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Midway through the fast, Gandhi began to sink. Unyielding, the British started discreet preparations for his death. Two Brahmin priests were brought to the prison and held in readiness to officiate at the cremation. Under the cover of darkness the sandalwood for his funeral pyre was secretly taken into the palace. Everyone was ready for his death except the 74-year-old Gandhi. He had weighed less than 110 pounds when the fast began. Yet 21 days on a diet of water mixed with salt and an occasional drop of lemon and moosambi juice couldn’t kill his towering spirit. He survived his self-imposed ordeal.
Another one awaited him, however. The sandalwood that had been destined for his cremation would feed the flames of another funeral pyre, his wife’s. On 22 February 1944 the woman he had married as an illiterate, thirteen-year-old child died, her head resting in Gandhi’s lap. Gandhi had not been prepared to disavow a principle to save her life. He believed in nature cures and he also believed that to administer medicine by hypodermic needle performed a violent action upon the human body. Aware that his wife was dying from acute bronchitis, the British flew a supply of rare and precious penicillin to the prison. But at the last minute, when Gandhi learned the drug which could have saved his dying wife would have to be administered intravenously, he had refused her doctors permission to give it to her.
After her death, Gandhi’s own health failed rapidly. He contracted malaria, hookworm and amoebic dysentery. In his weakened and depressed state, it was clear he would not survive long. A reluctant Churchill was finally prevailed on to release him so he would not die in a British jail.
He was not going to die in a British India, either. Ensconced in a hut on the beachfront estate of a wealthy supporter near Bombay, Gandhi slowly recovered his health. As he did so, Churchill, who had not bothered to reply to his Viceroy’s urgent cables on India’s growing famine, sent New Delhi a petulant cable. Why, he asked, hadn’t Gandhi died yet?
A few days later, Gandhi’s host entered his hut to find one of the Mahatma’s followers standing on his head, another in transcendental meditation, a third asleep on the floor and the Mahatma himself on his open toilet staring raptly into space.
He burst into gales of laughter. Why, Gandhi asked as he emerged from his toilet, was he laughing?
‘Ah Bapu,’ laughed his host, ‘look at this room: one man standing on his head, another meditating, a third sleeping, you on your toilet – and these are the people who are going to make India free!’
Northolt Airport, 20 March 1947
The aircraft waited in the early morning light on the runway of Northolt airport where, two and a half months earlier, Louis Mountbatten had landed on New Year’s Day. Charles Smith, his valet, had already stowed on board the Mountbattens’ personal luggage, 66 pieces, a collection so complete it included a set of silver ashtrays with the new Viceroy’s family crest. His wife had casually placed in the overhead rack an old shoe-box. Finding it would cause a moment of panic on the flight out. Packed inside was a family heirloom, a diamond tiara Lady Mountbatten would wear when she was proclaimed Vicereine.
Stowed away also were all the documents, the briefs, the position papers the new Viceroy and his staff would have to guide them in the months ahead. The most important among them covered only two pages and was signed by Clement Attlee. It set out the terms of Mountbatten’s mission. No Viceroy had ever received a mandate like it. Mountbatten had, for all practical purposes, written it himself. Its terms were clear and simple. He was to make every effort to arrange for the transfer of British sovereignty in India to a single, independent nation within the Commonwealth by 30 June 1948. As a guide he was to follow as far as possible a plan formulated eight months earlier by a cabinet mission sent to New Delhi under the chairmanship of Sir Stafford Cripps. It proposed, as a compromise with the Moslem demand for Pakistan, a federated India with a weak central government. There was, however, no question of forcing an agreement out of India’s warring politicians. If by 1 October, six months after taking power, Mountbatten saw no way of getting them to agree on a plan for a united India, then he was to recommend his alternative solution to India’s dilemma.
As his York MW 102* went through its final checks, Mountbatten paced the tarmac alongside with two of his old wartime comrades who were going off to India with him. Capt. Ronald Brockman, head of his personal staff, and Lt-Commander Peter Howes, his senior ADC. On how many trips, Brockman thought, had that converted Lancaster bomber carried Mountbatten to front-line posts in the jungles of Burma, to the great conferences of the war. Beside him, the usually ebullient Admiral was moody and introspective. The crewman announced the flight was ready.
