeal. Then he’d persuade them to move in together under one roof. They would become the joint guarantors of the village’s peace. If his fellow Moslems assailed the village’s Hindus, the Moslem promised to undertake a fast to death. The Hindu made a similar pledge.

      But on those blood-spattered byways of Noakhali, Gandhi did not limit himself to trying to exorcise the hatred poisoning the villages through which he passed. Once he sensed a village was beginning to understand his message of fraternal love, he broadened the dimension of his appeal. India for Gandhi was its lost and inaccessible villages, like those hamlets along his route in Noakhali. He knew them better than any man alive. He wanted his independent India built on the foundation of her re-invigorated villages, and he had his own ideas on how to re-order the patterns of their existence.

      ‘The lessons which I propose to give you during my tour are how you can keep the village water and yourselves clean,’ he would tell the villagers; ‘what use you can make of the earth, of which your bodies are made; how you can obtain the life force from the infinite sky over your heads; how you can reinforce your vital energy from the air which surrounds you; how you can make proper use of sunlight.’

      The ageing leader did not satisfy himself with words. Gandhi had a tenacious belief in the value of actions. To the despair of many of his followers, who thought a different set of priorities should order his time, Gandhi would devote the same meticulous care and attention to making a mudpack for a leper as preparing for an interview with a Viceroy. So, in each village he would go with its inhabitants to their wells. Frequently he would help them find a better location for them. He would inspect their communal latrines, or if, as was most often the case, they didn’t have any, he would teach them how to build one, often joining in the digging himself. Convinced bad hygiene was the basic cause of India’s terrible mortality rate, he’d inveighed for years against such habits as public defecation, spitting, and blowing out nostrils on the paths where most of the village poor walked barefoot.

      ‘If we Indians spat in unison,’ he had once sighed, ‘we would form a puddle large enough to drown three hundred thousand Englishmen.’ Every time he saw a villager spitting or blowing his nose on a footpath, he would gently reprimand him. He went into homes to show people how to build a simple filter of charcoal and sand to help purify their drinking water. ‘The difference between what we do and what we could do,’ he constantly repeated, ‘would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.’

      Every evening he held an open prayer meeting, inviting Moslems to join in, being careful to recite as part of each day’s service verses from the Koran. Anyone could question him on anything at those meetings. One day a villager remonstrated with him for wasting his time in Noakhali when he should have been in New Delhi negotiating with Jinnah and the Moslem League.

      ‘A leader,’ Gandhi replied, ‘is only a reflection of the people he leads.’ The people had first to be led to make peace among themselves. Then, he said, ‘their desire to live together in peaceful neighbourliness will be reflected by their leaders.’

      When he felt a village had begun to understand his message, when its Moslem community had agreed to let its frightened Hindus return to their homes, he set out for the next hamlet, five, ten, fifteen miles away. Inevitably, his departure took place at precisely 7.30. As at Srirampur, the little party would march off, Gandhi at its head, through the mango orchards, the green scum-slicked ponds where ducks and wild geese went honking skywards at their approach. Their paths were narrow, winding their way through palm groves and the underbush. They were littered with stones, pebbles, protruding roots. Sometimes the little procession had to struggle through ankle-deep mud. By the time they reached their next stop, the 77-year-old Mahatma’s bare feet were often aching with chilblains, or disfigured by bleeding sores and blisters. Before taking up his task again, he soaked them in hot water. Then, Gandhi indulged in the one luxury of his penitent’s tour. His great-niece and constant companion, Manu, massaged his martyred feet – with a stone.

      For thirty years those battered feet had led the famished hordes of a continent in prayer towards their liberty. They had carried Gandhi into the most remote corners of India, to thousands of villages like those he now visited, to lepers’ wading pools, to the worst slums of his nation, to palaces and prisons, in quest of his cherished goal, India’s freedom.

      Mohandas Gandhi had been an eight-year-old schoolboy when the great-grandmother of the two cousins sipping their tea in Buckingham Palace had been proclaimed Empress of India on a plain near Delhi. For Gandhi, that grandiose ceremony was always associated with a jingle he and his playmates had chanted to mark the event in his home town of Porbandar, 700 miles from Delhi on the Arabian Sea:

       Behold the mighty Englishman!

       He rules the Indian small

       Because being a meat eater

       He is five cubits tall.

      The boy whose spiritual force would one day humble those five-cubit Englishmen and their enormous empire could not resist the challenge in the jingle. With a friend, he cooked and ate a forbidden piece of goat’s meat. The experiment was disastrous. The eight-year-old Gandhi promptly vomited up the goat and spent the night dreaming the animal was cavorting in his stomach.

      Gandhi’s father was the hereditary diwan, prime minister, of a tiny state on the Kathiawar peninsula near Bombay and his mother an intensely devout woman given to long religious fasts.

      Curiously, Gandhi, destined to become India’s greatest spiritual leader of modern times, was not born into the Brahmin caste that was supposed to provide Hinduism with its hereditary philosophical and religious elite. His father was a member of the vaisyas, the caste of shopkeepers and petty tradesmen which stood halfway up the Hindu social scale, above Untouchable and sudras, artisans, but below Brahmins and kashatriyas, warriors.

      At thirteen, Gandhi, following the Indian tradition of the day, was married to an illiterate stranger named Kasturbai. The youth who was later to offer the world a symbol of ascetic purity revelled in the consequent discovery of sex.

      Four years later, Gandhi and his wife were in the midst of enjoying its pleasures when a rap on the door interrupted their lovemaking. It was a servant. Gandhi’s father, he announced, had just died.

      Gandhi was horrified. He was devoted to his father. Moments before he’d been by the bed on which his father lay dying, patiently massaging his legs. An urgent burst of sexual desire had seized him and he’d tiptoed from his father’s room to wake up his pregnant wife. The joy of sex began to fade for Gandhi. An indelible stamp had been left on his psyche.

      As a result of his father’s death, Gandhi was sent to England to study law so he might become prime minister of a princely state. It was an enormous undertaking for a devout Hindu family. No member of Gandhi’s family had ever gone abroad before. Gandhi was solemnly pronounced an outcast from his shopkeepers’ caste, because, to his Hindu elders, his voyage across the seas would leave him contaminated.

      Gandhi was wretchedly unhappy in London. He was so desperately shy that to address a single word to a stranger was a painful ordeal; to produce a full sentence agony. Physically, at nineteen he was a pathetic little creature in the sophisticated world of the Inns of Court. His cheap, badly-cut Bombay clothes flopped over his undersized body like loose sails on a becalmed ship. Indeed, he was so small, so unremarkable, his fellow students sometimes took him for an errand boy.

      The lonely, miserable Gandhi decided the only way out of his agony was to become an English gentleman. He threw away his Bombay clothes and got a new wardrobe. It included a silk top-hat, an evening suit, patent-leather boots, white gloves and even a silver-tipped walking stick. He bought hair lotion to plaster his unwilling black hair on to his skull. He spent hours in front of a mirror contemplating his appearance and learning to tie a tie. To win