Freedom at Midnight (4 page)

More mundane, but a truer measure of the terrible toll taken by disease and unknown fevers on India's English settlers, were the stones of legions of Deputy Superintendents of Police, Railway Engineers, District Commissioners, Collectors of Revenues and their wives. No one was immune. Even the wife of India's first viceroy, Lady Canning, living in her palace seemingly beyond the reach of India's microbes, contracted jungle fever and died in 1861. Who could imagine the anguish that life in India had meant for Major W. R. Holroyd, Director of Public Instruction, Punjab, when he sadly inscribed on his wife's tombstone: "She died at Rawalpindi on 8th April, 1875, in sight of those mountains whose air one hoped would restore her health. Four little children are left in England unconscious of the depth of their loss and one lies here beside her."

No sight those graveyards offered was sadder, nor more poignantly revealing of the human price the British paid for their Indian adventure, than their rows upon rows of undersize graves. They crowded every cemetery in India in appalling number. They were the graves of children and infants killed in a climate for which they had not been

bred, by diseases they would never have known in their native England.

Sometimes a lone tomb, sometimes three or four in a row, those of an entire family wiped out by cholera or jungle fever, the epitaphs upon those graves were a parent's heartbreak frozen in stone.

In Asigarh, two stones side by side offer for eternity the measure of what England's glorious imperial adventure meant to one ordinary Englishman. "April 19, 1845. Alexander, 7 months old son of Conductor Johnson and Martha Scott. Died of cholera," reads the first. The second: beside it, reads: "April 30, 1845, William John, 4 year old son of Conductor Johnson and Martha Scott. Died of cholera." Under them, on a larger stone, their grieving parents chiseled a last farewell:

One blessing, one sire, one womb

Their being gave.

They had one mortal sickness

And share one grave

Far from an England they never knew.

Obscure clerks or dashing blades such as those immortalized by Gary Cooper galloping at the head of his Bengal Lancers, those generations of Englishmen policed and administered India as no one before them had done.

Their rule was paternalistic, that of the old public-school master disciplining an unruly band of boys, forcing on them the education that he was sure was good for them. With an occasional exception they were able and incorruptible, determined to administer India in its own best interests—but it was always they who decided what those interests were.

Their great weakness was the distance from which they exercised their authority, the terrible racial smugness setting them apart from those they ruled. Never was that attitude of racial superiority summed up more succinctly than it was by a former officer of the Indian Civil Service in a parliamentary debate at the turn of the century. There was, he said, "a cherished conviction shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest, by the planter's assistant in his lonely bungalow and by the editor in the full light of his presidency town, from the Chief Commissioner in charge of an important province to the

Viceroy upon his throne—the conviction in every man that he belongs to a race which God has destined to govern and subdue."

The massacre of 680,000 members of that race that God had destined to govern and subdue in the trenches of World War I wrote an end to the legend of a certain India. A whole generation of young men who might have patrolled the Frontier, administered the lonely districts or galloped their polo ponies down the long maidans was left behind in Flanders fields. From 1918 on, recruiting for the Indian Civil Service became increasingly difficult. Sensing the evolution of history, the survivors of the war turned away from careers that seemed certain to end before they reached retirement age. Increasingly, a brilliant coterie of Indians was accepted into the ranks of the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Army's officer corps.

On New Year's Day, 1947, barely a thousand British members of the Indian Civil Service remained in India, still somehow holding 400 million people in their administrative grasp. They were the last standard-bearers of an elite that had outlived its time, condemned at last by a secret conversation in London and the inexorable currents of history.

"WALK ALONE, WALK ALONE'

Srirampur, Noakhali, India, New Year's Day, 1947

Six thousand $iiles from Downing Street, in a village of the Gangetic Delta above the Bay of Bengal, an elderly man stretched out on the dirt floor of a peasant's hut. It was exactly twelve noon. As he did every day at that hour, he reached up for the dripping wet cotton sack that an aide offered him. Dark splotches of the mud packed inside it oozed through the bag's porous folds. The man carefully patted the sack onto his abdomen. Then, he took a second, smaller bag and stuck it on his bald head.

