Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (62 page)

Mountbatten flew to London to get the Government’s approval, and persuaded Churchill, in Opposition, not to delay the process. Then, in an enormous hurry to prevent the whole administration falling apart in communal violence, he set the plan in motion. Congress and the Muslim League both accepted the proposals, and together their leaders announced it to the nation on All-India Radio—Jinnah in English, his speech being then translated into Urdu. Mountbatten himself gave a press conference to announce that the British could not wait until the following year after all—independence had to come before the end of 1947. Pressed by reporters to name a date, he decided there and then upon the anniversary of the surrender of the Japanese in 1945. They would withdraw from India, he said, completely and irrevocably, by August 15, 1947, and sovereignty would then be surrendered. After 250 years on Indian soil, the British had given themselves seventy-three days to retire.

‘Plan Balkan’, the precipitate partitioning of India, was hardly a dignified process, but it was decisive. It was, like Dunkirk, a failure dashingly achieved, with a touch of sleight of hand. The unity of India, the proudest achievement of British rule, was to be deliberately sundered. The great institutions of British India were to be split down the middle. The Indian Princes, who had lost their own independence in return for the protection of the Crown, were to be
betrayed. A sub-continent on the brink of civil war was to be subjected to an enormous social and governmental upheaval, millions of people to assume new nationalities, Ministries to be shuffled here and there, loyalties to be suddenly jettisoned or invented. Mountbatten himself called it ‘sheer madness, fantastic communal madness’.

But it was final. Gone were the old fumblings and second thoughts which had, for forty years, alternately delayed, hastened and obfuscated the transfer of power in India. Seventy-three days! In London the India Independence Bill ran through all its Parliamentary stages in a single week, ending at a stroke all British claims to sovereignty in India, and abrogating all the hundreds of treaties concluded between the Crown and the Princely States. Mountbatten kept a large calendar on his desk, to mark off the days, like the count-down of a space launching, and with hectic resolution the British in India prepared the obsequies of their paramountcy. It had taken them centuries to pacify and survey the immense expanses of their Indian territories, father succeeding son in the great task: now in a matter of weeks a boundary commission sliced the edifice into parts, laying new frontiers like string on a building-site, under the dispassionate instructions of an English barrister, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never set foot in India before. The Indian Army was bisected, regiments split by squadrons, companies that had served together for a century suddenly distributed among alien battalions. The white Viceregal train chuffed away from Delhi for the last time, for it was allotted to Pakistan: the officials of the Kennel Club were relieved to be told that its assets would remain in India.

All went! All the dreams of the Empire-builders long before, all the Curzonian splendour of imperial function, and as the British relentlessly cleared their office desks, India subsided into anarchy. Eleven million people abandoned their homes and moved in hordes across the countryside, hastening to the right side of the new communal frontiers. The roads were crammed with refugees, people clung to the steps of trains, or crowded upon their roofs, and the old gypsy confusion of India, the crowding and the clutter, the always familiar scenes of exhaustion, bewilderment and deprivation, were multiplied a thousand times. Violence erupted on a scale never
known in British India before, even in the Mutiny. It was like a gigantic boil bursting, an enormous eruption of frustrations and resentments suppressed for so long by the authority of Empire. Whole communities were massacred. Entire train-loads of refugees died on the tracks, to the last child in arms. In the Punjab gangs of armed men roamed the countryside, slaughtering columns of refugees, and thousands of people died unremarked in the streets of Amritsar, where the death of 400 had horrified the world twenty-five years before.

The Viceroy was not deterred. Working day and night the last British officials of the Indian Civil Service established administrations for the two new Dominions, one with its capital at New Delhi, the other at Karachi. A Boundary Force, commanded by a Welshman with Hindu and Muslim advisers, was hastily put together to try to keep the peace, and the British Army was steadily and unostentatiously withdrawn: one by one the regiments left the soil of India, embarking on their troopships at Bombay while the bands on the Apollo Bunder played ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and the old hands of the Royal Bombay Yacht Club looked on sadly from their verandah.

The last days passed. The last of the wavering Princely States opted for one Dominion or the other, leaving only Kashmir, Hyderabad and Junagadh with their futures unresolved. The last of the British imperialists desperately worked against the clock, creating at least rudimentary Governments to succeed themselves. As the bloodshed and the turmoil continued, as the migratory masses laboured this way and that across the Indian plains, in the midst of it all the British Empire came to an end in India. At 8.30 a.m. on the appointed day, August 15, 1947, the Union Jack was hauled down all over the sub-continent, from frontier fort and Governor’s palace, from law court and town hall, from the water-front at Surat where it all began, from the Viceroy’s crowning palace, from the ruined Residency at Lucknow where the flag had flown night and day since the Indian Mutiny—

In Karachi Jinnah was sworn in as Governor-General of the Dominion of Pakistan. In Delhi Lord Mountbatten gave up the Viceroyalty, with its almost despotic power, and became the Governor-General of the Dominion of India, with no power at all.

