Freedom at Midnight (44 page)

On returning to Delhi, Mountbatten had intervened personally with the Viceroy Lord Wavell, but to no avail. London would not agree to a step that might start a wave of princes marrying Europeans and thus undermining the whole concept of the princely caste.

As soon as his aides assembled, Mountbatten announced his intentions to elevate the Begum of Palanpore to the dignity of "Highness."

"But," one protested, "you can't do that!"

"Who says I can't?" said Mountbatten, laughing. "I'm the Viceroy, aren't I?" He ordered someone sent out in search of a paper scroll. Then he had a secretary inscribe it with a few ringing phrases elevating the Nawab's Australian Begum, "by the grace of God," to the dignity of Highness. The result was placed on his desk at 11:58 p.m. A smile of purest pleasure illuminating his face, Louis

Mountbatten took his pen and performed the last official action to be exercised by the viceroy of India.*

Outside, at almost the same instant, his personal standard as the Viceroy of India, a Union Jack emblazoned with the Star of India, came down the flagstaff of Viceroy's House for the last time.

From the vast reaches of time, long before man's memory was transposed from legend to stone, the wail of the conch shell on the seacoasts of India had been the herald of the dawn. Now a man draped in cotton khadi stood poised at the edge of a gallery overlooking New Delhi's packed Constituent Assembly waiting to herald a new dawn for millions of human beings. Clutched in the crook of his arm was a spiraling shell glittering in rose and purple. He was, in a sense, a bugler, a bugler for that Congress army in white caps and flopping white shirt tails that had swarmed down the alleys and streets of India clamoring for freedom, a horde of ghosts hacking down the pillars of an empire.

Below him, on the speaker's stand, was Jawaharlal

* Mountbatten's final gesture was not without its sequel. A few days later, he received a lyrical note from the Nawab's British Resident, Croft, who said, "I can never thank you enough. Your act was the most far-reaching and kindest gesture you could have performed. I am as grateful to you as the Nawab, and if ever by any chance I should be in a position to do you a service, do not hesitate to call on me."

Three years later, in 1950, Mountbatten was Fourth Sea Lord of the Admiralty. He was, among other things, responsible for the Navy's customs privileges, duty-free alcohol, cigarettes and other items considered vital moral supports for H.M.'s seamen. Pressed by the Attlee government to turn up additional revenue, the Collector of Customs announced his intention to abolish those privileges. Everyone in the naval hierarchy tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the gentleman to change his mind. Mountbatten finally advised the Secretary of the Admiralty, Sir John Lang, that he intended to try himself. Out of the question, Lang replied, everyone had tried, the Collector refused to budge, and since it was a popular financial move, it was certain to zip through the Cabinet.

Mountbatten persisted, however, and finally found himself being ushered into the office of the Collector of Customs. To his utter surprise, the man who rose to greet him was Sir William Croft. "How wonderful to see you!" exclaimed Croft "You know, I can never thank you enough for what you did for the Begum of Palanpore."

"Ah," said Mountbatten, "but you can." The Navy's customs privileges were preserved.

Nehru. Twisted into the buttonhole of his cotton vest was the flower, which, except during the nine years he had spent in British jails, had been the ever present badge of his elegant person, a freshly plucked rose. On the walls around him, the stately oil paintings of the viceroys of India had been replaced, their gilded frames filled this evening with green-white-and-orange banners.

Ranged on the packed Assembly benches facing Nehru, in saris and khadi, princely robes and dinner jackets, were the representatives of the nation to be born this night. The people they represented were an amalgam of races and religions, languages and cultures of a diversity and contrast unmatched on the globe. Theirs was a land of supreme spiritual attainment and the most debasing misery on earth; a land whose greatest riches were its paradoxes, whose people were more fertile than its fields; a land obsessed by God and beset with natural calamities unsurpassed in cruelty and dimension; a land of past accomplishment and present concern, whose future was compromised by problems more taxing than those confronting any other assembly of humans on earth. Yet, for all that, for all her ills, their India was also one of the supreme and enduring symbols protruding above the cultural horizons of mankind.