‘Well,’ sighed Mountbatten, ‘we’re off to India. I don’t want to go. They don’t want me out there. We’ll probably come home with bullets in our backs.’
The three men mounted the aircraft. The engines came to life. The York fled down the runway, cut across the sun and pointed east to India to close the great adventure Capt. Hawkins had begun by sailing east in his galleon the Hector, three and a half centuries earlier.
* The third was Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. He admired Tolstoy’s insistence on applying his moral principles in his daily life. The two men held remarkably similar views on non-violence, education, diet, industrialization, and corresponded briefly before Tolstoy’s death.
* Dyer was reprimanded for his actions and asked to resign from the army. He was, however, allowed to retain full pension benefits and other rights due him. His demonstration was applauded by most of the British in India. In clubs all across the country, his admiring countrymen took up a collection on his behalf, amassing the then prodigious sum of £26,000 to ease the rigours of his premature retirement.
* There would be no more immediate beneficiary of the pact than a young Sikh student named Gurcharan Singh. Arms bound behind his back, Gurcharan Singh was walking that morning down a long corridor in Lahore prison towards a courtyard where a hangman waited to put an end to his life.
As Gurcharan Singh came within sight of the gallows tree, he heard footsteps running down the corridor behind him. He glanced back and saw his English jailer, a major named Martin, running after his party waving a blue piece of paper.
‘Congratulations!’ Martin shouted.
Gurcharan Singh almost fainted. ‘You British are impossible,’ he gasped, ‘you’re hanging me and you want to congratulate me on it.’
No, the flustered Martin explained, all executions had been suspended because of the pact just signed in Delhi. Several weeks later, Gurcharan Singh was freed. His first, grateful gesture was a pilgrimage to Gandhi’s ashram. There the ardent student revolutionary fell under the Mahatma’s spell and vowed to follow in Gandhi’s footsteps. Ironically it was he who one day would hold in his arms the dying figure of the leader who had saved his life.
* Cripps did not leave immediately. He nearly succeeded in getting the Congress leadership to break with the Mahatma. The issue was the degree to which they would be allowed to supervise India’s war efforts. Once again, it was Churchill who prevented an agreement being reached.
* Mountbatten was particularly attached to the converted Lancaster bomber. It had flown him on countless missions during his days as Supreme Commander South-East Asia. He had fitted it out with bunks for a relief crew which would shorten the time required for the London-Delhi journey by eliminating crews’ rest stops on the ground.
The plane, in fact very nearly kept him from going to India at all. One day, Mountbatten happened to be in his London office when an RAF Group Captain called his ADC, Lt-Col. Peter Howes, to advise him that the York MW 102 would not be available for use by the new Viceroy. Mountbatten took the phone from his ADC’s hands.
‘Group Captain,’ he said, ‘I wish to thank you.’
‘Thank me?’ said the perplexed officer.
‘Yes,’ continued Mountbatten. ‘You see when I accepted this appointment, I stipulated as one of my conditions that I should be allowed to take the York to Delhi with me. You tell me I cannot have this aircraft and I am most grateful to you. I did not want to be Viceroy of India and now you’ve saved me from the job.’
A stunned silence settled over the room as he hung up. Within minutes he had his plane.
FOUR
A Last Tattoo for the Dying Raj
Penitent’s Progress III
Nothing could stop him. Fired by his unquenchable spirit, the old man drove his bare and aching feet from village to village, applying the balm of his love to India’s sores. Slowly, the wounds began to heal. In the wake of Gandhi’s wan and bent silhouette, the passions cooled. Timidly, uncertainly, peace spread its mantle over the blood-drenched marshes of Noakhali.
Its return did not end Gandhi’s suffering, however. A private drama had accompanied him on his march along those hate-filled footpaths, a drama whose dimensions would eventually scandalize some of his oldest associates, alarm millions of Indians, and baffle the historians who would one day attempt to comprehend all the facets of Mohandas Gandhi’s complex character. It would also produce one of the gravest personal crises in the life of the 77-year-old man who was the conscience of India.
