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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.

THREE
‘Leave India to God’

London, January 1947

‘Look,’ said Louis Mountbatten, ‘a terrible thing has happened.’

Two men were alone in the intimacy of a Buckingham Palace sitting-room. At times like this, there was never any formality between them. They sat side by side like a couple of old school friends chatting as they sipped their tea. Today, however, a special nuance enlivened Mountbatten’s conversational tone. His cousin King George VI represented his court of last appeal, the last faint hope that he might somehow avoid the stigma of becoming the man to cut Britain’s ties with India. The King was after all Emperor of India and entitled to the final word on his appointment as Viceroy. It was not to be the word the young admiral wished to hear.

‘I know,’ replied the King with his shy smile, ‘the Prime Minister’s already been to see me and I’ve agreed.’

‘You’ve agreed?’ asked Mountbatten. ‘Have you really thought it over?’

‘Oh, yes,’ replied the King quite cheerfully. ‘I’ve thought it over carefully.’

‘Look,’ said Mountbatten. ‘This is very dangerous. Nobody can foresee any way of finding an agreement out there. It’s almost impossible to find one. I’m your cousin. If I go out there and make the most deplorable mess, it will reflect very badly on you.’

‘Ah,’ said the sovereign, ‘but think how well it will reflect on the monarchy if you succeed.’

‘Well,’ sighed Mountbatten, sinking back into his chair, ‘that’s very optimistic of you.’

He could never sit there in that little salon without remembering another figure who used to sit in the chair across from his, another cousin, his closest friend, who had stood beside him on his wedding day at St Margaret’s, Westminster, the man who should have been King, David, Prince of Wales. From early boyhood, they had been close. When in 1936, as Edward VIII, David had abdicated the throne for which he had been trained because he was not prepared to rule without the woman he loved, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten had haunted the corridors of his palace, the King’s constant solace and companion.

How ironic, Mountbatten thought. It was as David’s ADC that he had first set foot on the land he was now to liberate. It was 17 November 1921. India, the young Mountbatten had noted in his diary that night, ‘is the country one had always heard about, dreamt about, read about.’ Nothing on that extraordinary royal tour would disappoint his youthful expectations. The Raj was at its zenith then, and no attention was too lavish, no occasion too grand for the heir to the imperial throne, the Shahzada Sahib, and his party. They travelled in the white and gold viceregal train, their journey a round of parades, polo games, tiger hunts, moonlit rides on elephants, banquets and receptions of unsurpassed elegance proffered by the crown’s staunchest allies, the Indian princes. Leaving, Mountbatten thought, ‘India is the most marvellous country and the Viceroy has the most marvellous job in the world.’

Now, with the confirming nod of another cousin, that ‘marvellous job’ was his.

A brief silence filled the Buckingham Palace sitting-room. With it, Louis Mountbatten sensed a shift in his cousin’s mood.

‘It’s too bad,’ the King said, a melancholy undertone to his voice, ‘I always wanted to come out to see you in Southeast Asia when you were fighting there, and then go to India, but Winston stopped it. I’d hoped at least to go out to India after the war. Now I’m afraid I shan’t be able to.’

t’s sad,’ he continued, ‘I’ve been crowned Emperor of India without ever having gone to India and now I shall lose the title from here in this palace in London.’

Indeed, George VI would die without ever setting foot on that fabulous land. There would never be a tiger hunt for him, no parade of elephants jangling past in silver and gold, no line of bejewelled maharajas bowing to his person.

His had been the crumbs of the Victorian table, a reign unexpected in its origins, conceived and matured in the shadows of war, now to be accomplished in the austerity of a post-war, Socialist England. On the May morning in 1937 when the Archbishop of Canterbury had pronounced Prince Albert, Duke of York, George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, 16 million of the 52 million square miles of land surface of the globe had been linked by one tie or another to his crown.

