Читать книгу Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House - Dominique Lapierre, Larry Collins - Страница 10

London, New Year’s Day, 1947

It was the winter of a great nation’s discontent. An air of melancholia hung like a chill fog over London. Rarely, if ever, had Britain’s capital ushered in a New Year in a mood so bleak, so morose. Hardly a home in the city that festive morning could furnish enough hot water to allow a man to shave or a woman to cover the bottom of her wash-basin. Londoners had greeted the New Year in bedrooms so cold their breath had drifted on the air like puffs of smoke. Precious few of them had greeted it with a hangover. Whisky, in the places where it had been available the night before for New Year’s Eve celebrations, had cost £8 a bottle.

The streets were almost deserted. The passers-by hurrying down their pavements were grim, joyless creatures, threadbare in old uniforms or clothes barely holding together after eight years of make-do and mend. What few cars there were darted about like fugitive phantoms guiltily consuming Britain’s rare and rationed petrol. A special stench, the odour of post-war London, permeated the streets. It was the rancid smell of charred ruins drifting up like an autumn mist from thousands of bombed-out buildings.

And yet, that sad, joyless city was the capital of a conquering nation. Only seventeen months before, the British had emerged victorious from mankind’s most terrible conflict. Their achievements, their courage in adversity then, had inspired an admiration such as the world had never before accorded them.

The cost of their victory, however, had almost vanquished the British. Britain’s industry was crippled, her exchequer bankrupt, her once haughty pound sterling surviving only on injections of American and Canadian dollars, her Treasury unable to pay the staggering debt she’d run up to finance the war. Foundries and factories were closing everywhere. Over two million Britons were unemployed. Coal production was lower than it had been a decade earlier and, as a result, every day, some part of Britain was without electric power for hours.

For Londoners, the New Year beginning would be the eighth consecutive year they’d lived under severe rationing of almost every product they consumed: food, fuel, drinks, energy, shoes, clothing. ‘Starve and shiver’ had become the byword of a people who’d defeated Hitler proclaiming ‘V for Victory’ and ‘Thumbs Up’.

Only one family in fifteen had been able to find and afford a Christmas turkey for the holiday season just past. Many a child’s stocking had been empty that Christmas eve. The treasury had slapped a 100% purchase tax on toys. The word most frequently scrawled on the windows of London’s shops was ‘No’: ‘No potatoes’, ‘No logs’, ‘No coal’, ‘No cigarettes’, ‘No meat’. Indeed, the reality confronting Britain that New Year’s morning had been captured in one cruel sentence by her greatest economist. ‘We are a poor nation,’ John Maynard Keynes had told his countrymen the year before, ‘and we must learn to live accordingly.’

Yet, if Londoners did not have enough hot water that morning to make a cup of tea with which to welcome the New Year, they had something else. They could, because they were English, lay claim to a blue and gold document which would guarantee their entry to almost a quarter of the earth’s surface, a British passport. No other people in the world enjoyed such a privilege. That most extraordinary assemblage of dominions, territories, protectorates, associated states and colonies which was the British Empire, remained, on this New Year’s Day 1947, largely intact. The lives of 560 million people, Tamils and Chinese, Bushmen and Hottentots, pre-Dravidian aborigines and Melanesians, Australians and Canadians, were still influenced by the actions of those Englishmen shivering in their unheated London homes. They could, that morning, claim domain over almost three hundred pieces of the earth’s surface from entities as small and as unknown as Bird Island, Bramble Cay and Wreck Reef to great, populous stretches of Africa and Asia. Britain’s proudest boast was still true: every time Big Ben’s chimes tolled out over the ruins of Central London that New Year’s Day, at sunrise, somewhere in the British Empire, a Union Jack was riding up a flagstaff.

No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a comparable realm. For three centuries its scarlet stains spreading over the maps of the world had prompted the dreams of schoolboys, the avarice of her merchants, the ambitions of her adventurers. Its raw materials had fuelled the factories of the Industrial Revolution, and its territories furnished a protected market for their goods. ‘Heavy with gold, black with industrial soot, red with the blood of conquest’, the Empire had made in its time a little island kingdom of less than 50 million people the most powerful nation on earth, and London the capital of the world.