Yet its roots were in no way sunk in the great political struggle of which he’d been the principal figure for a quarter of a century. They lay in that force which Gandhi had struggled to sublimate and control for forty years, sex. Its locus was a nineteen-year-old girl, Gandhi’s great-niece, Manu. Manu had been raised by Gandhi and his wife as their own granddaughter. She had nursed Kasturbai Gandhi on her deathbed and, before dying, Kasturbai had confided her to her husband’s care.
‘I’ve been a father to many,’ Gandhi promised the girl, ‘to you I am a mother.’ He fussed over her like a mother, supervising her dress, her diet, her education, her religious training. The problem which arose in Noakhali had begun in a conversation between them just before Gandhi set out on his pilgrimage. With the shyness of a young girl confessing something to her mother, Manu had admitted to Gandhi she had never felt the sexual impulses normal in a girl of her age.
To Gandhi, with his convoluted philosophy of sex, her words had special importance. Since he had sworn his own vow of chastity, Gandhi had maintained that sexual continence was the most important discipline his truly non-violent followers, male and female, had to master. His ideal non-violent army would be composed of sexless soldiers because otherwise, Gandhi feared, their moral strength would desert them at a critical moment.
Gandhi saw in Manu’s words the chance to make of her the perfect female votary. ‘If out of India’s millions of daughters, I can train even one into an ideal woman by becoming an ideal mother to you,’ he told her, ‘I shall have rendered a unique service to womankind.’ But first, he felt he had to be sure she was telling the truth. Only his closest collaborators were accompanying him in Noakhali, he informed her, but she would be welcome provided she submitted to his discipline and went through the test to which he meant to subject her.
They would, he decreed, share each night the crude straw pallet which passed for his bed. He regarded himself as a mother; she had said she found nothing but a mother’s love in him. If they were both truthful, if he remained firm in his ancient vow of chastity and she had never known sexual arousal, then they would be able to lie together in the innocence of a mother and daughter. If one of them was not being truthful, they would soon discover it.
If, however, Manu was being truthful then, Gandhi believed, she would flourish under his close and constant supervision. His own sexless state would stifle any residual desire still lurking in her. Pygmalion-like, a transformation would come over her. She would develop clarity of thought and firmness of speech. A new spirit would suffuse the girl, giving her a pure, crystalline devotion to the great task which awaited her.
Manu had accepted and her lithe figure had followed Gandhi’s traces across the swamp-lands of Noakhali. As Gandhi had known it would, his decision had immediately provoked the consternation of his little party.
‘They think all this is a sign of infatuation on my part,’ he told Manu after a few nights together. ‘I laugh at their ignorance. They do not understand.’
Very few people would. Only the purest of Gandhi’s followers would be able to follow the complex reasoning behind this latest manifestation of a great spiritual struggle, which for Gandhi, went all the way back to that evening in South Africa in 1906 when he had announced to his wife his decision to take the vow of Brahmacharya, chastity. In swearing that pledge,* Gandhi was setting out on a path almost as old as Hinduism itself. For countless centuries, a Hindu’s route to self-realization had passed by the sublimation of that vital force responsible for the creation of life. Only by forcing his sexual energy inward to fuel the furnace of his spiritual force, the Hindu ancients maintained, could a man achieve the spiritual intensity necessary to self-realization.
To aid men sworn to lead the chaste life, those Hindu sages had laid down a code of conduct for Brahmacharya called the nine-fold wall of protection. A true Brahmachari was not supposed to live among women, animals or eunuchs. He was not allowed to sit on the same mat with a woman or even gaze upon any part of a woman’s body. He was counselled to avoid the sensual blandishments of a hot bath, an oily massage or the alleged aphrodisiac properties of milk, curds, ghee or fatty foods.
Gandhi had not become chaste so as to live in a Himalayan cave, however. That kind of chastity involved little self-discipline or moral merit, he maintained. He had taken his vow because he firmly believed the sublimation of his sexual energies would give him the moral and spiritual power to accomplish his mission. His kind of Brahmachari was a man who had so suppressed his sexual urge that he could move normally in the society of women without feeling any sexual desire in himself or arousing it in them. A Brahmachari, he wrote, ‘does not flee the company of women’, because for him ‘the distinction between man and woman almost disappears’.