The central historic achievement of George VI’s reign would be the melancholy task foretold by the presence of his cousin in his sitting-room. He would be remembered by history as the monarch who had reigned over the dismemberment of the British Empire. Crowned King Emperor of an Empire that exceeded the most extravagant designs of Rome, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Caliphs or Napoleon, he would die the sovereign of an island kingdom on its way to becoming just another European nation.

‘I know I’ve got to take the “I” out of GRI. I’ve got to give up being King Emperor,’ the monarch noted, ‘but I would be profoundly saddened if all the links with India were severed.’

George VI knew perfectly well that the great imperial dream had faded. But if it had to disappear, how sad it would be if some of its achievements and glories could not survive it, if what it had represented could not find an expression in some new form more compatible with a modern age.

‘It would be a pity,’ he observed, ‘if an independent India were to turn its back on the Commonwealth.’

The Commonwealth could indeed provide a framework in which George VI’s hopes might be realized. It could become a multi-racial assembly of independent nations with Britain, prima inter pares, at its core. Bound by common traditions, a common past, common symbolic ties to his crown, the Commonwealth could exercise great influence in world affairs. Britain, at the hub of such a body, would still speak in the councils of the world with an echo of that imperial voice that had once been hers. London might still be London; cultural, spiritual, financial and mercantile centre for much of the world. The imperial substance would have disappeared, but a shadow would remain to differentiate George VI’s island kingdom from those other nations across the English Channel.

If that ideal was to be realized, it was essential India remain within the Commonwealth. If India refused to join, the Afro-Asian nations which in their turn would accede to independence in the years to come would almost certainly follow her example. That would condemn the Commonwealth to become just a grouping of the Empire’s white dominions.

Influenced by a long anti-imperial tradition however, George VI’s Prime Minister and the Labour Party did not share the King’s inspiration. Attlee had not even told Mountbatten he was to make an effort to keep India in the Commonwealth.

George VI, as a constitutional monarch, could do virtually nothing to further his hopes. His cousin, however, could and Louis Mountbatten ardently shared the King’s aspirations. No member of the royal family had travelled as extensively in the old Empire as he had. His intellect had understood and accepted its imminent demise; his heart ached at the thought.

Sitting there in the Buckingham Palace sitting-room, Victoria’s two great-grandsons reached a private decision. Louis Mountbatten would become the agent of their common aspiration for the Commonwealth’s future.

In a few days, Mountbatten would insist that Attlee include in his terms of reference a specific injunction to maintain an independent India, united or divided, inside the Commonwealth if at all possible. In the weeks ahead, there could be no task to which India’s new Viceroy would devote more thought, more persuasiveness, more cunning than that of maintaining a link between India and his cousin’s crown.

In a sense, no one might seem more naturally destined to occupy the majestic office of Viceroy of India than Louis Mountbatten. His first public gesture had occurred during his christening when, with a wave of his infant fist, he had knocked the spectacles from the bridge of his great-grandmother’s imperial nose.

His family’s lineage, with one passage through the female line, went back to the Emperor Charlemagne. He was, or had been, related by blood or marriage to Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Ferdinand I of Rumania, Gustav VI of Sweden, Constantine I of Greece, Haakon VII of Norway and Alexander I of Yugoslavia. For Louis Mountbatten, the crises of Europe had been family problems.

Thrones, however, had been in increasingly short supply by the time Mountbatten was eighteen at the end of the First World War. The fourth child of Victoria’s favourite granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse, and Prince Louis of Battenberg, her cousin, had had to savour the royal existence at second hand, playing out the summers of his youth in the palaces of his more favoured cousins. The memories of those idyllic summers remained deeply etched in his memory: tea parties on the lawns of Windsor Castle at which every guest might have worn a crown; cruises on the yacht of the Tsar; rides through the forests around Saint Petersburg with his haemophiliac cousin, the Tsarevitch, and the Tsarevitch’s sister, the Grand Duchess Marie, with whom he fell in love.