The India represented by those men and women would be a nation of 275 million Hindus (70 million of them, a population almost twice the size of France, untouchables); 50 million Moslems; seven million Christians; six million Sikhs; 100,000 Parsis; and 24,000 Jews, whose forebears had fled the destruction of Solomon's Temple during the Babylonian exile.

Few of the people in the hall could talk to each other in their native language; their only common tongue was the English of the colonizers, whose rule was about to end. Their nation would harbor fifteen official languages and 845 dialects. The Urdu of the deputies of the Punjab was read from right to left; the Hindi of their neighbors in the United Provinces from left to right. The Tamil of the Madrasis was often read up and down, and other tongues were decoded like the symbols on a Pharaonic frieze. Even their gestures were dissimilar. When a dark-skinned Madrasi from the South nodded his head, he meant "yes." When a pale northerner made the same movement, he

India would harbor a leper population the size of Switzerland; as many priests as there were Belgians in Belgium; enough beggars to populate all of Holland; fifteen million sadhus, or holy men; 20 million aborigines, some like the Nagas of Nagaland still hunting human heads. Ten million Indians were essentially nomads, engaged in such hereditary occupations as snake charmers, fortunetellers, jugglers, well-diggers, magicians, tightrope walkers, herb vendors— which kept them constantly moving from village to village. Thirty-eight thousand Indians were born every day, half of them to die before the age of five. Ten million other Indians died each year from malnutrition, undernourishment and diseases like smallpox, eradicated in most parts of the earth.

Their great subcontinent was the most intensely spiritual area in the world, birthplace of one great religion, Buddhism, motherland of Hinduism, deeply influenced by Islam, a land whose gods came in a bewildering array of forms and figures, whose religious practices ranged from yoga and the most intensive meditation the human spirit was capable of, to animal sacrifice and debauched sexual orgies performed in clandestine jungle temples. The pantheon of India's Hindus contained three million deities, a god for every need imaginable because one never knew God, only his manifestation.

There were gods and goddesses for the dance, poetry, song; for death, destruction and disease; goddesses like Markhai Devi, at whose feet goats were sacrificed to check cholera epidemics; and gods like Deva Indra, who was beseeched to give his faithful carnal capacities akin to those displayed on India's great temple friezes. God was held manifest in banyan trees, in India's 136 million monkeys, the heroes of her mythological epics, in the Sacred Cow; worshiped in her snakes, and particularly cobras, whose fangs each year killed 20,000 of the humans who venerated them. India's sects included Zoroastrians, descendants of ancient Persia's fire worshipers, and Jains, a Hindu offshoot whose adherents in that land of the world's lowest life expectancy held all existence so sacred they refused to eat meat, most vegetables, and went about with a gauze mask so that they could not advertently inhale and kill an insect

India would embrace some of the richest men in the world and 300 million peasants living on the frontiers of existence, dispersed over what might have been one of the

earth's richest surfaces and was still one of its poorest. Ninety percent of India's population was illiterate. Her per capita income averaged five cents a day, and a quarter of the people in her two great cities ate, slept, defecated, fornicated, and died in their open streets.

India received an average rainfall of 114 centimeters a year, but her skies unleashed it in an appalling inequality of time and space. Most came in the drenching downpours of the monsoon, and over a third of it ran unused to the sea. Three hundred thousand square kilometers of her land, an area the size of East and West Germany combined, got no rain at all, while other areas got so much water the salt table was almost at the earth's surface, rendering its cultivation extremely difficult. India contained three of the great industrial families of the world, the Birlas, the Tatas and the Dalmias, but her economy was essentially feudal, benefiting a handful of wealthy landowners and capitalists.

