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

in the highest regard, Louis Mountbatten. Aware that Mountbatten’s usefulness would be destroyed if India’s Moslem leaders learned of the genesis of his appointment the two men had agreed to reveal the details of their talk to no one. Menon revealed the details of his conversation with Cripps in a series of conversations with one of the authors in New Delhi in February 1973, a year before his death.

^* Wavell too had recommended a time limit to Attlee during a London visit in December 1946.

TWO

       ‘Walk Alone, Walk Alone’

       Srirampur, Noakhali, New Year’s Day, 1947

      Six thousand miles from Downing Street, in a village of the Gangetic Delta above the Bay of Bengal, an elderly man stretched out on the dirt floor of a peasant’s hut. It was exactly twelve noon. As he did every day at that hour, he reached up for the dripping wet cotton sack that an assistant offered him. Dark splotches of the mud packed inside it oozed through the bag’s porous folds. The man carefully patted the sack on to his abdomen. Then he took a second, smaller bag and stuck it on his bald head.

      He seemed, lying there on the floor, a fragile little creature. The appearance was deceptive. That wizened 77-year-old man beaming out from under his mudpack had done more to topple the British Empire than any man alive. It was because of him that a British Prime Minister had finally been obliged to send Queen Victoria’s great-grandson to New Delhi to find a way to give India her freedom.

      Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an unlikely revolutionary, the gentle prophet of the world’s most extraordinary liberation movement. Beside him, carefully polished, were the dentures he wore only when eating and the steel-rimmed glasses through which he usually peered out at the world. He was a tiny man, barely five feet tall, weighing 114 pounds; all arms and legs like an adolescent whose trunk has yet to rival the growth of his limbs. Nature had meant Gandhi’s face to be ugly. His ears flared out from his oversized head like the handles of a sugar bowl. His nose buttressed by squat, flaring nostrils thrust its heavy beak over a sparse white moustache. Without his dentures, his full lips collapsed over his toothless gums. Yet Gandhi’s face radiated a peculiar beauty because it was constantly animated, reflecting with the quickly shifting patterns of a magic lantern his changing moods and his impish humour.

      To a century fraught with violence, Gandhi had offered an alternative, his doctrine of ahimsa – non-violence. He had used it to mobilize the masses of India to drive England from the sub-continent with a moral crusade instead of an armed rebellion, prayers instead of machine-gun fire, disdainful silence instead of the fracas of terrorists’ bombs.

      While Western Europe had echoed to the harangues of ranting demagogues and shrieking dictators, Gandhi had stirred the multitudes of the world’s most populous area without raising his voice. It was not with the promise of power or fortune that he had summoned his followers to his banner, but with a warning: ‘Those who are in my company must be ready to sleep upon the bare floor, wear coarse clothes, get up at unearthly hours, subsist on uninviting, simple food, even clean their own toilets.’ Instead of gaudy uniforms and jangling medals, he had dressed his followers in clothes of coarse, homespun cotton. That costume, however, had been as instantly identifiable, as psychologically effective in welding together those who wore it, as the brown or black shirts of Europe’s dictators.

      His means of communicating with his followers were primitive. He wrote much of his correspondence himself in longhand, and he talked: to his disciples, to prayer meetings, to the caucuses of his Congress Party. He employed none of the techniques for conditioning the masses to the dictates of a demagogue or a clique of ideologues. Yet, his message had penetrated a nation bereft of modern communications because Gandhi had a genius for the simple gesture that spoke to India’s soul. Those gestures were all unorthodox. Paradoxically, in a land ravaged by cyclical famine, where hunger had been a malediction for centuries, the most devastating tactic Gandhi had devised was the simple act of depriving himself of food – a fast. He had humbled Great Britain by sipping water and bicarbonate of soda.

      God-obsessed India had recognized in his frail silhouette, in the instinctive brilliance of his acts, the promise of a Mahatma – a Great Soul – and followed where he’d led. He was indisputably one of the galvanic figures of his century. To his followers, he was a saint. To the British bureaucrats whose hour of departure he’d hastened, he was a conniving politician, a bogus Messiah whose non-violent crusade always ended in violence and whose fasts unto death always stopped short of death’s door. Even a man as kind-hearted as Wavell detested him as a ‘malevolent old politician … Shrewd, obstinate, domineering, double-tongued’, with ‘little true saintliness in him’.

      Few of the English who’d negotiated with Gandhi had liked him; fewer still had understood him. Their puzzlement was understandable. He was a strange blend of great moral principles and quirky obsessions. He was quite capable of interrupting their serious political discussions with a discourse on the benefits of sexual continence or a daily salt and water enema.

      Wherever Gandhi went, it was said, there was the capital of India. Its capital this New Year’s Day was the tiny Bengali village of Srirampur where the Mahatma lay under his mudpacks, exercising his authority over an enormous continent without the benefit of radio, electricity or running water, thirty miles by foot from the nearest telephone or telegraph line.

      The region of Noakhali in which Srirampur was set, was one of the most inaccessible in India, a jigsaw of tiny islands in the waterlogged delta formed by the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers. Barely forty miles square, it was a dense thicket of two and a half million human beings, 80% of them Moslems. They lived crammed into villages divided by canals, creeks and streams, reached by rowing-boat, by hand-poled ferries, by rope, log or bamboo bridges swaying dangerously over the rushing waters which poured through the region.

      New Year’s Day 1947 in Srirampur should have been an occasion of intense satisfaction for Gandhi. He stood that day on the brink of achieving the goal he’d fought for most of his life: India’s freedom.

      Yet, as he approached the glorious climax of his struggle, Gandhi was a desperately unhappy man. The reasons for his unhappiness were everywhere manifest in the little village in which he’d made his camp. Srirampur had been one of the unpronounceable names figuring on the reports arriving almost daily on Clement Attlee’s desk from India. Inflamed by fanatical leaders, by reports of Hindus killing their coreligionists in Calcutta, its Moslems, like Moslems all across Noakhali, had suddenly turned on the Hindu minority that shared the village with them. They had slaughtered, raped, pillaged, and burned, forcing their neighbours to eat the flesh of their Sacred Cows, sending others fleeing for safety across the rice paddies. Half the huts in Srirampur were blackened ruins. Even the shack in which Gandhi lay had been partially destroyed by fire.

      The Noakhali outbursts were isolated sparks but the passions which had ignited them could easily become a firestorm to set the whole sub-continent ablaze. Those horrors, the outbursts which had preceded them in Calcutta and those which had followed to the north-west in Bihar where, with equal brutality, a Hindu majority had turned on a Moslem minority, explained the anxiety in Attlee’s conversation with the man he urgently wanted to dispatch to New Delhi as Viceroy.

      They also explained Gandhi’s presence in Srirampur. The fact that, as their hour of triumph approached, his countrymen should have turned on each other in communal frenzy, broke Gandhi’s heart. They had followed him on the road to independence, but they had not understood the great doctrine he had enunciated to get them there, non-violence. Gandhi had a profound belief in his non-violent creed. The holocaust the world had just lived, the spectre of nuclear destruction now threatening it, were to Gandhi the conclusive proof that only non-violence could save mankind. It was his desperate desire that a new India should show Asia and the world this way out of man’s dilemma. If his own people turned on the doctrines he’d lived by and used to lead them to freedom, what would