With that background, Mountbatten could have enjoyed a modest income, token service under the crown; the pleasant existence of a handsome embellishment to the ceremonials of a declining caste. He had chosen quite a different course, however, and he stood this winter morning at the pinnacle of a remarkable career.

Mountbatten had just become 43 when, in the autumn of 1943, Winston Churchill, searching for ‘a young and vigorous mind’, had appointed him Supreme Allied Commander Southeast Asia. The authority and responsibility that command placed on his youthful shoulders had only one counterpart, the Supreme Allied Command of Dwight Eisenhower. One hundred and twenty-eight million people across a vast sweep of Asia fell under his charge. It was a command which at the time it was formed, he would later recall, had had ‘no victories and no priorities, only terrible morale, a terrible climate, a terrible foe and terrible defeats’.

Many of his subordinates were twenty years and three or four ranks his senior. Some tended to look on him as a playboy who used his royal connection to slip out of his dinner jacket into a naval uniform and temporarily abandon the dance floor of the Café de Paris for the battlefield.

He restored his men’s morale with personal tours to the front; asserted his authority over his generals by forcing them to fight through Burma’s terrible monsoon rains; cajoled, bullied and charmed every ounce of supplies he could get from his superiors in London and Washington.

By 1945, his once disorganized and demoralized command had won the greatest land victory ever wrought over a Japanese Army. Only the dropping of the atomic bomb prevented him from carrying out his grand design, Operation Zipper’, the landing of 250,000 men from ports 2000 miles away on the Malay Peninsula, an amphibious operation surpassed in size only by the Normandy landing.

As a boy, Mountbatten had chosen a naval officer’s career to emulate his father who had left his native Germany at fourteen and risen to the post of First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy. Mountbatten had barely begun his studies as a cadet, however, when tragedy shattered his adored father’s career. He was forced to resign by the wave of anti-German hysteria which swept Britain after the outbreak of World War I. His heartbroken father changed his family name from Battenberg to Mountbatten at King George V’s request and was created Marquess of Milford Haven. The First Sea Lord’s equally affected son vowed to fill one day the post from which an unjust outcry had driven his father.

During the long years between the wars, however, his career had followed the slow, unspectacular path of a peacetime officer. It was in other, less martial fields that the young Mountbatten had made his impression on the public. With his charm, his remarkable good looks, his infectious gaiety, he was one of the darlings of Britain’s penny press, catering to a world desperate for glamour after the horrors of war. His marriage to Edwina Ashley, a beautiful and wealthy heiress, with the Prince of Wales as his best man, was the social event of 1922.

Rare were the Sunday papers over the next years that did not contain a photograph or some mention of Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, the Mountbattens at the theatre with Noël Coward, the Mountbattens at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, dashing young Lord Louis water-skiing in the Mediterranean or receiving a trophy won playing polo.

They constituted an image Mountbatten never denied; he revelled in every dance, party and polo match. But beneath that public image there was another figure of which the public was unaware. It emerged when the dancing was over.

The glamorous young man had not forgotten his boyhood vow. Mountbatten was an intensely serious, ambitious, and dedicated naval officer. He possessed an awesome capacity for work, a trait which would leave his subordinates gasping all his life. Convinced that future warfare would be patterned by the dictates of science and won by superior communications, Mountbatten eschewed the more social career of a deck officer to study signals.

He came out top of the Navy Higher Wireless Course in 1927, then sat down to write the first comprehensive manual for all the wireless sets used by the Navy. He was fascinated by the fast-expanding horizons of technology and plunged himself into the study of physics, electricity and communications in every form. New techniques, new ideas, were his passions and his playthings.

He obtained for the Royal Navy the works of a brilliant French rocketry expert, Robert Esnault Pelterie. Their pages gave Britain an eerily accurate forecast of the V-bomb, guided missiles and even man’s first flight to the moon. In Switzerland, he ferreted out a fast-firing anti-aircraft gun designed to stop the Stuka dive bomber; then spent months forcing the reluctant Royal Navy to adopt it.

