Freedom at Midnight (52 page)

rented a tonga for four annas for himself, his wife and his seven children. All around him, Lai could hear other peasants excitedly explaining to their kith and kin why they were all going to New Delhi. "The British are going," they cried. "Nehru is going to raise a new flag. We are free!"

The shriek of silver trumpets sundered the morning air. With a final burst of Victorian pomp the first official ceremony of this extraordinary day was beginning. It was the swearing-in of the first constitutional governor general of the new dominion of India. The man taking that oath would be an Englishman, the same Englishman who, only a few hours earlier, had carried the burden of the most powerful office in an empire intended by its founders to last a thousand years.

As solemn as he had been in Karachi, Queen Victoria's great-grandson advanced toward the throne, where he would receive a charge and an honor unique in the coming annals of decolonialization. For Louis Mountbat-ten, "the most remarkable and inspiring-day in his life" was beginning, the day he would be handing over charge of the heartland of his great-grandmother's empire.

His wife walked by his side in a silver-lame gown, a diadem set in her auburn hair. Determined that the day "would go off with the utmost pomp," Mountbatten had supervised every detail of India's indpendence ceremonies with his love of pageantry and his Teutonic zest for detail. A colorfully uniformed escort preceded the regal pair as they advanced toward those crimson thrones on which, five months before, they had been installed as viceroy and vicereine.

Ranged to their right and left on the marble dais under a velvet canopy were the new masters of India: Nehru, in cotton jodhpurs and a linen vest; Vallabhbhai Patel, more than ever the scowling Roman emperor in his white dhoti; all the others in their little white Congress caps.

As he took his place, an amusing thought struck Mount-batten. The men and women ranged beside him probably had only one experience in common: they had, almost all of them, served time in a British prison. Before that array of former guests of His Majesty's government's prison administration, Louis Mountbatten raised his right hand and

solemnly swore to become the humble and faithful first servant of an independent India. When he had finished, those ministers whose names Nehru had forgotten to place in his envelope the evening before, swore their oaths at the hands of the man who had given India her independence.

Outside, the echoes of the twenty-one-gun salute* marking the event began to roll across India's rejoicing capital. Waiting for the Mountbattens at the foot of the red-carpeted steps leading out of Durbar Hall was the gold state carriage assembled almost half a century earlier by the craftsmen of London's Messrs. Barker and Company, for the royal visit to India of George V and Queen Mary. In front of its six matched bays, the entire Governor General's Bodyguard was assembled in glistening black jackboots, white riding breeches, white tunics closed by scarlet sashes embroidered in gold.

The great colorful procession jangled off down the drive of Viceroy's House, all fluttering pennants and lances, point men and postillions, color guards and connecting files, buglers and commanders, four squadrons of the world's finest horsemen aglitter in scarlet and gold, a lovely portrait from an old story book, the last parade of the British raj.

Nodding with those stiff and graceful half-gestures with which royalty condescends to acknowledge the masses, the tautly erect Mountbattens drove down a line of saluting troops to the great wrought-iron gates of Lutyens's Palace. There, outside, India waited.

It was an India such as no Englishman had seen in three centuries of history. This was no curious crowd come to be dazzled by the circuses of the raj, to applaud the spectacles staged for their entertainment by their rulers. The dimensions of India had always been in her masses, and today those masses were thronging New Delhi in numbers and density never seen before. Jubilant, excited, gleefully unruly, they swarmed around the procession, forcing the horses of the Bodyguard down to a slow walk. All Mountbatten's protocol, all his careful arrangements, all calculated on the traditions of another India, collapsed, engulfed, overwhelmed by the new India born this day, a vibrant seething mass drowning the scarlet and gold in a horde of human beings.

* The old viceregal thirty-one-gun salute had been reduced to twenty-one guns for the constitutional governor general.

Caught in the crowd along the Mountbattens' route,, the Sikh journalist who the night before had greeted independence by kissing a Moslem medical student suddenly thought, The chains are breaking all around me. He remembered how once, when he was a child, an English schoolboy had forced him off a sidewalk. No one could do that to me now, he thought. In the crowd, he noted, there were no more rich or poor, Untouchables or masters, lawyers, bank clerks, coolies or pickpockets, just happy people embracing and calling to each other, "Azad Sahib!" ("We are free, sir!")