Now, almost furtively, a black Austin Princess slipped down the deserted streets of that capital towards the heart of the city. As it passed Buckingham Palace and turned on to the Mall, its sole passenger stared moodily out at the imperial boulevard passing before his eyes. How often, he reflected, had Britain celebrated the triumphs of empire along its course. Half a century earlier, on 22 June 1897, Queen Victoria’s carriage had come clattering down its length for the festival that had marked its zenith, her Diamond Jubilee. Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, Hausas from Africa’s Gold Coast, the Fuzzy Wuzzies of the Sudan, Cypriots, Jamaicans, Malaysians, Hong Kong Chinese, Borneo headhunters, Australians and New Zealanders, South Africans and Canadians had all in their turn marched down the Mall to the plaudits of that energetic race to whose empire they’d belonged. All that had represented an extraordinary dream for those Englishmen and the generations that had succeeded them along the Mall. Now even that was to be snatched away from them. The age of imperialism was dead and it was in recognition of that historic inevitability that the black Austin Princess was running its lonely course down the avenue which had witnessed so many of its grandiose ceremonies.

Its passenger sank back in his seat. His eyes, this holiday morning, should have been gazing on a different sight, a sundrenched Swiss ski slope. An urgent summons, however, had interrupted his Christmas vacation and sent him to Zurich where he’d boarded the RAF aircraft which had just deposited him at Northolt Airport.

His car passed Parliament Street and drove down a narrow lane up to what was probably the most photographed doorway in the world, Number 10 Downing Street. For six years, the world had associated its simple wooden frame with the image of a man in a black homburg, a cigar in his mouth, a cane in his hands, fingers upthrust in a ‘V’ for Victory. Winston Churchill had fought two great battles while he’d lived in that house, one to defeat the Axis, the other to defend the British Empire.

Now, however, a new Prime Minister waited inside 10 Downing Street, a Socialist don whom Churchill had disparaged as ‘a modest man with much to be modest about’.

Clement Attlee and his Labour Party had come to office publicly committed to begin the dismemberment of the Empire. For Attlee, for England, that historic process had inevitably to begin by extending freedom to the vast, densely populated land Britain still ruled from the Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin – India. That superb and shameful institution, the British Raj, was the cornerstone and justification of the Empire, its most remarkable accomplishment and its most constant care. India with its Bengal Lancers and its silk-robed Maharajas, its tiger hunts and its polo maidans, its pugree helmets and its chota pegs of whisky, its royal elephants caparisoned in gold and its starving sadhus, its mulligatawny soups and haughty memsahibs, had incarnated the imperial dream. The handsome rear-admiral stepping from his car had been called to 10 Downing Street to end that dream.

Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, Viscount Mountbatten of Burma was, at 46, one of the most noted figures in England. He was a big man, over six feet tall, but not a trace of flab hung from his zealously exercised waist line. Despite the terrible burdens he’d carried in the past six years, the face, familiar to millions of the readers of his country’s penny press, was remarkably free of the scars of strain and tension. His features, so astonishingly regular that they seemed, almost, to have been conceived as a prototype of facial design, his undiminished shock of dark hair setting off his hazel eyes, conspired to make him seem a good five years younger than he was this January morning.

Mountbatten knew well why he’d been summoned to London. Since his return from his post as Supreme Allied Commander South-east Asia, he’d been a frequent visitor to Downing Street as a consultant on the affairs of the nations which had fallen under SEAC’s command. On his last visit, however, the Prime Minister’s questions had quickly focused on a nation that had not been part of his theatre of operations, India. The young admiral had suddenly had a ‘very nasty, very uneasy feeling’. His premonition had been justified. Attlee intended to name him Viceroy of India. The Viceroy’s was the most important post in the empire, the office from which a long succession of Englishmen had held domain over the destinies of a fifth of mankind. Mountbatten’s task, however, would not be to rule India from that office. His assignment would be one of the most painful an Englishman could be asked to undertake, to give it up.

