CHAPTER 14

A RAINBOW IN THE SKY

‘NATIVE RACES WITHIN THE EMPIRE ARE SHOWING AN EVER more lively appreciation of their status’, reported the British Imperial Review in August 1947. ‘The whole outlook has changed, and the native has been educated to echo the shibboleths of democracy.’ Self-congratulation reverberated in the Review‘s tone, as it surveyed the indigenous movements in New Zealand, Canada and South Africa: ‘the Maori and the Red Indian, under fostering and enlightened care, have shown a surprising and gratifying ability to survive … A mere advisory body does not satisfy the Bantu. He wants more executive power, something nearer equality.’¹ Past and present were being revised at a speed to match Mountbatten’s haste in India. Had not the British Empire always been a kindly, generous, and even selfless father figure, gently shepherding flocks of dumb savages towards freedom and democracy? Old volumes of Lord Macaulay’s essays were retrieved from the attic and dusted off, and his assertion that the day India achieved self-rule would be ‘the proudest day in British history’ presented as incontrovertible evidence that, indeed, that had always been absolutely true.²There seemed to be no real difference in attitude between Macaulay and Mountbatten. It followed, then, that what went between must have been progress.³

The new spirit of post-colonial liberation seemed to be everywhere. News from Indonesia provided the sense of superiority: the Dutch had embarked upon a new wave of atrocities against the indigenous rebels. News from Palestine added to the motivation: British military lorries were blown up by Jewish terrorists, and two young sergeants hanged from a tree near Natanya at the end of July. When the staff at the Viceroy’s House sat down to watch their Sunday film, Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, in the first week of August, they were treated to the bizarre but apposite spectacle of white actors with cut-glass English accents dressed up in fake tan, black wigs, linen and beads, refusing to submit to the Roman Empire with cries of ‘Leave us to settle our own affairs!’, ‘Yes, go back to your own country!’, ‘Egypt belongs to us, not to you!’, and ‘Egypt for the Egyptians!’

In India itself, security remained perilous. On 27 July huge crowds of Sikhs, estimated at over 10,000, attempted to enter the All-Punjab Sikh Conference in Lahore, and were fired upon twice by police. Dalip Singh, presiding, observed that ‘The British scheme for the partition of the country provides for an Empire for the Muslims in India.’⁴ Responding to the signals of future trouble, Mountbatten took a personal role in organizing a Punjab Boundary Force, under the command of Major-General T.W. Rees, whom he described as ‘a marvellous little man’.⁵ General Rees was supported by two high-ranking advisers, one Muslim, one Sikh; he had 50,000 mixed troops at his command, including a high proportion of British officers. ‘It is probably the largest military force ever collected in any one area of a country for the maintenance of law and order in peace-time,’ noted Alan Campbell-Johnson.⁶ On the same day, Attlee announced drastic cuts in foreign spending.

The British government was feeling the cold sweat of a financial crisis that threatened to overwhelm it. The next day, Sir Stafford Cripps met the American Under-Secretary of State in Paris, and tried to persuade him to relax the terms of its $3.75 billion loan, of which Britain had only $1 billion left. By this point, the government in London was having secret plans drawn up in case the United States did not let it off the hook. These included a below subsistence ration of 1700 calories per person per day, and the conscripting of schoolchildren into agricultural work.⁷ Five days later Churchill, recovered from his illness, delivered a rousing speech at his birthplace, Blenheim Palace. He told an audience of 60,000 Conservatives that the only hope of national recovery was to have an election and throw out the Labour government.

With these troubles brewing, the Mountbattens’ relationship suffered further. ‘The last two days have been pretty good Hell’, Ismay wrote to his wife on 5 August. ‘Both Dickie and Edwina are dead tired, nervy as they can be, and right across each other. So that in addition to my other troubles, I have been doing peace-maker and general sedative … It’s very wearing for them, and for me.’⁸ While Edwina was concerned with world events and the plight of the growing number of victims of violence in the Punjab, Dickie seemed to be incapable of seeing beyond protocol. That day, he bothered Jawahar with a list of dates upon which the Union Jack might continue to be flown in India after independence. It is hard to imagine an issue of less pressing import that could have consumed the Viceroy’s time just ten days before the transfer of power. That evening, Edwina went alone to see Jawahar.⁹

Despite his preoccupation with trivialities, even Mountbatten could not ignore the fierce controversies thrown up by the two partitions of Bengal and the Punjab. For centuries, both regions had been melting-pots of cultures, a jumbled variety of Muslims and Hindus living side by side, with Sikhs, Buddhists, Animists and Christians fitted in too. In times of peace, it had not mattered much to which of these religions a Punjabi or a Bengali adhered. As Jinnah himself had admitted, most people within the regions tended to consider their local identity before their religious affiliation. But the importance of religious identity had been growing in the twentieth century, notably in India and more slowly in the world beyond it.