He seemed, lying there on the floor, a fragile little creature. The appearance was deceptive. That wizened seventy-seven-year-old man beaming out from under his mudpack had done more to topple the British Empire than any man alive. It was because of him that a British prime minister had finally been obliged to send Queen Victoria's great-grandson to New Delhi to find a way to give India her freedom.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an unlikely revolutionary, the gentle prophet of the world's most extraordinary liberation movement. Beside him, carefully polished, were the dentures he wore only when eating and the steel-rimmed glasses through which he usually peered out at the world. A tiny man, barely five feet tall, he weighed 114 pounds; all arms and legs, like an adolescent whose trunk has yet to rival the growth of his limbs. Nature had meant

Gandhi's face to be ugly. His ears flared out from his oversized head like the handles of a sugar bowl. His nose buttressed by squat, flaring nostrils thrust its heavy beak over a sparse white mustache. Without his dentures, his full lips collapsed over his toothless gums. Yet Gandhi's face radiated a peculiar beauty, because it was constantly animated, reflecting with the quickly shifting patterns of a lantern camera his changing moods and his impish humor.

To a century fraught with violence, Gandhi had offered an alternative, his doctrine of ahimsa —"nonviolence." He had used it to mobilize the masses of India to drive England from the subcontinent with a moral crusade instead of an armed rebellion, prayers instead of machine-gun fire, disdainful silence instead of the fracas of terrorists' bombs.

While Western Europe had echoed to the harangues of ranting demagogues and shrieking dictators, Gandhi had stirred the multitudes of the world's most populous area without raising his voice. It was not with the promise of power or fortune that he had summoned his followers to his banner, but with a warning—"Those who are in my company must be ready to sleep upon the bare floor, wear coarse clothes, get up at unearthly hours, subsist on uninviting, simple food, even clean their own toilets." Instead of gaudy uniforms and jangling medals, he had dressed his followers in clothes of coarse, homespun cotton. That costume, however, had been as instantly identifiable, as psychologically effective in welding together those who wore it, as the brown or black shirts of Europe's dictators had been.

Gandhi's means of communicating with his followers were primitive. He wrote much of his correspondence himself in longhand, and he talked—to his disciples, to prayer meetings, to the caucuses of his Congress Party. He employed none of the techniques for conditioning the masses to the dictates of a demagogue or a clique of ideologues. Yet, his message had penetrated a nation bereft of modern communications, because Gandhi had a genius for the simple gestures that spoke to India's soul. Those gestures were all unorthodox. Paradoxically, in a land ravaged by cyclical famine, where hunger had been a curse for centuries, the most devastating tactic Gandhi had devised was the simple act of depriving himself of food—a fast. He had humbled Great Britain by sipping water and bicarbonate of soda.

God-obsessed India had recognized in his frail silhouette, in the instinctive brilliance of his acts, the promise of a Mahatma—a "great soul"—and followed where he led. He was indisputably one of the galvanic figures of his century. To his followers, he was a saint. To the British bureaucrats whose hour of departure he had hastened, he was a conniving politician, a bogus messiah whose nonviolent crusades always ended in violence and whose fasts unto death always stopped short of death's door. Even a man as kind-hearted as Wavell, the viceroy whom Louis Mountbatten was destined to succeed, detested him as a "malevolent old politician . . . Shrewd, obstinate, domineering, double-tongued," with "little true saintliness in him."

Few of the English who had negotiated with Gandhi liked him; fewer still understood him. Their puzzlement was understandable. With his strange blend of great moral principles and quirky obsessions, he was quite capable of interrupting their serious political discussions with a discourse on the benefits of sexual continence or a daily salt-and-water enema.

Wherever Gandhi went, it was said, there was the capital of India. Its capital this New Year's Day was the tiny Bengali village of Srirampur, where the Mahatma lay under his mudpacks, exercising his authority over an enormous continent without benefit of radio, electricity or running water, thirty miles by foot from the nearest telephone or telegraph line.

