Freedom at Midnight (26 page)

It was, however, the number of guns in the salute accorded a ruler that provided the final and definitive criterion of his place in the princely hierarchy. It was within the viceroy's power to increase the number of guns in a ruler salute to reward him for exceptional services or reduce the salute as a punishment. Size and population were not the sole determinants of a ruler's salute. Fidelity to the paramount power and the blood and treasure expended in its defense were equally important. Five rulers— of Hyderabad, Gwalior, Kashmir, Mysore and Baroda —were entitled to the supreme accolade, twenty-one guns. Nineteen-, seventeen-, fifteen-, thirteen, eleven- and nine-gun states were ranged behind them. For 425 unfortunate rajas and nawabs, rulers of insignificant little principalities, there was no salute at all. They were India's forgotten rulers, the men for whom the guns never tolled.

The India of the maharajas was known in legend for its rulers' extravagances and eccentricities, but it was often noted for substantial achievements as well. Where the

London. On arriving for the festivities, the unfortunate prince discovered that the ship carrying his luggage had gone down at sea. To save the situation he was forced to divulge to a London tailor the secret of how his favorite trousers were made.

rulers were enlightened men, often Western-educated, the state's subjects enjoyed benefits and privileges unknown in those areas administered directly by the British. Baroda banned polygamy and made education free and universal before the turn of the century. Its ruler had campaigned for the Untouchables with a zeal less well-known, but no less sincere, than Gandhi's. He created institutions to house and educate them, and he personally financed the education of the man who became their leader, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedker, at Columbia University in New York. The Maharaja of Bikaner had turned parts of his Rajas-than desert kingdom into a paradise of artificial lakes and gardens for his subjects* use. The ruler of Bhopal offered women an equality of status and position enjoyed nowhere else in India. Mysore harbored Asia's best science faculty and a chain of hydroelectric dams and industries. The descendant of one of history's greatest astronomers, a man who had translated Euclid's Principles of Geometry into Sanskrit, the Mahajara of Jaipur, maintained in his capital one of the world's outstanding observatories. With the Second World War, a new generation of rulers had begun to ascend the thrones, men usually less flamboyant, less self-indulgent than their fathers, more conscious of the need for change and reforming their states. One of the first acts of the eighth Maharaja of Patiala was to close the harem of his father, Sir Bhupinder Singh the Magnificent. The Maharaja of Gwalior married a commoner, the brilliant daughter of a civil servant, and moved out of his father's vast palace. Unhappily for those men and many others like them who ruled their states responsibly and ably, the public would always associate the Maharajas of India with the excesses and extravagances of a handful among them.

For two of India's states, whose two princes enjoyed the supreme honor of twenty-one guns, the initiative undertaken in London by Sir Conrad Corfield had profound significance. Both states were enormous. Both were landlocked. Both had rulers whose religion differed from that of the vast majority of their subjects. Both rulers caressed the same dream: to convert their states into wholly independent, sovereign nations.

Of all the bizarre and exotic rulers in India, Rustum-i-Dauran, Arustu-i-Zeman, Wal Mamalik, Asif Jah, Nawab

Mir Osman, Alikhar Bahadur, Musafrul Mulk Nizam al-Mulk, Sipah Solar, Fateh Jang, His Exalted Highness, Most Faithful Ally of the British Crown, the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, was surely the most bizarre. A devout and learned Moslem, he and an Islamic ruling caste presided over the largest and most populous state in India, an entity of twenty million Hindus and only three million Moslems set right in the heart of the subcontinent. He was a frail little old man of five-foot-three, weighing barely ninety pounds. Years of devoted chewing of betel nuts had reduced his teeth to a line of rotting reddish-brown fangs. He lived in constant dread of being poisoned by some jealous courtier and was followed everywhere by a food taster whom he obliged to share his unvarying diet of cream, sweets, fruits, betel nuts and a nightly bowl of opium. The Nizam was the only ruler in India entitled to the appellation "Exalted Highness," a distinction conferred on him by a grateful Britain in recognition of his hundred-million-dollar contribution to their war chest in World War I.