The real Brahmachari’s ‘sexual organs will begin to look different’, Gandhi declared. ‘They remain as mere symbols of his sex and his sexual secretions are sublimated into a vital force pervading his whole being.’ The perfect Brahmachari in Gandhi’s mind was a man who could ‘lie by the side even of a Venus in all her naked beauty, without being physically or mentally disturbed’.
It was an extraordinary ideal and Gandhi’s fight to attain it was doubly difficult because the sex drive he was struggling to suppress had been strongly and deeply rooted. For years after taking his vow, Gandhi experimented with different diets, looking for one which would have the slightest possible impact on his sexual organs. While thousands of Indians sought out exotic foods to stimulate their desires, Gandhi spurned in turn spices, green vegetables, certain fruits, in his efforts to stifle his.
Thirty years of discipline, prayer and spiritual exercise were needed before Gandhi reached the point at which he felt he had rooted out all sexual desire from his mind and body. His confidence in his achievement was shattered one night in Bombay in 1936, in what he referred to as ‘my darkest hour’. That night, at the age of 67, thirty years after he’d sworn his Brahmachari’s vow, Gandhi awoke from a dream with what would have been to most men of that age a source of some satisfaction, but was to Gandhi a calamity, an erection. There, quivering between his loins, was proof he had still not reached the ideal towards which he’d been striving for three decades. Gandhi was so overwhelmed by anguish at ‘this frightful experience’, that he swore a vow of total silence for six weeks.
He pondered for months over the meaning of his weakness, debating whether he should retreat into a kind of Himalayan cave of his own making. He finally concluded his horrible nightmare was a challenge to his spiritual force thrown up by the forces of evil. He decided to accept the challenge, to press on to his goal of extirpating the last traces of sexuality from his being.
As his confidence in the mastery of his desires came back, he gradually extended the range of physical contact he allowed himself with women. He nursed them when they were ill and allowed them to nurse him. He took his bath in full view of his fellow ashramites, male and female. He had his daily massage virtually naked, with young girls most frequently serving as his masseuses. He often gave interviews or consulted the leaders of his Congress Party while the girls massaged him. He wore few clothes and urged his disciples, male and female, to do likewise because clothes he said, only encouraged a false sense of modesty. The only time he ever addressed himself directly to Winston Churchill was in reply to his famous phrase ‘half-naked fakir’. He was trying to be both, Gandhi said, because the naked state represented the true innocence for which he was striving. Finally, he decreed that there would be no problem in men and women who were faithful to their vow of chastity sleeping in the same room at night, if they happened, in the performance of their duties, to find themselves together at nightfall.
The decision to have Manu share his pallet so he could guide more totally her spiritual growth was, to Gandhi, a natural outgrowth of that philosophy. During the agonizing days of his penitent’s pilgrimage, her delicate figure was rarely out of his sight. From village to village, she shared the crude shelters offered him by the peasants of Noakhali. She massaged him, prepared his mudbaths, cared for him when he was striken with diarrhoea. She slept and rose with him, prayed by his side, shared the contents of his beggar’s bowl. One bitter February night she awoke to find the old man shaking violently by her side. She massaged him, heaped on his shivering frame whatever scraps of cloth she could find in the hut. Finally, Gandhi dozed off and, she later noted, ‘we slept cosily in each other’s warmth until prayer time’.
For Gandhi, secure in his own conscience, there was nothing improper or even remotely sexual in his relations with Manu. Indeed, it is almost inconceivable that the faintest tremor of sexual arousal passed between them. To the Mahatma, the reasoning which had led him to perform what was, for him, a duty to Manu, was sufficient justification for his action. Perhaps, however, deep in his subconscious, other forces he ignored helped propel him to it.
In the twilight of his life, Gandhi was a lonely man. He had lost his wife and closest friend in wartime prison. He was losing the support of some of his oldest followers. He risked losing the dream he’d pursued for decades. He had never had a daughter and, perhaps, the one failure in his life had been in his role as a father. His eldest son, embittered because he’d felt his father’s devotion to others had deprived him of his share of paternal affection, was a hopeless alcoholic who had staggered drunk to his dying mother’s bedside. Two of his other sons were in South Africa and rarely in contact with Gandhi. Only with his youngest son did he enjoy a normal father-son relation. In any event, whatever the explanation, a deep, spiritual bond was destined to link the Mahatma and the shy, devoted girl so anxious to share his misery during the closing months of his life.
