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

persistent English foe of the elderly man patiently cleaning the faeces from his way had been the master orator of the House of Commons. Winston Churchill had uttered in his long career enough memorable phrases to fill a volume of prose, but few of them had imprinted themselves as firmly on the public’s imagination as those with which he had described Gandhi just sixteen years earlier, in February 1931: ‘half-naked fakir’.

      The occasion that prompted Churchill’s outburst occurred on 17 February 1931. One hand holding his bamboo stave, the other clutching the edges of his white shawl, Mahatma Gandhi had that morning shuffled up the red sandstone steps to Viceroy’s House, New Delhi. He was still wan from his weeks in a British prison but the man who had organized the Salt March did not come to that house as a suppliant for the Viceroy’s favours. He came as India.

      With his fistful of salt and his bamboo stave, Gandhi had rent the veil of the temple. So widespread had support for his movement become, that the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, had felt obliged to release him from prison and invite him to Delhi to treat with him as the acknowledged leader of the Indian masses. He was the first and the greatest in a line of Arab, African and Asian leaders who in the decades to come would follow his route from a British prison to a British conference chamber.

      Winston Churchill had correctly read the portents of the meeting. He had assailed ‘the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor’.

      ‘The loss of India,’ he said with a clairvoyance that foreshadowed his speech sixteen years later, ‘would be final and fatal to us. It could not fail to be part of a process that would reduce us to the scale of a minor power.’

His words, however, had no impact on the negotiations in New Delhi. These covered eight meetings over three weeks and produced what became known as the Gandhi-Irwin pact. Its text read like a treaty between two sovereign powers, and that was the measure of Gandhi’s triumph. Under it, Irwin agreed to release from jail the thousands of Gandhi’s followers who’d followed their leader to prison.^* Gandhi for his part agreed to call off his movement and attend a round table conference in London to discuss India’s future.

      Six months later, to the astonishment of a watching British nation, Mahatma Gandhi walked into Buckingham Palace to take tea with the King Emperor dressed in a loincloth and sandals, a living portrayal of Kipling’s Gunga Din with ‘nothing much before and rather less than ’arf o’ that behind’. Later, when questioned on the appropriateness of his apparel, Gandhi replied with a smile ‘the king was wearing enough for both of us’.

      The publicity surrounding their meeting was in a sense the measure of the real impact of Gandhi’s London visit. The round table conference he’d come to attend was a failure. London was not yet ready to contemplate Indian independence.

      The real work Gandhi proclaimed lay ‘outside the conference … The seed which is being sown now may result in a softening of the British spirit.’ No one did more to soften it than Gandhi. The British press and public were fascinated by this man who wanted to overthrow their empire by turning the other cheek.

      He had walked off his steamer in his loincloth carrying his bamboo stave. Behind him there were no aides-de-camp, no servants, only a handful of disciples and a goat, who tottered down the gangplank after Gandhi, an Indian goat to supply the Mahatma’s daily bowl of milk. He ignored the hotels of the mighty to live in a settlement house in London’s East End slums.

      The man who had first come to London as an inarticulate tongue-tied student almost never stopped talking. He met Charlie Chaplin, Jan Smuts, George Bernard Shaw, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Harold Laski, Maria Montessori, coal miners, children, Lancashire textile workers thrown out of work by his campaigns in India; virtually everyone of importance except Winston Churchill, who adamantly refused to see him.

      The impression Gandhi made was profound. The newsreels of the Salt March had already made him famous. To the masses of a Britain beset by industrial unrest, unemployment and grave social injustice, this messenger from the East in his Christ-like cotton sheet with his even more Christ-like message of love, was a fascinating and vaguely disturbing figure. Gandhi himself, perhaps, put his finger on the roots of much of that fascination in a radio broadcast to the USA.

      World attention had been drawn to India’s freedom struggle, he said, ‘because the means adopted by us for attaining that liberty are unique … the world is sick unto death of blood-spilling. The world is seeking a way out and I flatter myself with the belief that perhaps it will be the privilege of the ancient land of India to show the way out to a hungering world.’

      The western world Gandhi was visiting was not yet ready for the way out proposed by this revolutionary who travelled with a goat instead of a machine-gun. Already Europe’s streets echoed to the stomp of jackboots and the shrieks of impassioned ideologues. Nonetheless, when he left, thousands of French, Swiss and Italians flocked to the railroad stations on his route to the Italian port of Brindisi to gape at the frail, toothless man leaning from the window of his third-class compartment.

      In Paris, so many people swarmed to the station that Gandhi had to climb on a baggage cart to address them. In Switzerland, where he visited his friend, the author Romain Rolland, the dairymen of Léman clamoured for the privilege of serving the ‘king of India’. In Rome, he warned Mussolini fascism would ‘collapse like a house of cards’, watched a football game and wept at the sight of the statue of Christ on the Cross in the Sistine Chapel.

      Despite that triumphant progress across Europe, Gandhi suffered much on the voyage home. ‘I have come back empty-handed,’ he told the thousands who greeted him in Bombay. India would have to return to civil disobedience. Less than a week later the man who had been the King Emperor’s tea-time guest in London was once again His Imperial Majesty’s guest – this time back in Yeravda prison.

      For the next three years, Gandhi was in and out of prison while in London Churchill thundered, ‘Gandhi and all he stands for must be crushed.’ Despite Churchill’s opposition, however, the British produced a basic reform for India offering her provinces some local autonomy, the Government of India Act of 1935. Finally released from jail, Gandhi turned from his political combat to devote three years to two projects particularly close to him, the plight of India’s millions of Untouchables and the situation in her villages.

      With the approach of World War II, Gandhi became more convinced than ever that the non-violence which had been the guiding principle of India’s domestic struggle was the only philosophy capable of saving man from self-destruction.

      When Mussolini overran Ethiopia, he urged the Ethiopians to ‘allow themselves to be slaughtered’. The result, he said, would be more effective than resistance since ‘after all, Mussolini didn’t want a desert’. Sickened by the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews, he declared: ‘If ever there could be justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, war against Germany to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race would be completely justified.’

      ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I do not believe in war.’ He proposed ‘a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah.’ ‘That,’ he said, ‘would convert [the Germans] to an appreciation of human dignity.’

      Not even the atrocities which were perpetrated in the concentration camps of Europe were to make him doubt the essential correctness of his attitude.

      When war finally broke out, Gandhi prayed that the holocaust might at least produce, like some sudden burst of sunshine after the storm, the heroic gesture, the non-violent sacrifice, that would illuminate for mankind the path away from a tightening cycle of self-destruction.

      While Churchill summoned his countrymen to ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’, Gandhi, hoping to find in the English a people brave enough to put his theory to the ultimate test, proposed another course. ‘Invite Hitler and Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions,’ he wrote