Gandhi & Churchill (3 page)

Other English took their own informal revenge. Bingham’s men had caught one of Nana Sahib’s officials when they entered the city. “We broke his caste,” Bingham wrote later. “We stuffed pork, beef, and everything which would possibly break his caste down his throat.” After the men had finished with their prisoner, Bingham was amazed the man was still alive when he was finally dragged to a tree and hanged, “which I had the pleasure of witnessing.” One tree alone was soon festooned with more than 150 battered native corpses. “No doubt this is strange law,” Neill said at the time, “but it suits the occasion well.”
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Almost every white in India agreed. As the story of the Bibighar massacre spread, the facts took on more and more grotesque dimensions. Stories circulated that the women had been systematically raped and forced to commit what Victorians would only call “unspeakable acts” before they died. Given the sexually repressed society of the British Raj and the hysterical fear that the mutiny had triggered, almost any lurid atrocity story found believers.

There were stories of English matrons being sold in the bazaars to the highest bidder; of children being roasted alive; of an officer’s wife at Meerut being stripped and her breasts cut off. And it was not just British men who were turned into bloodthirsty killers by the rumors. In far-off peaceful Bombay Mrs. Fanny Duberly, wife of a hussar officer, wrote in her diary: “I can only look forward with awe to the day of vengeance, when our hands shall be dipped in the blood of our enemies, and the tongues of our dogs shall be red with the same.”
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As British soldiers left Cawnpore, they swore oaths that for every white woman and child killed they would kill one hundred of the enemy. That “enemy” was now anyone with a colored skin. An appalling trail of bodies followed Havelock’s advance on Lucknow. The slaughter intensified when the main British Army returned from the Punjab and began its march on Delhi; and it reached its height in September as they retook the Mughal capital.

On September 11, 1857, cannon and howitzers fired their opening barrage on the city. Three days later British, Sikh, Pathan, and Gurkha troops stormed through the Kashmir Gate. Savage hand-to-hand fighting carried the attackers over the walls, into Delhi’s maze of narrow, twisting streets and into nearly every house. British soldiers broke into the cellars of merchants who sold European beer and liquor and were soon drunk on port and brandy.

“The demon of destruction seemed to have enjoyed a perfect revel,” commented the officer leading the assault on Delhi. Smashed walls and buildings, bayoneted bodies, and abandoned wagons and artillery pieces clogged every avenue, as the killing continued.
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Men, young and old, sepoy or not, were mowed down without compunction. Indian women and children were generally spared. However, one officer met an old school chum in the street, a civilian volunteer from the Bengal Civil Service whose sister had been murdered by the mutineers. He told the officer that “he had put to death all he had come across, not excepting women and children.” Judging by the man’s crazed face and blood-soaked clothes, the officer added, “I quite believe he told me the truth.”
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After the seventh day of fighting, on September 21, the Union Jack flew over the royal citadel, the famed Red Fort. Six out of every ten men in the British force had been killed or wounded. Dead rebels and civilians were beyond count. Refugees streamed out of the city, including the man in whose name the mutiny had been raised, seventy-year-old Bahadur Shah II, the king of Delhi and the last surviving Mughal ruler. Captain William Hodson of Hodson’s Horse rode after him with fifty of his crack Sikh troopers. They were lean whipcord men, men with hawklike faces who never shaved or cut their hair. But the Sikhs were renowned across India for their bravery in battle, their skill with sword and musket, and their light dun-colored or
karki
clothes, which more and more British soldiers were substituting for their traditional scarlet coats.
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Hodson and his men caught up with the would-be emperor and his entourage six miles south of the city at the great tomb of Emperor Humayun.

Hodson guaranteed the old man’s safety if he surrendered; the safety of his three sons was another matter. The rumor was that they had ordered every English woman in Delhi to be put to death, forcing them to drink the blood of their own children before being murdered.

Bahadur Shah sent a messenger to ask if the princes’ lives would be spared if they surrendered. “Unconditional surrender” was Hodson’s only reply. At last the princes gave up and were loaded into a bullock cart for transport back to Delhi. When they were a mile from the Red Fort, Hodson pushed them out of the cart and ordered them to strip. He then shot each of the princes in the head with a carbine he borrowed from one of his men.

