Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House

They also explained Gandhi’s presence in Srirampur. The fact that, as their hour of triumph approached, his countrymen should have turned on each other in communal frenzy, broke Gandhi’s heart. They had followed him on the road to independence, but they had not understood the great doctrine he had enunciated to get them there, non-violence. Gandhi had a profound belief in his non-violent creed. The holocaust the world had just lived, the spectre of nuclear destruction now threatening it, were to Gandhi the conclusive proof that only non-violence could save mankind. It was his desperate desire that a new India should show Asia and the world this way out of man’s dilemma. If his own people turned on the doctrines he’d lived by and 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. To tear India apart on religious lines would be to fly in the face of everything for which Gandhi stood. Every fibre of his being cried out against the division of his beloved country demanded by India’s Moslem politicians, and which 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.

‘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 from engulfing all India. ‘I see no light through the impenetrable darkness,’ he had cried in anguish as the first communal killings had opened an abyss between India’s Hindu and Moslem communities. ‘Truth and non-violence to which I swear, 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 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 was spending more and more time on a curious occupation: practising crossing the slippery, rickety, log bridges surrounding the village.

That day, when he had finished with his mudpack, he called his followers to his hut. His ‘Inner Voice’ had spoken at last. As once ancient Hindu holy men had crossed their continent in barefoot pilgrimage 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 47 of Noakhali’s villages.

He, a Hindu, would go among those enraged Moslems, moving from village to village, from hut to hut, seeking to restore with the poultice of his presence Noakhali’s shattered peace.

Because this was a pilgrimage of penance, he decreed he wanted no other companion but God. Only four of his followers would accompany him. They would live on whatever charity the inhabitants of the villages they visited were ready to offer them. Let the politicians of his Congress Party and the Moslem League wrangle over India’s future in their endless Delhi debates, he said. It was, as it always had been, in India’s villages that the answers to her problems would have to be found. ‘This,’ he said, ‘would be his “last and greatest experiment.” If he could “rekindle the lamp of neighbourliness”, in those villages cursed by blood and bitterness, their example might inspire the whole nation.’ Here in Noakhali, he prayed, he could set alight again the torch of non-violence and conjure away the spectre of communal warfare which was haunting India.

His party set out at dawn. Gandhi’s pretty nineteen-year-old great-niece Manu had put together his spartan kit: a pen and paper, a needle and thread, an earthen bowl and a wooden spoon, his spinning-wheel and his three gurus, a little ivory representation of the three monkeys who ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’. She also packed in a sack the books that reflected the eclecticism of the man marching into the jungle: the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, a Koran, the Practice and Precepts of Jesus, and a book of Jewish thoughts.

With Gandhi at their head, the little band marched over the dirt paths, past the ponds and groves of betel and coconut palms to the rice paddies beyond. The villagers of Srirampur rushed for a last glimpse of this bent 77-year-old man striding off with his bamboo stave in search of a lost dream.

As Gandhi’s party began to move out of sight across the harvested paddies, the villagers heard him singing one of Rabindranath Tagore’s great poems set to music. It was one of the old leader’s favourites, and as he disappeared they followed the sound of his high-pitched, uneven voice drifting back across the paddies.

‘If they answer not your call,’ he sang, ‘walk alone, walk alone.’

The fraternal bloodshed Gandhi hoped to check had for centuries rivalled hunger as India’s sternest curse. The great epic poem of Hinduism, the Mahabharata, celebrated an appalling civil slaughter on the plains of Kurukshetra, north-west of Delhi, 2500 years before Christ. Hinduism itself had been brought to India by the Indo-European hordes descending from the north to wrest the sub-continent from its semi-aboriginal Dravidian inhabitants. Its sages had written their sacred vedas on the banks of the Indus centuries before Christ’s birth.

The faith of the Prophet had come much later, after the cohorts of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had battered their way down the Khyber Pass to weaken the Hindu hold on the great Gangetic plain. For two centuries, the Moslem Moghul emperors had imposed their sumptuous and implacable rule over most of India, spreading in the wake of their legions the message of Allah, the One, the Merciful.

The two great faiths thus planted on the sub-continent were as different as could be found among the manifestations of man’s eternal vocation to believe. Where Islam reposed on a man, the Prophet, and a precise text, the Koran, Hinduism was a religion without a founder, a revealed truth, a dogma, a structured liturgy or a churchly establishment. For Islam, the Creator stood apart from his creation, ordering and presiding over his work. To the Hindu, the Creator and his creation were one and indivisible, and God a kind of all pervading cosmic spirit to whose manifestations there would be no limit.

The Hindu, as a result, worshipped God in almost any form he chose: in animals, ancestors, sages, spirits, natural forces, divine incarnations, the Absolute. He could find God manifested in snakes, phalli, water, fire, the planets and the stars.

