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

of science at Cambridge never ceased to be appalled by his fellow Indians who refused to stir from their homes on days proclaimed inauspicious by their favourite astrologers. He was a publicly declared agnostic in the most intensely spiritual area in the world, and he never ceased to proclaim the horror the word ‘religion’ inspired in him. Nehru despised India’s priests, her sadhus, her chanting monks and pious sheikhs. They had only served, he felt, to impede her progress, deepen her divisions and ease the task of her foreign rulers.

      And yet, the India of those sadhus and the superstition-haunted masses had accepted Nehru. For thirty years he had travelled across India haranguing the multitudes. Clinging to the roofs and sides of tramways to escape the slums of India’s cities, on foot and by bullock cart in the countrysides, his countrymen had come by the hundreds of thousands to see and hear him. Many in those crowds could not hear his words nor understand them when they did. For them, it had been enough however just to see, over the ocean of heads around them, his frail and gesticulating silhouette. They had taken darshan, a kind of spiritual communion received from being in the presence of a great man and that had sufficed.

      He was a superb orator and writer, a man who treasured words as a courtesan jewels. Anointed early by Gandhi, he had advanced steadily through the ranks of Congress eventually to preside over it three times. The Mahatma had made it clear that it was on his shoulders that he wished his mantle to fall.

      For Nehru, Gandhi was a genius. Nehru’s cool, pragmatic mind had rejected almost all of Gandhi’s great moves: civil disobedience, the Salt March, Quit India. But his heart had told him to follow the Mahatma and his heart, he would later admit, had been right.

      Gandhi had been, in a sense, Nehru’s guru. It was he who had re-Indianized Nehru, sending him into the villages to find the real face of his homeland, to let the fingers of his soul touch India’s sufferings. Whenever the two men were in the same place, Nehru would spend at least half an hour sitting at ‘Bapuji’s’ feet, sometimes talking, sometimes listening, sometimes just looking and thinking. Those were, for Nehru, moments of intense spiritual satisfaction, perhaps the closest brush his atheist’s heart would ever have with religion.

      Yet so much separated them: Nehru, the religion-hating atheist; Gandhi, to whom an unshakeable belief in God was the very essence of being: Nehru, whose hot temper had made him a notably imperfect soldier of non-violence, a man who adored literature and painting, science and technology, the very things Gandhi ignored or detested as being responsible for much of mankind’s misery.

      Between them a fascinating father-son relation grew up, animated by all the tensions, affections and repressed guilt such a relationship implied. All his life, Nehru had had an instinctive need for a dominant personality near him, some steadying influence to whom he could turn in the crises engendered by his volatile nature. His father, a bluff, jovial barrister with a penchant for good Scotch and Bordeaux, had first filled that role. Since his death, it had been Gandhi.

      Nehru’s devotion to Gandhi remained total, but a subtle change was overtaking their relationship. A phase in Nehru’s life was drawing to a close. The son was ready to leave his father’s house for the new world he saw beyond its gates. In that new world, he would need a new guru, a guru more sensitive to the complex problems that would assail him there. Although he was perhaps unaware of it as he sat in the Viceroy’s study that March afternoon, a vacuum had opened in the psyche of Jawaharlal Nehru.

      Much had changed in the world and in their own lives since Nehru and Mountbatten had met for the first time, but the undercurrent of mutual sympathy which had warmed their earlier encounter soon made itself felt in the Viceroy’s study. It was not surprising that it should. Although Mountbatten, of course, did not know it, Nehru was partially responsible for his being there.

      Besides, there was a great deal to bind the scion of a 3000-year-old line of Kashmiri Brahmins and the man who claimed descent from the oldest ruling family in Protestantism. They both loved to talk and expanded in each other’s company. Nehru, the abstract thinker, admired Mountbatten’s practical dynamism, the capacity for decisive action that wartime command had given him. Mountbatten was stimulated by Nehru’s culture, the subtlety of his thought. He quickly understood that the only Indian politician who would share and understand his desire to maintain a link between Britain and a new India was Jawaharlal Nehru.

      With his usual candour, the Admiral told him that he had been given an appalling responsibility and he intended to approach the Indian problem in a mood of stark realism. As they talked, the two men rapidly agreed on two major points: a quick decision was essential to avoid a bloodbath; the division of India would be a tragedy.

      Then Nehru turned to the actions of the next Indian leader who would enter Mountbatten’s study, the penitent marching his lonely path through Noakhali and Bihar. The man to whom he’d been so long devoted was, Nehru said, ‘going around with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India instead of diagnosing the cause of the eruption of the sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole’.

      In offering a glimpse into the growing gulf separating the Liberator of India and his closest companions, Nehru’s words provided Mountbatten with a vital insight into the form his actions in Delhi should take. If he could not persuade India’s leaders to keep their country united, he was going to have to persuade them to divide it. Gandhi’s unremitting hostility to partition could place an insurmountable barrier in his path. His only hope in that event would be to persuade the leaders of Congress to break with their leader and agree to divide India as the only solution to their country’s dilemma. Nehru would be the key if that happened. He was the one ally Mountbatten had to have. Only he, Mountbatten thought, might have the authority to stand out against the Mahatma.

      Now his words had revealed the discord between Gandhi and his party chiefs. Mountbatten might be forced to widen and exploit that gap. He spared no effort to win Nehru’s support. On none of India’s leaders would Operation Seduction have more impact than the realistic Kashmiri Brahmin. A friendship that would prove decisive in the months to come was beginning that afternoon.

      Taking Nehru to the door, Mountbatten told him: ‘Mr Nehru, I want you to regard me not as the last British Viceroy winding up the Raj, but as the first to lead the way to a new India.’ Nehru turned and looked at the man he had wanted to see on the viceregal throne. ‘Ah,’ he said, a faint smile creasing his face, ‘now, I know what they mean when they speak of your charm as being so dangerous.’

      Once again, Churchill’s half-naked fakir was sitting in the viceregal study, there ‘to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor’.

      ‘He’s rather like a little bird,’ Louis Mountbatten thought, as he contemplated that famous figure at his side, ‘a kind of sweet, sad sparrow perched on my armchair.’^*

      They made an odd couple: the royal sailor who loved to dress up in uniformed splendour and the elderly Indian who refused to cover his nakedness with anything more than a sheet of rough cotton. Mountbatten, handsome, the vitality surging from his muscled athlete’s body; Gandhi, whose little frame almost disappeared into his armchair; the advocate of non-violence and the professional warrior; the aristocrat and the man who had chosen to live his life immersed in the poverty of the most destitute masses on the globe; Mountbatten, the wartime master of the technology of communications, for ever searching for some new electronic gadget to enhance the complex signal net that linked him to the millions of his command; Gandhi, the fragile Messiah who mistrusted all that paraphernalia and yet still communicated with his public as few figures in this century had been able to.

      All of those elements, almost everything in their backgrounds, seemed to destine the two men to disagreement. And yet, in the months ahead, Gandhi the pacifist would, according to one of his intimates, find in the soul of the professional warrior ‘the echo of certain of the moral values that stirred in his own soul’. For his part, Mountbatten would become so attached to Gandhi that on his death he would predict that ‘Mahatma Gandhi will go down in history on a par with Christ and Buddha’.

      So important had Mountbatten considered this