Freedom at Midnight (48 page)

"WITH NO JOY IN MY HEART"

His personal emblem, a freshly plucked rose, in the buttonhole of his tunic, a pensive Jawa-harlal Nehru poses for a moment in the garden of Viceroy's House {above). (Left) the Indian leader is caught exercising the yoga he practiced daily. Anxious to reconcile on Indian soil the parliamentary democracy of Britain and the economic socialism of Karl Marx, Nehru agreed with Mountbatten that the only alternative to dividing India was civil war. Reluctantly he turned his back on his old leader, Gandhi, and "with no joy in my heart" commended the Viceroy's plan to partition India to his countrymen.

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HINDU AND MOSLEM KEFU&BES ON THE MOVE, AUTUMN 1947

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THE DAY AN AGE ENDED

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New Delhi, August 15, 1947: Engulfed in a hysterical, happy throng, the Mountbattens' gilded carriage becomes a kind of life raft tossed upon the sea of humans celebrating India's independence. The famished hordes of a continent in prayer had won at last their freedom from an empire that had dwarfed the realms of Babylon, Greece and Rome. With their achievement, one chapter in man's experience—the four-century-old Age of Imperialism—was ending and another, the emergence of three-quarters of the globe's people in the Third World, was beginning.

THE INADVERTENT ARCHITECT OF A TRAGEDY

Surrounded by four of the Indian assessors who were supposed to aid him, Sir Cyril Radcliffe (white suit, below) poses in the Punjab, one of the two Indian provinces it was his unhappy lot to divide. The brilliant British jurist was chosen for the agonizing task because he had never been to India, knew little of the country, and could have no preconceived notion of the subcontinent. As any border line he drew was condemned to do, his tracings on the map of India helped to unleash one of the great dramas of modern times, the uprooting of millions of helpless human beings in the Punjab. 37

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AN OATH OF FREEDOM FROM VICTORIAS GREAT-GRANDSON

While his wife looks on, Louis Mountbatten, chosen by the Indians to be their first governor general, administers {above) the oath of office to India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. {Below) the Mountbattens arrive in Karachi for the ceremonies marking the birth of Pakistan.

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THE DISPOSSESSED-

India's freedom was won at a terrible price. Partition hurled ten million wretched people onto the roads, the railways and the unharvested fields of the Punjab in the greatest migration in human history. By every form of transportation available, Hindus and Sikhs streamed out of Pakistan (top), and Moslems out of India in the terrible autumn of 1947. Their destinations, like that of the despondent youth (middle), were squalid refugee camps. Massacred by marauding bands, assailed by heat, hunger, thirst and fatigue, countless thousands, like the man waiting to die by the roadside (below), never reached safety.

-AND THE DYING"

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THE VULTURES' CRUEL HARVEST

While another trainload of miserable human beings prepares to leave the Punjab {above), a horde of vultures gorges in an anonymous alleyway {below) on the remains of a few of the thousands of Indians and Pakistanis for whom the dream of independence became a horrible nightmare.

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A VICEROY'S VISION OF AN APOCALYPSE

The Mountbattens scramble down a railroad embankment in Peshawar (above) after having faced, courageously and alone, 100,000 shrieking Pathan tribesmen. {Below) with the governor of the Punjab (in fedora) they inspect the ruins of one of the province's shattered villages.

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