Tryst With Destiny: The Half of the Speech Nobody Quotes

There is a photograph taken in the Constitution Hall in New Delhi in the first minutes of 15 August 1947. Nehru is in it, standing at his desk in a white cap, head down. So are the men on either side of him. Every one of them is holding a small sheet of paper and reading off it, the way you read something you have been handed and do not want to get wrong.

They were reading a pledge. And the country they were pledging themselves to did not know where its own border ran.

The map had been finished three days earlier. It was in the Viceroy's possession, and it would stay unpublished for another two days after the flag went up.

Almost everyone can quote about eleven words of what Nehru said that night. Very few people have read the rest of it, and the rest of it is not a celebration.

What the speech actually says

The famous sentence is really two, and the second half of the first one is the part that gets dropped. Here is the whole thing, from the official record of the Assembly:

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

"Not wholly or in full measure." That is the opening of the speech, and it is a man telling a room that they are getting less than they asked for. Everything after it follows the same line.

A few sentences on comes "Freedom and power bring responsibility. That responsibility rests upon this Assembly, a sovereign body." Then the passage that ought to be the quotable one and never is: "The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity." Then the flat instruction: "And so we have to labour and to work and work hard to give reality to our dreams."

Nehru does mention Gandhi, and even that is framed as an unfinished job rather than a tribute. He says the ambition of the greatest man of the generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye, and then adds that it may well be beyond them, and that while there are still tears the work is not over.

Read the whole thing in order and the shape is obvious. Two sentences of arrival, and then roughly nine hundred words of what has not been done yet. It is closer to a handover note than to a victory speech.

The tryst itself is a reference most people miss. It points back to another midnight. In December 1929 the Congress met at Lahore and resolved on complete independence, and at midnight on the last night of that year Nehru raised the flag on the bank of the Ravi. On 26 January 1930 the declaration was promulgated and read out publicly across the country as a pledge. That was the appointment being kept. When the Constituent Assembly later had to pick a day for the Constitution to come into force, it chose 26 January for exactly that reason, which is why Republic Day sits where it does.

The date came out of somebody else's war

On 20 February 1947 the British government told Parliament what it planned to do. The wording is in Hansard and it is not vague: it was the definite intention of His Majesty's Government "to take the necessary steps to effect the transference of power into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June, 1948."

June 1948. That was the timetable when Mountbatten was appointed on the same day, and it was still the timetable when he landed in March.

It lasted about ten weeks. On 3 June he broadcast the partition plan, and the date attached to it was 15 August 1947. Roughly ten months had been taken off the clock.

Why that particular day has an answer, and it is a strange one. Mountbatten had spent the war as Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia. 15 August 1945 was the day Japan announced its surrender, the day Britain still marks as VJ Day. In interviews he gave years afterwards, published in Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre's Freedom at Midnight, he said the date came to him in reply to a journalist's question, that he was determined to show he was master of the event, and that he settled on 15 August because it was the second anniversary of Japan's surrender.

Take that at face value and the founding date of the country was chosen, in the moment, to mark a victory in a war fought somewhere else.

The law caught up afterwards. The Indian Independence Act received Royal Assent on 18 July 1947, which left twenty eight days between the statute and the two dominions it brought into being. Constitutions have been argued over for longer than that.

The case for hurrying was real and deserves saying. The killings had already started, the administration was coming apart, and there is a genuine argument that a slower handover would have meant a longer emergency rather than a calmer one. But that is an argument about whether to hurry. It is not an argument for picking the day off the calendar of a different war, and it does not explain what happened next.

The border was finished and then withheld

The man who drew the line was Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister with no experience of India whatsoever. He arrived in Delhi on 8 July 1947 and met Mountbatten two days later. The boundary commissions he chaired held public sittings through the second half of July, in Calcutta and in Lahore, and again in early August for the Sylhet district.

He was dividing provinces holding tens of millions of people, on the basis of out of date census returns and competing claims, with about five weeks in hand.

His decision is dated 12 August. It reached the Viceroy on the evening of 12 to 13 August. Mountbatten did not open it. V. P. Menon advised against putting it out before the ceremonies, on the reasoning that publishing it first would wreck the independence events in both new capitals and inflame everything already burning. Copies went to the political leadership on 16 August. The award was published on 17 August.

So the position on the morning of 15 August was this. Two countries existed in law. Their governments were sworn in. Flags went up. And in the districts along the line, the people who were about to lose their homes stood in the street celebrating a freedom without knowing which of the two countries they were now standing in.

They found out two days later, and then they moved. Estimates of the dead over the following months run from two hundred thousand to two million, which is itself a measure of how little anyone was counting. Somewhere between twelve and twenty million people were displaced.

The withholding was defended as crowd control, and it may even have worked as crowd control for forty eight hours. It also meant that nobody could organise, protest, appeal or simply leave early, and that the officials who would have to police the line learned where it ran at the same time as everybody else.