As word of what was happening spread beyond his entourage, a campaign of calumnies, spread by the leaders of the Moslem League, grew up about Gandhi. The news reached Delhi, spreading intense shock among the leaders of Congress waiting to begin their critical talks with India’s new Viceroy.
Gandhi finally confronted the rumours in an evening prayer meeting. Assailing the ‘small talk, whispers and innuendo around him’, he told the crowd that his great-niece Manu shared his bed with him each night and explained why she was there. His words calmed his immediate circle, but when he sent them to his newspaper Harijan to be published, the storm broke again. Two of the editors quit in protest. Its trustees, fearful of a scandal, did something they had never dreamed of doing before. They refused to publish a text written by the Mahatma.
The crisis reached its climax in Haimchar, the last stop on Gandhi’s tour. There, Gandhi revealed his intention to carry his mission to the province of Bihar where, this time, he would work with his fellow Hindus who had killed the members of a Moslem minority in their midst.
His words alarmed the Congress leadership in Delhi who feared the effect his relationship with Manu could have on Bihar’s orthodox Hindu community. A series of emissaries discreetly asked him to abandon it before leaving for Bihar. He refused.
Finally, it was Manu herself, perhaps prodded by one of those emissaries, who gently suggested to the elderly Mahatma that they suspend their practice. She remained absolutely at one with him, she promised. She was renouncing nothing of what they were trying to achieve. The concession she proposed was only temporary, a concession to the smaller minds around them who could not understand the goals he sought. She would stay behind when he left for Bihar. Saddened, Gandhi agreed.
New Delhi, March – April 1947
In his immaculate white naval uniform, ‘he looked like a film star’ to the 23-year-old captain of the Grenadier Guards just appointed one of his ADCs. Serene and smiling, his wife at his side, Louis Mountbatten rode up to Viceroy’s House in a gilded landau built half a century before for the royal progress through Delhi of his cousin, George V. At the instant his escort reached the palace’s grand staircase, the bagpipes of the Royal Scots Fusiliers skirled out a plaintive welcome to India’s last Viceroy.
A faint, sad smile on his face, the outgoing Viceroy, Lord Wavell, waited at the head of the staircase. The very presence in New Delhi of those two men represented a break with tradition. Normally, an outgoing Viceroy sailed with due pomp from the Gateway of India while the next steamer bore his successor towards its spans, thus sparing India the embarrassment of having two Gods upon its soil at the same time. Mountbatten himself had insisted on this breach of custom so he could talk with the man to whom he formally bowed his head as he reached the top of the stairs.
For a moment, in the intermittent glare of flashbulbs, the two men stood chatting. They were a poignantly contrasting pair: Mountbatten the glamorous war hero, exuding confidence and vitality; Wavell, the one-eyed old soldier, adored by his subordinates, brusquely sacked by the politicians, a man who had sadly noted in his diary not long before that, for the past half decade, his had been the unhappy fate ‘to conduct withdrawals and mitigate defeats’.*
Wavell escorted Mountbatten through the heavy teak doors to the Viceroy’s study and his first direct confrontation with the awesome problems awaiting him.
‘I am sorry indeed that you’ve been sent out here in my place,’ Wavell began.
‘Well,’ said Mountbatten, somewhat taken aback, ‘that’s being candid. Why? Don’t you think I’m up to it?’
‘No, it’s not that,’ replied Wavell, ‘indeed, I’m very fond of you, but you’ve been given an impossible task. I’ve tried everything I know to solve this problem and I can see no light. There is just no way of dealing with it. Not only have we had absolutely no help from Whitehall, but we’ve now reached a complete impasse here.’
Patiently, Wavell reviewed his efforts to reach a solution. Then he stood up and opened his safe. Locked inside were the only two items he could bequeath his successor. The first sparkled on dark velvet folds inside a wooden box. It was the diamond-encrusted badge of the Grand Master of the Order of the Star of India, the emblem of Mountbatten’s new office, which, forty-eight hours hence, he would hang around his neck for the ceremonial which would officially install him as Viceroy.
The second was a manilla file on which was written the words ‘Operation Madhouse’. It contained the only solution the able soldier had to propose to India’s dilemma. Sadly, he took it out of the safe and laid it on his desk.
