The Partition of India – Part 1: End of Empire
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. As

I suppose it's very on-brand to say that I have extremely mixed emotions about the topic that we are about to explore today. On the one hand, I am incredibly excited, and on the other hand, I'm absolutely terrified. See, on my laptop, I have this folder, and in that folder is a very long list of potential topics for the show for Conflicted.

And today's topic has been languishing on that list for almost the entire time I've been doing this show, which at this point is coming up on about three years. So for three years, I've been avoiding this thing, which of course begs the question, why have I been avoiding it? Obviously, we do not shy away from difficult topics on this show. But in terms of complexity, depth, and sheer scope, this one is almost unparalleled.

It is also very emotionally charged. This topic means something to people. It's still raw. It still hurts. And yet, paradoxically, almost no one in the Western Hemisphere knows much about it at all. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about something called the partition of India. Partition, of course, means division or separation.

For almost 200 years, the British Empire held dominion over the Indian subcontinent. What began as a series of handshake deals with a few curious Maharajas snowballed into a complete and total subjugation of 400 million people.

From the peaks of the Himalayas to the river deltas of Bengal, the Union Jack fluttered proudly, a symbol of His Majesty's absolute control over one of the oldest cradles of civilization. India was, as one writer put it, quote, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, their chief source of wealth and a vital well of military manpower. In fact, at the dawn of the 20th century, four out of every five British subjects died

was Indian. But then, in 1947, they left. Brow-beaten and bankrupted by the horrific war against the Nazis, the British came to the uncomfortable conclusion that they could no longer afford their metaphorical crown, much less the jewel glittering at the center of it. As historian Alex von Tunzelman put it, quote, "...the treasury was all but empty, and the debts of empire lay in the middle of it, like an open drain."

Yes, it was time to leave India for good. But it wasn't just empty pockets that compelled the Brits to abdicate their prized possession. For decades, voices of freedom had been rising in India. A generation of homegrown lawyers and activists, led by a skinny little firebrand named Mohandas Gandhi, maybe you've heard of him, convinced the common people of India that they didn't need the British anymore. In fact, maybe they never needed them at all. It was time for them to leave.

Finally, for a united India to stand up and take its place on the world stage, as one nation, one people, with one voice. But history, as we all know, is rarely as simple or clean as that. India is a very, very diverse place, with hundreds of dialects, dozens of religions, and countless competing ideologies. There were some Indians who began to wonder whether all those different kinds of people could or should live side by side –

Maybe this rosy, candyland idea of unity, of one India, maybe that was just one more poison pill from the departing British. Just another legacy of colonialism, incompatible with the demographic realities of India.

When the British finally left, they wondered how would religious minorities, the Muslims, the Sikhs, be treated by the new governing Hindu majority? What if India was simply swapping one oppressive regime for another? And so, for reasons that we will go into in great depth later, the voices of freedom were eclipsed by voices of fear. In August 1947, the subcontinent was partitioned, or split, into two new countries –

Muslim majority Pakistan, and Hindu majority India. The immediate result of that division was a near indescribable cataclysm of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and bottomless human misery. The boundary line that separated India from Pakistan ripped apart communities, bisected entire cities, and unraveled the social fabric of whole provinces.

Millions of people suddenly found themselves living on the quote-unquote wrong side of the border, surrounded by hostile and suspicious neighbors. As historian Hajari Nisid writes, quote, Nearly 70 years later, partition has become a byword for horror. Instead of joining hands at their twinned births, India and Pakistan would be engulfed by some of the worst sectarian massacres the modern world has ever seen. Non-Muslims on one side of the new border in the Punjab

and Muslims on the other descended with sword and spear and torch on the minorities who lived among them.

The human cost was jaw-dropping. As Hajari Nasid continues later in his book, "...at least 14 million refugees were uprooted in what remains the biggest forced migration in history." Anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million people died. It was, as historian Yasmin Khan puts it, "...war by any other name."

End quote. But the story of Partition is not just some one-dimensional parade of suffering, doom, and gloom. There is beauty buried in the heart of it all, powerful acts of human kindness hiding just beneath the surface, serving as a sharp rebuttal to the cynical notion that cruelty is just mankind's factory setting. And only by looking at that full spectrum of behavior can we assemble a comprehensive understanding of what actually happened in the summer of 1947.

And why? As one elderly survivor of partition violence put it, quote, If times of old must be discussed, they must be discussed in their entirety. End quote. Over the course of this new multi-part series on the partition of India, we will meet a huge and fascinating cast of historical figures. From the halls of power to decrepit slums, we'll examine this conflict through the eyes of the people who saw it, experienced it, and shaped it.

We will meet princes and pimps, viceroys and gang leaders, idealists and opportunists, bleeding-heart activists and bloodthirsty killers, ordinary people with extraordinary stories. And with a little luck, all these different viewpoints and perspectives will help us cobble together a deeper appreciation for a century-shaping event, one that you would be hard-pressed to find so much as a paragraph about in a textbook on this side of the Atlantic.

But even though it happened 75 years ago, in a very distant corner of the world, this is a story that can hit uncomfortably close to home. At its most basic level, Partition is a story about communities drifting apart, about political polarization and the weaponization of identity. It's about how people who have lived side-by-side all their lives can

can be taught how to hate each other. It's about what happens when we become convinced to our core that we have nothing in common with those people. That the differences between us are so wide and unbridgeable that we're better off living apart. Or worse yet, hurting the other group so that they don't hurt us first.

These are the issues at the core of the partition story, and I can't promise that we'll reach satisfying answers to any of them. But maybe we can at least uncover a few kernels of insight that we can carry with us into our daily lives. In this first episode, we're going to meet some of the key players and get the lay of the land. We'll enter our story at the twilight of the British Raj, just as India was on the cusp of achieving true independence.

Now, I have learned my lesson from past multi-part series, and I won't say outright exactly how many episodes this series will be, because the truth is, I don't honestly know. I have a roadmap, but like always, the story will go kind of where it wants to go. But that said, I am very excited to share it with you. So without further ado, let's get started. Welcome to The Partition of India, Part 1, End of Empire.

It's August 1947. We're on the platform of a train station in the ancient city of Lahore. The picturesque temples and mosques scattered throughout the metropolis are hundreds of years old.

The city itself is even older, but the nation Lahore resides in, Pakistan, has only existed for about 15 days. For weeks, passenger trains have been pouring into the station, bringing hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from across the newly drawn border with India.

There are no empty seats on these trains, and sometimes there are no seats at all. Every square inch of every carriage was bursting with people, squeezed so close and so tight it was hard to know where one body ended and another began. Skin against skin, someone else's breath in your nostrils, all under a suffocating blanket of 116-degree summer heat. The men, women, and kids who couldn't find a spot inside simply hung onto the sides or sat on the roof.

