Freedom at Midnight (47 page)

THE PARADE OF THE PROUDEST OF THE SIKHS

The last reigning Maharaja of Patiala, sovereign of a Sikh state in the heart of the Punjab, parades through the streets of his capital on elephant back (above) and under a golden canopy [below). His predecessors paraded through the same streets once a year, naked except for a belt of diamonds, their sexual organs in full erection. The spectacle was meant to reassure their subjects that their powers were intact.

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mm

Km

A MINIATURE VERSAILLES AND THE WORLD'S RICHEST MAN

The Maharaja of Karpurthala surrounded by his courtiers (above) decided he'd been Louis XIV in an earlier incarnation and built himself a miniature Versailles to sustain his fantasies. The Nizam of Hyderabad {below, carrying cane) was the world's richest man and also, perhaps, the most miserly. The attics and cellars of his palace were crammed with millions of dollars, pounds and rupees he so loathed to spend, wrapped in old newspapers.

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THE

GENTLE PROPHET

OF A

NONVIOLENT

REVOLUTION

To a century fraught with violence, Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi offered an alternative—nonviolence and civil disobedience. In Churchill's famous phrase, a "half-naked fakir," Gandhi crisscrossed his nation on foot and {above) in third-class railway cars to stress his identity with the impoverished masses. He took tea at Buckingham Palace (opposite, below) with the King-Emperor, dressed in the homespun cotton sheet that was his uniform, and with his wife {opposite, top) practiced a life of spartan simplicity. The symbol of his challenge to the Age of Imperialism was the primitive wooden spinning wheel on which he labored religiously every day.

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PAKISTAN'S IMPROBABLE PROPHET

Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a Moslem who drank, ate pork, rarely entered a mosque and ignored the Koran. Yet so determined was he to win his fellow Moslems a nation of their own that he forced the last Viceroy {left) to the most important decision the British ever made in India—to accept the division of the subcontinent, the unity of which they had so carefully nurtured for three centuries.

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THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM

On June 3, 1947, in a historic meeting in his study in Viceroy's House, • Louis Mountbatten (below) secured the agreement of the Indian leadership to the plan that ultimately divided India into two separate, independent nations. Present, at Mountbatten's left, were Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan and Rab Nishtar for the Moslem League, and, at his right, Jawa-harlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Acharya Kripalani for Congress and | Baldev Singh for the Sikhs. Seated against the wall behind Mountbatten were his two key advisers, Sir Eric Mieville, left, and General Lord Ismay right.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Pakistan, a nation of ninety million people, eventually grew out of the formal dinner beginning (above) with oysters and Chablis in a London hotel in 1933. Fourteen years later, on August 14, 1947, Mohammed Ali Jinnah (arrow above and below) was able to proclaim what had seemed to him that evening in London "an impossible dream," the birth of an independent Islamic nation on the soil of the Indian subcontinent.