In 1947, the Nizam was reputed to be the richest man in the world and the legends of his wealth were surpassed only by legends of the avarice with which he sought to keep it intact. He dressed in rumpled cotton pajamas and ill-formed gray slippers bought in the local market place for a few rupees. For thirty-five years he had worn the same soiled, dandruff-encrusted fez. Although he owned a gold service for one hundred, he ate off a tin plate squatting on a mat in his bedroom. So stingy was he that he smoked down the butts left behind by his guests. When a state occasion forced him to put champagne on the princely table, he saw to it that the single bottle he reluctantly set out never got more than three or four places from him. In 1944, when Wavell was arriving for a viceregal visit, the Nizam cabled Delhi inquiring whether, in view of its high wartime cost, the Viceroy really insisted on being served champagne. Once a week, after Sunday services, the English Resident came to call. Faithfully a retainer appeared with a tray containing a cup of tea, a biscuit and a cigarette for the Nizam and his guest. One Sunday, the Resident arrived unannounced with a particularly distinguished visitor. The Nizam whispered to his servant, who returned to offer the visitor a second tray on which had been set one cup of tea, one biscuit and one cigarette.

In most states, it was the custom once a year for the nobles to make their prince a symbolic offering of a gold piece, which the ruler touched and then returned to its owner. In Hyderabad, there was nothing symbolic about the offering. The Nizam grabbed each gold piece and dropped it into a paper bag beside his throne. On one occasion when one fell, he was on his hands and knees like a shot racing its owner along the floor to the rolling coin.

Indeed, so miserly was the Nizam that when his doctor arrived from Bombay to give him an electrocardiogram, he couldn't make his machine work. The doctor finally discovered why. In order to save on his electricity bill, the Nizam had cut back the palace's current; no machine could function properly on it.

The Nizam's bedroom looked like a slum hut, its furnishings consisting of a battered bed and table, three kitchen chairs, overflowing ash trays and wastebaskets emptied once a year on the Nizam's birthday. His office was littered with stacks of dusty state archives, its ceiling a forest of cobwebs.

Yet, tucked into the corners of that palace was a fortune beyond counting. Stuffed into one drawer of the Nizam's desk, wrapped in an old newspaper, was the Jacob diamond, a bauble the size of a lime—280 sparkling, precious carats. The Nizam used it as a paperweight. In the overgrown garden was a convoy of dozens of trucks mired in mud up to their axles from the weight of their loads, solid gold ingots. The Nizam's jewels, a collection so enormous, it was said, that the pearls alone would cover all the sidewalks of Piccadilly Circus, were spilled like coals in a coal bin on the floors of a series of rooms in his cellar, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, diamonds mingled in indiscriminate heaps. He had well over ten million dollars in cash, sterling rupees, wrapped in old newspapers, stuck in dusty corners of the palace's basement and attic. There they accrued a kind of negative interest by the jaws of rats, who annually gnawed their way through thousands of dollars of the Nizam's fortune.

The Nizam had a sizable army equipped with heavy artillery and aviation. Indeed, he had every possible requirement for independence except two—a seaport and the support of his people.

His overwhelmingly Hindu population detested the Moslem minority which ruled them. Nonetheless, there was

no question about the future the miserly, slightly demented ruler of a state half the size of France foresaw for himself.

"At last," he shouted, leaping from his chair when Sir Conrad Corfield had informed him of Britain's decision to leave India by June 1948. "I shall be free." *

A similar ambition burned in the breast of another powerful prince at the other end of India. Reigning over the enchanted valley that cradled one of the world's most beautiful and storied sites, the Vale of Kashmir, Hari Singh, Maharaja of Kashmir, was a Hindu of a high Brahman subcaste whose four million subjects were overwhelmingly Moslem. His state, set against the awesome crests of the Himalayas, was the attic to the roof of the world, the remote, wind-swept spaces of Ladakh, Tibet and Sinkiang, a vital crossroad where India, a future Pakistan, China and Afghanistan were certain to meet

Hari Singh was a weak, vacillating, indecisive man who divided his time between opulent feasts in his winter capital in Jammu and the beautiful, flower-choked lagoons of his summer capital, Srinagar, the Venice of the Orient. He had begun his reign with a few timid aims at reform quickly abandoned for an authoritarian rule that kept his state jails filled with his political foes. Their most recent occupant had been none other than Jawaharlal Nehru. The prince had ordered Nehru arrested when he tried to visit the state in which he had been born. Hari Singh too had an army to defend the frontiers of his state and give his claims to independence a menacing emphasis.