Her imperial rulers had made no effort to industrialize her. Her exports were almost exclusively commodities— jute, tea, cotton, tobacco. Most of her machinery had to be imported. India's per capita consumption of electricity was ludicrously low, one two-hundredth of that of the United States. Her soil contained at least a quarter of the world's reserves of iron ore, but her steel production was barely a million tons a year, close to the lowest in the world. She had 6,083 kilometers of coastline and a fishing industry so primitive she wouldn't even offer her population a pound of fish per capita a year.

Indeed to those tense, expectant men and women filling the benches of a Delhi assembly hall, it might well have seemed, that August night, that problems were the only heritage being left them by their departing colonizers. No such melancholy conjecture, however, animated their gathering. Instead, its keynote was the good feeling with which India's former rulers were regarded, and a touching, if naive belief that somehow their departure was going to ease the terrible burdens under which she agonized.

The man upon whom those burdens would now weigh most heavily rose to speak. After his phone call from Lahore, Jawaharlal Nehru had had neither the time nor the inclination to write a speech. His words were extemporaneous, heartfelt.

"Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny," he declared, "and now the time comes when we shall redeem

our pledge not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom."

One after another, the eloquent phrases fell from his lips, yet for Jawaharlal Nehru, that sublime moment of achievement had been fatally flawed. "I was hardly aware of what I was saying," he would later tell his sister. "The words came welling up, but my mind could only conceive the awful picture of Lahore in flames."

"A moment comes," Nehru continued, "which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.

"At the dawn of history, India started on her unending quest, and the trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her successes and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike, she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideal which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune, and India discovers herself again.

"This is no time for petty and destructive criticism," he concluded, "no time for ill-will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell."

At the stroke of midnight, Nehru moved, they would all rise and pledge themselves to the service of India and her people. Outside a rippling wave of thunder clattered across the midnight sky and a drenching monsoon rain spattered the thousands of ordinary Indians jamming the area around the hall. Clutching bicycles, in white Congress caps and shapeless tunics of homespun cotton, in white shirts and slacks, saris and business suits, they stood silent in the downpour, their exuberance stilled by the awesomeness of the moment approaching.

In the hall, the hands of the clock over the speaker's stand crept up on the Roman numeral XII. Heads bowed, the representatives of what would become in a few instants the second-most-populous nation in the world sat in attentive silence waiting for the chimes of midnight. Not a figure stirred as those twelve heavy tolls marked the end of a day and an era.

As the echoes of the twelfth stroke fell, a toneless shriek reverberated through the hall from the figure poised in the gallery, a primitive call from across Nehru's trackless cen-

tunes. To those Indian politicians, the conch shell's bleat heralded the birth of their nation. To the world, it played retreat for the passing of an age.

That age had begun on a soft summer day in a little Spanish port in 1492, when Christopher Columbus sailed off across the endless green seas to the edge of the world in search of India and found America by mistake. Four and a half centuries of human history bore the imprint of that discovery and its consequences: the economic, religious and physical exploitation of the nonwhite masses throughout the globe by the white, Western, Christian masses at its core. Aztec, Inca, Swahili, Egyptian, Iraqi, Hottentot, Algerian, Burmese, Philippine, Moroccan, Vietnamese—an unending stream of peoples, nations and civilizations in the course of 450 years had passed through the colonial experience; decimated, impoverished, educated, converted, culturally enriched or debased, economically exploited or stimulated, but finally, irrevocably altered by it.

Now the famished hordes of a continent in prayer had claimed their freedom from the architects of the greatest empire those centuries had produced, a realm that dwarfed in dimension, population and importance the domains of Rome, Babylon, Carthage and Greece. With the crown jewel of the British Empire prised away by the brown Asian hands to which it belonged, no other colonial empire could long endure. Their rulers might try with rhetoric and arms to check history's onrushing tide; theirs would be futile, bloody gestures condemned by this moment to failure. Irrevocably, definitively, the independence of India closed a chapter in man's experience. The conch shell's call in New Delhi's Constituent Assembly that August night marked the beginning of the postwar history of the world.