From ‘India My Love’ by Dominique Lapierre

 

 

तन्नश्तम् यन्न दियते

tannashtam yanna diyate

 

“All that is not given is lost”

Indian Proverb

 

I soon learnt the habit of indicating ones religion immediately is typically Indian. It takes precedence over all other forms of identification.

 

Five sovereigns - those of Hyderabad, Kashmir, Mysore, Gwalior and Baroda - were granted the supreme honor of a twenty-one gun salute. Then came the states with nineteen then seventeen, fifteen, thirteen, elevan and nine gun salutes. For four hundred and twenty-five more modest rajas and nawabs who ruled over small principalities almost forgotten on the map of the subcontinent, there was no gun salute. They were the forsaken princess of India; men for whom the guns were not fired.

 

“If only you knew what these whims of Gandhi cost the British treasury!” Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, revealed to us. “We were so worried he might get assassinated that all his co-travelers in his third class compartment – untouchables, beggars and lepers - were police inspectors in disguise.”

 

What bliss! My beloved India, had gratified Larry and me with the most exhaustive documentation ever collected on the fall of the British Empire in India and the partition of the subcontinent into two sovereign nations, India with the Hindu majority and Muslim Pakistan. We had collected more than two thousand unpublished accounts and about five hundred kilos of material. The documents in our treasure trove were almost entirely original, rich material that constituted the basis of the narrative for one of the greatest epochs in the history of the 20th century.