by Jan Morris
The war had sharpened these multiple antagonisms. The British were disillusioned by Indian behaviour during the war. Though Indian soldiers had fought on nearly every front, they had really fought more as mercenaries than loyalists—‘India’s soldiers’, Gandhi wrote in 1942, ‘are not a national army, but professionals who will as soon fight under the Japanese or any other if paid for fighting.’ The British were dismayed to find the defectors of the Indian National Army greeted as heroes by the populace, and their leader Subhas Chandra Bose hailed after his death as a martyr and a liberator. None of the chief Hindu leaders had helped in the war—they were all imprisoned for subversion in 1942—and the ‘Quit India’ movement had brought the country to the brink of revolution at the most vicious moment of the conflict: large areas had been altogether out of Government control, communications between Delhi and Calcutta were cut and more than 100,000 people arrested.
Conversely British prestige had been irrevocably eroded by the war. The Viceroy’s unilateral declaration of war had been bitterly resented. ‘There was something rotten’, Nehru thought, ‘when one man, and a foreigner and representative of a hated system, could plunge 400 million human beings into war without a slightest reference to them.’ The fall of Singapore fatally weakened the British military reputation, and as more and more Indians succeeded to senior jobs in the Government at home, so the Raj itself lost its power of aloof command. Every Club had its Indian members now, and the mystery had gone. In wartime the British might be as ruthless and resolute as ever, but in peacetime, as many a percipient Indian understood, they would never hold on to India by sheer force. It was not mere loss of will—to many members of the ICS the liberal tradition of their service was now reaching its fulfilment, and the transfer of power would be the honouring of an old purpose: but whether it was weakness or high principle that the imperialists displayed, cautiously the Indian opportunists edged away from them, looking ahead to new patrons.
Anyway, ever since the Salt March Indian leaders had felt themselves to be masters of their own destinies. It was only a matter of time, as Churchill had foreseen. The Indians, Hindu and Muslim, were perfectly conscious of their power—all over the world public opinion, ignorant or informed, supported their cause, and it was inconceivable that the British would indefinitely defy it. Gandhi, now the guru of the Congress Party to Nehru’s Presidency, was already recognized by many of his correspondents as the de facto President of India, and the universality of his appeal, the implication that India represented, now as always, deeper spiritual values, gave to British actions a sadly parochial, almost suburban air. It seemed to the British only their duty, to arrange matters with order and dignity: it seemed to the rest of the world only sophistry and procrastination.
The British aimed, as usual, at compromise. The Indians wanted nothing less than absolutes.
3
Many of the British, even now, failed to grasp their true relationship with India. The habit of sahibdom was too ingrained, the attitude of condescension, even mockery, still natural to them. It was through a veil of false constructions that they groped their way towards an Indian settlement, falling back often upon legalities and constitutional pragmatisms. They were torn between themselves, and in themselves, for even the most sincerely liberal Englishman felt a pang of regret, when he considered the ending of the Indian Empire. Subconsciously, no doubt, they often hoped for failure, as the long negotiations intermittently continued, and frequently officials in the field felt London reluctantly lagging and prevaricating at the other end of the cable. The chief obstacles to progress, said the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow, were Indian political stupidity and British political dishonesty, but the chief one really was lack of decision. Two Viceroys had presided between the 1935 Act and the arrival of Lord Mountbatten: both were men of honour, both sincerely worked for an Indian settlement, but neither had the decisive powers to achieve it.
Lord Linlithgow was the first. ‘Hopie’, as his friends called him, was a Tory aristocrat, like most of his predecessors—of the eight twentieth-century Viceroys, six had been the sons of peers and five had been Etonians. He was a very tall man, 6 foot 5 inches, an elder of the Church of Scotland, a devotee of English music-hall and a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. Doreen his wife was almost six foot herself, handsome, sociable, daughter to an antique baronetcy, and indefatigable in good works. They made a formidable couple, and their intentions were altogether admirable, but they seem in retrospect out of their historical depth.