His grim-eyed Sikh troopers “shouted with delight.” Their greatest leader, Guru Teg Bahadur, had been murdered by Delhi’s emperor in 1675, and prophecy had told them that a white man would lead them to the ancient capital and avenge the killing.
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Hodson even dumped the princes’ bodies in the exact spot where the Sikh leader’s head had been displayed in 1675—and where the blood of the dead English women murdered in the uprising in May still stained the ground.

Hodson went to bed that night “very tired but very much satisfied with the day’s work.” On all sides, he wrote, he received congratulations “for my success in destroying the enemies of our race.”
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The heirs to the last Mughal emperor, direct descendants of the great Tamurlaine, were dead. British rule in India was secure. Bit by bit order was restored. The last rebel holdout, at Gwalior, fell on June 19, 1858. In March Bahadur Shah was tried by a military court and found guilty on all charges. He was sentenced to exile for life to Rangoon, in far-off Burma, where he died and was buried four years later in November 1862.

However, one rebel leader escaped capture. Nana Sahib had faked suicide after the fall of Cawnpore in hopes of eluding his British pursuers. His aide and general, Tania Tope, was caught and executed in April 1859. But Nana Sahib was never found. Hodson had said hanging him would have been “a positive pleasure.” There were persistent rumors that Nana eventually died of fever in Nepal, but they were never confirmed. For decades officers in remote hill stations in northern and western India would report sightings of the ever-elusive raja of Bithur. The last would be in 1895.

Like some Victorian Osama bin Laden, the memory of the man Havelock called a “devil incarnate” would haunt the British Raj down to its final hours. The retribution for what he had done would scar India forever. Today Cawnpore has been renamed Kanpur, and the marble angel that once stood on the site of the Bibighar well is gone. But the red-brick neo-Gothic church built to the memory of the European victims still remains.

It serves as a reminder that for a few terrible months in 1857, violence had been met with violence, and the seeds of future violence had been sown. The British Empire in India, which seemed stronger than ever in the years after the Great Mutiny, would one day reap the whirlwind.

Meanwhile, on the west coast of India in Porbandar, an ancient port overlooking the Arabian Sea, the events of the Mutiny seemed as far away as events on the moon. British soldiers and officials were almost unknown in the city. Porbandar was one of many parts of India untouched by the uprising. Instead, its prosperous Hindu and Muslim merchants were still ruled, as they always had been, by their local prince, the rana of Porbandar. That same year, when the streets of Cawnpore and Delhi were flowing with blood, the rana’s
diwan
or chief counselor, Karamchand Gandhi, was taking his new wife and bride through Porbandar’s happily bustling avenues to his family home.

Karamchand was forty, tall, and distinguished looking. His bride was barely twelve. This was Karamchand Gandhi’s fourth marriage. His first two wives had died before being able to produce him a male heir; the third had been terminally ill when he made his marriage contract in the traditional Hindu way with the family of his new bride, Putlibai. For her family, it was a good match. The Gandhis belonged to a higher
jati,
or subcaste, and Karamchand was an important man of affairs, as well as a man of property and piety. His house stood near the center of town, next to a temple dedicated to Lord Krishna and surrounded by elegant buildings made of a bright luminescent limestone that gave Porbandar the name of the White City. At sunset Karamchand and Porbandar’s other residents would set small lamps on their doorsteps as part of some religious festivals, bathing the white limestone in a gentle amber glow.
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Karamchand Gandhi’s house was a fine one, with three stories, that his grandfather had bought from a Brahmin woman eighty years earlier. (The original deed, written in the local language of Gujarati, and witnessed with the seal and swastika
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of the rana himself, still survives.) The top floor, sunlit and fanned by the sea breezes, was where Karamchand’s father conducted his daily prayers every morning for two hours. All the Gandhis were members of the Bania caste, devout Hindus, and Vaishnavas, or devotees to the cult of Vishnu and Lord Krishna, whose temple next door they visited twice a day.