But no passenger complained about the lack of amenities or legroom. The only thing that mattered was that they were heading towards Pakistan and away from India.

But this afternoon, at this platform, the train from India was running late, which was hardly surprising to some degree in the chaos and confusion of partition public transportation operated when and where it could. But today's train is particularly behind schedule, and when it finally screeches into the station, the people waiting on the platform see why. The first thing they notice is the complete and utter chaos.

Silence. Anyone who's been on a crowded train can tell you that they are very, very noisy. When you cram 3,000 people into 15 train carriages, the talking, chatter, and shouting becomes deafening. But this train is strangely, eerily quiet. And when it rolls to a stop, no one gets out. Not a single passenger disembarks. The people waiting on the platform open the carriage doors and step inside to investigate.

Inside the train, they find what one historian called, quote, a funeral pyre on wheels, end quote. The floor is sticky with blood. The air is thick with flies. And everywhere, sprawled in heaps and bent at odd angles, are the passengers. Every single person on the train is...

is dead. All except one. The only soul left alive is the train driver. His life was spared. After all, someone needed to deliver this macabre cargo to its destination. On the side of the train, a single phrase is scrawled in fresh paint. Quote,

A gift from India. In the coming weeks, more ghost trains would arrive in Pakistan, but still more would be sent back in the opposite direction. But instead of dead Muslims, the carriages would be filled with dead Hindus and Sikhs. Tit for tat, blood for blood. Upon arriving in Delhi or Emiratesar, the people on those platforms would read the words, quote, a gift from Pakistan, end quote. It

It was a horrific state of affairs. The subcontinent was transfixed by an orgy of genocide, what one historian called, quote, a fever of hate.

But five months earlier, in the spring of 1947, no one could have imagined that things would go so bad, so fast. At that time, 4,000 miles away, in the United Kingdom, Edwina Mountbatten's biggest concern was what kind of dress she was going to wear for her husband's big party. It was the evening of March 18th, 1947.

And the most violent thing happening in the reception hall of the Royal Automobile Club in London was the popping of champagne corks. It was the party of the year, a well-to-do whirlwind of glitz and glamour. One quick look around the room would have revealed a dazzling who's who of big egos and tiny waists. Everybody was there.

the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, even members of the royal family. 700 people, all dressed to the nines to bid farewell to one very important couple. And at the center of the room, glittering in the limelight, were the man and woman of the hour, Louis and Edwina Mountbatten. That's M-O-U-N-T-B-A-T-T-E-N, Mountbatten.

Now, if you're at all familiar with British royal history, you've probably heard the name Mountbatten before. But if you haven't, that's okay. The Mountbattens have an important part to play in our story, and we will come to know them very well over the course of this series. These days, of course, the royals are mostly just fodder for tabloid gossip, but in the mid-20th century, they were still power players on the geopolitical stage.

And no one relished his place on that stage quite like Louis, Francis, Albert, Victor, Nicholas, 1st Earl of Mountbatten, and Viscount of Burma. Although all his friends just called him Dickie. Dickie Mountbatten was royalty, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria herself. And he looked the part, too.

Tall, handsome, and debonair in a classically English sort of way, Dickie looked as if he'd been created in a test tube to represent the British monarchy. As historian Alex von Tunzelman writes, quote, End quote. End quote.

With his chiseled cheeks and falcon features, no one seemed capable of outshining the elegant Earl of Mountbatten. No one, except the woman on his arm, the Countess of Mountbatten. As von Tunzelman writes, quote,

End quote. Her name, as previously mentioned, was Edwina, and in 1947, she was 46 years old. Like Dickie, Edwina had come from old money, a pampered rich girl with blood as blue as Mughal sapphires and table manners to match.

The Countess of Mountbatten was the heiress to a large banking fortune and a $3 million trust fund, and as such, she fit right in at royal parties and state dinners. And even at 46, she was a knockout, with short brown hair, an hourglass figure, and a gentle, disarming smile. It is, of course, tempting to dismiss Edwina as yet another self-obsessed aristocrat. The

The royal family, after all, has never been short on those, but Edwina differed from the average debutante. Dickie had always been a hopeless romantic, and he spent his youth pining for a fairytale bride that he could smother with affection. What he got instead was Edwina, a complicated, introspective, and fiercely independent woman who was not content to be a submissive piece of royal arm candy. There was a hunger to her.

a gnawing sense of longing for new experiences. She wanted to see things, do things, travel, eat, fall in love, fall out of love, make mistakes, and put some genuine mileage on her soul. As one friend said at the time, quote, "...for Edwina, there was always something missing. She didn't know what it was or where it was, but she was determined to find it."

Dickie and Edwina had met back in 1920, two 20-something kids with cash to burn and expectations to meet. They fell hard and fast for one another. By 1922, the wedding bells were ringing in London. And they had it all. They were rich, powerful, and beautiful. But beneath the picture-perfect facade, there was a much more complicated marital situation. Edwina, Dickie soon discovered, had a wife.

had appetites. Appetites that lay outside the marriage bed. She liked to flirt, she liked to kiss, and she liked to hook up. Mostly with men that were not named Dickie Mountbatten. In short, monogamy was just not her style. At first, Dickie tried to ignore it. Every time he heard a rumor or read a headline in a tabloid rag, he dismissed it. But before long, it became painfully clear that his wife was having, as one historian put it, quote, a long and ostentatious series of affairs, end quote. And

And one night, it all came to a head. The two got into a knockdown drag out that ended with Edwina crying her eyes out in the bathtub, telling her husband that she, quote, wanted to be free, end quote. And that would have been the death knell for most marriages, but as Dickie sat stewing in the other room, alone and humiliated, he realized he didn't want to leave his wife.

He loved his wife. The only question was, did she love him back? Really love him? His question was answered just a few hours later when Edwina slipped into his room and begged for reconciliation. It was a decisive moment in their relationship. Dickie realized that what he wanted more than anything was for Edwina to be happy. He loved her and he didn't want to lose her. And if that meant sharing her with other people, well, then he was willing to live with that.

So, in a scandalous and unconventional twist, the Earl and Countess of Mountbatten entered into an open relationship. Edwina could have her flings, Dickie could have his girlfriends, and at the end of the day they'd fall asleep in each other's arms. At least metaphorically. It was an arrangement that would continue for decades to come.

with decisive results in the faraway future for the faraway country of India. However, the trials and tribulations of the Mountbatten's were just getting started. Before long, Europe was at war for the second time in a generation. Bombs were falling on London, swastikas were flying over Paris, and ships were sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic.