Diligently and tactfully Lord Linlithgow grappled with the bickerings, sectarian rifts and snaky rivalries of Indian political life: like obelisks of British probity Doreen and her family stood at his side, dignified always, never daunted, and often breaking into the chorus of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ when the band played them into dinner at the Viceregal palace. Linlithgow was Viceroy for more than seven years, and his knowledge of Indian affairs was enormous. Yet he achieved, in effect, nothing. Though he assiduously implemented the Constitution of 1935, nothing was added to it in his time, and the reason perhaps was not lack of integrity, or lack of intellect, or even the frequently meddlesome interference of London, but incompatibility. Lord Linlithgow, who once admitted to his private secretary that he had never set eyes on an Indian rupee, was as absolutely removed from the roots of the Indian problem as it was possible to be—in temperament, in background, in experience.
Instinctively he played for time, and sought to preserve the past rather than hasten the future. It was Linlithgow who declared war on India’s behalf without consulting a single Indian, and his promises of self-government to the Indian people were hedged all about with qualifications and reservations—‘entering into consultation’, ‘in the light of the then circumstances’, ‘such modifications as may seem desirable’, ‘subject to the due fulfilment of obligations’. It was not always the Viceroy’s fault—every sentence of his declarations had to be argued out with London—but still it was hardly the stuff of generosity. Lord Linlithgow had never, as the Indian conservative leader Tej Bahadur Sapru said, ‘touched the heart of India’. If he was a great man to his Scottish tenants, or even to his adoring staff at the Viceroy’s palace, set against the scale of the Indian future he was a man out of his class—a good, cautious man, promoted, like so many a pro-consul of Empire, beyond his genius.
His successor was Wavell. A kinder person seldom lived, and there had never been a Viceroy more earnest or benevolent than he, or one more truly anxious to give Indians their rights. He seemed in many ways the ideal Englishman. He had written a scholarly biography of Allenby, and lectured at Cambridge on the arts of generalship. He had memorized so wide a repertoire of English verse that he later turned it without addition into a book. His subordinates loved him. His colleagues found him modest and helpful. Yet he was a loser, often petulant and frequently depressed. Churchill recognized it, and never had much faith in him, which is why in June 1943 Wavell was appointed Viceroy of India instead of getting some great command in the assault on Europe. His war record, generally through no fault of his own, had been disastrous. His only victories, which had made him the idol of the British middle classes, had been won against the inept Italian armies in Africa, and he had never won anything again: he had lost Greece and Crete, would have abandoned Iraq but for Churchill’s prodding, and as Commander-in-Chief in south-east Asia, failed to save Malaya, Singapore or Burma. He was condemned, he said himself, ‘to conduct withdrawals and mitigate defeats’. He lacked panache. He felt a fool when the Indians, in their effusive way, garlanded him with flowers. He was so taciturn as to be disconcerting in company. He was reluctant to take initiatives, and had no confidence in his own powers as Viceroy. ‘I very much doubt’, he wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day, 1946, ‘whether my brain-power or personality are up to it.’
He was right. His personality was not up to it. Churchill, having considered Eden and Miles Lampson of Cairo as possible Viceroys, had perhaps chosen Wavell precisely
because he did not want a solution in India—he hoped still that the problem could be indefinitely postponed. Wavell, himself, though, genuinely believed in Indian independence, and was ashamed of the often specious policies which emanated from London—‘we were proposing a policy of freedom for India, and in practice opposing every suggestion for a step forward.’ He was embarrassed by the insincerity of British attitudes, and he responded generously to Indian feelings—‘If India is not to be ruled by force, it must be ruled by the heart rather than the head.’
Yet even so he never achieved a rapport with the Indian leaders. They rather looked down on him, as the simple soldier he often claimed himself to be, and he quite failed to perceive their stature. He called Nehru’s approach to Indian independence ‘sentimental’, and wilfully refused to recognize the greatness of Gandhi, whom he described at one time or another as obstinate, domineering, double-tongued, unscrupulous, impertinent, malevolent and hypocritical. Just as Lampson had habitually called Farouk ‘the boy’, so Wavell, with the same defensive contempt, liked to speak of Gandhi as ‘the old man’.
These were the two statesmen, helped as often as they were hindered by their instructions and advices, who for the twelve years after 1935 tried to cut the Indian knot. They were hamstrung by circumstance, historical and political, and distracted by the exigencies of a terrible war: but some of their disadvantages lay in themselves.1
4
The knot was worse than the Gordian, and everyone was tightening it. ‘Beware the Gandhiji’, wrote Wavell one evening at the end of a long day:
Beware the Gandhiji, my son,
The satyagraha, the bogy fast,
Beware the Djinnarit, and shun
The frustrious scheduled caste.
The year was 1946, and he had been grappling with a Cabinet mission sent out by the new Labour Government to make yet another fresh start. By then the prospect of a peaceable transfer of power to a united independent India seemed remote, for every Indian aspiration was subdivided into lesser hopes, and complicated by deceptions, illusions and contradictions—as Gandhi said, every case had seven points of view, ‘all correct by themselves, but not correct at the same time and in the same circumstances’.
All the parties were at odds. Congress claimed to be the natural successor Government still, but the Muslim League, under the inflexible M. A. Jinnah, was now demanding a separate State for the country’s 90 million Muslims—Pakistan, ‘Land of the Pure’.1 But there were many lesser disputes and anomalies. The Sikhs wanted a Sikhistan, the 584 Indian States mostly wanted to remain within the Empire, the Kashmiris were a Muslim community under a Hindu prince, the Hyderabadis a Hindu community under a Muslim prince. Even the British themselves pursued varying interests. The Indian Political Service was deeply committed to the cause of the Princely States, the British commercial community was anxious about its future profits, the Indian Civil Service was planning another competitive examination for British entrants, and an Indian Army Commission, comprising three British officers and one Indian, had lately recommended that half the Indian Army’s officers should continue to be British.
And gradually, as they argued, the Raj was cracking. Government was running down, the ICS was now half Indian, and Wavell himself admitted that the British had lost nearly all power to control events. Riots and strikes swept the country. Illegal organizations proliferated. The Indian Navy mutinied. There were rumours that the Afghans were about to invade the North-West Frontier Province, that the Sikhs were about to rebel in the Punjab. The integrity of the police became ever more suspect, and even the civil service became for the first time politically tainted, as some of its Indian officers tacked understandably to the wind. Above all the spectre of communal war, Muslim versus Hindu, now stalked the country. In August 1946 the two religions clashed so violently in Calcutta that in a single day 5,000 people were said to have died. Demagogues of both sides gained eager audiences everywhere, and from Dacca to Peshawar people prepared to kill or be killed, in the cause of Kali or at the bidding of Allah. ‘We shall have India divided,’ wrote Jinnah, ‘or we shall have India destroyed!’ ‘I tell the British,’ cried Gandhi, ‘give us chaos!’
Still Wavell laboured on, studying his interminable instructions from London, cabling endless memoranda, reasoning with Jinnah, debating with Nehru, hammering away at constitutional niceties or communal discrepancies. He blamed it mostly on Churchill’s Government. ‘What I want’, he wrote, ‘is some definite policy, and not to go on making promises to India with no really sincere intention of trying to fulfil them.’ Once he seemed almost to succeed, when the Indian leaders, assembled in conference at Simla, appeared ready to accept a constitutional settlement: but when that hope collapsed too, the exhausted, dispirited and now embittered Viceroy gave up. Perhaps the only way, he thought, was simply to leave, without devising a solution at all—giving them chaos, if that was what they wanted. Perhaps they should withdraw province by province, women and children first, then civilians, then the army, leaving India to murder, burn and loot itself as it wished. He sent the plan home to London, and called it ‘Operation Ebb-Tide’.