In the bottom floor of the house was a room less than twenty feet long and thirteen wide, where Karamchand’s bride would spend her entire life. It was dark, so dark that even at midday one needed to light the oil lamp to see, and stifling hot in summer. Yet it was the center of life for the household and the women in the Gandhi family. There she arose every morning before anyone else and retired after everyone else had gone to bed.
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On one side was a tiny kitchen, where she prepared the family meals: on the other, an even tinier room where her mother and sister lived. It was into that room that Putlibai, on October 2, 1869, retired to give birth to her fifth and last child.

In a Vaishnava household like the Gandhis, everything related to childbirth was considered a gross form of pollution. No one else entered the room except a midwife of the lowest caste: after the child’s birth the room would be subject to days of ritual purification and cleansing. Karamchand’s mother, however, was allowed to speak to Putlibai through the doorway. It was she who would inform the wives of her other sons and her granddaughters that Putlibai had given birth to a son. They would be jealous; surely Putlibai must be favored by the gods, since only one of her four children was a girl.
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For the next ten days, Putlibai and her new infant lay together in the sweltering chamber, lit by only a single oil lamp. But the baby was safe and well. Another daughter would have been problematic: the
Aitareya Brahmana
had proclaimed to Hindus for three thousand years that “to have a daughter is misery,” and female infanticide, officially forbidden by the British, was not unknown in the region.
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But this was a son, with a large head and hands, and a priest astrologer was immediately brought in to cast his horoscope. It was favorable, and out of the letters he recommended as most auspicious his parents formed a name: Mohandas.

He would be Putlibai’s favorite, the spoiled youngest child in a large, pious, active household. His mother prayed daily that Lord Krishna should make her Mohandas a hero among heroes. But as life in the house of Gandhi returned to normal, and the tiny glowing lamps were set out on the doorstep for evening worship, even she could never have guessed what a hero he would become, or how.

Chapter One

THE CHURCHILLS AND THE RAJ

And Blenheim’s Tower shall triumph
O’er Whitehall.

ANONYMOUS PAMPHLETEER
, 1705

O
N
N
OVEMBER
30, 1874,
ANOTHER BABY
boy was born on the other side of the world. This one also first saw light in his grandfather’s house, but on a far grander scale—indeed, in the biggest private home in Britain.

Surrounded by three thousand acres of “green lawns and shining water, banks of laurel and fern, groves of oak and cedar, fountains and islands,” Blenheim Palace boasted 187 rooms.
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It was in a drafty bedroom on the first floor that Jennie Jerome Churchill gave birth to her first child. “Dark eyes and hair” was how her twenty-five-year-old husband, Randolph Churchill, described the boy to Jennie’s mother, and “wonderfully very pretty everybody says.”
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The child’s baptized name would be Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. If the Gandhis were unknown outside their tiny Indian state, the Churchill name was steeped in history. John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, had been Europe’s most acclaimed general and the most powerful man in Britain. His series of victories over France in the first decade of the eighteenth century had made Britain a world-class power. A grateful Queen Anne gave him the royal estate at Woodstock on which to build a palace, which he named after his most famous victory. For Winston Churchill, Blenheim Palace would always symbolize a heritage of glory and a family born to greatness.

Yet the first Duke of Marlborough had been followed by a succession of nonentities. If the power and wealth of England expanded to unimagined heights over the next century, that of the Churchills steadily declined.

The vast fortune that the first duke accumulated in the age of Queen Anne was squandered by his successors. When Randolph’s father inherited the title in 1857, the same year the Great Mutiny raged in India, he had been faced, like his father and grandfather before him, by debts of Himalayan proportions and slender means with which to meet them. Randolph’s grandfather had already turned Blenheim into a public museum, charging visitors one shilling admission. Randolph’s father would have to sell off priceless paintings (including a Raphael and Van Dyck’s splendid equestrian portrait of King Charles I, still the largest painting in the National Gallery), the fabulous Marlborough collection of gems, and the eighteen-thousand-volume Sunderland library, in order to make ends meet.
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