Dominique Lapierre - Freedom at Midnight - Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House

As a result, India had in 1947 the largest bovine herd in the world, 200 million beasts, one for every two Indians, an animal population larger than the human population of the United States. 40 million cows produced a meagre trickle of milk averaging barely one pint per animal per day. 40 or 50 million more were beasts of burden, tugging their bullock carts and ploughs. The rest, 100-odd million, were sterile, useless animals roaming free through the fields, villages and cities of India. Every day their restless jaws chomped through the food that could have fed ten million Indians living on the edge of starvation.

The instinct for survival alone should have condemned those useless beasts. Yet, so tenacious had the superstition become that cow slaughter remained an abomination for those very Indians who were starving to death so that the beasts could continue their futile existence. Even Gandhi maintained that in protecting the cow it was all God’s work that man protected.

To the Moslems, the thought that a man could so degrade himself as to worship a dumb animal was repugnant. They took a perverse delight in driving a lowing, protesting herd of cows past the front door of a Hindu Temple en route to the slaughter house. Over the centuries, thousands of human beings had accompanied those animals to their deaths in the riots which often followed each such gesture.

While the British ruled India, they managed to keep a fragile balance between the two communities, at the same time using their antagonism as an instrument to ease the burden of their rule. Initially, the drive for Indian independence was confined to an intellectual elite in which Hindus and Moslems ignored communal differences to work side by side towards a common goal. Ironically, it was Gandhi who had disrupted that accord.

In the most spiritual area on earth, it was inevitable that the freedom struggle should take on the guise of a religious crusade, and Gandhi had made it one. No man was ever more tolerant, more genuinely free of any taint of religious prejudice than Gandhi. He desperately wanted to associate the Moslems with every phase of his movement. But he was a Hindu, and a deep belief in God was the very essence of his being. Inevitably, unintentionally, Gandhi’s Congress Party movement began to take on a Hindu tone and colour that aroused Moslem suspicions.

Their suspicions were strengthened as narrow-minded local Congress leaders persistently refused to share with their Moslem rivals whatever electoral spoils British rule allowed. A spectre grew in Moslem minds: in an independent India they would be drowned by Hindu majority rule, condemned to the existence of a powerless minority in the land their Moghul forebears had once ruled.

One perspective seemed to offer an escape from that fate, the creation of a separate Islamic nation on the sub-continent. The idea that India’s Moslems should set up a state of their own was formally articulated for the first time on four and a half pages of typing paper in a nondescript English cottage at 3 Humberstone Road in Cambridge. Its author was a forty-year-old Indian Moslem graduate student named Rahmat Ali, and the date at the head of his proposal was 28 January 1933. The idea that India formed a single nation, Ali wrote, was ‘a preposterous falsehood’. He called for a Moslem nation carved from the provinces of north-west India where the Moslems were predominant, the Punjab, Kashmir, Sind, the Frontier, Baluchistan. He even had a name to propose for his new state. Based on the names of the provinces that would compose it, it was ‘Pakistan – land of the pure’.

‘We will not crucify ourselves,’ he concluded in a fiery, if inept metaphor, ‘on a cross of Hindu nationalism.’

Adopted by the body that was the focal point of Moslem nationalist aspirations, the Moslem League, Rahmat Ali’s proposal gradually took hold of the imagination of India’s Moslem masses. Its progress was nurtured by the chauvinistic attitude of the predominantly Hindu leaders of Congress who remained determined to make no concession to their Moslem foes.

The event which served to catalyse into violence the rivalry of India’s Hindu and Moslem communities took place on 16 August 1946, just five months before Gandhi set out on his penitent’s march. The site was the second city of the British Empire, a metropolis whose reputation for violence and savagery was unrivalled, Calcutta. Calcutta, with the legend of its Black Hole, had been a synonym for Indian cruelty to generations of Englishmen.

Hell, a Calcutta resident had once remarked, was being born an Untouchable in Calcutta’s slums. Those slums contained the densest concentration of human beings in the world, foetid pools of unrivalled misery, Hindu and Moslem neighbourhoods interlaced without pattern or reason.

At dawn on 16 August, howling in a quasi-religious fervour, Moslem mobs had come bursting from their slums, waving clubs, iron bars, shovels, any instrument capable of smashing in a human skull. They came in answer to a call issued by the Moslem League, proclaiming 16 August ‘Direct Action Day’, to prove to Britain and the Congress Party that India’s Moslems were prepared ‘to get Pakistan for themselves by “Direct Action” if necessary’.

They savagely beat to a sodden pulp any Hindus in their path and stuffed their remains in the city’s open gutters. The terrified police simply disappeared. Soon tall pillars of black smoke stretched up from a score of spots in the city, Hindu bazaars in full blaze.

Later, the Hindu mobs came storming out of their neighbourhoods looking for defenceless Moslems to slaughter. Never, in all its violent history, had Calcutta known 24 hours as savage, as packed with human viciousness. Like water-soaked logs, scores of bloated corpses bobbed down the Hooghly river towards the sea. Others, savagely mutilated, littered the city’s streets. Everywhere, the weak and helpless suffered most. At one crossroads, a line of Moslem coolies lay beaten to death where a Hindu mob had found them, between the poles of their rickshaws. By the time the slaughter was over, Calcutta belonged to the vultures. In filthy grey packs they scudded across the sky, tumbling down to gorge themselves on the bodies of the city’s 6000 dead.

The Great Calcutta Killings, as they became known, triggered bloodshed in Noakhali, where Gandhi was; in Bihar; and on the other side of the sub-continent in Bombay.

They changed the course of India’s history. The threat the Moslems had been uttering for years, their warnings of a cataclysm which would overtake India if they were denied their own state, took on a terrifying reality. Suddenly, India was confronted by the awful vision that had sickened Gandhi and sent him into the jungles of Noakhali: civil war.

To another man, to the cold and brilliant lawyer who had been Gandhi’s chief Moslem foe for a quarter of a century, that prospect now became the tool with which to pry India apart. History, beyond that written by his own people, would never accord Mohammed Ali Jinnah the high place his achievements merited. Yet, it was he, more than Gandhi or anyone else, who held the key to India’s future. It was with that stern and uncompromising Moslem Messiah, leading his people to another man’s Promised Land, that Queen Victoria’s great-grandson would have to contend when he reached India.

In a tent outside Bombay in August 1946, he had evaluated for his followers in the Moslem League the meaning of Direct Action Day. If Congress wanted war, he declared, then India’s Moslems would ‘accept their offer unhesitatingly’.

Pale lips pressed into a grim smile, his piercing eyes alight with repressed passion, Jinnah had that day flung down the gauntlet to Congress, to the British.

‘We shall have India divided,’ he vowed, ‘or we shall have India destroyed.’