‘This is called “Madhouse”,’ he explained, ‘because it is a problem for a madhouse. Alas, I can see no other way out.’
It called for the British evacuation of India, province by province, women and children first, then civilians, then soldiers, a move likely, in Gandhi’s words, to ‘leave India to chaos’.
‘It’s a terrible solution, but it’s the only one I can see,’ Wavell sighed. He picked up the file from his desk and offered it to his stunned successor.
‘I am very, very, very sorry,’ he concluded, ‘but this is all I can bequeath you.’
As the new Viceroy concluded that sad introduction to his new functions, his wife, on the floor above Wavell’s study, was receiving a more piquant introduction to her new life. On reaching their quarters, Edwina Mountbatten had asked a servant for a few scraps for the two sealyhams, Mizzen and Jib, which the Mountbattens had brought out from London. To her amazement, thirty minutes later, a pair of turbaned servants solemnly marched into her bedroom, each bearing a silver tray set with a china plate on which were laid several slices of freshly roasted chicken breast.
Eyes wide with wonder, Edwina contemplated that chicken. She had not seen food like it in the austerity of England for weeks. She glanced at the sealyhams, barking at her feet, then back at the chicken. Her disciplined conscience would not allow her to give pets such nourishment.
‘Give me that,’ she ordered.
Firmly grasping the two plates of chicken, she marched into the bathroom and locked the door. There, the woman who would offer in the next months the hospitality of Viceroy’s House to 25,000 people, gleefully began to devour the chicken intended for her pets.
The closing chapter in a great story was about to begin. In a few minutes on this morning of 24 March 1947, the last Englishman to govern India would mount his gold and crimson viceregal throne. Installed upon that throne, Louis Mountbatten would become the twentieth and final representative of a prestigious dynasty, his would be the last hands to clasp the sceptre that had passed from Hastings to Wellesley, Cornwallis and Curzon.
The site of his official consecration was the ceremonial Durbar Hall of a palace whose awesome dimensions were rivalled only by those of Versailles and the Peterhof of the Tsars. Ponderous, solemn, unabashedly imperial, Viceroy’s House, New Delhi, was the last such palace men would ever build for a single ruler. Indeed, only in India with its famished hordes desperate for work would a palace like Viceroy’s House have been built and maintained in the twentieth century.
Its façades were covered with the red and white stone of Barauli, the building blocks of the Moghuls whose monuments it had succeeded. White, yellow, green, black marble quarried from the veins that had furnished the glistening mosaics of the Taj Mahal, embellished its floors and walls. So long were its corridors that in its basement servants rode from one end of the building to the other on bicycles.
This morning, those servants were giving a last polish to the marble, the woodwork, the brass of its 37 salons and its 340 rooms. Outside, in the formal Moghul gardens, 418 gardeners, more than Louis XIV had employed at Versailles, laboured to provide a perfect trim to its intricate maze of grass squares, rectangular flower beds and vaulted water-ways. 50 of them were boys hired just to scare away the birds. In their stables, the 500 Punjabi horsemen of the Viceroy’s bodyguard adjusted their white and gold tunics as they prepared to mount their superb black horses. Throughout the house, gold and scarlet turbans flaring above their foreheads, their white tunics already embroidered with the new Viceroy’s coat of arms, other servants scurried down the corridors on a final errand. For the last time, they all, gardeners, chamberlains, cooks, stewards, bearers, horsemen, all the retainers of that feudal fortress lost in the twentieth century, joined in preparing the enthronement of one of that select company of men for whom it had been built, a Viceroy of India.
In one of the private chambers of the great house, a man contemplated the white full-dress admiral’s uniform his employer would wear to take possession of Viceroy’s House’s majestic precincts. No flaring turban graced his head. Charles Smith was not a product of the Punjab or Rajasthan, but of a country village in the south of England.
With a meticulous regard for detail acquired over a quarter of a century of service in Mountbatten’s employ, Smith slipped the cornflower-blue silk sash of the world’s most exclusive company, the Order of the Garter, through the right epaulette and stretched it taut across the uniform’s breast. Then he looped the gold aiguillettes which marked the uniform’s owner as a personal ADC to King George VI through the right epaulette.