"It was as though an entire people had suddenly rediscovered their home," noted one witness to that happy pandemonium. Seeing his nation's flag flying for the first time over the Delhi officers' mess, Major Ashwini Dubey, an officer in the Indian Army, thought, In a mess where we've been stooges, now there's no one above us but our brother Indian officers. Sulochna Panigrahi, an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl dressed for the occasion in a bright new sari, thought of Wordsworth's words: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven."

For many simple Indians the magic word "independence" meant that a new world was at hand. Ranjit Lai, the peasant from Chatharpur, assured his children that "there will be much to eat now, because India is free." People refused to pay bus fares, assuming that they should now be free. A humble beggar walked into the enclosure reserved for foreign diplomats at one ceremony. A policeman asked him for his invitation.

"Invitation?" he answered. "Why do I need an invitation? I have my independence. That's enough."

Across India, scenes of rejoicing similar to those in the capital marked this memorable morning. In Calcutta at 8 a.m., a horde from the city's slums swept through the gates of the majestic governor's palace. While the last British governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, and his wife breakfasted in a corner of the house, the crowd raced through the palace's spacious salons. In Burrows's bedroom, some of those miserable creatures who had never slept on anything softer than a patch of dirt or the ropes of a charpoy celebrated their independence by jumping up and down like excited children on the bed in which the governor's lady had been sleeping an hour before. Else-

where in the house, other Calcuttans expressed their joy at India's independence by stabbing the oil paintings of India's former rulers with the tips of their umbrellas.

Streetcars ran free of charge all day. A city that had feared it would echo this day to the sound of gunfire rang with happier sounds—the explosion of firecrackers. In Bombay, excited crowds swarmed into that citadel of imperial elegance, The Taj Mahal Hotel. All day long, in Madras, the dark south-Indian crowds streamed along the waterfront to Fort St. George to stare with pride and rapture at their nation's flag flying at last over the first fortress of the British East India Company. At Surat, dozens of gaily bedecked boats staged an independence regatta in the bay where Captain Hawkins had begun Britain's Indian adventure with his galleon the Hector.

Independence brought freedom of a most tangible nature to a whole category of people. Jail doors opened for thousands of convicts granted pardons as an Independence Day gesture. Death sentences were commuted. Mystic India, the India of fakirs and fairy tales, joined the feast. At Tiruka-likundram in the south, the mysterious pair of white eagles that swooped down from the sky each noon to snatch their food from the hands of a local sadhu seemed to honor the occasion with an exultant beating of their wings. In the jungles of Madura, near Madras, other holy men indulged in the outlawed spectacle of hook-swinging. Impaling the flesh of their backs on iron claws suspended from a kind of gibbet, they dangled above gawking crowds, offering their agony for India's freedom—and a particularly bountiful harvest of alms.

Everywhere, the day was characterized by the good will displayed toward the English and the dignity with which they participated in ceremonies that for many of them marked a sad, nostalgic moment. In Shillong, the British commanding officer of the Assam Rifles spontaneously stood down, giving his Indian Deputy the honor of commanding the Independence Day parade. At the huge Chuba tea plantation near the Burmese border, Peter Bullock, the plantation manager, organized a field day complete with egg-and-spoon and sack races for his fifteen hundred workers, most of whom didn't even know what it was they were celebrating with their unexpected holiday.

There were exceptions. In Simla, Mrs. Maude Penn Montague refused to leave the home in which she had

given so many grand balls and dinners. She considered herself in mourning. Born in India, of a father who also had been born on the subcontinent, she felt India was her home. With the exception of five years' schooling in England, her whole life had been spent there. To friends who suggested that it was now time to leave, she replied, "My dear, whatever would I do in England? I don't even know how to boil the water for a cup of tea." And so, while the former summer capital of the raj celebrated, she sat home weeping, unable to bear the sight of another nation's flag going up that pole where her beloved Union Jack had flown.