To the Moslem, on the contrary, there was but one God, Allah, and the Koran forbade the Faithful to represent him in any shape or form. Idols and idolatry to the Moslem were abhorrent; paintings and statues blasphemous. A mosque was a spare, solemn place in which the only decorations permitted were abstract designs and the repeated representations of the 99 names of God.

Idolatry was Hinduism’s natural form of expression and a Hindu temple was the exact opposite of a mosque. It was a kind of spiritual shopping centre, a clutter of Goddesses with snakes coiling from their heads, six-armed Gods with fiery tongues, elephants with wings talking to the clouds, jovial little monkeys, dancing maidens and squat phallic symbols.

Moslems worshipped in a body, prostrating themselves on the floor of the mosque in the direction of Mecca, chanting in unison their Koranic verses. A Hindu worshipped alone with only his thoughts linking him and the God he could select from a bewildering pantheon of three to three and a half million divinities. It was a jungle so complex that only a handful of humans who’d devoted their lives to its study could find their way through it. At its core was a central trinity: Brahma, the Creator; Shiva, the Destroyer; Vishnu, the Preserver – positive, negative, neutral forces, eternally in search, as their worshippers were supposed to be, of the perfect equilibrium, the attainment of the Absolute. Behind them were Gods and Goddesses for the seasons, the weather, the crops, and the ailments of man, like Maryamma, the smallpox Goddess revered each year in a ritual strikingly similar to the Jewish Passover.

The greatest barrier to Hindu-Moslem understanding, however, was not metaphysical, but social. It was the system which ordered Hindu society, caste. According to Vedic scripture, caste originated with Brahma, the Creator. Brahmins, the highest caste, sprang from his mouth; Kashtriayas, warriors and rulers, from his biceps; Vaishyas, traders and businessmen, from his thigh; Sudras, artisans and craftsmen, from his feet. Below them, were the outcasts, the Untouchables who had not sprung from divine soil.

The origins of the caste system, however, were notably less divine than those suggested by the Vedas. It had been a scheme employed by Hinduism’s Aryan founders to perpetuate the enslavement of India’s dark, Dravidian populations. The word for caste, varda, meant colour, and centuries later, the dark skins of India’s Untouchables gave graphic proof of the system’s real origins.

The five original divisions had multiplied like cancer cells into almost 5000 sub-castes, 1886 for the Brahmins alone. Every occupation had its caste, splitting society into a myriad of closed guilds into which a man was condemned by his birth to work, live, marry and die. So precise were their definitions that an iron smelter was in a different caste to an ironsmith.

Linked to the caste system was the second concept basic to Hinduism, reincarnation. A Hindu believed his body was just a temporary garment for his soul. Each life was only one of his soul’s many incarnations in its journey through eternity, a chain beginning and ending in some nebulous merger with the cosmos. The Karma, the accumulated good and evil of each mortal lifetime, was a soul’s continuing burden. It determined whether, in its next incarnation, that soul would move up or down in the hierarchy of caste. Caste had been a superb device to perpetuate India’s social inequities by giving them divine sanction. As the Church had counselled the peasants of the Middle Ages to forget the misery of their lives in the contemplation of the hereafter, so Hinduism had for centuries counselled the miserable of India to accept their lot in humble resignation as the best assurance of a better destiny in their next incarnation.

To the Moslems to whom Islam was a kind of brotherhood of the Faithful, that whole system was anathema. A generous, welcoming faith, Islam’s fraternal embrace drew millions of converts to the mosques of India’s Moghul rulers. Inevitably, the vast majority of them were Untouchables, seeking in the brotherhood of Islam an acceptance their own faith could offer them only in some distant incarnation.

With the collapse of the Moghul Empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a martial Hindu renaissance spread across India, bringing with it a wave of Hindu-Moslem bloodshed. Britain’s conquering presence had forced its Pax Britannica on the warring sub-continent, but the mistrust and suspicion in which the two communities dwelt remained. The Hindus did not forget that the mass of Moslems were the descendants of Untouchables who’d fled Hinduism to escape their misery. Caste Hindus would not touch food in the presence of a Moslem. A Moslem entering a Hindu kitchen would pollute it. The touch of a Moslem’s hand could send a Brahmin shrieking off to purify himself with hours of ritual ablutions.

Hindus and Moslems shared the villages awaiting Gandhi’s visit in Noakhali, just as they shared the thousands of villages all through the northern tier of India in Bihar, the United Provinces, the Punjab. They dwelt, however, in geographically distinct neighbourhoods. The frontier was a road or path, frequently called the Middle Way. No Moslem would live on one side of it, no Hindu on the other.