Mountbatten wanted no part of the job. He entirely endorsed the idea that the time had come for Britain to leave India. His heart however, rebelled at the thought that it would be he who would be called on to sever the ancient links binding Britain and the bulwark of her empire. To discourage Attlee he had thrown up a whole series of demands, major and minor, from the number of secretaries he’d be allowed to take with him to the aircraft, the York MW 102 he’d employed in Southeast Asia, which would be placed at his disposal. Attlee, to his dismay, had agreed them all. Now, entering the Cabinet Room, the admiral still hoped somehow to resist Attlee’s efforts to force the Indian assignment on him.

With his sallow complexion, his indifferently trimmed moustache, his shapeless tweed suits which seemed blissfully ignorant of a pressing iron’s caress, the man waiting for Mountbatten exuded in his demeanour something of that grey and dreary city through which the admiral’s car had just passed. That he, a Labour Prime Minister, should want a glamorous, polo-playing member of the royal family to fill the most critical position in the empire that Labour was pledged to dismantle, seemed, at first sight, an incongruous idea.

There was much more to Mountbatten, however, than his public image indicated. The decorations on his naval uniform were proof of that. The public might consider him a pillar of the establishment; the establishment themselves tended to regard Mountbatten and his wife as dangerous radicals. His command in South-east Asia had given him a knowledge of Asian nationalist movements few in England could match. He had dealt with the supporters of Ho Chi Minh in Indo-China, Sukarno in Indonesia, Aung San in Burma, Chinese Communists in Malaya, unruly trade unionists in Singapore. Realizing they represented Asia’s future, he had sought accommodations with them rather than, as his staff and Allies had urged, trying to suppress them. The nationalist movement with which he would have to deal if he went to India was the oldest and most unusual of them all. In a quarter of a century of inspired agitation and protest, its leadership had forced history’s greatest empire to the decision Attlee’s Party had taken: let Britain leave India in good time rather than be driven out by the forces of history and armed rebellion.

The Prime Minister began by reviewing the Indian scene. The Indian situation, he said, was deteriorating with every passing day and the time for urgent decision was at hand. It was one of the paradoxes of history that at this critical juncture, when Britain was at last ready to give India her freedom, she could not find a way to do so. What should have been Britain’s finest hour in India seemed destined to become a nightmare of unsurpassable horror. She had conquered and ruled India with what was, by colonial standards, relatively little bloodshed. Her leaving it threatened to produce an explosion of violence that would dwarf in scale and magnitude anything India had experienced in three and a half centuries.

The root of the problem was the age-old antagonism between India’s 300 million Hindus and 100 million Moslems. Sustained by tradition, by antipathetic religions, by economic differences, subtly exacerbated through the years by Britain’s own policy of Divide and Rule, their conflict had reached boiling point. The Moslem leaders now demanded that Britain rip apart the unity she had so painstakingly erected to give them an Islamic state of their own. The cost of denying them their state, they warned, would be the bloodiest civil war in Asian history.

Just as determined to resist their demands were the leaders of the Congress Party representing most of India’s 300 million Hindus. To them, the division of the sub-continent would be a mutilation of their historic homeland almost sacrilegious in its nature.

Britain was trapped between those two apparently irreconcilable positions, sinking slowly into a quagmire from which she seemed unable to extricate herself. Time and again British efforts to resolve the problem had failed. So desperate had the situation become, that the present Viceroy, an honest, forthright soldier, Field-Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, had just submitted to the Attlee government his last-ditch recommendations. Should all else fail, he suggested the British announce ‘we propose to withdraw from India in our own method and in our own time and with due regard to our own interests; and that we will regard any attempt to interfere with our programme as an act of war which we will meet with all the resources at our command.’