It looked, for a brief, scary moment, like the British Empire might not survive the storm. But in the pitch black days of World War II, something changed in Edwina. Something switched. She threw herself into the dangerous, difficult tasks of wartime operations.

Overnight, she became a one-woman machine, inspecting bomb shelters and working day and night to improve conditions in them. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she was not afraid to pull off the tea gloves and get her hands dirty. She comforted bullet-torn soldiers in France, gave rousing speeches in America, and toured POW camps from Bangkok to Singapore. Proximity to danger never seemed to bother Edwina. One American general couldn't help but comment, quote, "'She is so smart, she scares me.'"

Finally, after years of restlessness, she had found her calling, something to care about, something to occupy her time besides disposable affairs and empty pageantry. When World War II finally ended, Edwina emerged from the ordeal an accomplished and devoted humanitarian. Little did she know, destiny was about to place her and her husband at the center of yet another hurricane.

In the spring of 1947, Dickie Mountbatten was entrusted with possibly the most important diplomatic responsibility in the history of the British Empire.

The Earl had never been short on fancy titles, but now they were adding another one to his list. Viceroy of India. In the long history of the British Raj, or British rule, over India, there had been 19 Viceroys. Dickie Mountbatten was going to be the 20th, and the last. The responsibilities of his post were simple, yet immense. He

He somehow had to organize, plan, and negotiate Britain's withdrawal from their most important colonial asset. The voices of freedom had made their case and won the day. After all these years, India was going to be free. And it was up to the Mountbatten's to make it happen. For observers at the time, it was a head-scratcher of a staffing choice. Dickie Mountbatten was not the obvious pick to pull this thing off. He wasn't particularly bright or talented and his war record was checkered at best.

His peers at the Navy, after all, jokingly called him, quote, the master of disaster. But he was a hard worker, charismatic, and completely loyal to the crown. He could, it seemed, be trusted to get this thing done, one way or another. As they sipped cocktails and entertained guests at their farewell reception on the night of March 18th, 1947, Dickey and Edwina had no conception of the tempest they were about to plunge into. As Alex von Tunzelman writes, quote,

End quote. Giving India back to the Indians in a way that preserved British dignity and satisfied all the parties involved was going to be an awesome, near insurmountable task. Historian Ahmed Akbar underscores the enormity of the mission. End quote.

Dickie was understandably nervous. As he climbed aboard the plane that would take he and Edwina to India, Mountbatten turned to an aide and said, quote,

I don't want to go. They don't want me out there. We'll probably come home with bullets in our backs. The last Viceroy of India was right about one thing. Before all was said and done, many, many people were going to die.

But before we spend any more time with Edwina and Dickey Mountbatten, the last viceroy and vicerine of India, we need to wind back the clock. We need to understand how the British came to rule over all of India in the first place. And more importantly, why, after such a long and lucrative tenure, they were being forced to leave. Ryan Reynolds here from Intmobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down.

The year is 1880.

about 70 years before the Mountbatten's boarded their plane bound for India. We're in a small town on the western coast of India in the province of Gujarat. And it was a town like any other. It had a market, it had farms, it had places of worship, mosques and temples and churches. And like any town filled with rough men who spent most of their day toiling under the sun, it had a brothel.

And today, the world's oldest profession has a very young customer. Into this small town brothel steps a skinny little Indian teenager. And this kid is sweating bullets. He's fidgety, he's nervous, he's excited, he's pretty much exactly how you'd expect a teenage virgin to behave...

in a whorehouse. If his parents knew he was here, he would get the beating of a lifetime. After all, this was not the first time the boy had engaged in acts of teenage defiance. When puberty hit, he started taking all kinds of risks and pushing all kinds of boundaries. The boy's family was vegetarian, so he ate meat. His parents didn't approve of smoking, so he smoked.

His family was financially secure, so he stole gold from under their noses, and today's hormone-fueled trip to the local brothel was the latest in an escalating pattern of rebellion. But as he's standing at the entryway of the brothel, with his skinny legs, big ears, and peach fuzz lip, looking at these full-grown women inside…

The boy chickens out. He can't do it. Stealing gold and eating meat was one thing, but this was a line he could not bring himself to cross. And so the boy runs home to his parents and never tells them about his close brush with dishonor. To the prostitutes in the brothel, he was just some scared, nameless kid. But history would come to know his name very well. That kid's name was Mohandas Gandhi.

It is of course impossible to tell the story of partition without talking about Gandhi, the Mahatma, the Great Soul, as his legions of followers came to call him. He is as much a part of this narrative as the landscape of India itself. Because the truth is there is no independent India, partitioned or otherwise, without Mohandas Gandhi. In terms of sheer name recognition, Gandhi is up there with Napoleon, Caesar, Muhammad and Jesus, everyone and their mom.

knows about the little man in the loincloth who mobilized India's masses and led his people to freedom. But the reality is much more complicated. In many ways, Mohandas Gandhi was a bundle of contradictions: strong, yet frail; moral, yet rigid;

Now, this series will not devolve into a glorified biography of Gandhi, that's not what we're here to do, but like the Mountbatten's, he is a critical member of our cast, pardon the pun. Because ironically, at the climax of his life's work, at the

cusp of achieving the thing that he had spent his entire life devoted to, the great advocate for non-violent resistance, would be a witness to some of the most unspeakable killing sprees his country had ever seen. But way back in 1880, he was just a sexually frustrated teenager with a rebellious streak and a chip on his shoulder. From an early age, the young Gandhi was always pushing back on the status quo, and it was at that time that he became acutely aware of the most entrenched status quo of them all.

The British Raj, or British Rule. When Gandhi was growing up, the British had been running the show in India for generations, well beyond the horizon of living memory, and they had crept in on cat's feet. As Gandhi would later observe, quote,

End quote. Almost 300 years earlier, in 1615, no one in India could have imagined that the handful of oddly dressed white guys swaggering into their palaces would eventually come to dominate the entire subcontinent. The English, after all, hailed from what one historian called, quote, a grubby, unsophisticated, cold, dismal little kingdom. End quote.

At the time, compared to the wealth and majesty of Mughal India, England was a third-world dumping ground. As Alex von Tunzelman colorfully writes, quote, In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty, and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, deserterized,

End quote. But the English had not left their sad little island and sailed 5,000 miles to the richest empire in the Eastern Hemisphere to simply admire its cultural achievements. They were there for one reason and one reason alone. Money.

The first Englishmen to splash ashore to India were not official representatives of the British crown. They weren't soldiers, they were businessmen, traders,

corporate stooges and middle managers looking for their next big acquisition. And when they clapped eyes on the 1.2 million square mile cash cow that was the Indian subcontinent, dollar signs bulged in their eyes. The truth is there were many European trade entities skulking around the subcontinent at the time, but one corporation quickly eclipsed them all. The notorious EIT, the East India Trading Company.