What the country actually was that morning

Not a republic. This is the part that surprises people.

What came into existence on 15 August 1947 was the Dominion of India. George VI remained head of state. Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, stayed on as the first Governor-General and held the post until June 1948, when C. Rajagopalachari took it. The Assembly sitting through that midnight session still had its actual job ahead of it, which was to write a constitution, and that took until 26 January 1950. Only on that morning did the King stop being head of state and Rajendra Prasad become President.

The map was not settled either, and not only along the new boundary. Around 565 princely states covered something close to two fifths of the land. British paramountcy over them lapsed at independence, which in strict law left each ruler free to join either dominion or to try standing alone. Sardar Patel and Menon spent the next two years converting that into a country, one Instrument of Accession at a time, and the last of it was not finished when the Constitution came into force.

None of this is a gotcha about 1947. It is the ordinary condition of a new state. But it is a long way from the way the night is usually described, as a finished thing handed over at a stroke.

The man who did not come

Gandhi was not in Delhi.

He had reached Calcutta on 13 August and moved into Hyderi Manzil, a run down house in Beliaghata, a mixed neighbourhood in a city still raw from the previous year's killings. He stayed there until 7 September. He held prayer meetings on both days, and the crowd on 14 August ran to something like ten thousand people. On 15 August so many turned up that the police cordon stopped meaning anything.

His grand-niece Manu kept a diary. Her entry for 15 August records that he spun for two hours, and that the day was kept as a fast.

She also wrote down what she saw in the streets that day, which is the detail worth holding on to. Hindus were in Muslim localities and Muslims were in Hindu areas, she noted, as if nothing had ever happened.

That is what he had gone there to do, and in Calcutta it held while it did not hold elsewhere. He judged that the work was in Beliaghata rather than at the ceremony, and so the most recognisable figure of the whole movement spent the first day of independence sitting on the floor of a borrowed house with a spinning wheel.

The pledge

After the speech, after the vote, as midnight struck, the members stood and repeated a pledge line by line, first in Hindustani and then in English. The full wording is in the record:

At this solemn moment when the people of India, through suffering and sacrifice, have secured freedom, I, a member of the Constituent Assembly of India, do dedicate myself in all humility to the service of India and her people to the end that this ancient land attain her rightful and honoured place in the world and make her full and willing contribution to the promotion of world peace and the welfare of mankind.

There is not a word in it about having won anything. It is all future tense and all obligation, and its only claim about the past is that people suffered to get here. It is a job description, and it was written by people who had been given a country in twenty eight days, with a border they had not seen and a constitution they had not written.

That is the thing the eleven famous words have gradually buried. The night is remembered as an arrival. Almost everything said and signed in that room treats it as a starting gun.

Which brings it back to the photograph. Nobody in it is looking at the camera, and nobody is looking pleased. They are looking down at the paper, getting the words right.

Sources

• Constitution of India, "Constituent Assembly Debates on 14 August 1947" (the Assembly meeting at 11pm with Rajendra Prasad in the chair, the order of business, and the verbatim wording of the pledge taken at midnight in Hindustani and English).
• Indian Kanoon, "Constituent Assembly Debates On 14 August, 1947" (the verbatim text of Nehru's speech, including "not wholly or in full measure", "Freedom and power bring responsibility", the passage on serving the millions who suffer, and the line about wiping every tear from every eye).
• Hansard, "Indian Policy, House of Lords, 20 February 1947" (the original commitment to transfer power by a date not later than June 1948).
• The National Archives, "Mountbatten radio broadcast" (the partition plan announced by broadcast on 3 June 1947).
• Wikipedia, "Indian Independence Act 1947" (Royal Assent on 18 July 1947 and the creation of two dominions with effect from 15 August).
• The Tribune, "The lead up to the Radcliffe award" (Radcliffe arriving in Delhi on 8 July 1947, the sittings in Calcutta, Lahore and Sylhet, and the handling of the draft).
• Constitution of India, "Transfer of Power: The Delayed Announcement of the Boundaries" (the award reaching Mountbatten on the evening of 12 to 13 August, his decision not to open it, Menon's advice, and publication on 17 August).
• Wikipedia, "Partition of India" (death toll estimates of 200,000 to 2 million and displacement of 12 to 20 million people).
• Wikipedia, "Dominion of India" (dominion status from 15 August 1947 to 26 January 1950, George VI as head of state, and the two Governors-General).
• Wikipedia, "Purna Swaraj" (the Lahore resolution of December 1929, the flag on the Ravi at midnight on 31 December, the pledge read out on 26 January 1930, and why that date was later chosen for the Constitution).
• Open, "Calcutta on August 15, 1947" (Gandhi at Hyderi Manzil in Beliaghata from 13 August, the prayer meetings and their size, and Manu's diary entries on the two hours of spinning, the fast, and what she saw in the streets).