The two communities mixed socially, attending each other’s feasts, sharing the poor implements with which they worked. Their intermingling tended to end there. Intermarriage was almost unknown. The communities drew their water from separate wells and a caste Hindu would choke before sipping water from the Moslem well perhaps yards from his own. In the Punjab, what few scraps of knowledge Hindu children acquired came from the village Pandit who taught them to write a few words in Punjabi in mud with wheat stalks. The same village’s Moslem children would get their bare education from a sheikh in the mosque reciting the Koran in a different language, Urdu. Even the primitive drugs of cow’s urine and herbs with which they struggled against the same diseases, were based on different systems of natural medicine.

To those social and religious differences, had been added an even more divisive, more insidious distinction, economic. The Hindus had been far swifter than the Moslems to seize the opportunities British education and Western thought had placed before India. As a result, while the British had been socially more at ease with the Moslems, it was the Hindus who had administered India for them.* They were India’s businessmen, financiers, administrators, professional men. With the Parsees, the descendants of ancient Persia’s fire-worshipping Zoroastrians, they monopolized insurance, banking, big business and India’s few industries.

In the towns and small cities, the Hindus were the dominant commercial community. The ubiquitous role of the moneylender was almost everywhere discharged by Hindus, partly because of their aptitude for the task, partly because of the Koranic proscription preventing Moslems from practising usury.

The Moslem upper classes, many of whom descended from the Moghul invaders, had tended to remain landlords and soldiers. The Moslem masses, because of the deeply engrained patterns of Indian society, rarely escaped in the faith of Mohammed the roles that caste had assigned their forebears in the faith of Shiva. They were usually landless peasants in the service of Hindus or Moslems in the country, labourers and petty craftsmen in the service of Hindu employers in the city.

That economic rivalry accentuated the social and religious barriers between the two communities and made communal slaughters such as that which had shattered the peace of Srirampur a regular occurrence. Each community had its pet provocations with which it would launch them.

For the Hindus it was music. Music never accompanied the austere service of the mosque and its strains mingling with the mumble of the Faithfuls’ prayers was a blasphemy. There was no surer way for the Hindus to incite their Moslem neighbours than to set up a band outside a mosque during Friday prayers.

For the Moslem, the favourite provocation involved an animal, one of the grey, skeletal beasts lowing down the streets of every city, town and village in India, aimlessly wandering her fields, the object of the most perplexing of Hinduism’s cults, the Sacred Cow.

The veneration of the cow dated back to biblical times, when the fortunes of the pastoral Indo-European peoples migrating on to the sub-continent depended on the vitality of their herds. As the rabbis of ancient Judea had forbidden pigs’ flesh to their people to save them from the ravages of trichinosis, so the sadhus of ancient India proclaimed the cow sacred so as to save from slaughter in times of famine the herds on which their peoples’ existence depended.

As a result, India had in 1947 the largest bovine herd in the world, 200 million beasts, one for every two Indians, an animal population larger than the human population of the United States. 40 million cows produced a meagre trickle of milk averaging barely one pint per animal per day. 40 or 50 million more were beasts of burden, tugging their bullock carts and ploughs. The rest, 100-odd million, were sterile, useless animals roaming free through the fields, villages and cities of India. Every day their restless jaws chomped through the food that could have fed ten million Indians living on the edge of starvation.

The instinct for survival alone should have condemned those useless beasts. Yet, so tenacious had the superstition become that cow slaughter remained an abomination for those very Indians who were starving to death so that the beasts could continue their futile existence. Even Gandhi maintained that in protecting the cow it was all God’s work that man protected.

To the Moslems, the thought that a man could so degrade himself as to worship a dumb animal was repugnant. They took a perverse delight in driving a lowing, protesting herd of cows past the front door of a Hindu Temple en route to the slaughter house. Over the centuries, thousands of human beings had accompanied those animals to their deaths in the riots which often followed each such gesture.

While the British ruled India, they managed to keep a fragile balance between the two communities, at the same time using their antagonism as an instrument to ease the burden of their rule. Initially, the drive for Indian independence was confined to an intellectual elite in which Hindus and Moslems ignored communal differences to work side by side towards a common goal. Ironically, it was Gandhi who had disrupted that accord.

In the most spiritual area on earth, it was inevitable that the freedom struggle should take on the guise of a religious crusade, and Gandhi had made it one. No man was ever more tolerant, more genuinely free of any taint of religious prejudice than Gandhi. He desperately wanted to associate the Moslems with every phase of his movement. But he was a Hindu, and a deep belief in God was the very essence of his being. Inevitably, unintentionally, Gandhi’s Congress Party movement began to take on a Hindu tone and colour that aroused Moslem suspicions.

Their suspicions were strengthened as narrow-minded local Congress leaders persistently refused to share with their Moslem rivals whatever electoral spoils British rule allowed. A spectre grew in Moslem minds: in an independent India they would be drowned by Hindu majority rule, condemned to the existence of a powerless minority in the land their Moghul forebears had once ruled.