The reason for this effect can in part be traced to the British policy of ‘divide and rule’. Undoubtedly, the raj did plenty to encourage identity politics. The British found it easier to understand their vast domain if they broke it down into manageable chunks, and by the 1930s they had become anxious to ensure that each chunk was given a full and fair hearing. But picking a few random unelected lobbyists, based on what the British thought was a cross-section of Indian varieties, was not a reliable way to represent 400 million people. India’s population could not be divided into neat boxes labelled by religion and cross-referenced with social position. India was an amorphous mass of different cultures, lifestyles, traditions and beliefs. After so many centuries of integration and exchange, these were not distinct, but rippled into each other, creating a web of cultural hybrids and compromises. A Sunni Muslim from the Punjab might have more in common with a Sikh than he did with a Shia Muslim from Bengal; a Shia might regard a Sufi Muslim as a heretic; a Sufi might get on better with a Brahmin Hindu than with a Wahhabi Muslim; a Brahmin might feel more at ease with a European than he would with another Hindu who was an outcaste. When the British started to define ‘communities’ based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged. At the same time, Indian politicians began to focus on religion as a central part of their policies – defining themselves by what they were, and even more by what they were not.¹⁰

This phenomenon is shown at its clearest with Jinnah, who began his career as the leading light of Hindu–Muslim unity, and ended it by forcing the creation of a separate Islamic-majority state. But the arc of Jinnah’s career merely amplifies that of Indian politics as a whole. Congress was a largely secular and inclusive organization during Motilal Nehru’s prime in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Though it was the opposite of his intention, the emergence of Gandhi gave confidence to religious chauvinists. While Gandhi himself welcomed those of all faiths, the very fact that he brought spiritual sensibilities to the centre of politics stirred up extreme and divisive passions. Fundamentalist Hindus were rare presences on the political scene before Gandhi. In the wake of Gandhi, though, Hindu nationalists were able to move into the central ground of politics; while organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), dedicated to the formation of a Hindu nation, swelled their ranks from the fringes. This was no slow, invisible political trend: it was happening visibly during the spring and summer of 1947, when holy sadhus clad in saffron robes marched around the streets of Delhi, bellowing forth political slogans.¹¹ Rajendra Prasad, who was to become the President of the new Constituent Assembly, wrote to Nehru on 7 August telling him that since July he had received 164,000 letters and postcards demanding that cow slaughter be made illegal – a common concern of devout Hindus, but one which is often used and taken as an anti-Muslim strategy. It was the Muslims in India, and the Untouchables, who ran the lucrative leather and beef industries, mostly for export.¹² The threat of a ban on cow slaughter naturally drove Muslims and Untouchables into the arms of more radical political organizations, which they felt would stick up for them. Whether the British caused division by carving up politics on the basis of religion, or whether they were simply responding to a trend in Indian society for Hindu nationalism and the beginnings of an Islamic resurgence, is an endlessly debatable question.

In an atmosphere of such tension, almost every part of the partition lines could be disputed by someone. But the three greatest controversies to haunt India’s and Pakistan’s future were those of two Punjabi districts, Gurdaspur and Ferozepur; and one Bengali district, Chittagong.

The Punjab is a great sweep of plain, laced with rivers, stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the Thar Desert in the west. It is one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world, frequently described as the ‘bread-basket’ of India. According to a religious breakdown of the population, the western wing along the Indus had to go to Pakistan; the eastern wing between the Sutlej and Jumna Rivers had to go to India. The central sections were in dispute, mainly because they were rich, populous districts, and strategically important. Religiously speaking, the populations in those central tracts were far too integrated and too complex for a straight partition of their land. The economic case was labyrinthine. There would be conflicting interests over the divisions of holy shrines, railways, defensive frontiers, and water supplies.