The region of Noakhali in which Srirampur was set, was one of the most inaccessible in India, a jigsaw of tiny islands in the waterlogged delta formed by the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers. Barely forty miles square, it was a dense thicket of two and a half million human beings, 80 percent of them Moslems. They lived crammed into villages divided by canals, creeks and streams, reached by rowboat, by hand-poled ferries, by rope, log or bamboo bridges swaying dangerously over the rushing waters pouring through the region.

New Year's Day, 1947, in Srirampur should have been an occasion of intense satisfaction for Gandhi. He stood that day on the brink of achieving the goal he had fought for for most of his life: India's freedom.

Yet, as he approached the glorious climax of his struggle, Gandhi was a desperately unhappy man. The rea-

sons for his unhappiness were everywhere manifest in the little village in which he had made his camp. Srirampur had been one of the unpronounceable names figuring on the reports arriving almost daily on Clement Attlee's desk from India. Inflamed by fanatical leaders, by reports of Hindus killing their coreligionists in Calcutta, its Moslems—like Moslems all across Noakhali—had suddenly turned on the Hindu minority that shared the village with them. They had slaughtered, raped, pillaged and burned, forcing many of their neighbors to eat the flesh of their sacred cows, sending others fleeing for safety across the rice paddies. Half the huts in Srirampur were blackened ruins. Even the shack in which Gandhi lay had been partly destroyed by fire.

The Noakhali outbursts were isolated sparks, but the passions which had ignited them could easily set the whole subcontinent ablaze. Those horrors, the outbursts which had preceded them in Calcutta and those which had followed to the northwest in Bihar, where with equal brutality a Hindu majority had turned on a Moslem minority, explained Attlee's anxiety with the man he urgently wanted to dispatch to New Delhi as viceroy.

They also explained Gandhi's presence in Srirampur. The fact that, as their hour of triumph approached, his countrymen should have turned on one another in communal frenzy, broke Gandhi's heart. They had followed him on the road to independence, but they had not understood the great doctrine that he had enunciated to get them there, nonviolence. The holocaust that the world had just lived through and the specter of nuclear destruction now threatening it were to Gandhi the conclusive proof that only nonviolence could save mankind. It was his desperate desire that a new India show Asia and the world a nonviolent way out of man's dilemma. If his own people turned on the doctrines he had lived by and had used to lead them to freedom, what would remain of Gandhi's hopes? It would be a tragedy that would turn independence into a worthless triumph.

Another tragedy too threatened Gandhi on New Year's Day, 1947. To tear India apart on religious lines would be to fly in the face of everything Gandhi stood for. Every fiber of his being cried out against the division of his beloved country demanded by India's Moslem politicians, a division that many of its English rulers were now ready to

accept. India's people and faiths were, for Gandhi, as inextricably interwoven as the intricate patterns of an Oriental carpet. India could no more be split up without destroying the essence of her being, he felt, than a carpet could be cut up without rupturing its pattern.

"You shall have to divide my body before you divide India," he had proclaimed again and again.

He had come to the devastated village of Srirampur in search of his own faith and to find a way to prevent the disease infecting it from engulfing all India. "I see no light through the impenetrable darkness," he had cried in anguish as the first communal killings opened an abyss between India's Hindu and Moslem communities. "Truth and nonviolence which I swear by and which have sustained me for fifty years seem to fail to show the attributes I have ascribed to them. ...

"I have come here," he told his followers, "to discover a new technique and test the soundness of the doctrine which has sustained me and made my life worth living."

For days, Gandhi wandered through the village, talking to its inhabitants, meditating, waiting for the counsel of the "inner voice," which had so often illuminated the way for him in times of crisis. Recently, his acolytes had noticed, he had been spending more and more time in a curious occupation: practicing crossing the slippery, rickety log bridges surrounding the village.

New Year's Day when he had finished his mudpack, he called his followers to his hut. His inner voice had spoken at last. As once ancient Hindu holymen had crossed their continent in barefoot pilgrimages to its sacred shrines, so he was going to set out on a Pilgrimage of Penance to the hate-wasted villages of Noakhali. In the next seven weeks, walking barefoot as a sign of his penitence, he would cover 116 miles visiting forty-seven of Noakhali's villages.