In the early years after 1970, Dominique LA Pierre and Larry Collins interviewed many high-ranking officials while researching for their book about events about Indian independence and partition – Freedom At Midnight. Of all the veterans eager to share their stories about the imperial adventure and the end of the Empire, only one showed reluctance. Cyril Radcliffe, the last Viscount of Radcliffe was a 45-year-old lawyer practicing at the Chancery bar and was appointed a King’s Counsel in 1935.
As part of the Indian Independence Act, passed in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, two boundary committees were set up. The mission was to partition British India into two independent dominions – India and Pakistan. Radcliffe hardly knew anything about India and never set foot beyond Paris when Lore Chancellor (Mountbatten) called upon him to chair the committees. He had to draw the borders of two (three in future) nations within five weeks. Even God had only seven days to accomplish much more than that. Nehru and Jinnah preferred the provenance of ignorant, cold impartiality over their respective discoveries of secular and holy lands.
Dominique LA Pierre visited the last Viscount of Radcliffe in a former convent attached to the ruins of a Gothic Church in Warwickshire. He was pruning rose bushes in the yard armed with clippers. He had a cold reserved air about him “that hardly invited confidences”. He recalled it was precisely his inexperience in the matters of India, according to the Lord Chancellor that qualified him for the job. After the meeting with the Chancellor, a high official came to India’s office and unfolded a map to show him the provinces he would have to divide. LA Pierre asked him, “Could you have refused?”
“I knew vaguely that they were both in the north of the country, one in the west and the other in the east. I watched the officer’s fingers run along the Indus River, skim the barrier of the Himalayas, go down to New Delhi, climb back up towards the Ganges, skirt the shores of the Gulf of Bengal… The sight of the two vast regions I was going to have to cut in half gave me vertigo.”
Sir Cyril arrived in New Delhi a few days later in the sultry heat after the meeting. He began to trace on a Royal Engineers map the boundary lines separating two huge populations who used to be subjects of the Empire. He had no contact with them and had no agency or wisdom to foresee the grand march of devastation he was to unleash upon them.
“I knew water is a symbol of life everywhere – that whoever controls the water controls life. And there I was having to carve irrigation channels. Canal systems, locks, and reservoirs on a map, I mutilated rice and corn fields without ever having seen them. I have not visited a single village through which my boundary would pass, nor form any idea of the tragedy it would inflict upon poor peasants suddenly deprived of their fields, wells, and routes. The maps provided were inadequate and had wrong information that Punjab’s five rivers flowed several miles away from where they were officially surveyed. The demographics statistics too were falsified by both parties to support their claims.”
Of the two provinces, Bengal gave the least trouble. Once Calcutta was determined based on the Hindu population, the rest was easy – “My boundary was just a pencil line drawn on a piece of paper. In the tangle of marshes and half-flooded plains of Bengal, there were no natural boundaries to serve as a frontier.” And Punjab? The mere mention of the name was enough to make the barrister’s eyes pucker. He said as he mopped his forehead, “The whole area was a mosaic of religious communities overlapping one another. It was impossible to delimit the boundary that would respect the integrity of the communities. I had to cut to the quick.”
“I knew from the outset that a bloodbath would follow the publication of my plan for partition”, he sadly admitted as he recalled the memory of the torrid heat of those summer weeks and their cruel, enervating dampness in the three rooms of a Bungalow under a fan suspended from the ceiling stirring up a swirl of papers that were pieces of maps, reports and notes with rice glue behind them coming unstuck from the walls as if it was a symbolic storm portending the epic tragedy that awaited the villages of Punjab.
Annotated from “Freedom At Midnight”, Larry Collins and Dominique La Pierre
Chronicles 
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