Britain and India, Attlee told Mountbatten, were heading towards a major disaster. The situation could not be allowed to go on. Wavell was a man of painfully few words, and, Attlee said, he’d been unable to establish any real contact with his loquacious Indian interlocutors.

A fresh face, a fresh approach was desperately needed if a crisis were to be averted. Each morning, Attlee revealed, brought its batch of cables to the India Office announcing an outburst of wanton savagery in some new corner of India. It was, he indicated, Mountbatten’s solemn duty to take the post he’d been offered.^*

A sense of foreboding had been filling Mountbatten as he listened to the Prime Minister’s words. He still thought India was ‘an absolutely hopeless proposition’. He liked and admired Wavell, with whom he’d often discussed India’s problems during his regular visits to Delhi as Supreme Allied Commander in South-east Asia.

Wavell had all the right ideas, Mountbatten thought. If he couldn’t do it, what’s the point of my trying to take it on? Yet he was beginning to understand there was no escape. He was going to be forced to accept a job in which the risk of failure was enormous and in which he could easily shatter the brilliant reputation he’d brought out of the war.

If Attlee was going to force it on him, however, Mountbatten was determined to impose on the Prime Minister the political conditions that would give him at least some hopes of success. His talks with Wavell had given him an idea what they were.

He would not accept, he told the Prime Minister, unless the government agreed to make an unequivocal public announcement of the precise date on which British rule in India would terminate. Only that, Mountbatten felt, would convince India’s sceptical intelligentsia that Britain was really leaving and infuse her leaders with the sense of urgency needed to get them into realistic negotiations.^*

Second, he demanded something no other Viceroy had ever dreamed of asking, full powers to carry out his assignment without reference to London and, above all, without constant interference from London. The Attlee government could give the young admiral his final destination but he, and he alone, was going to set his course and run the ship along the way.

‘Surely,’ Attlee asked, ‘you’re not asking for plenipotentiary powers above His Majesty’s Government, are you?’

‘I am afraid, Sir,’ answered Mountbatten, ‘that that is exactly what I am asking. How can I possibly negotiate with the Cabinet constantly breathing down my neck?’

A stunned silence followed his words. Mountbatten watched with satisfaction as the nature of his breathtaking demand registered on the Prime Minister’s face, hoping, as he did, that it would prompt Attlee to withdraw his offer.

Instead, the Prime Minister indicated with a sigh his willingness to accept even that. An hour later, shoulders sagging, Mountbatten emerged from the portal of Downing Street. He knew he was condemned to become India’s last Viceroy, the executioner, in a sense, of his countrymen’s fondest imperial dream.

Getting back into his car, a strange thought struck him. It was exactly seventy years, almost to the hour, from the moment his own great-grandmother had been proclaimed Empress of India on a plain outside Delhi. India’s princes, assembled for the occasion, had begged the heavens that day that Queen Victoria’s ‘power and sovereignty’ might ‘remain steadfast forever’.

Now, on this New Year’s morning one of her great-grandsons had initiated the process which would fix the date on which ‘forever’ would come to an end.

History’s most grandiose accomplishments can sometimes have the most banal of origins. Great Britain was set on the road to the great colonial adventure for five miserable shillings. They represented the increase in the price of a pound of pepper proclaimed by the Dutch privateers who controlled the spice trade.

Incensed at what they considered a wholly unwarranted gesture, twenty-four merchants of the City of London gathered on the afternoon of 24 September 1599 in a decrepit building on Leadenhall Street. Their purpose was to found a modest trading firm with an initial capital of £72,000 subscribed by 125 shareholders. Only the simplest of concerns, profit, inspired their enterprise which, expanded and transformed, would ultimately become the most noteworthy creation of the age of imperialism, the British Raj.

The Company received its official sanction on 31 December 1599, when Queen Elizabeth I signed a royal charter assigning it exclusive trading rights with all countries beyond the Cape of Good Hope for an initial period of fifteen years. Eight months later, a 500-ton galleon named the Hector dropped anchor in the little port of Surat, north of Bombay. It was 24 August 1600. The British had arrived in India. Their initial landing was a modest one. It came in the solitary figure of William Hawkins, Captain of the Hector, a dour old seaman who was more pirate than explorer. Hawkins marched off into the interior, prepared to find rubies as big as pigeons’ eggs; endless stands of pepper, ginger, indigo, cinnamon; trees whose leaves were so enormous that the shade they cast could cover an entire family, potions derived from elephants’ testicles to give him eternal youth.

There was little of that India along the Captain’s march to Agra. There, however, his encounter with the great Moghul compensated for the hardships of his journey. He found himself face to face with a sovereign beside whom Queen Elizabeth appeared the ruler of a provincial hamlet. Reigning over 70 million subjects, the Emperor Jehangir was the world’s richest and most powerful monarch, the fourth and last of India’s great Moghul rulers.

The first Englishman to reach his court was greeted with a gesture which might have disconcerted the 125 worthy shareholders of the East India Trading Company. The Moghul made him a member of the Royal Household and offered him as a welcoming gift the most beautiful girl in his harem, an Armenian Christian.

Fortunately, benefits of a nature more likely to inspire his employer’s esteem than the enrichment of his sex life also grew out of Captain Hawkins’ arrival in Agra. Jehangir signed an imperial firman authorizing the East India Company to open trading depots north of Bombay. Its success was rapid and impressive. Soon, two ships a month were unloading mountains of spices, gum, sugar, raw silk and Muslin cotton on the docks along the Thames and sailing off with holds full of English manufactures. A deluge of dividends, some of them as high as 200%, came pouring down on the firm’s fortunate shareholders.

The British, generally, were welcomed by the native rulers and population. Unlike the zealous Spaniards who were conquering South America in the name of a redeeming God, the British stressed that it was in the name of another God, Mammon, that they had come to India. ‘Trade not territory’, the Company’s officers never ceased repeating, was their policy.

Inevitably, however, as their trading activities grew, the Company’s officers became enmeshed in local politics and forced, in order to protect their expanding commerce, to intervene in the squabbles of the petty sovereigns on whose territories they operated. Thus began the irreversible process which would lead England to conquer India almost by inadvertence. On 23 June 1757, marching through a drenching rainfall at the head of 900 Englishmen of the 39th Foot and 2000 Indian sepoys, an audacious general named Robert Clive routed the army of a troublesome Nawab in the rice paddies outside a Bengali village called Plassey.

Clive’s victory opened the gates of northern India. With it, the British conquest of India truly started. Their merchants gave way to the builders of empire; and territory, not trade, became the primary concern of the British in India.

The century that followed was one of conquest. Although they were specifically instructed by London to avoid ‘schemes of conquest and territorial expansion’, a succession of ambitious governor generals relentlessly embraced the opposite policy. In less than a century a company of traders was metamorphosed into a sovereign power, its accountants and traders into generals and governors, its race for dividends into a struggle for imperial authority. Without having set out to do so, Britain had become the successor to the Moghul Emperors.

From the outset, her intent was always one day to relinquish the possessions she had so inadvertently acquired. As early as 1818, the Marquess of Hastings noted: ‘A time, not very remote, will arrive when England will, on sound principles of policy, wish to relinquish the domination which she has gradually and unintentionally assumed over this country.’ Empires, however, were more naturally acquired than disposed of and the moment foreseen by Hastings was to be considerably more remote than the Marquess might have imagined.

British rule nonetheless brought India benefits of considerable magnitude, Pax Britannica and reasonable facsimiles of Britain’s own legal, administrative and educational institutions. Above all, it gave India the magnificent gift which was to become the common bond of its diverse peoples and the conduit of their revolutionary aspirations, the English language.

The first manifestation of those aspirations came in the savage Mutiny in 1857. Its most important result was an abrupt change in the manner in which Britain governed India. After 258 years of fruitful activities, the Honourable East India Company’s existence was terminated. Responsibility for the destiny of 300 million Indians was transferred to the hands of a 39-year-old woman whose tubby figure would incarnate the vocation of the British race to dominate the world, Queen Victoria. Henceforth, Britain’s authority was to be exercised by the crown, represented in India by a kind of nominated king ruling a fifth of humanity, the Viceroy.

With that change began the period the world would most often associate with the British Indian experience, the Victorian era. Its predominant philosophy was a concept frequently enunciated by the man who was its self-appointed poet laureate – Rudyard Kipling – that white Englishmen were uniquely fitted to rule ‘lesser breeds without the law’. The responsibility for governing India, Kipling proclaimed, had been ‘placed by the inscrutable decree of providence upon the shoulders of the British race’.

Ultimately, responsibility was exercised at any given time by a little band of brothers, 2000 members of the Indian Civil Service, the ICS, and 10,000 British officers of the Indian Army. Their authority over 300 million people was sustained by 60,000 British soldiers and 200,000 men of the Indian Army. No statistics could measure better than those the nature of Britain’s rule in India after 1857 or the manner in which the Indian masses were long prepared to accept it.

The India of those men was that picturesque, romantic India of Kipling’s tales. Theirs was the India of gentlemen officers in plumed shakos riding at the head of their turbaned sepoys; of district magistrates lost in the torrid wastes of the Deccan; of sumptuous imperial balls in the Himalayan summer capital of Simla; cricket matches on the manicured lawns of Calcutta’s Bengal Club; polo games on the sunburnt plains of Rajasthan; tiger hunts in Assam; young men. sitting down to dinner in black ties in a tent in the middle of the jungle, solemnly proposing their toast in port to the King Emperor while jackals howled in the darkness around them; officers in scarlet tunics pursuing rebellious Pathan tribesmen in the sleet or unbearable heat of the Frontier; the India of a caste unassailably certain of its superiority, sipping whiskies and soda on the veranda of its Europeans Only clubs. Those men were, generally, the products of families of impeccable breeding but less certain wealth; the offspring of good Anglican country churchmen; talented second sons of the landed aristocracy; sons of school-masters, classics professors and above all of the previous generation of the British in India. They mastered on the playing fields and in the classrooms of Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Haileybury, the disciplines that would fit them to rule an empire: excellence at ‘games’, a delight in ‘manly pursuits’, the ability to absorb the whack of a headmaster’s cane or declaim the Odes of Horace and the verses of Homer. ‘India’, noted lames S. Mill, ‘was a vast system of outdoor relief for Britain’s upper classes.’

It represented challenge and adventure, and its boundless spaces an arena in which England’s young men could find a fulfilment their island’s more restricted shores might deny them. They arrived on the docks of Bombay at nineteen or twenty, barely able to raise a stubble on their chins. They went home thirty-five or forty years later, their bodies scarred by bullets, by disease, a panther’s claws or a fall on the polo field, their faces ravaged by too much sun and too much whisky, but proud of having lived their part of a romantic legend.

A young man’s adventure usually began in the theatrical confusion of Bombay’s Victoria Station. There, under its red brick neo-Gothic arches, he discovered for the first time the face of the country in which he’d chosen to spend his life. It was usually a shock, a whirlpool of frantically scurrying, shoving, shouting human beings, darting in and out among jumbles of cases, valises, bundles, sacks, bales, all scattered in the halls of the station without any apparent regard for order. The heat, the crisp smell of spices and urine evaporating in the sun were overwhelming. Men in sagging dhotis and flapping night shirts, women in saris, bare arms and feet jangling with the gold bracelets on their wrists and ankles, Sikh soldiers in scarlet turbans, emaciated sadhus in orange and yellow loincloths, deformed children and beggars thrusting out their stunted limbs for baksheesh, all assailed him. The relief of a young lieutenant or newly appointed officer of the ICS on boarding the dark green cars of the Frontier Mail or the Hyderabad Express was usually enormous. Inside, behind the curtains of the first-class carriages, a familiar world waited, a world of deep brown upholstered seats and a dining-car with fresh white linen and champagne chilling in silver buckets; above all, a world in which the only Indian face he was likely to encounter was that of the conductor collecting his tickets. That was the first lesson a young officer learned. England ran India, but the English dwelt apart.

A harsh schooling awaited the empire’s young servants at the end of their first passage to India. They were sent to remote posts, covered by primitive roads and jungle tracks, inhabited, if at all, by only a few Europeans. By the time they were twenty-four or twenty-five, they often found themselves with sole responsibility for handing down justice to and administering the lives of a million or more human beings, in areas sometimes larger than Scotland.

His apprenticeship in those remote districts eventually qualified a young officer to take his privileged place in one of those green and pleasant islands from which the aristocracy of the Raj ran India, ‘cantonments’, golden ghettos of British rule appended like foreign bodies to India’s major cities.

Inevitably, each enclave included its green expanse of garden, its slaughterhouse, its bank, its shops and a squat stone church, a proud little replica of those in Dorset or Surrey. Its heart was always the same: an institution that seemed to grow up wherever more than two Englishmen gathered, a club. There, in the cool of the afternoon, the British of the cantonment could gather to play tennis on their well-kept grass courts, or slip into white flannels for a cricket match. At the sacred hour of sundown, they sat out on their cool lawns or on their rambling verandas while white-robed servants glided past with their ‘sundowners’, the first whisky of the evening.

The parties and receptions in imperial India’s principal cities – Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore, Delhi, Simla – were lavish affairs. ‘Everyone with any standing had a ballroom and a drawing-room at least eighty feet long,’ wrote one grande dame who lived in Victorian India. ‘In those days, there were none of those horrible buffets where people go to a table with a plate and stand around eating with whomsoever they choose. The average private dinner was for thirty-five or forty with a servant for each guest. Shopkeepers and commercial people were never invited nor, of course, did one ever see an Indian socially, anywhere.

‘Nothing was as important as precedence and the deadly sin was to ignore it. Ah, the sudden arctic air that could sweep over a dinner party if the wife of an ICS joint secretary should find herself seated below an army officer of rank inferior to that of her husband.’

Much of the tone of Victorian India was set by the ‘memsahibs’, the British wives. To a large extent, the social separation of the English and the Indians was their doing. Their purpose, perhaps, was to shield their men from the exotic temptations of their Indian sisters, a temptation to which the first generations of Englishmen in India had succumbed with zest, leaving behind a new Anglo-Indian society suspended between two worlds.

The great pastime of the British in India was sport. A love of cricket, tennis, squash and hockey would be, with the English language, the most enduring heritage they would leave behind. Golf was introduced in Calcutta in 1829, 30 years before it reached New York, and the world’s highest course laid out in the Himalayas at 11,000 feet. No golf bag was considered more chic on those courses than one made of an elephant’s penis – provided, of course, its owner had shot the beast himself.

The British played in India but they died there, too, in very great numbers, often young. Every cantonment church had its adjacent graveyard to which the little community might carry its regular flow of dead, victims of India’s cruel climate, her peculiar hazards, her epidemics of malaria, cholera, jungle fever. No more poignant account of the British in India was ever written than that inscribed upon the tombstones of those cemeteries.

Even in death India was faithful to its legends. Lt St John Shawe, of the Royal Horse Artillery, ‘died of wounds received from a panther on 12 May 1866, at Chindwara’. Maj. Archibald Hibbert, died 15 June 1902, near Raipur after ‘being gored by a bison’, and Harris McQuaid was ‘trampled by an elephant’ at Saugh, 6 June 1902. Thomas Henry Butler, an Accountant in the Public Works Department, Jubbulpore, had the misfortune in 1897 to be ‘eaten by a tiger in Tilman Forest’.