He had followed the rise of Hitler and German rearmament with growing apprehension. He had also watched with pained but perceptive eyes the evolution of the society that had driven his beloved uncle Nicholas II from the throne of the Tsars. Increasingly, as the thirties wore on, Mountbatten and his wife spent less and less time on the dance floor, and more and more in a crusade to awaken friends and politicians to the conflict both saw was coming.

On 25 August 1939, a proud Mountbatten took command of a newly commissioned destroyer, HMS Kelly. A few hours later the radio announced Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact. The Kelly’s captain understood the import of the announcement immediately. Mountbatten ordered his crew to work day and night to reduce the three weeks needed to ready the ship for sea.

Nine days later, when war broke out, the captain of the Kelly was slung over the ship’s side in a pair of dirty overalls, sloshing paint on her hull along with his able seamen. The next day, however, the Kelly was in action against a German submarine.

‘I will never give the order “Abandon ship”,’ Mountbatten promised his crew. ‘The only way we will ever leave this ship is if she sinks under our feet.’

The Kelly escorted convoys through the channel, hunted U-boats in the North Sea, dashed through fog and German bombers to help rescue six thousand survivors of the Narvik expedition at the head of the Namsos Fiord in Norway. Her stern was damaged at the mouth of the Tyne and her boiler room devastated by a torpedo in the North Sea. Ordered to scuttle, Mountbatten refused, spent a night alone on the drifting wreck, then, with eighteen volunteers, brought her home under tow.

A year later, in May 1941, off Crete, the Kelly’s luck ran out. She took a bomb in her magazine and went down in minutes. Faithful to his vow, Mountbatten stayed on her bridge until she rolled over, then fought his way to the surface. For hours, he held the oil-spattered survivors around a single life raft, leading them in singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ while German planes strafed them. Mountbatten won the DSO for his exploits on the Kelly and the ship a bit of immortality in the film In Which We Serve, made by Mountbatten’s friend Noël Coward.

Five months later, Churchill, searching for a bold young officer to head Combined Operations, the commando force created to develop the tactics and technology that would eventually bring the Allies back to the continent, called on Mountbatten. The assignment proved ideal for his blend of dash and scientific curiosity. Vowing he was a man who would never say no to an idea, he opened his command to a parade of inventors, scientists, technicians, geniuses and mountebanks. Some of their schemes, like an iceberg composed of frozen sea water mixed with five per cent wood pulp to serve as a floating and unsinkable airfield, were wild fantasies. But they also produced Pluto, the underwater trans-channel pipeline, the Mulberry artificial harbours and the landing and rocket craft designs that made the Normandy invasion possible. For their leader, they ultimately produced his extraordinary elevation to Supreme Command of South-east Asia at the age of 43.

Now preparing to take on the most challenging task of his career, Mountbatten was at the peak of his physical and intellectual powers. The war at sea and high command had given him a capacity for quick decision and brought out his natural talent for leadership. He was not a philosopher or an abstract thinker, but he possessed an incisive, analytical mind honed by a lifetime of hard work. He had none of the Anglo-Saxon affection for the role of the good loser. He believed in winning. As a young officer, his crews had once swept the field in a navy regatta because he had taught them an improved rowing technique. Criticized later for the style he’d introduced, he had acidly observed that he thought the important thing was ‘crossing the finishing line first’.

His youthful gaiety had matured into an extraordinary charm and a remarkable facility for bringing people together. ‘Mountbatten’, remarked a man who was not one of his admirers, ‘could charm a vulture off a corpse if he set his mind to it.’

Above all, Mountbatten was endowed with an endless reservoir of self-confidence, a quality his detractors preferred to label conceit. When Churchill had offered him his Asian command, he had asked for 24 hours to ponder the offer.

‘Why,’ snarled Churchill, ‘don’t you think you can do it?’

‘Sir,’ replied Mountbatten, ‘I suffer from the congenital weakness of believing I can do anything.’

Victoria’s great-grandson would need every bit of that self-confidence in the weeks ahead.