The Tryst and the Talisman

ON 18 JULY 1947, a bill received Royal Assent at Westminster, running to twenty sections and three schedules in the flat, unbothered prose that statutes reserve for everything alike, whether they are regulating the sale of milk or dismantling an empire. As from the fifteenth day of August, it provided, two independent Dominions shall be set up in India; the appointed day was named, the territories described, and the Crown’s paramountcy over five hundred princely states was allowed to lapse, three centuries of treaty and tribute closed out in a single subsection. That is the legal instrument of our freedom, an Act of a Parliament in which no Indian sat by right, bringing two hundred years to an end in the passive voice.

While it was being printed, about fifteen million people were walking.

I have never been able to hold those two facts in one hand, and I have stopped trying, because both of them are the founding of India and neither cancels the other. In a room in London a clerk was checking the numbering of the clauses; on a road somewhere between Lahore and Amritsar a woman was deciding which of her children she could carry. Trains were arriving at stations with nobody alive inside them, children were being handed across a border that had not existed the previous month, and in the middle of it all, in a hall in Delhi, a few hundred people sat down and conducted themselves as though this thing had a future.

The appointment

They met at eleven at night on 14 August, Rajendra Prasad in the chair in white khadi, the hall flood-lit, the panels where the portraits of the viceroys had hung covered over with flags, and the traffic jammed along Parliament Street because crowds had come to hear the loudspeakers. Nehru rose and spoke first in Hindustani for about six minutes, which almost nobody remembers, then changed language and said the sentence that has been quoted at every one of us since: long years ago, he said, we made a tryst with destiny.

Sit for a moment with the word he chose, because a dozen others were available and not one of them would have meant this. A tryst is not a destiny and not an arrival, not an inheritance received nor a right at last vindicated; it is an appointment made privately between two parties, at a place and an hour agreed long before, and it carries no force beyond the willingness of both of them to turn up. He was not telling a country that something had been given to it. He was telling it that a promise made long ago had at last come round, and the only thing that has ever kept an appointment is somebody arriving to keep it.

Then, in the same breath and the same sentence, he said the part that is almost never quoted, which is that the pledge would be redeemed not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.

Nine words at the highest emotional altitude any Indian politician has ever reached, and they are the vocabulary of partial performance. In front of a country that had waited two centuries to be told it had won; he conceded that the promise was being met in installments and a balance remained outstanding. I cannot think of a more honest thing said from a stage in the last century, nor of one we have forgotten more completely.

The rest of the speech keeps that discipline. The famous line about the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps and India awakes to life and freedom, is worth hearing against the fact that the world was not sleeping at all: Lahore was not sleeping, Amritsar was not sleeping, and our great sentence of triumph was delivered over a country that was burning while he spoke it. What he asked for was work, because the service of India, he said, means the service of the millions who suffer, and he named what would have to end before any of it could be called freedom: poverty, ignorance, disease, inequality of opportunity. There is no revenge anywhere in that speech. And at the close he reached past politics and said that the ambition of the greatest man of our generation, meaning Gandhi, who was not in the room and not in Delhi at all, had been to wipe every tear from every eye, which is Revelation almost word for word in the mouth of a declared agnostic, because nothing smaller was available to him that night.

Then came the conch and the flag, and every member of that Assembly rose to take a pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people, one by one, by name, in the middle of the night. The Act had been passed for us in London by strangers. The pledge was taken here, by people who could be held to it.