India's Independence Day is a British war anniversary

On 3 June 1947 the Viceroy announced how British India was to be divided. The next day he held a press conference in Delhi to explain it, and his prepared remarks covered the plan in considerable detail while leaving out one thing: when any of it would actually happen.

A journalist asked. Lord Mountbatten, by his own later account, had no date ready and settled on one while standing there.

The date I chose came out of the blue. I chose it in reply to a question. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event.

The date he produced was 15 August 1947. