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

had assembled and guided the British Empire. Their debates and decisions had fixed the destiny of half a billion human beings scattered around the globe and helped impose the domination of a white, Christian, European elite on over a third of the earth’s inhabitable land surface.

      Now, tensely expectant, the members of the House of Commons shivered in the melancholy shadows stretching out in dark pools from the corners of their unheated hall to hear their leader pronounce a funeral oration for the British Empire. His bulky figure swathed in a black overcoat, Winston Churchill slumped despondently on the Opposition benches. For four decades, since he had joined the Commons, his voice had given utterance in that hall to Britain’s imperial dream, just as, for the past decade, it had been the goad of England’s conscience, the catalyst of her courage.

      He was a man of rare clairvoyance but inflexible in many of his convictions. He gloried in every corner of the realm but for none of them did he have sentiments comparable to those with which he regarded India. Churchill loved India with a violent and unreal affection. He had gone out there as a young subaltern with his regiment, the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars; played polo on the dusty maidans, gone pig-sticking and tiger hunting. He had climbed the Khyber Pass and fought the Pathans on the North-west Frontier. He was, forty-one years after his departure, still sending two pounds every month to the Indian who’d been his bearer for two years when he was a young subaltern. His gesture revealed much of his sentiments about India. He loved it first of all as a reflection of his own experience there and he loved the idea of doughty, upright Englishmen running the place with a firm, paternalistic hand.

      His faith in the imperial dream was unshakeable. He had always maintained that Britain’s position in the world was determined by the Empire. He sincerely believed in the Victorian dogma that those ‘lesser breeds, without the law’ were better off under European rule than they would have been under the tyranny of local despots. Despite the perception he had displayed on so many world issues, India was a blind spot for Churchill. Nothing could shake his passionately held conviction that British rule in India had been just and exercised in India’s best interests; that her masses looked on their rulers with gratitude and affection; that the politicians agitating for independence were a petty-minded, half-educated elite, unreflective of the desires or interests of the masses. Churchill understood India, his own Secretary of State for India had noted acidly, ‘about as well as George III understood the American colonies’.

      Since 1910 he had stubbornly resisted every effort to bring India towards independence. He contemptuously dismissed Gandhi and his Congress followers as ‘men of straw’. More than any other man in that chamber, Churchill was torn by the knowledge that his successor at 10 Downing Street was undertaking the task he had refused to contemplate, dismembering the Empire. If he and his Conservative Party had been defeated in 1945, however, they still commanded an absolute majority in the House of Lords. That gave him the power, if he chose to exercise it, to delay Indian independence by two full years. Distaste spreading like a rash over his glowering face, he watched the spare Socialist who’d succeeded him as Prime Minister rise to speak.

      The brief text in Clement Attlee’s hand had been largely written by the young admiral he was sending to New Delhi to negotiate Britain’s departure from India and whose name he was about to reveal. Louis Mountbatten had, with characteristic boldness, proposed it as a substitute for the lengthy document Attlee himself had drafted. It defined the new Viceroy’s task in simple terms. Above all, it contained the new and salient point Mountbatten had maintained was essential if there was to be any hope of breaking the Indian log-jam. He had wrestled with Attlee for six weeks to nail it down with the precision he wanted.

      The chilly assembly stirred as Attlee began to read the historic announcement. ‘His Majesty’s Government wishes to make it clear,’ he began, ‘that it is their definite intention to take the necessary steps to effect the transference of power into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June 1948.’

      A stunned silence followed as his words struck home to the men in the Commons. That they were the inevitable result of history and Britain’s own avowed course in India did not mitigate the sadness produced by the realization that barely fourteen months remained to the British Raj. An era in British life was ending. What the Manchester Guardian would call the following morning ‘the greatest disengagement in history’ was about to begin.

      The bulky figure slumped on his bench rose when his turn came to protest, to hurl out one last eloquent plea for empire. Shaking slightly from cold and emotion, Churchill declared that the whole business was ‘an attempt by the government to make use of brilliant war figures in order to cover up a melancholy and disastrous transaction’.

      By fixing a date for independence Attlee was adopting one of Gandhi’s ‘most scatter-brained observations – “Leave India to God” ’.

      ‘It is with deep grief,’ Churchill lamented, ‘that I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered mankind. Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself … let us not add by shameful flight, by a premature, hurried scuttle – at least let us not add to the pangs of sorrow so many of us feel, the taint and sneer of shame.’

      They were the words of a master orator, but they were also a futile railing against the setting of a sun. When the division bell rang, the Commons acknowledged the dictate of history. By an overwhelming majority, it voted to end British rule in India no later than June 1948.

      

       Penitent’s Progress II

      The deeper his little party penetrated into Noakhali’s bayous, the more difficult Gandhi’s mission became. The success he’d enjoyed with the Moslems in the first villages through which he’d passed had alerted the leaders in those that lay ahead. Sensing in it a challenge to their own authority, they had begun to stir the populace’s hostility to the Mahatma and his mission.

      This morning, his pilgrim’s route took him past a Moslem school where seven- and eight-year-old children sat around their sheikh in an open-air classroom. Beaming like an excited grandfather rushing to embrace his favourite grandchildren, Gandhi hurried over to speak to the youngsters. The sheikh leapt up at his approach. With quick and angry gestures, he shooed his pupils into his hut, as though the old man approaching were a bogeyman come to cast some evil spell over them. Deeply pained by their flight, Gandhi stood before the doorway of the sheikh’s hut, making sad little waves of his hand to the children whose faces he could make out in the shadows. Dark eyes wide with curiosity and incomprehension, they stared back at him. Finally Gandhi touched his hand to his heart and sent them the Moslem greeting ‘salaam’. Not a single childish hand answered his pathetic sign. Gandhi turned away and resumed his march.

      There had been other incidents. Four days before someone had sabotaged a bamboo support holding up a rickety bridge of bamboo poles over which Gandhi was due to cross. Fortunately, it had been discovered before the bridge could collapse and send Gandhi and his party tumbling into the muddy waters ten feet below. On another morning, his route had taken him through a grove of bamboo and coconut trees. Every tree seemed to be festooned with a banner proclaiming slogans like ‘Leave, you have been warned’, ‘Accept Pakistan’, or ‘Go for your own good’.

      Those signs had no effect on Gandhi. Physical courage, the courage to accept without protest a beating, to face danger with quiet resolution was, Gandhi maintained, the prime characteristic required of a non-violent man. Since the first beating he’d received in South Africa, physical courage had been an attribute the frail Gandhi had displayed in abundance.

      Muffling the inner sorrow the hostile signs and the children’s rejection had provoked, Gandhi trudged serenely towards his next stop. It had been a damp, humid night and the alluvial soil on the narrow path along which his party walked was slick and slippery under the heavy dew. Suddenly, the little procession came to a halt. At its head, Gandhi laid aside his bamboo stave and bent down. Some unknown Moslem hands had littered the track on which he was to walk barefoot with shards of glass and lumps of human excrement. Tranquilly, Gandhi broke off the branch of a stubby palm. With it, he stooped and humbly undertook the most defiling act a Hindu can perform. Using his branch as a broom,