Twas grillig [he wrote]; and the Congreelites
Did harge and shobble in the swope,
All jinsy were the Pakstanites,
And the spruft Sikhs outstrope.1
5
Presently he was sacked. Attlee, the Prime Minister of the new Labour Government, had firm views about India. He had gone there on a Parliamentary mission as long before as 1928, and had concerned himself with the subject ever since. He had long ago reached the conclusion that only the Indians themselves could solve their own problems, freed of all British constitutional restraints, and even before the war he had argued that India should be given Dominion status within a fixed period of years. By 1946 he was sure that the transfer of power must be made as soon as possible—peaceably if possible, with the rights of minorities protected if they could be, but above all quickly, and absolutely. The first necessity, he thought, was to be rid of poor Wavell, whom he considered defeatist and ineffectual, ‘a curious silent bird’. It did not take him long to find a successor. ‘I thought very hard,’ he wrote, ‘and looked all around. And suddenly I had what I now think was an inspiration. I thought of Mountbatten.’
Mountbatten! The perfect, the allegorical last Viceroy! Royal himself, great-grandson of the original Queen-Empress, second cousin of George VI, though by blood he was almost as German as he was English he seemed nevertheless the last epitome of the English aristocrat. He was a world figure in his own right, too, for as Supreme Commander in South-East Asia he had commanded forces of all the allied nations—one of the four supremos who, in the last year of the war, had disposed the vast fleets and armies of the western alliance. Moreover he was a recognized progressive, sympathetic to the ideals of Labour, anything but a reactionary on the meaning of Empire, and with a cosmopolitan contempt for the petty prejudices of race and class.
‘What is different about you from your predecessors?’ Nehru asked Mountbatten soon after his arrival in India. ‘Can it be that you have been given plenipotentiary powers? In that case you will succeed where all others have failed.’ The Viceroy had in fact demanded such powers, enabling him to reach swift decisions on the spot. He had also committed Attlee to a date for the end of British rule in India, with no escape clauses. The Raj was to end not later than June, 1948, when complete power would be handed to Indian successors.
This renunciation meant that Britain had no bargaining power any more: she was genuinely disinterested at last, and was concerned only to see that India was left a workable State, preferably a member of the Commonwealth, at least friendly to Great Britain. She had nothing much to offer in return, now that liberty was so firmly pledged, but nevertheless Mountbatten was marvellously, some thought overweeningly, self-confident. As he said himself, he thought he could do anything, and sure enough the combination of prestige, assurance and clear intention made him a much more formidable n
egotiator than the aloof Linlithgow or the despondent Wavell. It meant that he was arguing, if not from strength, at least from style.
The Mountbattens brought to the viceregal office an element of brio absent since the days of Curzon. They sustained the swagger of it all, the thousands of servants, the white viceregal train, the bodyguards, the curtseying and the royal emblems, but they made it contemporary. Gone were the ancient shibboleths of the court. The only royal Viceroy was the least grandiose of them all. At viceregal dinners now half the guests were always Indian, and earlier incumbents might have been horrified to observe how frankly the Mountbattens talked to natives of all ranks. It was an abdication in itself, for it was the very negation of imperial technique, but it was proper for the times and the purpose.
Mountbatten hoped to leave behind a federal united India, Hindus, Muslims and Princely States constitutionally linked. As second-best, he aimed at a peacefully divided one. He was adamant from the start that there would be no reservations or hidden clauses. ‘All this is yours’, he said to Gandhi one day, when the Mahatma asked if he might walk around the viceregal gardens. ‘We are only trustees. We have come to make it over to you.’ No Viceroy had ever talked like that before, and no Viceroy had ever ventured into such intimate political relationships. During his first two months in India Mountbatten had 133 recorded interviews with Indian political leaders, conducted always in an atmosphere of candid urgency—if the Indians wished to inherit a peaceful India, they must decide fast how to arrange it. He talked to scores of politicians, but the fate of the country was really decided by four men: the Viceroy himself, Gandhi, Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.