"A DAY CURSED BY THE STARS"

London, May 1947

The man riding up to 10 Downing Street should have been contrite or, at the very least, apprehensive. Louis Mountbatten was neither. He had flown to London in response to a request from Attlee for a personal explanation of what had gone wrong in Simla. Lord Ismay, his chief of staff, had warned him at the airport that the government was "hopping mad. They don't know what you're doing and they're not sure you do, either."

Mountbatten, however, had in his briefcase the new draft of his plan. He was confident that it held the key to the Indian dilemma. Before leaving Simla he had received Nehru's assurances that Congress would accept it. Mountbatten did not propose "to do any explaining away." He intended, instead, to substitute this plan for the old one and tell Attlee and his Cabinet "how lucky they were I'd had my hunch."

Poised and smiling, Mountbatten got out of his car and walked past the popping flash bulbs into the building in which, just five months earlier, he had been given his terrible charge.

Waiting for him were Attlee, Sir Stafford Cripps and the other key members of the Labor government involved with India. Their greetings were cordial but restrained. Undaunted, Mountbatten sat down and set to work. "I gave them no apology," he later recalled, "nor any explanations. I had the most frightful, not so much conceit,

172

but complete and absolute belief that it all depended on me, and they really had to do what I said."

As a result of the changes in his original draft cabled to Delhi he had, he said, played a hunch and shown it to Nehru. That had revealed certain fundamental Congress objections which would have produced a disaster, had the plan been formally submitted to Congress. They had been met in his new draft, and he was confident he had now placed before them a plan that all concerned would accept. Beyond that, he told Attlee, he could now reveal a remarkable piece of news.

He had been able to honor the pledge he had made to his cousin the King before leaving London. He could now assure the Attlee government that an independent India and Pakistan would remain linked to Britain in the British Commonwealth. Jinnah had always wanted to keep an independent Pakistan in the Commonwealth, but the idea of maintaining a tie to the Crown had been a difficult one for Congress to accept. The British Crown had been, after all, the symbol against which their independence struggle had been directed. While he was in Simla, he had received a message from Vallabhbhai Patel. The shrewd Congress leader knew Mountbatten was in a hurry to see power transferred to Indian hands. So was he. Patel suggested that Mountbatten employ a time-saving device for the actual transfer of power. Simply proclaim India and Pakistan independent dominions like Canada inside the British Commonwealth of free nations. If Mountbatten acted quickly, long before the old deadline of June 30, 1948, then, Patel promised, a grateful Congress would not sever the Commonwealth ties that automatically went with dominion status.

Mountbatten was delighted. Patel's proposal was in fact just what he had been secretly lobbying for. He had eagerly ordered V. P. Menon to incorporate the idea into the redrafted plan that he was submitting to Attlee.

The key to the situation now, he said, was speed. He had put before them a transfer-of-power plan which he could assure them was acceptable to the Indians. It would keep both nations in the British Commonwealth. Delay now would risk immersing Britain in the situation against which he had been warning them since his arrival in India, a subcontinent sinking into civil war. The burden was on

them. How quickly could they drive the legislation necessary to realize his plan through the Commons?

It was an awesome demonstration, Mountbatten at his dynamic, persuasive best. By the time he finished, the "hopping mad" Attlee government was eating out of his hand. They accepted his new draft plan without the alteration of so much as a comma.

"My God,'* exclaimed Ismay, the veteran of so many stormy scenes in Downing Street, as they left the meeting, "Fve seen some performances in my lifetime, but what you just did to the people in there beats them all!"

The familiar figure in the bed, a quilted dressing gown falling from his shoulders, half-rim spectacles poised on the bridge of his nose, his constant trademark, a cigar clamped in his mouth, had been one of the fixtures on the horizon of Louis Mountbatten's life.

Among Mountbatten's early memories was the image of Churchill, the young flamboyant First Lord of the Admiralty, sitting in the Mountbatten drawing room chatting with the elder Mountbatten, then First Sea Lord. Mountbatten's mother had once warned him lightheartedly that the man who would one day be the symbol of European resistance to Hitler was "unreliable." He had committed what was, in her eyes, an unpardonable sin. He had failed to return a book he had borrowed.