One perspective seemed to offer an escape from that fate, the creation of a separate Islamic nation on the sub-continent. The idea that India’s Moslems should set up a state of their own was formally articulated for the first time on four and a half pages of typing paper in a nondescript English cottage at 3 Humberstone Road in Cambridge. Its author was a forty-year-old Indian Moslem graduate student named Rahmat Ali, and the date at the head of his proposal was 28 January 1933. The idea that India formed a single nation, Ali wrote, was ‘a preposterous falsehood’. He called for a Moslem nation carved from the provinces of north-west India where the Moslems were predominant, the Punjab, Kashmir, Sind, the Frontier, Baluchistan. He even had a name to propose for his new state. Based on the names of the provinces that would compose it, it was ‘Pakistan – land of the pure’.

‘We will not crucify ourselves,’ he concluded in a fiery, if inept metaphor, ‘on a cross of Hindu nationalism.’

Adopted by the body that was the focal point of Moslem nationalist aspirations, the Moslem League, Rahmat Ali’s proposal gradually took hold of the imagination of India’s Moslem masses. Its progress was nurtured by the chauvinistic attitude of the predominantly Hindu leaders of Congress who remained determined to make no concession to their Moslem foes.

The event which served to catalyse into violence the rivalry of India’s Hindu and Moslem communities took place on 16 August 1946, just five months before Gandhi set out on his penitent’s march. The site was the second city of the British Empire, a metropolis whose reputation for violence and savagery was unrivalled, Calcutta. Calcutta, with the legend of its Black Hole, had been a synonym for Indian cruelty to generations of Englishmen.

Hell, a Calcutta resident had once remarked, was being born an Untouchable in Calcutta’s slums. Those slums contained the densest concentration of human beings in the world, foetid pools of unrivalled misery, Hindu and Moslem neighbourhoods interlaced without pattern or reason.

At dawn on 16 August, howling in a quasi-religious fervour, Moslem mobs had come bursting from their slums, waving clubs, iron bars, shovels, any instrument capable of smashing in a human skull. They came in answer to a call issued by the Moslem League, proclaiming 16 August ‘Direct Action Day’, to prove to Britain and the Congress Party that India’s Moslems were prepared ‘to get Pakistan for themselves by “Direct Action” if necessary’.

They savagely beat to a sodden pulp any Hindus in their path and stuffed their remains in the city’s open gutters. The terrified police simply disappeared. Soon tall pillars of black smoke stretched up from a score of spots in the city, Hindu bazaars in full blaze.

Later, the Hindu mobs came storming out of their neighbourhoods looking for defenceless Moslems to slaughter. Never, in all its violent history, had Calcutta known 24 hours as savage, as packed with human viciousness. Like water-soaked logs, scores of bloated corpses bobbed down the Hooghly river towards the sea. Others, savagely mutilated, littered the city’s streets. Everywhere, the weak and helpless suffered most. At one crossroads, a line of Moslem coolies lay beaten to death where a Hindu mob had found them, between the poles of their rickshaws. By the time the slaughter was over, Calcutta belonged to the vultures. In filthy grey packs they scudded across the sky, tumbling down to gorge themselves on the bodies of the city’s 6000 dead.

The Great Calcutta Killings, as they became known, triggered bloodshed in Noakhali, where Gandhi was; in Bihar; and on the other side of the sub-continent in Bombay.

They changed the course of India’s history. The threat the Moslems had been uttering for years, their warnings of a cataclysm which would overtake India if they were denied their own state, took on a terrifying reality. Suddenly, India was confronted by the awful vision that had sickened Gandhi and sent him into the jungles of Noakhali: civil war.

To another man, to the cold and brilliant lawyer who had been Gandhi’s chief Moslem foe for a quarter of a century, that prospect now became the tool with which to pry India apart. History, beyond that written by his own people, would never accord Mohammed Ali Jinnah the high place his achievements merited. Yet, it was he, more than Gandhi or anyone else, who held the key to India’s future. It was with that stern and uncompromising Moslem Messiah, leading his people to another man’s Promised Land, that Queen Victoria’s great-grandson would have to contend when he reached India.

In a tent outside Bombay in August 1946, he had evaluated for his followers in the Moslem League the meaning of Direct Action Day. If Congress wanted war, he declared, then India’s Moslems would ‘accept their offer unhesitatingly’.

Pale lips pressed into a grim smile, his piercing eyes alight with repressed passion, Jinnah had that day flung down the gauntlet to Congress, to the British.

‘We shall have India divided,’ he vowed, ‘or we shall have India destroyed.’

* The Moslems had also been subtly penalized in the two or three decades after 1857 for the role their community had played in the Indian Army Mutiny.

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