Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (60 page)

O
N March 22, 1947, a new Viceroy arrived at New Delhi to take up office, and he and his wife were met by their predecessors on the steps of Lutyens’ palace. They had all known each other for years, but never was there such a contrast in styles between the old incumbents and the new. Down the steps came Lord and Lady Wavell of Cyrenaica, elderly and benevolent: he dressed in his Field Marshal’s uniform, his face grey and haggard, his one eye heavy-lidded (he had lost the other in the Great War), she smiling in the background in a low-waisted dress of floral silk, a tea-gown perhaps, wearing a silver ornament around her neck and looking for all the world like an evangelical bishop’s wife welcoming a new curate.

Up the steps came Lord and Lady Mountbatten of Burma, in the prime of worldly life, dashing, good-looking, confident: he in the uniform of an Admiral, slashed with the medal ribbons of a triumphant wartime career, she svelte in green cotton, as though she might be going on later to cocktails in Knightsbridge, or a theatrical party on 51st Street. The Field Marshal was a cultivated, gentlemanly but not very demonstrative soldier, aged sixty-three, the Admiral a pushing, rather conceited and brilliantly enterprising sailor, aged forty-six. One man bowed to the other, the younger woman curtseyed to the older, but later that day the Viceroyalty passed from Wavell to Mountbatten, and the courtesies were reversed. Their meaning was ironic, for the Admiral’s sole purpose in assuming this, the greatest office the British Empire had to offer, was to end the Raj in India, and conclude the long line of the Viceroys once and for all.

Since the constitution of 1935, India had muddled on, and she was no nearer independence ten years later. This was not for lack of trying. The nationalists had maintained their pressure throughout the war, the British, nagged by their allies, had gone so far in 1942 as to offer immediate Dominion status after victory, with the right to secede from the Empire too. Every initiative, though, had ended in deadlock. The most forceful of the Indian Hindus wanted instant independence—‘Why accept a post-dated cheque’, Gandhi is supposed to have asked, ‘on a bank that is obviously crashing?’ The most intransigent of the Indian Muslims wanted autonomy for themselves. The British, and especially Churchill, did not really want independence to happen at all.

Most Englishmen still doubted if Indians were ready for self-government: for one thing the populace was now apparently irrevocably divided on religious lines, for another there was the problem of the myriad Princely States, not part of British India at all, but direct feudatories of the imperial Crown. Most Indians still doubted if the British were sincere, suspected that the Muslim-Hindu rivalry was encouraged for imperial purposes, and had no patience with the pettifogging and sycophantic princes. The Hindus believed themselves to be the natural successors to the British as rulers of all India: the Muslims believed themselves to be natural rulers
per
se
, never subject to Hindu rule and never likely to be: the Sikhs believed themselves to be separate from, superior to and irrepressible by any other parties in the dispute: the British thought themselves,
au
fond
, indispensable.

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.

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.
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