As they sunk their hooks into India one trading post at a time, the reach and power of the company grew and grew and grew. With fat stacks and tasty profits, they financed a merciless private army, one that they had no hesitation about using. The East India Company was, as Alex von Tunzelman puts it, quote, a private empire of money, unburdened by

Now that is not to say that India was some untouched paradise of peace and tranquility. The wheels of power were always turning, grinding down old dynasties and lifting up new ones. As historian Lawrence James puts it, quote,

End quote. Like almost every other square inch of the globe in the 17th century, it was a land of constant political change. Mughal princes cut each other's throats amidst Persian invasions and Rajput uprisings. There was no cohesive national identity. No one called themselves an Indian.

But it was precisely that instability that allowed the British to make short work of the existing power structures and establish their own hegemony over the subcontinent. It didn't happen overnight, though. The British measured their designs in decades, not years. The real evil genius of the East India Company was patience. As historian M.J. Akbar describes, quote,

The British built their empire in small, careful steps, choosing one adversary at a time, and using exceptional diplomatic skills to sabotage an enemy alliance to the extent that they could. They were brilliant at provoking dissent through the effective expedience of promising power to the rebel. End quote.

Divide and conquer, reward and rule. It was a brilliant system. And one could argue that it was the pen that conquered India rather than the sword. That's what Gandhi was talking about when he said the Indians had given their home to the British willingly. Sell out your neighbor for a cut of the profits today and watch yourself get sold out tomorrow. And on and on and on. And so it went. As one historian put it, "...conquest gathered its own momentum." End quote.

And in just a hundred years, the British had fashioned themselves into the undisputed masters of India. It made the East India Trading Company, and by extension the British Empire, fabulously wealthy. As a French ambassador remarked at the time, "...there are few kings in Europe richer than the directors of the East India Company." One representative of the company gloated, "...our ships are laden with the harvest of every climate."

And it was about this time that the English language added a new word to its lexicon. The Hindustani term for plundered wealth, you might know it,

Yes, in the long history of corporations, there have been few as successful as the British East India Company. But on a long enough timeline, even the most powerful corporations eventually find themselves at the crossroads of a scandal, one that threatens to bring the whole enterprise down. Enron, Lehman Brothers, Theranos, the East India Company was no different. The East India Company experienced its version of a big corporate scandal in 1857, when it

when millions of Indians, tired of having a British boot on their windpipe, took up arms and rebelled. There was horrible violence, atrocities on both sides, and ultimately, the uprising failed. And the wages of that defeat were 800,000 dead Indians and a big change in leadership. With the Government of India Act in 1858, the East India Company was liquidated. Going forward, India would be under the direct control of

of the British crown. And so began the mythically glamorous era of colonialism we call the British Raj. To the lords and ladies of England like Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten, it was a golden age.

Patios, parasols, and elephant rides. But for the average Indian, it was a period of abject poverty, vicious bigotry, and endless exploitation. As India grew poorer, Britain grew richer. The British Empire was, quote, a succubus, according to one historian. It was patronage at its most parasitic.

Historian Shashi Thraror expounds, "...by the end of the 19th century, India was Britain's biggest source of revenue, the world's biggest purchaser of British exports, and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India's own expense. Indians literally paid for their own oppression." And it was a level of oppression that was abundantly clear to 45-year-old Mohandas Gandhi.

The year was 1915, and Mohan was not a horny kid anymore. Nor was he the bent-backed, loincloth-wearing saint of later years. He was just Mr. Gandhi, a short, wiry man with a white turban and a jet-black mustache. The rebellious teenager was long gone, but the defiant spirit had only intensified. And after 20 years in exile, Gandhi...

was returning home. Mohan Gandhi was at the spear tip of an up-and-coming vanguard of Indian activists and lawyers, educated in British schools and trained to be loyal servants of the empire, and yet painfully aware of their own secondary status within it,

As von Tunzelman writes, quote,

blind justice and fair play, only to discover that none of these rights actually applied to them." Gandhi's first eye-opening brush with bigotry happened on a train in South Africa way back in 1893. He was in his mid-twenties at the time, a well-spoken lawyer educated in the British system lounging comfortably in a first-class compartment. And to his shock and dismay, the young Gandhi was dragged from his seat by a policeman and thrown off the train.

The reason for the poor treatment? Well, wasn't it obvious? This Gandhi, or whatever his name was, was just another dark-skinned N-word, as the British commonly called their Indian inferiors. And no matter how many degrees he held, no matter how well-pressed his suits were, he did not belong in first class with the other good white folks. Gandhi later put his hurt and disgust into words. Quote, They treat us like beasts.

Mohandas Gandhi spent the next 20 years in South Africa, fighting for the rights of the Indian diaspora. And it was there, in that place so far from home, that a revolutionary new political method began to take shape. When Gandhi was a child, memories of the disastrous 1857 uprising against the British East India Company were still fresh in people's minds. Terrible recollections of prisoners blown apart by cannons, or

or forced to lick blood off the floor. Violence clearly had not helped the Indians achieve their political goals. All it did was infuriate their colonial masters more and trigger vicious crackdowns. Mohandas Gandhi came to believe that the only successful way to fight back against British injustice was to do so without shedding blood, without taking lives.

The British Raj, powerful as it may be, was buoyed by a tiny group of British administrators. What if 400 million Indians simply refused to participate in their own oppression? When the trains stopped, when the shops closed, when the mines were empty, when the

when the money dried up. Then the British would be forced to listen. They can beat us, Gandhi said. They can kick us. They can shoot us. They can throw us in jail. They can bulldoze our homes, seize our property, and ruin our lives. But if we refuse to cooperate, if we refuse to retaliate, if we bear the slings and arrows of their hatred with inexhaustible love and

and patience, their spirit will eventually crack, and we will win. The idea, as one writer put it, was to, quote, return good for evil until the evildoer tires of evil, end quote. This idea was, as historian Louis Fisher explains, quote, a weapon peculiarly his own. It was unprecedented and has remained unimitated in

Indeed, it was so unique he could not find a name for it until he finally hit upon satyagraha. Satya means truth, the equivalent of love, and both are attributes of the soul. Agraha is firmness or force. Satyagraha is therefore translated as soul force or truth force. Satyagraha, Gandhi wrote, is, quote, the vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent,

but on one's self. The opponent must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. End quote. On one occasion, to help communicate what this meant to people, Gandhi read a poem by Percy Shelley that articulated the strategy. Quote, "...with folded arms and steady eyes, and little fear and less surprise, look upon them as they slay till their rage has died away."