A Punjab Boundary Commission had been set up to report to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, with four judges – two Muslims, a Hindu and a Sikh. These judges were given no mandate to negotiate with political leaders or other interested parties, which might have been supposed to be their most crucial function. Instead, they simply heard the cases presented, and then predictably divided in two when it came to the judgement – the Muslims sticking together, and the Sikh siding with the Hindu. Radcliffe was left to consider these inconclusive verdicts, and consequently had no choice but to make the decision of where to draw the dividing line entirely according to his own opinions. Suffering terribly from the heat, he was left alone with a secretary in a bungalow in the grounds of the Viceroy’s House, amid daunting piles of maps, submissions and reports. He was not supposed to speak to any of the Indian leaders about his work, including the Viceroy; perhaps blessedly, he enjoyed a complete ignorance of Indian politics, and had never previously been east of Gibraltar.¹³ He later admitted that it would have taken two years to draw up a just partition.¹⁴ The Governor of the Punjab, Evan Jenkins, told Mountbatten it would have taken twice that to partition it peacefully.¹⁵ Radcliffe had forty days.

In 1556, aged fourteen, Akbar had been crowned emperor at Gurdaspur.¹⁶ In 1947, its significance was that it provided the only useful land-link between India and Kashmir. Further east along the Indo-Kashmiri border, the Himalayas rose so high as to prohibit a readily navigable route. Mountbatten has been accused of interfering with the decision on Gurdaspur, and certainly its fate had worried Nehru.¹⁷ Most of it did eventually go to India, but there is good reason to think it would have done so anyway. As early as February 1946, when Lord Wavell had drawn up an estimate for what might constitute Pakistan, he had insisted that Gurdaspur must be kept with Amritsar. If it were not, Amritsar would be encircled to the east, west and north by Pakistan, rendering the Sikh position untenable. This would have proved a decisive factor in the apportioning of Gurdaspur regardless of the road link to Kashmir.¹⁸ On that basis, Mountbatten’s innocence of the charge of interfering with Gurdaspur is credible, though not proven beyond doubt.

The case of Ferozepur entails a lot more doubt, and a lot less innocence. Ferozepur was a narrowly Muslim-majority district running along the south bank of the Sutlej River, with a population of over half a million people. It included a major arsenal as well as the headwaters that irrigated the princely state of Bikaner. A salient within it, sticking out forty miles into Sikh lands and effectively encircling Amritsar to the south, had been assigned to Pakistan.¹⁹ This can be seen from a provisional map sent from Mountbatten’s private secretary, George Abell, to Evan Jenkins on 8 August. The map showed the approximate border, which was to be finalized the next day. ‘There will not be any great changes from this boundary’, Abell wrote.²⁰ But the Ferozepur salient was of evident concern to Bikaner, which had already agreed to go to India. Kanwar Sain, the Chief Engineer of Bikaner, said that he and his Prime Minister visited Mountbatten on 11 August. They told him that, if the Ferozepur headwaters went to Pakistan, so too would their state.²¹

Mountbatten did not respond to this threat, though Sain remembered that his face changed colour; but apparently he took it seriously. Late that night, Radcliffe received a visitation in the suave form of V.P. Menon, who invited him to lunch with Mountbatten and Lord Ismay the next day. Christopher Beaumont, secretary to the Boundary Commission, was unusually excluded from the invitation. Beaumont later testified that Radcliffe returned from that lunch ‘agitated’, would not disclose what was said, and immediately redrew the line of partition to award Ferozepur to India. Both Beaumont and one of Mountbatten’s secretaries thought that the Viceroy was under pressure from Nehru as well as from Bikaner to make Radcliffe change the line. Evan Jenkins received a telegram bearing the two words: ‘eliminate salient’.²²

Throughout the rest of his life, Mountbatten kept up the position that he had never interfered with Radcliffe. This was a lie, as he himself allowed in at least one private letter. Mountbatten wrote to Ismay in April 1948, with the instruction that he should burn the letter. It survived, and provides a potentially less dishonest Mountbatten side of the story. Radcliffe, he says, came to him with the Ferozepur problem, and Mountbatten hinted that it would be fine to ‘make any adjustments necessary’ – with the caveat that, owing to the difficulty presented by the Sikh population in the Punjab, he would prefer any concession to Pakistan to be made in Bengal.²³

Mountbatten’s account to Ismay still does not tie up entirely with Beaumont’s testimony, which attributes the raising of the subject very clearly to Mountbatten rather than to Radcliffe. There is no reason to assume he was telling the whole truth to Ismay. But, even if he was, the other side of the bargain presented to Radcliffe was not fulfilled: there was no matching concession to Pakistan in Bengal. Mountbatten’s official biographer has suggested that the award of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bengal to Pakistan compensated for Ferozepur.²⁴ But the award of Chittagong was supposed to make up for Pakistan’s loss of a far greater prize: Calcutta.