Indian service had its bizarre hazards. Sister Mary of the Church of England Foreign Missionary Services died at the age of 33, ‘Killed while teaching at the Mission School Sinka when a beam eaten through by white ants fell on her head’. Major General Henry Marion Durand of the Royal Engineers, met his death on New Year’s Day 1871 ‘in consequence of injuries received from a fall from a Howdah while passing his elephant through Durand Gate, Tonk’. Despite his engineering background, the general had failed that morning to reach a just appreciation of the difference in height between the archway and his elephant. There proved to be room under it for the elephant, but none for him.

No sight those graveyards offered was sadder, nor more poignantly revealing of the human price the British paid for their Indian adventure, than their rows upon rows of undersized graves. They crowded every cemetery in India in appalling numbers. They were the graves of children, children and infants killed in a climate for which they had not been bred, by diseases they would never have known in their native England.

Sometimes a lone tomb, sometimes three or four in a row, those of an entire family wiped out by cholera or jungle fever, the epitaphs upon those graves were a parents’ heartbreak frozen in stone: ‘In memory of poor little Willy, the beloved and only child of Bomber William Talbot and Margaret Adelaide Talbot, the Royal Horse Brigade, Born Delhi 14 December 1862. Died Delhi 17 July 1863.’

In Asigarh, two stones side by side offer for eternity the measure of what England’s glorious imperial adventure meant to many an ordinary Englishman. ‘19 April 1845. Alexander, 7-month-old son of Conductor Johnson and Martha Scott. Died of cholera,’ reads the first. The second, beside it, reads: ‘30 April 1845, William John, 4-year-old son of Conductor Johnson and Martha Scott. Died of cholera.’ Under them, on a larger stone, their grieving parents chiselled a last farewell:

One blessing, one sire, one womb

Their being gave.

They had one mortal sickness

And share one grave

Far from an England they never knew.

Obscure clerks or dashing blades, those generations of Britons policed and administered India as no one before them had.

Their rule was paternalistic, that of the old public schoolmaster disciplining an unruly band of boys, forcing on them the education he was sure was good for them. With an occasional exception they were able and incorruptible, determined to administer India in its own best interests – but it was always they who decided what those interests were, not the Indians they governed.

Their great weakness was the distance from which they exercised their authority, the terrible smugness setting them apart from those they ruled. Never was that attitude of racial superiority summed up more succinctly than by a former officer of the Indian Civil Service in a parliamentary debate at the turn of the century. There was, he said, ‘a cherished conviction shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest, by the planter’s assistant in his lonely bungalow and by the editor in the full light of his presidency town, from the Chief Commissioner in charge of an important province to the Viceroy upon his throne – the conviction in every man that he belongs to a race which God has destined to govern and subdue’.

The massacre of 680,000 members of that race in the trenches of World War I wrote an end to the legend of a certain India. A whole generation of young men who might have patrolled the Frontier, administered the lonely districts or galloped their polo ponies down the long maidans was left behind in Flanders fields. From 1918 recruiting for the Indian Civil Service became increasingly difficult. Increasingly, Indians were accepted into the ranks both of the civil service and the officer corps.

On New Year’s Day 1947, barely a thousand British members of the Indian Civil Service remained in India, still somehow holding 400 million people in their administrative grasp. They were the last standard bearers of an elite that had outlived its time, condemned at last by a secret conversation in London and the inexorable currents of history.

^* Although Mountbatten didn’t know it, the idea of sending him to India had been suggested to Attlee by the man at the Prime Minister’s side, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps. It had come up at a secret conversation in London in December, between Cripps and Krishna Menon, an outspoken Indian left-winger and intimate of the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru. Menon had suggested to Cripps and Nehru that Congress saw little hope of progress in India so long as Wavell was Viceroy. In response to a query from the British leader, he had advanced the name of a man Nehru held in the highest regard, Louis Mountbatten. Aware that Mountbatten’s usefulness would be destroyed if India’s Moslem leaders learned of the genesis of his appointment the two men had agreed to reveal the details of their talk to no one. Menon revealed the details of his conversation with Cripps in a series of conversations with one of the authors in New Delhi in February 1973, a year before his death.

^* Wavell too had recommended a time limit to Attlee during a London visit in December 1946.