But of course to many, Gandhi's methods seemed naive, passive, and unstrategic. Might makes right, after all. At the end of the day, freedom is won with bayonets, not bouquets. How can you even beat an opponent who breaks the rules as easily as he breaks your bones? Gandhi's response to that critique was to say, well, then we invent new rules. Quote,

A satyagrahi bids goodbye to fear. He is therefore never afraid to trust the opponent. Even if the opponent plays him false 20 times, the satyagrahi is ready to trust him the 21st time. For an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed. End quote. All the skeptics called it cowardice, passivity. But it was anything but. As Fisher writes, quote, Nonviolence, Gandhi said,

End quote. And historian M.J. Akbar concurs, quote,

Satyagraha was the ideology of the victim, its moral center of gravity firmly rooted in justice, its principal target the adversary's conscience. It was martial in spirit, all the characteristics required of a war hero – discipline, fearlessness and the readiness to sacrifice one's life – were prerequisites in Gandhian peaceful resistance.

End quote. Unshakable, unbreakable, uncorruptible moral example. That is how we will win, he said.

And the crazy part was, it actually worked. Gandhi's secret sauce was a willingness to not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. He and his followers took bruises and beatings, abuse and failure, spent years of their lives in jail cells. But with time and patience, his methods yielded results, first in South Africa and later in India. The monolithic edifice of British colonialism was being chipped at and eroded immediately.

bit by bit. But like all lightning rod activists, Gandhi's success attracted as much hatred as admiration. English critics conferred on Gandhi an array of odious titles, quote, the prince of liars, miserable swine, and the ungratefulest of men, just to name a few. One of Gandhi's fiercest critics later in life was none other than Winston Churchill, who said, quote, I hate you.

They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. End quote. And as for Gandhi himself, quote, End quote.

But Gandhi earned more reverence than revilement, and even as a young man an image was being cultivated around him of the saintly sage, calm and tranquil, sitting on a reservoir of infinite wisdom. But the truth was of course more complicated. Beneath that simplistic image, as one historian put it, "...storms continued to rage within him."

Mohandas Gandhi had a complex and fascinating psychology. At the innermost core of his personality was a pathological obsession with deprivation. He was an intensely religious man, a devout Hindu, and he saw sin lurking around every corner. He believed that by withholding pleasure in almost every form, he could achieve a kind of moral and mental transcendence.

To obtain this purity, Gandhi scratched almost every earthly delight off his metaphorical menu. He gave up sex and became celibate. He swore off alcohol, meat, eggs, dairy, even salt. He spoke out against modern medicine and surgery, calling them, quote, black magic, and believing that disease was the rightful consequence of poor life choices.

Of course, that didn't stop him from going under a surgeon's knife to remedy a bout of appendicitis later in life, but overall, in creed and conscience, Gandhi stuck to his guns. But it was all rooted in this obsession with deprivation. If it made you feel good, Gandhi thought it was corrosive to his soul. Pain and hardship was the path to purity.

As Alex von Tunzelman writes, quote,

to be righteous. End quote. To his political adversaries, Gandhi's unorthodox lifestyle made him all the more threatening. As an Oxford professor named Gilbert Murray wrote, quote, Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasures, nothing for comfort or praise or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes is right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you so little purchase. Oh,

over his soul. End quote. But of course Gandhi also expected the people close to him to conform to a similar life of austerity which caused huge rifts between he and members of his family. He and his eldest son clashed constantly over their differing world views. As Tunzelman put it, quote, "...it is not easy being a saint, and it is perhaps even less so to live with one."

End quote. No, Gandhi may have never been father of the year, but he was the father of an extremely potent and successful political strategy that he brought back home to India from South Africa in 1915. And from there, his non-violent struggle against the British Raj only intensified. But the British, like all colonial overlords, were not going to leave without a fight.

It's April 13th, 1919, 30 years before partition. We're in northwestern India, in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar. It's about 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and a massive crowd is beginning to form in a large public garden.

20,000 people, men, women, children, families, all gathered to celebrate a traditional spring festival. If you were to leave the garden and stroll a few blocks to the west, you would have stumbled upon the world-famous Golden Temple, a splendid seek-house of worship floating atop a man-made pool. It was a tranquil, sacred place. But in the public square, just 600 meters away...

The mood was anything but calm. While many of the 20,000 people gathering in the square were just there to celebrate the local festival, a significant portion of the crowd were political activists coming out to make their voices heard, to express their anger at the latest slap in the face from the British Raj. For weeks, the city had been roiling with discontent. The British government had recently passed a punitive series of laws called the Rowlett Acts –

and the acts had obliterated what limited and meager protections the average Indian had in the colonial justice system. From Amritsar to Bombay to Calcutta, Indians learned that they were no longer guaranteed a right to trial by jury. Worse still, the acts allowed internment without trial, meaning you could be tossed in a jail cell without a shred of evidence or due process. It was infuriating, but not surprising.

Just another fresh insult from the British Raj. The public outcry was swift and furious. Mohandas Gandhi, recently returned from South Africa, called for a campaign of non-violent resistance to the acts. Through righteous love and patient non-cooperation, he said, they would show the British the error of their ways. But very few people possessed the equanimity or self-control

of the Mahatma. Riots erupted in the streets of Amritsar and Delhi, and as riots tend to do, they quickly turned violent.

Five Englishmen were killed, banks were looted, and a schoolteacher was knocked off her bike and beaten. The British response came in the form of a mailed fist. On April 11th, 1,100 troops and two armored cars outfitted with machine guns rumbled through the streets of the Holy City, hell-bent on restoring order. The Indian reception to their arrival was not warm. From the alleyways and alcoves, the soldiers could hear shouts of, quote, the

The British Raj is at an end. The next day, martial law was imposed. A curfew was set, and the city was locked down. And yet, on April 13th, 20,000 people gathered in the public garden in defiance of the restrictions. And as massive as it was, the crowd was completely peaceful. There were no riots, no torches or pitchforks, no angry shouts. As historian M.J. Akbar describes, quote, there was not a hint of protest, let alone violence."

Yes, Gandhi would have been proud. But looking out on this gathering, from about 150 yards away, is Brigadier General Reginald D'Amelio.

Dyer, commander of the 1100-strong pacification force. General Dyer was an old dyed-in-the-wool colonialist, a clean-cut military man with a bushy mustache and a neatly combed side part. He believed in order, obedience, and had zero tolerance for agitators like the ones gathered here in the public garden, in greats all, who needed to be reminded of their place in the world.

and so with all the calm of ordering a cup of coffee dyer commanded fifty men to take up firing positions along the edge of the square there was no warning or call to disperse or so much as a word exchanged with the crowd in general dyer's mind these twenty thousand animals were in direct violation of an order from his majesty's government

And like animals, they only understood one thing. Dyer told his soldiers to aim their rifles and enforce the law. Historian Shashi Tharoor describes what happened next.

Quote,

they were trapped in a murderous fusillade. 1,600 bullets were fired that day into the unarmed throng, and when the job was finished just 10 minutes later, 379 people lay dead and 1,137 lay injured, many grotesquely maimed for life. A total of 1,516 casualties from 1,600 bullets. Only 84 had failed to find their mark.

End quote.

The body count, which included children, old people, and pregnant women, barely scratched Dyer's conscience. As he explained himself later, quote, End quote.

As it turned out, the Emirate Tsar Massacre, as it came to be known, caused a jolly lot of outrage. The atrocity was a fatal miscalculation from which the Raj would never fully recover. As historian Barney White Spunner writes, quote, Of all the many terrible events of empire, it ranks as one of the worst. Even Churchill, usually so determined in his defense of authority, said, quote, It was an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an

an event which stands in singular, sinister isolation. End quote. And Whitespunner goes on later in his book, quote, It is the Amritsar massacre that did the most to destroy trust and the reputation of the British Raj. End quote. For people all over the subcontinent, the calculated murder of hundreds of innocent civilians served as a blood-boiling wake-up call. In the political history of India, there is before Amritsar, end quote.

and after Amritsar. As Shashi Thraror writes, quote, The massacre made Indians out of millions of people who had not thought consciously of their political identity before that grim Sunday. End quote. One of those Indians, awakened and radicalized by the callous killings in the Punjab, was a young man named Jawaharlal Nehru. That's J-A-W-A-H-A-R-L-A-L Jawaharlal Nehru.

Although from this point on, mostly for the sake of my poor American tongue, we will just call him Neru. Over the past 45 minutes or so, we have been slowly expanding our cast. First, we met the Mountbatten's, with their glitz, glamour, and unconventional open marriage.

Then, we met Gandhi, the revolutionary paragon of non-violence and self-deprivation. And now, finally, we will round out our playbill with the third and arguably most important character, Jawaharlal Nehru. At the time of the Emirate Tsar Massacre, Nehru was 30 years old.

He was undeniably handsome, clean-shaven, with unusually pale skin and, quote, high aristocratic cheekbones and eyes that were deep pools, end quote, according to historian Hajari Naseed. He was a good-looking guy, but he wasn't Brad Pitt. If you passed him on the street, you probably wouldn't have given him a second thought. But Jawaharlal Nehru would turn out to be more important to the future of India than perhaps even Gandhi himself.

Now, for my money, Neru is one of the most interesting people in the story of Partition. As I was reading about him and reading about him and reading about him, I found myself coming back to his life over and over. Of all the characters in this story, Neru is probably the most relatable. In a landscape of historical figures that border on caricature,

He stands apart, as deeply human and accessible, in a way that the others are not. The Mountbatten's with their royal pedigree and obscene wealth feel slightly distant and aloof at first glance. Gandhi, with his rigid morality and otherworldly discipline, feels alien. But Nehru is probably the closest we have to a true blue audience surrogate.

So, who is he? Why are we talking about him? Why is he important? Well, spoiler alert, but Jawaharlal Nehru would go on to become the first prime minister of a free and independent India. He would lead his young country through a traumatic and bloody birthing process, and he is considered one of the great politicians ever.

of the 20th century. But way back in 1919, when the blood of 300-odd corpses was still oozing into the soil in Amritsar, Nehru was an angry young man.

A firebrand, with a hunger to change things, to make a difference, to crack some eggs and break some laws. But he had not always felt that way. Nehru was born into one of those rare Indian families that actually benefited from the British Raj. Like the heiress and future vicerine Edwina Mountbatten far away in London, Nehru was a rich kid, spoiled by, in his own words, quote, "...a soft life and pleasant experiences."

His dad was a wealthy, successful lawyer, and in a land dominated by ubiquitous poverty, young Nehru lived in a bubble of privilege.

As historian Shashi Thraror writes, "...Javaharlal grew up surrounded by every imaginable creature comfort. Not only did he have electricity and running water in the house, both unheard-of luxuries for most of his compatriots, but the family home was equipped with such unusual prerequisites as a private swimming pool and a tennis court. And his father ordered the latest toys for him from England, including the newly invented tricycle and bicycle."

End quote. Nehru was an only child, and his parents treated him accordingly. He was the apple of their eye. After all, his name, Javahirlal, meant precious jewel. And like any kid with a fussy and embarrassing first name, Nehru hated it. He was nothing if not self-aware and self-deprecating. He told a friend later in life, quote, For heaven's sake, don't call your son Javahirlal.

Javahar, jewel, by itself might pass, but the addition of lal, precious,

End quote. Like a lot of rich kids, when it came time to decide what to do with his life, he followed in his father's footsteps. If the barrister's wig was good enough for his dad, well, it was good enough for him too. And so young Nehru hopped on a ship and went to the beating heart of the British Empire to get his education. Seven years later, he returned to India from London with a crisp law degree and a keen sense of justice. And when he finally stepped into a courtroom, Nehru realized...

He hated it. After 5,000 miles traveled, countless hours wasted, and a small fortune spent, he had entered into a profession that he had little to no interest in. He was just another upper-crust daddy's boy. In his own words, quote, a bit of a prig with little to commend, end quote. Nehru's real passion, he found, was polygamy.

was politics. Like many Indians, he resented the British Raj and their succubus hold over India. As Lewis Fisher describes, quote, "...the British were masters in somebody else's house. Their very presence was a humiliation. Imperialism is government of other people, by other people, for other people. It is a perpetual insult, for it assumes that the outsider has the right to rule the insiders who cannot rule themselves."

Subjection breeds a desire for liberation. Hence, imperialism digs its own grave, and there can be no good colonizers. Young Nehru became a staunch supporter of the Indian independence movement. He became a card-carrying member of the Nationalist Congress Party, and before long he was attending meetings, waving flags, and having angry late-night political discussions at kitchen tables.

But like all young radicals, Nehru was a man in search of a mentor. And he found one for the ages in Mohandas Gandhi. This little man with big ears who shunned sex and defied empires. Nehru had lived a life of comfort and wealth and he was deeply moved and inspired by this man who gave up everything for the idea of a free India. In short, he was starstruck. Quote,

And then Gandhi came. He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths, like a beam of light that pierced the darkness and removed the scales from our eyes, like a whirlwind that upset many things, but most of all the working of people's minds. He did not descend from the top. He seemed to emerge from the millions of India, speaking their language and incessantly drawing attention to them in their appalling condition. End quote.