Back in March, when Mountbatten’s principal secretary had expressed the opinion that ‘Pakistan would definitely be unworkable without Calcutta’, Mountbatten had proposed that Chittagong might do as a port instead.²⁵ But Chittagong was far smaller than Calcutta, nowhere near as developed, and much less convenient for overland transport. Muslim-majority East Bengal was mainly agricultural, with a strong jute farming industry. But all the actual manufacturing and heavy industry was based in Hindu-majority West Bengal. The Governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, had predicted that an independent East Bengal without Calcutta would become a ‘rural slum’. It was felt among Muslims that partition of Bengal was a way of sabotaging East Pakistan. Mountbatten agreed. During the meeting, he made it clear several times that the whole point of the current policy was to allow Pakistan ‘to fail on its demerits’. If the plan presented to Jinnah was awful enough, the British thought, he could be made to reconsider the whole idea of Pakistan.²⁶ They were wrong; Jinnah would surprise them by accepting Pakistan anyway.

On 26 April, Mountbatten asked Jinnah how he would feel if Bengal, as a whole, became independent rather than joining Pakistan. Jinnah replied unhesitatingly: ‘I should be delighted. What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta; they had much better remain united and independent; I am sure that they would remain on friendly terms with us.’²⁷ Congress, on the other hand, was under no circumstance prepared to countenance a fully independent Bengal, and the Muslim League in East Bengal was under no circumstance prepared to join India. What was created, then, in East Bengal, soon to be East Pakistan and afterwards Bangladesh, was a nation deliberately designed to be incapable of supporting itself. At least one half of Pakistan was set up to fail.

Even the poor sop of Chittagong for Calcutta threw Congress into a frenzy. This was predicated on the grounds that the Chittagong Hills had a non-Muslim majority: most of the inhabitants were Buddhist or Animist. On 13 August, two days before the transfer of power, Patel wrote to Mountbatten deploring the probable award of the Chittagong tracts to Pakistan as ‘manifestly unjust’.²⁸ The letter insinuated that not only might the people of Bengal resist the award of Chittagong to Pakistan by force, but that they would be justified in doing so; and that the Indian government would have to support them, both morally and militarily.

Mountbatten was furious with Patel: ‘The one man I had regarded as a real statesman with both feet firmly on the ground, and a man of honour whose word was his bond, had turned out to be as hysterical as the rest.’²⁹ The plain fact was that, even with Chittagong taken into account, India had done much better out of the partition of Bengal than had Pakistan. East Pakistan was also to be deprived on its north side of the high ground claimed by the Muslim League, which would have included the hill station of Darjeeling. There were sound arguments of geography, trade and communications for including most of the north districts between East Bengal and the borders of Bhutan and Nepal in Pakistan. These had been clear during the earlier partition of Bengal in 1905, when they had been included in the east. But for the partition of 1947 such concerns as geography, trade and communications had to be subordinated beneath religious identity, and the religious identity of the northern part of East Bengal was, in the main, non-Muslim. It went to India, creating a tight corridor across the Himalayas between West Bengal and Assam, around the back of East Pakistan.

There was some debate among Mountbatten’s staff over when Radcliffe’s award should be published. Some suggested the earliest possible point, because it would be useful to the police and army. Others thought that, since it was bound to cause trouble, it was best left until 14 August. Mountbatten himself, after initially asking Radcliffe to publish the award on 10 August, ultimately suggested something even more radical than leaving it till the last minute – which was to make the announcement after independence.³⁰ This was technically impossible, for states could not exist without borders.³¹ But Mountbatten argued that independence day itself should not be marred by the inevitable trouble that would follow the award’s publication.³²

Mountbatten saw Radcliffe on 9 August and asked him to postpone the award.³³ Radcliffe refused point blank. He had finished the partitions of Bengal and the Punjab, and had almost finished partitioning Sylhet in Assam; any delay would be politically motivated. After a great deal of viceregal persuasion, he finally conceded that all three awards could be delivered simultaneously on 13 August. Handily, this would coincide with Mountbatten getting on a plane to Karachi. He would not be back in Delhi until the evening of 14 August, and the printing presses would be closed for the national Independence Day celebrations on 15 August. The awards arrived, and were put in a safe, where they would stay, apparently unperused, until 16 August.

Mountbatten’s personal report to London of 16 August deliberately misrepresented these dealings. ‘It was on Tuesday, 12th August, that I was finally informed by Radcliffe that his awards would be ready by noon the following day, just too late for me to see before leaving for Karachi,’ he averred on the official record. Another line in the same report got closer to the truth: ‘It had been obvious all along that, the later we postponed publication, the less would the inevitable odium react upon the British.’³⁴

To Mountbatten’s expressed relief, his two most troublesome foes – Gandhi and Jinnah – were soon to be out of his life. On 9 August, Gandhi arrived in Calcutta. He moved into the mansion of a Muslim widow in the suburb of Belliaghatta with H.S. Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Prime Minister of Bengal, in an attempt to restore communal harmony. On the night of 13 August, a crowd of a thousand Hindu youths threw stones at the house, smashed windows and shouted at Gandhi to move to Park Circus, a Muslim area where Hindu houses lay vacant and ruined.³⁵ ‘Gandhi has announced his decision to spend the rest of his life in Pakistan looking after the minorities,’ Mountbatten reported to London. ‘This will infuriate Jinnah, but will be a great relief to Congress for, as I have said before, his influence is largely negative or even destructive.’³⁶ Verdicts outside the Viceroy’s House were similarly bleak. ‘Mr Gandhi today is a very disappointed man indeed,’ noted the Times of India. ‘He has lived to see his followers transgress his dearest doctrines; his countrymen have indulged in a bloody and inhuman fratricidal war; non-violence, khadi and many another of his principles have been swept away by the swift current of politics. Disillusioned and disappointed, he is today perhaps the only steadfast exponent of what is understood as Gandhism.’³⁷

Jinnah’s parting was more cheerful. On 7 August, he had left Delhi for Karachi, flying in the Viceroy’s silver Dakota with Fatima. He arrived at Mauripur airport, and descended wearing a sherwani and an astrakhan cap. Cheering crowds broke through the police cordon to greet him, and pursued him all the way to his new residence, Government House.³⁸ Four days later, he was formally elected President of the constituent assembly, and delivered an extraordinary speech – so extraordinary, in fact, that it begs the question of what his intentions had ever been in proposing the idea of Pakistan. Some historians have put forward the notion that he may have intended it all along as a bargaining chip; and that, when Mountbatten advanced the date of the transfer of power and made it clear that the British were leaving, the rug was pulled from under his feet.³⁹

Jinnah’s speech on 11 August made it very clear that he intended Pakistan to be a secular state. ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State,’ he declared, guaranteeing equality in Pakistan for all faiths and communities. He went further still: ‘In course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community – because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on, and among Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalees, Madrasis and so on – will vanish,’ he said. ‘Indeed, if you ask me, this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain freedom and independence, and but for this we would have been free peoples long, long ago.’⁴⁰ These were peculiar words from the man who had long hindered independence precisely by reinforcing the division between Hindu and Muslim, and add weight to the theory that Jinnah may have been less serious about Pakistan as a Muslim homeland than as a playing piece. Perhaps, all along, he had pursued not an Islamic state, but rather a non-Hindu-majority state. There was no time to worry about it. On 13 August, an exhausted Radcliffe delivered his award; the last few princely states were still squabbling over better deals; Gandhi, in Calcutta, tried desperately to hold Hindus and Muslims together; and Nehru, in Delhi, began to read reports of new outbreaks of disorder in the Punjab with growing concern. One hundred and fifty people, mostly Sikhs, had been murdered there in the previous twenty-four hours.⁴¹

That afternoon, the Mountbattens flew to Karachi for the first of their independence days. In the evening, the Jinnahs threw a party at Government House. There was a state banquet, at which Fatima Jinnah and the Begum Liaquat Ali Khan teased Mountbatten about the midnight plans for Delhi’s independence ceremonies, and remarked how shocking it was that a government should be in thrall to the pronouncements of astrologers. ‘I refrained from retorting that the whole Karachi programme had had to change because Jinnah had forgotten that it was Ramazan,’ Mountbatten wrote sniffily, ‘and had had to change the lunch party he had himself suggested to a dinner party.’⁴²

On the verandah, the band played an eclectic selection of tunes – from ‘Finlandia’ to ‘A Whistler and His Dog’ – while the guests sipped soft drinks and ate ice cream and cakes. Jinnah, though elegant as ever, was showing the strain of the previous few weeks. The journalist Mildred Talbot, who was present, reported that his ‘appearance so shocked me that little else registered on my mind during the evening. I hadn’t thought it possible but he was even more slender and a worse colour than when we had seen him in Delhi last November. He looked like a walking, talking corpse. The nightmare I had that night was directly attributable to that vivid impression.’⁴³ Despite his appearance, Jinnah was at his warmest that night. He and Mountbatten had their friendliest ever conversation, with Jinnah thanking Mountbatten for the creation of Pakistan and for staying on in India, and imploring him to defend Pakistan’s interests, too.⁴⁴

The next morning, the Mountbattens and the Jinnahs drove to Assembly Hall in a superannuated Rolls Royce that had been borrowed from a prince. Jinnah wore a silk sherwani, while both Mountbattens were in their trademark dazzling white. ‘Mountbatten was looking very dashing,’ remembered one British soldier who was on duty during the parade, ‘with an all-over, almost Chorus Girl tan.’⁴⁵ All four waved and smiled as they drove through Karachi to the piping of the Royal Highlanders. Mountbatten doffed his cap as they passed the bronze statue of Mohandas Gandhi that stood between the secretariat and the chief court, a gift from Karachi’s Hindu merchants, who had threatened civil war within twenty-four hours if it were removed. Earlier that day, someone had put an Muslim fez on it: this had tactfully disappeared by the time the parade passed. When Mountbatten uncovered, Jinnah, too, raised his hand in an acknowledgement of his great rival.⁴⁶

At the assembly hall, the four descended from their car, which was by then so overheated that it burst into flames.⁴⁷ Inside the hall, Mountbatten noticed that there was only one special chair set up. He was still busy thinking that Jinnah ought to have a special chair, too, when Jinnah sat himself down on the throne and indicated that Mountbatten should take one of the humbler seats.⁴⁸ Both men gave gracious speeches, complimenting each other on a carefully chosen list of virtues. Edwina pressed Fatima Jinnah’s hand with affection as Jinnah gave his magisterial address.⁴⁹‘History seems sometimes to move with the infinite slowness of a glacier and sometimes to rush forward in a torrent,’ said Mountbatten when it was his turn to speak. ‘Just now, in this part of the world our united efforts have melted the ice and moved some impediments in the stream, and we are carried onwards in the full flood. There is no time to look back. There is time only to look forward.’⁵⁰ Jinnah read out the goodwill messages Pakistan had so far received. The very first was from one of the parties with the greatest interest in Pakistan’s future, President Harry S. Truman of the United States of America. It was followed by similar good wishes from Egypt, France, Syria and Nepal.⁵¹ The band played ‘God Save the King’ before the meeting broke up. Mildred Talbot cast some doubt on the supposed new spirit of camaraderie between Mountbatten and Jinnah. ‘If it were in truth a “parting between friends” as they both declared,’ she wrote, ‘it was the coldest friendship I have ever seen.’⁵²

After the ceremony, the Mountbattens and the Jinnahs emerged into the sunlight for a state parade. The atmosphere was reported as being one of ‘curious apathy’ – whether this represented a general antipathy towards Pakistan, or just the fact that most of Karachi’s population was Hindu, was not certain.⁵³ Mountbatten had been warned the day before by the Criminal Investigation Department of a plot to throw bombs at Jinnah during the procession. He had tried to persuade Jinnah to cancel it, ‘but he was in his strongest “no” mood’.⁵⁴ Instead, Jinnah advised Mountbatten not to join him in the open car; but the Viceroy would not baulk before Jinnah, and, in any case, he thought his presence might guard against any attempt by Hindus or Sikhs. ‘I knew that no one in that crowd would want to risk shooting me!’⁵⁵ The parade went on. ‘I won’t pretend I wasn’t scared,’ Mountbatten later admitted. ‘I was, and did my best not to show it, but the new Governor-General of Pakistan did not seem in the least bit frightened. I was deeply impressed by his calm courage and high sense of duty.’ The car trundled along, Mountbatten unable to relax until the view of Government House drew close and they arrived back through the gates. ‘Never had my feelings been warmer to the man with whom I shared this traumatic experience’, he wrote.

Jinnah flashed Mountbatten a grin, leaned forward to touch him on the knee and said, ‘Thank God I’ve brought you back alive.’ Mountbatten’s tension got the better of his etiquette. ‘You brought me back alive?’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s I who brought you back alive.’⁵⁶ But the important thing, as he soon afterwards admitted, was that they had both come back alive – and that there was a new cordiality in the air between the Governors General of India and Pakistan. Before the Mountbattens climbed on to their aeroplane at midday, Fatima Jinnah bid them farewell. To Edwina’s surprise, she kissed her goodbye affectionately on both cheeks.⁵⁷ But the cheerful mood sobered as the Viceroy’s plane flew over the Punjab boundaries on its way back to Delhi, the large fires of villages aflame clearly visible from the air.⁵⁸ In the villages of the Punjab, the beginnings of the partition disaster were already underway.

‘My warmest thanks to you on this day which sees the successful achievement of a task of an unexampled difficulty’, Attlee cabled to Mountbatten that night – adding a special thanks to Edwina. Mountbatten replied delightedly that it was ‘the most encouraging telegram I have ever received’.⁵⁹ He communicated Attlee’s thanks to Edwina in a heartfelt letter, perhaps intending to rebuild the relationship after the storms of the previous weeks: ‘surely no husband in history has had the proud privilege of transmitting a telegram of appreciation from the Prime Minister to his wife’, he wrote. ‘I’m proud to be that exception.’ He concluded with an appreciation of his own: ‘Thank you, my pet, with all my heart.’⁶⁰

In Delhi, the bunting was going up, and a joyful atmosphere prevailed. On every street, workmen climbed scaffolding to repaint walls and hang banners, wiring thousands of orange, white and green lightbulbs around trees and fences, swagging them across the roads. In the great shopping arcades of Connaught Circus, the national flag hung in every window. Drapers filled their windows with bales of silk in the national colours; restaurants offered special independence menus; cinemas proclaimed free shows of Indian movies for students and children. Gentlemen’s outfitters sold out of sherwanis: according to the Times of India, ‘An Indian dressed in a western suit is already beginning to feel self-conscious.’

In the cramped, ancient alleys of Old Delhi, steam billowed forth from vats of boiling milk, filling the air with the delicate scents of rosewater and cardamom as the city’s confectioners toiled to meet endless orders for sweets. The heavy rationing of sugar was not permitted to spoil the fun: ‘the blackmarketeer is having the time of his life, combining patriotism with business.’⁶¹ Nehru gave a splendid speech to a huge crowd, undiminished by the sheeting monsoon rain. ‘I felt happy at coming into close personal contact with great crowds again’, he wrote to his sister, Nan, who had left for her ambassadorial posting in Moscow a few days before. ‘I still seem to appeal to them.’⁶² He was thrilled to see the flags unfurling all over the capital, stamping a new Indian identity on the British city. ‘You do think they’re really going, don’t you,’ a respected political analyst asked an American journalist; ‘this is not just a subterfuge so they can come back when their crisis at home is over?’⁶³ But they were going. As the chimes sounded and the unexpected blast from a conch shell startled the delegates in the chamber of the Constituent Assembly, a nation that had struggled for so many years, and sacrificed so much, was freed at last from the shackles of Empire.

Yes, Britain was finally free.

By the following morning the world had turned once, and changed for ever. India and Pakistan were dominions. Britain had surrendered the keystone of its Empire. And yet at 8.30 sharp the Mountbattens were once again sitting on gold and scarlet thrones in New Delhi’s majestic Durbar Hall. Lord Mountbatten, resplendent in a uniform, was saluted by trumpet fanfares from the upper gallery. Meanwhile, according to Mildred Talbot: ‘Probably every woman present marveled at the cool appearance of Lady Mountbatten who, in the midst of Delhi’s indescribable summer heat, was stunning in gold lamé, arm-length gloves, and the appropriate jewelry including a gold tiara.’⁶⁴

This almost monarchical ceremony installed Mountbatten in his new democratic role as Governor General of India. For, though there had been a revolution, the Empire had not been overthrown. The British had got away with their dignity intact, and their majesty undimmed. The Mountbattens drove to the Council House for an inaugural meeting, at which Lord Mountbatten read out a message to India from his cousin, King George VI. ‘Freedom-loving people everywhere will wish to share in your celebrations,’ the King had written, ‘for with this transfer of power by consent comes the fulfilment of a great democratic ideal to which the British and Indian peoples alike are firmly dedicated.’⁶⁵ An overdue retreat had been turned into a great British victory.

