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

his first report to the Attlee government on 2 April 1947, ‘is one of unrelieved gloom … I can see little ground on which to build any agreed solution for the future of India.’

      After describing the country’s unsettled state, the young admiral issued an anguished warning to the man who had sent him to India. ‘The only conclusion I have been able to come to,’ he wrote, ‘is that unless I act quickly, I will find the beginnings of a civil war on my hands.’

      

^* The impulses thrusting Gandhi to take his vow were not Hindu alone. As Christ’s dictum of turning the other cheek had been vital in helping him formulate his non-violent ideal, so Jesus’ words referring to ‘those who become eunuchs for my sake … for love of the Kingdom of Heaven’, had inspired him in taking his ancient Hindu pledge.

^* The Attlee government had treated Wavell in particularly brutal fashion. He had been in London when Mountbatten was asked to replace him, but given no hint he was about to be sacked. He learned the news only hours before Attlee made it public. It was only on Mountbatten’s insistence that Attlee accorded him the elevation in his rank in the peerage which traditionally was offered a departing Viceroy.

FIVE

       An Old Man and his Shattered Dream

       New Delhi, April 1947

      There was no one else in the room. Not even a secretary unobtrusively taking notes disturbed the two men. Convinced of the urgency of the situation facing him, Mountbatten had decided to employ a revolutionary tactic for his negotiations with India’s leaders. For the first time in its modern history, India’s destiny was not being decided around a conference table, but in the intimacy of private conversation. The tête-à-tête just beginning in the Viceroy’s freshly painted study was the first in a series. Those conversations would determine whether India would be spared the horror of civil war foreseen in Louis Mountbatten’s first report to London. Five men would participate in them, Louis Mountbatten and four Indian leaders.

      Those four Indians had spent the better part of their lives agitating against the British and arguing with each other. All of them were past middle age. All of them were lawyers who had first honed their forensic skills in London’s Inns of Court. For each of them, their coming conversations with India’s new Viceroy would be the greatest argument of their lifetimes, the debate for which each of them had, in a sense, been preparing for a quarter of a century.

      In Mountbatten’s mind, there was no question what the outcome of that debate should be. Like many Englishmen, he looked on India’s unity as the greatest single legacy Britain could leave behind. He had a deep, almost evangelical desire to maintain it. To respond to the Moslem appeal to divide the country was, he believed, to sow the seeds of tragedy.

      Every effort to get India’s leaders to agree to a solution to their country’s problems in the quasi-public glare of a formal meeting had ended in a hopeless deadlock. But here, in the privacy of his study, reasoning with them one by one, Mountbatten hoped he might bring them to agreement in the brief time at his disposal. Supremely confident of his own powers of persuasion, confident, above all, of the compelling logic of his case, he was going to try to achieve in weeks what his predecessors had been unable to achieve in years; to get India’s leaders to agree on some form of unity.

      With his white Congress cap fixed on his balding head, a fresh rose twisted through the third buttonhole of his waistcoat, the man before him was one of the familiar figures on India’s political landscape. In his own slightly feline way, Jawaharlal Nehru was as impressively striking a figure as India’s new Viceroy. The sensual features of a face whose expression could change in an instant from angelic softness to daemonic wrath were often tinged with a glimmer of sadness. While Mountbatten’s features were almost always composed, Nehru’s rarely were. His moods and humours slipped across his face like shadows passing across the waters of a lake.

      He was the only one of the Indian leaders that Mountbatten already knew. The two men had met after the war when Nehru was on a visit to Singapore, where Mountbatten had his SEAC headquarters. Ignoring his advisers, who’d counselled him to have nothing to do with a rebel whose shoes still bore the dust of a British prison yard, Mountbatten had met the Indian leader.^* The two immediately sympathized with each other. Nehru rediscovered in the company of Mountbatten and his wife an England he had not known for forty years, the England his years in British jail had almost eradicated from his memory, that open and welcoming England he had known as a schoolboy. The Mountbattens delighted in Nehru’s charm, his culture, his quick humour. To the horror of his staff, Mountbatten had even spontaneously decided to ride through Singapore’s streets in his open car with Nehru at his side. His action, his advisers had warned, would only dignify an anti-British rebel.

      ‘Dignify him?’ Mountbatten had retorted. ‘It’s he who will dignify me. One day this man will be Prime Minister of India.’

      Now, his prophecy had been realized. It was to his position as Prime Minister of India’s interim government that Nehru owed the honour of being the first of India’s four leaders to enter Mountbatten’s study.

      For Jawaharlal Nehru, the conversation beginning in the Viceroy’s study was just the latest episode in a continuing dialogue with his country’s colonizers that had occupied most of his life. Nehru had been a pampered guest in the best country houses in England. He had dined off the gold service of Buckingham Palace and the tin plates of a British prison. His interlocutors had included Cambridge dons, Prime Ministers, Viceroys, the King Emperor – and jail-keepers.

      Born into an eastern aristocracy as old and as proud as any produced by India’s British rulers, that of the Kashmiri Brahmins, Nehru had been sent to England at sixteen to finish his education. He spent seven gloriously happy years there, learning Latin verbs and cricket at Harrow, studying science, Nietzsche and Chaucer at Cambridge, admiring the reasoning of Blackstone at the Inns of Court. With his gentle charm, elegant manners, rapidly expanding culture, he had enjoyed an extraordinary social success wherever he went. He moved easily through the drawing-rooms of English society absorbing with the sponge of his still malleable personality the values and mannerisms he found there. So complete was the transformation wreaked by those seven years in England that, on his return to Allahabad, his family and friends found him completely de-Indianized.

      The young Nehru soon discovered, however, the limits of his de-Indianization. He was blackballed when he applied for membership in the local British Club. He might have been a product of Harrow and Cambridge, but to the all white, all British – and devotedly middle-class – membership of the Club, he was still a black Indian.

      The bitterness caused by that rejection haunted Nehru for years and hastened him towards the cause which became his life’s work, the struggle for Indian independence. He joined the Congress Party, and his agitation on its behalf soon qualified him for admission to the finest political training school in the British Empire, British jails, where Nehru spent nine years of his life. In the solitude of his cell, in prison courtyards with his fellow Congress leaders, he had shaped his vision of the India of tomorrow. An idealist immersed in the doctrines of social revolution, Nehru dreamed of reconciling on the soil of India his two political passions: the parliamentary democracy of England and the economic socialism of Karl Marx. He dreamed of an India freed alike of the shackles of poverty and of superstition, unburdened of capitalism, an India in which the smoke stacks of factories reached out from her cities, an India enjoying the plenitude of that Industrial Revolution to which her colonizers had denied her access.

      No one might have seemed a more unlikely candidate to lead India towards that vision than Jawaharlal Nehru. Under the cotton khadi he wore in deference to the dictates of Congress, he remained the quintessential English