Nehru's political awakening was heralded by a two-pronged arrow. Gandhi inspired him. The Amritsar Massacre disgusted him. His radicalization was born in a mix of love and hate. In the aftermath of the massacre, the Congress Party sent Nehru to inspect the site, to conduct interviews and collect evidence. He went to the garden, to the spot where 379 people had been murdered,

and traced his hand over the bullet marks in the walls. He counted them one by one, 67 in total.

All the bodies were gone, but the stench of atrocity was still thick in the air. And Nehru found himself feeling so, so angry. His sister said that his blood was, quote, like superheated steam, end quote. In that moment, Nehru would have been willing to grab a rifle and wage a war of bloody independence against the British Raj. Many Indians felt like that.

But it was Gandhi who cooled passions and cleared heads. Murderers like Reginald Dyer were the exception, not the rule. The British were not evil, they were just misguided. Hearts and minds had to be changed, not blown to pulp with guns.

The Raj had to be conquered with love and patience, not bullets and blades. As they worked together more intimately and became closer and closer over the course of their lives, Nehru and Gandhi would have many arguments about the how of Indian independence. Nehru had a temper, and he would get angry with his calm, serene teacher. As Fisher describes, quote, In the course of a heated discussion, Nehru impatiently broke out, quote,

I want revolution. This is reformism. To which Gandhi rejoined, quote, I have made revolutions while others have talked about them. When your exuberance has subsided and your lungs are exhausted, you will come to me if you are really serious about making a revolution. End quote.

Gandhi and Nehru would grow to be, as von Tunzelman puts it, quote, the closest of friends. But Nehru was never a clone or a mini-me of Gandhi. Aside from their mutual aspiration towards a free India, they disagreed on almost everything. The Mahatma's guiding principle was non-violence. He was incapable of squishing a bug.

But Nehru had a fiery temper. If he saw something he believed was wrong, he would not hesitate to clench his soft lawyer's hands into a fist and dive headfirst into a street fight. It was something he would struggle with all his life. Then there was the matter of religion. On paper, Gandhi was a Hindu, but at prayer he did not discriminate. He found truth and beauty in all religions.

Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, to Gandhi they were all just different flavors of the same universal truth. In the space of a single breath he could quote Jesus, the Quran, and Hindu scripture. As Gandhi insisted, quote, no man can live without religion. And unlike many, many others, he actually practiced what he preached. As one historian commented, Gandhi was, quote, a better Christian than most Christians, end quote.

Young Nehru, however, did not share his mentor's belief in God. To Nehru, religion was, quote, the enemy of clear thought and a, quote, terrible burden. Unthinking deference to an invisible father figure in the clouds filled Nehru, quote, with horror. He believed that religion had no place in politics, none, that it clouded people's minds, stoked hatred, and gave rise to irrational passions. Only when India left religion behind could it, quote, breathe freshness.

freely." Gandhi, of course, felt the exact opposite. Those that say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means. To Gandhi, religion formed a vital moral framework, and no one needed that structure more than politicians, so vulnerable to cowardice and self-interest. But Nehru found Gandhi's obsession with religion "...most irritating."

The two men even disagreed on sex. Nehru could only roll his eyes at Gandhi's self-imposed celibacy. As von Tunzelman describes, quote, Nehru wrote that Gandhi's sex ban, quote, can only lead to frustration, inhibition, neurosis, and all manner of physical and nervous ills.

As for Gandhi's decree that birth control was a particular sin, for it allowed a person to quote, indulge his animal passions and escape the consequences of his acts, end quote, Nehru considered that to be outrageous. Quote,

But at the end of the day, even though they clashed over such fundamental issues, Nehru and Gandhi were like hand in glove, even father and son. As Nehru once wrote to Gandhi, quote,

The two men admired each other deeply. As Nehru wrote with introspective honesty, He is the very opposite.

End quote.

And so, in the waning days of the British Raj, a political partnership began to flower between Gandhi and Nehru, the saint and the atheist, the philosopher and the brawler, the celibate and the Lothario. Their friendship was a testament to the idea that people who deeply disagree can nevertheless work together to accomplish incredible things. That we are richer for our disagreements, not poorer.

As Gandhi said about Nehru, quote,

to estrange us. End quote. Meanwhile, the estrangement between the British Raj and its subjects was steadily progressing. The Emirate-Sar Massacre had irrevocably destroyed any trust that existed between the Indian people and their British overlords. And over the next three decades, the relationship between the rulers and the ruled would continue to erode. Cracks began to show, not only in the hard power of the Raj itself, but in the British conviction to keep it. In

In 1921, the New York Times had jokingly written that the British would sooner leave Great Britain than leave India. But by 1930, the British were beginning to lose their appetite for empire.

Things were changing. There was an indefinable electricity in the air like the smell of rain before a storm. The names Gandhi and Nehru were familiar to people as far away as America and Central Europe. Independence, what the nationalists called Swaraj or self-rule, seemed very, very close.

But Gandhi realized that no matter how worn down the British became, they would never bow to the table-pounding antics and strongly worded essays of a few ex-lawyers. Only a mass movement would shake them out of their obstinacy. He needed to ignite a desire for independence in the common people.

Freedom, he came to believe, would be won in the countryside, not the country club. And so, Gandhi and Nehru took their message all across the country, to the poorest slums and the most isolated hovels.

700,000 villages all waiting to be woken up. For Jawaharlal Nehru, who had spent so much of his life surrounded by luxury and privilege, it was an eye-opening experience, as he remembered, quote, "...looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame and

and sorrow, shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life in our petty politics of the city, which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty." Riding in third-class train cars, living frugally and crisscrossing the country, Nehru felt a sense of purpose and clarity that he had never felt in a courtroom, classroom or drawing room. He felt alive.

He felt like he was doing something real with his life. Campaigning against the Raj was his true calling. Naturally, the British did everything they could to silence Gandhi, Nehru, and their acolytes short of actually martyring them. They were arrested, beaten, and thrown in prison time and time again, only to be released and then arrested all over again for some fresh offense. Cumulatively, Jawaharlal Nehru would spend 10 years of his life in British jails. Gandhi would spend

would spend seven. But the Amritsar Massacre had been a huge turning point. The next one came 12 years later, and it didn't involve bullets or blood or homicidal brigadier generals. It involved the most mundane thing in the world, the simplest of commodities, salt.

Salt is of course a naturally occurring resource. You can go down to the beach, get a bucket of salt water, boil it, and boom, you have salt for your kitchen for like a month. But under the Raj, Indians had to buy their salt directly from the British and only from the British.

As Alex von Tunzelman writes, quote, "...in India, the British government had a long-enforced monopoly on salt. It was illegal to go to the beach and collect it, and more illegal to sell it. When salt was sold legitimately, a tax went directly to the British government, providing a total of 3% of its revenue from India."