For the other great dominion born on the subcontinent, August 15 was a particularly auspicious day. It fell on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan. The festivities were almost as much a celebration of the state's founder as they were of the state itself. Jinnah's photo and name were everywhere—in windows, bazaars, stores, on enormous triumphal arches spanning city streets. The Pakistan Times even proclaimed that, through the voice of their caretakers, the camels, monkeys and tigers of the Lahore zoo joined in sending their wishes to the Quaid-e-Azam and trumpeting "Pakistan Zindabad" There may have been no flags of the new state in Dacca, capital of its eastern wing, but there were pictures everywhere of the leader who had never visited its soil.

Jinnah himself celebrated the day by assuming full powers for his supposedly ceremonial office. In the year of life remaining to him, the London-trained lawyer who for years had not ceased to proclaim his faith in the constitutional process would govern his new nation as a dictator.

He would do it without the comforting presence of his closest living relative. More than 500 miles from Karachi, in a flat in Colaba, one of Bombay's most elegant suburbs, a young woman had decorated her balcony with two flags, one for India and one for Pakistan. They symbolized the terrible dilemma that Independence Day had posed for her, as well as for so many others. Dina, the only child of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had been unable to decide to which country she wished to belong, the land of her birth, or the Islamic nation created by her father.

Conscious of the terrible drama lurking behind this euphoric Independence Day, many an Indian was unable to

share in the ecstasy of his celebrating countrymen. In Lucknow, Anis Kidwai would always remember the incongruous spectacle of a group of cheering, laughing people waving flags next to others in tears because they had just learned of the death of close relatives in the Punjab.

Khushwant Singh, a Sikh lawyer from Lahore, was totally indifferent to the gay crowds around him in New Delhi. "I had nothing to rejoice about," he would bitterly recall. "For me and millions like me, this Independence Day was a tragedy. They had mutilated the Punjab, and I had lost everything."

The Punjab, August IS, 1947

India's joyful Independence Day was indeed a day of horror for the Punjab. The predominate color of the dawn of freedom breaking over its ancient vistas was not purple and gold but crimson. In Amritsar, while the city's new authorities dutifully performed their independence rituals at the city's old Mogul fortress, an enraged horde of Sikhs was ravaging a Moslem neighborhood less than a mile away. They slaughtered its male inhabitants without mercy or exception. The women were stripped, repeatedly raped, then paraded shaking and terrified through the city to the Golden Temple, where most had their throats cut.

In the Sikh state of Patiala, once ruled by Bhupinder Singh the Magnificent, Sikh bands prowled the countryside pouncing on Moslems trying to flee across the frontier to Pakistan. Prince Balindra Singh, the Maharaja's brother, stumbled on one such band armed with huge kirpans. Pleading with them to return to their villages, he said: "This is harvest time. You should be home cutting your crops."

"There is another crop to cut first," replied their leader, slicing the air with his kirpan.

Amritsar's red-brick railroad station had become a kind of refugee camp, a clearing house for thousands of Hindus who had fled Pakistan's half of the Punjab. They swarmed its waiting room, its ticket office, its platforms, ready to scrutinize each arriving train for missing relatives and friends.

Late in the afternoon of August 15, the stationmaster Chani Singh pushed his way through their near-hysterical, weeping ranks with all the authority his little blue cap and the red flag he clutched in his hands conferred on him. Singh was prepared for the scene that would greet the Number Ten Down Express arriving from Lahore. It was the same now for every train arriving in his station. -Men and women would rush to the windows and doors of the dust-yellow third-class cars, desperately searching for the child they had lost in their hasty flight, shrieking out names, trampling and shoving each other in grief and hysteria. People in tears would rush from car to car calling for a missing relative, looking for someone from their village who might bring them news. There would be the abandoned children weeping softly on a stack of luggage, the babies born in flight being nursed by their mothers in the midst of that milling mob.

At the head of the platform Singh took his place and officially waved the incoming locomotive to a halt. As its great steel frame rolled to a stop above his head, Singh glimpsed a strange sight. Four armed soldiers were standing guard over the sullen engine driver. When the hiss of escaping steam and the shriek of braking metal died, Singh suddenly realized that something was wrong.