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

had deprived him of his share of paternal affection, was a hopeless alcoholic who had staggered drunk to his dying mother’s bedside. Two of his other sons were in South Africa and rarely in contact with Gandhi. Only with his youngest son did he enjoy a normal father-son relation. In any event, whatever the explanation, a deep, spiritual bond was destined to link the Mahatma and the shy, devoted girl so anxious to share his misery during the closing months of his life.

      As word of what was happening spread beyond his entourage, a campaign of calumnies, spread by the leaders of the Moslem League, grew up about Gandhi. The news reached Delhi, spreading intense shock among the leaders of Congress waiting to begin their critical talks with India’s new Viceroy.

      Gandhi finally confronted the rumours in an evening prayer meeting. Assailing the ‘small talk, whispers and innuendo around him’, he told the crowd that his great-niece Manu shared his bed with him each night and explained why she was there. His words calmed his immediate circle, but when he sent them to his newspaper Harijan to be published, the storm broke again. Two of the editors quit in protest. Its trustees, fearful of a scandal, did something they had never dreamed of doing before. They refused to publish a text written by the Mahatma.

      The crisis reached its climax in Haimchar, the last stop on Gandhi’s tour. There, Gandhi revealed his intention to carry his mission to the province of Bihar where, this time, he would work with his fellow Hindus who had killed the members of a Moslem minority in their midst.

      His words alarmed the Congress leadership in Delhi who feared the effect his relationship with Manu could have on Bihar’s orthodox Hindu community. A series of emissaries discreetly asked him to abandon it before leaving for Bihar. He refused.

      Finally, it was Manu herself, perhaps prodded by one of those emissaries, who gently suggested to the elderly Mahatma that they suspend their practice. She remained absolutely at one with him, she promised. She was renouncing nothing of what they were trying to achieve. The concession she proposed was only temporary, a concession to the smaller minds around them who could not understand the goals he sought. She would stay behind when he left for Bihar. Saddened, Gandhi agreed.

      

       New Delhi, March – April 1947

      In his immaculate white naval uniform, ‘he looked like a film star’ to the 23-year-old captain of the Grenadier Guards just appointed one of his ADCs. Serene and smiling, his wife at his side, Louis Mountbatten rode up to Viceroy’s House in a gilded landau built half a century before for the royal progress through Delhi of his cousin, George V. At the instant his escort reached the palace’s grand staircase, the bagpipes of the Royal Scots Fusiliers skirled out a plaintive welcome to India’s last Viceroy.

      A faint, sad smile on his face, the outgoing Viceroy, Lord Wavell, waited at the head of the staircase. The very presence in New Delhi of those two men represented a break with tradition. Normally, an outgoing Viceroy sailed with due pomp from the Gateway of India while the next steamer bore his successor towards its spans, thus sparing India the embarrassment of having two Gods upon its soil at the same time. Mountbatten himself had insisted on this breach of custom so he could talk with the man to whom he formally bowed his head as he reached the top of the stairs.

For a moment, in the intermittent glare of flashbulbs, the two men stood chatting. They were a poignantly contrasting pair: Mountbatten the glamorous war hero, exuding confidence and vitality; Wavell, the one-eyed old soldier, adored by his subordinates, brusquely sacked by the politicians, a man who had sadly noted in his diary not long before that, for the past half decade, his had been the unhappy fate ‘to conduct withdrawals and mitigate defeats’.^*

      Wavell escorted Mountbatten through the heavy teak doors to the Viceroy’s study and his first direct confrontation with the awesome problems awaiting him.

      ‘I am sorry indeed that you’ve been sent out here in my place,’ Wavell began.

      ‘Well,’ said Mountbatten, somewhat taken aback, ‘that’s being candid. Why? Don’t you think I’m up to it?’

      ‘No, it’s not that,’ replied Wavell, ‘indeed, I’m very fond of you, but you’ve been given an impossible task. I’ve tried everything I know to solve this problem and I can see no light. There is just no way of dealing with it. Not only have we had absolutely no help from Whitehall, but we’ve now reached a complete impasse here.’

      Patiently, Wavell reviewed his efforts to reach a solution. Then he stood up and opened his safe. Locked inside were the only two items he could bequeath his successor. The first sparkled on dark velvet folds inside a wooden box. It was the diamond-encrusted badge of the Grand Master of the Order of the Star of India, the emblem of Mountbatten’s new office, which, forty-eight hours hence, he would hang around his neck for the ceremonial which would officially install him as Viceroy.

      The second was a manilla file on which was written the words ‘Operation Madhouse’. It contained the only solution the able soldier had to propose to India’s dilemma. Sadly, he took it out of the safe and laid it on his desk.

      ‘This is called “Madhouse”,’ he explained, ‘because it is a problem for a madhouse. Alas, I can see no other way out.’

      It called for the British evacuation of India, province by province, women and children first, then civilians, then soldiers, a move likely, in Gandhi’s words, to ‘leave India to chaos’.

      ‘It’s a terrible solution, but it’s the only one I can see,’ Wavell sighed. He picked up the file from his desk and offered it to his stunned successor.

      ‘I am very, very, very sorry,’ he concluded, ‘but this is all I can bequeath you.’

      As the new Viceroy concluded that sad introduction to his new functions, his wife, on the floor above Wavell’s study, was receiving a more piquant introduction to her new life. On reaching their quarters, Edwina Mountbatten had asked a servant for a few scraps for the two sealyhams, Mizzen and Jib, which the Mountbattens had brought out from London. To her amazement, thirty minutes later, a pair of turbaned servants solemnly marched into her bedroom, each bearing a silver tray set with a china plate on which were laid several slices of freshly roasted chicken breast.

      Eyes wide with wonder, Edwina contemplated that chicken. She had not seen food like it in the austerity of England for weeks. She glanced at the sealyhams, barking at her feet, then back at the chicken. Her disciplined conscience would not allow her to give pets such nourishment.

      ‘Give me that,’ she ordered.

      Firmly grasping the two plates of chicken, she marched into the bathroom and locked the door. There, the woman who would offer in the next months the hospitality of Viceroy’s House to 25,000 people, gleefully began to devour the chicken intended for her pets.

      The closing chapter in a great story was about to begin. In a few minutes on this morning of 24 March 1947, the last Englishman to govern India would mount his gold and crimson viceregal throne. Installed upon that throne, Louis Mountbatten would become the twentieth and final representative of a prestigious dynasty, his would be the last hands to clasp the sceptre that had passed from Hastings to Wellesley, Cornwallis and Curzon.

      The site of his official consecration was the ceremonial Durbar Hall of a palace whose awesome dimensions were rivalled only by those of Versailles and the Peterhof of the Tsars. Ponderous, solemn, unabashedly imperial, Viceroy’s House, New Delhi, was the last such palace men would ever build for a single ruler. Indeed, only in India with its famished hordes desperate for work would a palace like Viceroy’s House have been built and maintained in the twentieth century.

      Its façades were covered with the red and white stone of Barauli, the building blocks of the Moghuls whose monuments it had succeeded. White, yellow, green, black marble quarried from the veins that had furnished the glistening mosaics of the Taj Mahal, embellished its floors and walls. So long were its corridors that in its basement servants rode from one end of the building to the other on bicycles.

      This morning, those servants