End quote. To most people, it was just another small injustice, a tiny tile in the vast mosaic of British repression in India. But to Gandhi, it was a symbol, a simple, perfect metaphor for the immoral exploitation of the Raj. Gandhi was as much a showman as a saint, and he resolved to create an act of political theater that would embarrass the British government on the world stage. Gandhi announced that he would march 241 miles worldwide

on foot to the coast. And once there, he would defy the British by walking to the shore and collecting a small amount of untaxed contraband salt directly from Mother Nature herself.

And so, in March of 1930, Gandhi walked out of his home and headed for the ocean. As he got closer and closer to the coast, hundreds of people left their homes to join him. Then thousands, a vast column of humanity, rich and poor, young and old, a true cross-section of the subcontinent, had joined him. It was, as Lewis Fisher describes, quote, a moving congregation, end quote. India, it seemed...

was waking up. It was also a great act of PR. The international community was absolutely riveted. 24 days later, the 61-year-old Mahatma arrived at the beach. He walked down to the shore and plucked a few salt crystals out of the muddy sand. And that simple act sent shockwaves around the world. As Fisher continues, quote, Had Gandhi gone by train or automobile to make salt, the effect would have been considerable.

But to walk 241 miles in 24 days and rivet the attention of all India, to trek across the country saying, watch, I will give a signal to the nation, and then to pick up a palm full of salt in a publicized defiance of a mighty government, that required imagination, dignity, and a sense of showmanship of a great artist. It appealed to illiterate peasants and it fascinated sophisticated critics.

It was a powerful political act. Gandhi had, according to one historian, "...restored India's confidence. The magic wand of his personality became the national ramrod." More than 70 years after the 1857 mutiny, 300 years after the East India Company had begun dismantling India's civilization and carving it up into exploitable chunks, Indians had their dignity back.

A sense of self-respect and courage that they had forgotten that they had ever possessed. Gandhi had given it to them. Nehru had helped spread it. And now the long fever was breaking. As historian M.J. Akbar writes, quote,

Between 1757 and 1857, the British lost an occasional battle, but never a war, against the most powerful princes of India. They would eventually be defeated in 1947, but by a concept that they could never fully comprehend.

Non-violence. End quote. A couple months after Gandhi's famous salt march, the Mahatma was in jail. So was Nehru. The British wasted no time clapping the agitators and irons, but the power of their message still reverberated through the subcontinent like the tolling of a bell.

one that could not be unrung. In Bombay, an American journalist named Webb Miller watched a crowd of 2,500 protesters all clad in white march in defiance of the SALT tax. British-led police descended upon them with steel-tipped batons, and Miller remembered the scene, quote,

None of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of marchers groaned and sucked in their breath in sympathetic pain at every blow. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders.

And although everyone knew that within a few minutes he would be beaten down, perhaps killed, I could detect no sign of wavering or fear. They marched steadily, with heads up, without the encouragement of music or cheering or any possibility that they might escape injury or death. The police rushed out and methodically and mechanically beat down the second column. There was no fight, no struggle, the marchers simply walked forward,

This was Gandhi's dream in action. Peaceful non-cooperation. Satyagraha. The truth force. It would be 17 more years before India was officially free, but the die was cast. As Lewis Fisher writes, quote, Legally, technically, nothing had changed. India was free.

India was still a British colony, but there was a difference. End quote. India, wrote one poet, quote, could now afford to look down on Europe, where before she had looked up. End quote. And Jawaharlal Nehru himself remembered, quote, it was a psychological change, almost as if some expert in psychoanalytical methods had probed deep into the patient's past, found out the origins of his complexes, exposed them to his view, and thus rid him,

of that burden.

End quote. And Lewis Fisher continues, quote, The Salt March and its aftermath did two things. It gave Indians the conviction that they could lift the foreign yoke from their shoulders. It made the British aware that they were subjugating India. It was inevitable, after 1930, that India would someday refuse to be ruled. And more important, that England would someday refuse to rule. When the Indians allowed themselves to be beaten with batons and rifle butts and did not cringe,

They showed that England was powerless and India invincible. The rest was merely a matter of time. End quote. In his hot, dimly lit jail cell, Jawaharlal Nehru knew that a Rubicon had been crossed. It had been 11 years since he'd touched the bullet holes in the wall at Amritsar. And now he could feel the metaphorical holes spreading rapidly through the power of the Raj. Real independence. Freedom.

was so, so close. As he wrote from his cell, quote, It is clear that India, big as it is, is not big enough to contain both the Indian people and the British government. One of the two has got to go, and there can be little doubt as to which. We are in deadly earnest. We have burnt our boats, and there is no going back for us.

Well, guys, that is all the time we have for today. As I mentioned at the top, this is the first in a multi-part series, and we have a long, long way to go before we reach the end of our story. In Lord of the Rings parlance, we have barely left the Shire at this point. This episode, fundamentally, was about establishing why the British were in control of India in the first place, as well as understanding what they did to the subcontinent in a broad sense.

We also introduced some key members of the cast. We met the last Viceroy of India, Dickie Mountbatten, as well as his free-spirited wife, Edwina, on the eve of their mission to India. It'll be some time before they pop back into our story, but when they do, it will be hugely impactful, and I wanted to make you aware of their importance right from the jump.

We also spent time with Mohandas Gandhi, outlining his hugely influential philosophy of nonviolence as well as the contradictions raging within him. In particular, I wanted to establish the triumph and the power of his peaceful movement because later in the story, the Mahatma will live to see his dreams of a harmonious India turn to ashes.

And in the twilight of his life, he will undergo a traumatic ordeal in a vain attempt to stitch his people back together. And lastly, we met Gandhi's fiery protege, the young radical Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru has yet to really hit his stride in the story, but in the coming episodes, he will become more and more important. He will also cross paths with other characters in some very unexpected and scandalous ways. Next episode, we're going to be switching gears a bit.

We ended today's episode on a very triumphant high note, but beneath that sense of optimism and hope, old tensions were bubbling beneath the surface. Bitter, ancient fault lines within India's communities that would metastasize into genocide and ethnic cleansing.

in 1947. As we get closer and closer to the coming horror of partition, it's important that we understand the religious and cultural dynamics that will fuel the violence. Next episode, we're going to explore the relationship between the two main religious communities in India, Muslims and Hindus. We will also introduce a brand new character who will kind of round out our main cast, a flawed and fascinating politician named Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

who almost single-handedly and somewhat accidentally brought the country of Pakistan into existence. And once we understand the relationship between Hindus and Muslims in India, we can begin to comprehend how and why and what they did to each other during the historic splintering of the subcontinent. And so, that is it for today, but as always, thanks for spending your very valuable time with me. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option.

I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.