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

the two peoples inhabiting them would be staggering. Apart from a common faith in Allah the One, the Merciful, Punjabis and Bengalis shared nothing. They were as different as Finns and Greeks. The Bengalis were short, dark and agile, racially a part of the masses of Asia. The Punjabis, in whose veins flowed the blood of thirty centuries of conquerors, were scions of the steppes of Central Asia, and their Aryan features bore the traces of Turkestan, Russia, Persia, the deserts of Arabia. Neither history nor language nor culture offered a bridge by which those two peoples might communicate. Their marriage in the common state of Pakistan would be a union created against all the dictates of logic.

      The Punjab was the crown jewel of India. Half the size of France, it ran from the Indus River in the north-west all the way to the outskirts of Delhi. It was a land of sparkling rivers and golden fields of wheat, great rich fields rolling down to a distant blue horizon, an oasis blessed by the Gods in the midst of India’s arid face. Its name meant ‘Country of Five Rivers’, after the five torrents to whose waters the Punjab owed its natural fertility. The most famous of them was one of the great rivers of the globe, the Indus, which had given its name to the Indian sub-continent.

      Five thousand years of tumultuous history had fashioned the Punjab’s character and given it its identity. Its plains had resounded to the galloping hooves of Asia’s conquering hordes. It was in the Punjab that the celestial song of Hinduism’s sacred book, the Bhagavad Gita, had been inspired by a mystic dialogue between Lord Krishna and the warrior king Arjuna. The Persian legions of Darius and Cyrus, the Macedonians of Alexander the Great had camped on its plains. Mauryas, Scythians, Parthians had occupied them before being dispersed by waves of Huns and the Caliphs of Islam bringing their monotheistic faith to India’s polytheistic Hindu millions. Three centuries of Moghul domination brought India to the apogee of its power and, sprinkled it with its priceless heritage of monuments. Finally the Punjab’s indigenous Sikhs, with their rolled beards and their uncut hair packed in their multicoloured turbans, conquered the province in their turn before succumbing to its latest occupants, the British.

      The Punjab was a blend as subtle and complex as the mosaics decorating the monuments of its glorious Moghul past. To divide it would force an irreparable wound upon its population. Fifteen million Hindus, sixteen million Moslems and five million Sikhs shared its 17,932 towns and villages. Although divided by religion, they spoke a common language, clung to common traditions and an equal pride in their distinctive Punjabi personality. Their economic co-existence was fashioned even more intricately. The area’s prosperity rested upon a man-made miracle which, by its very nature, could not be divided, the immense network of irrigation canals built by the British which had made the Punjab the granary of India. Running from east to west across the entire province, their nourishing fingers had brought vast stretches of arid desert under cultivation and enriched the existence of millions of Punjabis. The province’s proud network of railways and roads designed to deliver the Punjab’s products to the rest of India, followed the same pattern. Wherever it went, the frontier of a partitioned Punjab would have to run from north to south, slicing the province’s vascular system in two. Nor could any frontier be drawn that would not cut the proud and bellicose Sikh community in half, leaving at least two million Sikhs, with the rich lands they had reclaimed from the desert and some of their most sacred sites, inside a Moslem state.

      Indeed, wherever the boundary line went, the result was certain to be nightmare for millions of human beings. Only an interchange of populations on a scale never realized before in history could sort out the havoc it would wreak. From the Indus to the bridges of Delhi, for over 500 miles, there was not a single town, not a single village, cotton grove or wheat field which would not somehow be threatened if the partition plan Lord Ismay had been ordered to prepare were carried out.

      The division of Bengal at the other end of the sub-continent held out the possibilities of another tragedy. Harbouring more people than Great Britain and Ireland combined, Bengal contained 35 million Moslems and 30 million Hindus in an expanse of land running from tiger-stalked jungles at the foot of the Himalayas to the steaming marshes through which the thousand fingers of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers drained into the Bay of Bengal. Despite its division into two religious communities, Bengal, even more than the Punjab, was a distinct entity. Whether Hindus or Moslems, Bengalis sprang from the same racial stock, spoke the same language, shared the same culture. They sat on the floor in a certain Bengali manner, ordered the sentences they spoke in a peculiar Bengali cadence, each rising to a final crescendo, celebrated their own Bengali New Year on 15 April. Its poets, like Tagore, were regarded with pride by all Bengalis.

      They were the descendants of a culture whose roots went back in time to the pre-Christian era when a Buddhist civilization flourished in Bengal. Obliged to renounce their Buddhist faith by a Hindu dynasty in the first centuries after Christ, the Bengalis of the east greeted the arrival of Mohummed’s warriors along their frontier as a release from Hindu oppression and eagerly embraced Islam. Since then, Bengal had been divided into religious halves, Moslems to the east, Hindus to the west.

      In 1905, Lord Curzon, one of the most able Viceroys to rule India, tried to take advantage of that religious split to divide Bengal into two administratively more manageable halves. His efforts ended in failure six years later when a bloody revolt proved the Bengalis more prone to nationalist sentiments than religious passions.

      If the Punjab seemed singled out for the blessings of the Divine, Bengal appeared the object of its malediction. A land seared by droughts alternating with frightening typhoon floods, Bengal was a kind of immense, steaming swamp in whose humid atmosphere flourished the two crops to which it owed a precarious prosperity, rice and jute. The cultivation of those two crops followed the province’s religious frontiers, rice to the Hindu west, jute to the Moslem east.

      The key to Bengal’s existence, however, lay not in its crops. It was a city, the city which had been the springboard for Britain’s conquest of India, the second city, after London, of the Empire, and first port of Asia, Calcutta, site of the terrible killings of August 1946.

      Everything in Bengal, roads, railways, raw materials, industry, funnelled into Calcutta. If Bengal were split into its eastern and western halves, Calcutta, because of its physical location, seemed certain to wind up in the Hindu west, which would condemn the Moslem east to slow but inexorable asphyxiation. If almost all of the world’s jute grew in East Bengal, all the factories which transformed it into rope, sacks, and cloth were clustered around Calcutta in West Bengal. The Moslem east which produced the jute grew almost no food at all, and its millions survived on the rice grown in the Hindu west.

      In April 1947, Bengal’s last British Governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, an ex-sergeant in the Grenadier Guards and railways trade union leader, predicted that East Bengal, destined one day to become Bangladesh, was condemned, in the event of India’s partition, to turn into ‘the greatest rural slum in history’.

      No aspect of partition, however, was more illogical than the fact that, even if Jinnah’s Pakistan were fully realized, it would still deliver barely half of India’s Moslems from the alleged inequities of Hindu majority rule which justified the state in the first place. The remaining Moslems were so scattered throughout the rest of India that it was humanly impossible to separate them. Islands in a Hindu sea, they would be the first victims of a conflict between the countries, India’s Moslem hostages to Pakistan’s good behaviour. Indeed, even after the amputation, India would still harbour almost 50 million Moslems, a figure which would make her the third largest Moslem nation in the world, after Indonesia and the new state drawn from her own womb.

      If Louis Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru, or Mahatma Gandhi had been aware in April 1947 of one extraordinary secret, the division threatening India might have been avoided. That secret was frozen on to the grey surface of a piece of film, a film which could have upset the Indian political equation and would almost certainly have changed the course of Asian history. Yet so precious was the secret that even the British CID, one of the most effective investigative agencies in the world, was ignorant of its existence.

      The heart of the film was two dark circles no bigger than a pair of ping-pong balls. Each was ringed by an irregular white border like the corona of the sun eclipsed by the moon. Above them, a galaxy of little white spots stretched up the film’s grey surface towards the top of the thoracic cage. That