Viceroy's House by Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre

Author:Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre [Collins, Larry; Lapierre, Dominique]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2017-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

That grand and guilty edifice, the British Raj, was no more. Beyond New Delhi’s Constituent Assembly hall, in the vastness of the two new states, the momentous changes portended by the conch shell’s call found their echo in jubilant cheers and a thousand small gestures. In Bombay, a policeman nailed a sign bearing the word ‘closed’ to the gates of the citadel of white supremacy, the Bombay Yacht Club. Henceforth, those precincts in which three generations of pukkasahibs and memsahibs had sipped their whiskies undisturbed by native stares would be a mess for cadets of the Indian Navy.

In Calcutta, eager hands tore down the signs of the city’s central thoroughfare. Clive Street became Subhas Road, named for an Indian nationalist who’d aligned himself with Japan against the British in World War II. In Simla, at the stroke of midnight, hundreds of Indians in saris and dhotis ran laughing down the Mall, the avenue on which no Indian had been allowed to appear in his native dress. In Firpo’s in Calcutta, Falletti’s in Lahore, the Taj in Bombay, hundreds more invaded the restaurants and dance floors that had been reserved for guests in dinner jackets and evening gowns.*

Delhi celebrated with lights. The austere, hard-working capital was ablaze with them. New Delhi’s Connaught Circus, the narrow alleys of Old Delhi, were hung in green, saffron and white lights. Temples, mosques and Sikh guru dwaras were outlined in garlands of light bulbs. So too, was the Red Fort of the Moghul Emperors. New Delhi’s newest temple, Birla Mandir, with its curlicue spires and domes hung with lights, looked to one passer-by like a hallucination of Ludwig of Bavaria. In the Bhangi sweepers’ colony, among whose Untouchables Gandhi had often dwelt, independence had brought a gift many of those wretched people had never known – light. The municipality had offered them the candles and the little oil lamps flickering in the gloom of their huts to honour their new freedom. On bicycles, tonga carts, cars, even on an elephant draped in rich velvet tapestry, crowds swept towards the centre of Delhi to sing, cheer and walk in a buoyant mood of self-congratulation. The restaurants and cafés of Connaught Place were thronged. Every member of that gigantic army of white-shirted bureaucrats for which Delhi was notorious, seemed to have gravitated to its pavements.

The bar of the Imperial Hotel, a sanctuary of Delhi’s former rulers, swarmed with celebrating Indians. Just after midnight, one of them climbed on to the bar and asked the crowd to join him in singing their new national anthem. They gleefully accepted his invitation, but as they started through the chorus of the hymn, written by India’s great national poet, Tagore, most of them made a disconcerting discovery: they didn’t know the words.

At Maiden’s hotel in Old Delhi, the most famous establishment in the city, a beautiful Indian girl in a sari danced from table to table, twisting a red dot, a tilak, for good luck on to the forehead of everyone in the place with a lipstick tube.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.