Incalculable crowds celebrated the event in Delhi—the largest crowds anybody could remember seeing, in a country of multitudes. The grand military parade planned for that evening was cancelled, the military being so engulfed in the crowd that only the coloured tips of their puggarees were visible from the grandstands. When the Mountbattens returned in their State coach to the palace, thronged all about by hysterically happy crowds, Nehru sat on top of the hood, ‘like a schoolboy’, Mountbatten reported, four Indian ladies with their children clambered up the sides, a Polish woman and an Indian newspaperman hung on behind. Thus queerly loaded, and accompanied by several thousand running, cheering people, the last of the Viceroys clattered the long mile up Kingsway to his great house, while fireworks sprayed the evening sky above him, and the thunder of a million people echoed across Delhi.

It was done. The flags of the new Dominions, the Indian decorated with the Wheel of Ashoka, the Pakistani with Islam’s star and crescent, flew all over the sub-continent, and all the paraphernalia of authority was handed over to the successor States. King George VI, Emperor no longer, sent his somewhat stilted greetings. Mountbatten proclaimed it ‘a parting between friends, who have learned to honour and respect one another, even in disagreement’. Attlee said it was not the abdication, but the fulfilment of Britain’s mission to India. The British Press was self-congratulatory, the British public, casting a cursory eye over the reportage, thought that on the whole they were well out of it. Some 200,000 Indians had died.

‘The wheels of fate’, Rabindrinath Tagore had written on his 
death-bed, ‘will one day compel the British to give up their Empire. …What a waste of mud and filth they will leave behind!’

Still, it was fulfilment of a kind. The British left India euphorically surprised and touched by the goodwill they were shown, retaining most of their commercial advantages, and leaving behind at least cadres of government. Since both the new Dominions chose to remain within the Commonwealth, they persuaded themselves that the Empire had been preserved anyway, and they persuaded the world that their withdrawal had not only been generous, but had been planned all along, flourishing many a hoary quotation, from Macaulay, Montagu or Ramsay MacDonald, to prove it. Few of them felt bitter: many felt regret. Soon after the withdrawal Queen Mary, widow of George V, had a letter from her son the King. ‘The first time Bertie wrote me a letter with the I for Emperor of India left out,’ she noted in her journal. ‘Very sad.’

It was left to Gandhi to enact by sacrifice the bitter breaking of his own long dream. He had always recognized the merits of the British Empire. He stood himself for the best of its values—tolerance, duty, service. His life-long fight against the Raj, his fasts and imprisonments, his frail self-exhibitions high above the adulating crowds—all were full of contradictions, for he was not at heart a politician at all: his real concern was not the immediate cause of political emancipation, but the far greater one of human dignity. He was a philosopher and a moralist, not an ideologue.

It seemed to him now that India’s freedom was being gained without Godliness, against an ironic
mise
en
scène
of bigotry. He had been unassailably opposed to partition, which was a surrender to religious prejudice, and thought the British would have done better to allow Jinnah to preside over a united India for the remaining years of his life, or even to adopt Wavell’s policies of despair. As the events of 1947 approached their climax, he withdrew from political life into prayer and fasting, emerging into public only to preach to the crowds that assembled wherever he appeared, or to calm by his very presence some communal disturbance. He did not believe his powers to be waning. He thought he would live to be 125—‘or according to learned opinion’, as he used to say, possibly 133—and he knew that his influence upon events remained immense. He
exerted it now, though, only in conciliation, to still the consequences of his own victory.

Time and again he appealed for reconciliation between the fanatic religionists; twice he entered into protracted fasts, to shame them into peace; he personally quelled riots in Delhi and Calcutta, so effectively that Mountbatten called him ‘a one-man boundary force’. When independence came, and partition became a fact, Gandhi accepted it regretfully and fairly—too fairly, many of the Hindu extremists considered. They thought him altogether too conciliatory to the Pakistanis, just as they had always disliked his liberal ideas on caste; and so the chief architect and ornament of Indian independence, the most beloved and admired character to be given to the world by the entire imperial process, was killed by his own people for his opinions.

Every week Gandhi held a public prayer meeting in the garden of Birla House, the home of a rich sympathizer only half a mile from the Viceroy’s palace in New Delhi. There, on January 30, 1948, he was martyred, the only apposite death perhaps for a man whose life was never ordinary. It was a crisp winter evening, and the usual throng of people had walked through the dusk to Birla House, and were sitting on the big lawn behind the house. The Mahatma emerged from a side door, spindly as ever and bowed now over his staff, for he was in his seventy-ninth year, and made his way to his prayer platform at the far end of the garden. As he climbed the shallow steps, and turned to greet the people with his
namaste
, the joined hands and bow of Indian courtesy, a young man in khaki clothing stepped out of the crowd and fired three shots at him with a revolver. Gandhi died at once, and they took his body upstairs in Birla House, and placed it on a balcony for all to see, illuminated by a searchlight from the road below.

As soon as he heard the news Mountbatten hastened down to Birla House. A huge crowd was still milling about the place, and as the Governor-General shouldered his tall way to the door a voice cried, ‘It was a Muslim who did it!’ Mountbatten did not know who had done it, but he reacted instantly in the tradition of Empire. ‘You fool,’ he cried, so that the crowd could hear, ‘you fool! Don’t you know it was a Hindu?’—and so the imperial instinct, for so long the
keeper of the Indian peace, saved in the moment of its extinction a few last Indian lives.
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