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.