No cynicism blighted the mass celebrations that day. While the dignitaries of the Constituent Assembly delivered their speeches in the Council Chamber, the Indian tricolour was raised above the building for the first time. For a few minutes, there was silence along the grand avenue of Kingsway, as the hundreds of thousands assembled (some on roofs, or hanging out of trees) took in the long-wished-for sight. But a gradual rumbling soon swelled into a cheer, which was renewed as Nehru came out on to the balcony. When the Mountbattens emerged, another shout of approval went up. Before he and his wife got into their state coach, Lord Mountbatten, knowing exactly how to serve the moment, turned and saluted both his friend Nehru and the Indian flag.

After lunch and a quick change, the Mountbattens were driven in a parade down the whole length of Kingsway to India Gate, through streets so packed with crowds that they were unable to get out of their coach. In the blistering heat of that afternoon, Princes’ Park was crammed with hundreds of thousands of free Indians. The park was a monument to royalty, with a colossal statue of King George V in a pagoda at the centre, and the palaces of five of India’s most magnificent princes arranged in a circle around it: the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Gaekwar of Baroda, and the Maharajas of Patiala, Bikaner and Jaipur. On Independence Day, it brimmed with ordinary people. Where 30,000 had been expected, at least ten times that number turned up: some estimates said as many as a million. An instant democracy blossomed, as peasant crowds stormed the grandstand which had been reserved for dignitaries, and cheerfully occupied it six to a chair.⁶⁶ The crush was such that people could not lift a foot for fear they would never get it back to the ground. The Mountbattens’ daughter Pamela remembered that ‘it was raining babies! Because lots of women had brought their babies with them and they were being crushed. So they threw them up in the air in despair of having these babies crushed, and you just sort of caught a baby as it came down.’⁶⁷ Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, saw one woman decide that her baby was probably safer with Lady Mountbatten, and pass it over. Edwina held the infant tightly in her arms.⁶⁸

Pamela was with Vallabhbhai Patel’s daughter, Maniben. Maniben was a tiny, fragile-looking woman, and Pamela began to fear seriously for her life as the crowd squeezed tighter. They were rescued by Nehru, who created a distraction by lifting off a nearby Indian’s topee and bashing another on the head with it. He climbed up on to a man’s shoulders, and surfed forwards over the shoulders of the crowd towards them. ‘Panditji came galloping over people, wearing sandals,’ Pamela remembered. Nehru pulled them towards the flag platform, which would provide something to stand against.

‘Where do I put my feet?’ asked Pamela. ‘I cannot walk on people.’

‘Of course you can walk on people,’ he replied. ‘Nobody will mind.’ Pamela indicated her high-heeled shoes, at which he added, ‘Well, take those shoes off then nobody will mind.’

‘And we walked over human bodies the whole way,’ remembered Pamela, ‘and the extraordinary thing about that day was that nobody did mind.’⁶⁹

Taken aback, Mountbatten and Nehru decided to abandon the carefully planned programme of ceremonial. Instead, the Governor General simply shouted from his carriage that the new Indian flag should be hoisted up, as he pulled fainting children out of the crowd and into safety. The new Indian tricolour unfurled to a chorus of joyous uproar. (The British flag was not hauled down first. Mountbatten had seen to it that all Union Jacks had been removed the night before.)⁷⁰ As a salute was fired, a rainbow broke across the sky – a detail that one would dismiss as fanciful, were it not for the fact that so many observers insisted they had seen it.⁷¹ Mountbatten pointed up at this well-timed natural phenomenon, and the crowd went wild again. ‘I had never noticed how closely a rainbow could resemble the new Dominion flag of saffron, white and green,’ he mused in his report to the British government the next day.⁷²

The rest of the day was taken up with parties, speeches and almost impossible progressions through the undiminishing throngs in the streets. The Mountbattens’ coach was besieged as it returned to the Viceroy’s House (renamed Government House for the new era). As the coach trawled through the crowds, it picked up several stowaways. Four Indian ladies and their children crammed inside next to the Mountbattens, along with the Polish wife of a British officer. An Indian press photographer clung to the back. Nehru himself, unable to get to his car, sat cross-legged on the hood. The photographer was particularly struck by the people’s reaction to the Mountbattens, as they shouted out, ‘Pandit Mountbatten ki jai!’ (‘Hail Mountbatten!’) The next day, he was moved to tell Mountbatten’s press attaché: ‘At last, after two hundred years, Britain has conquered India.’⁷³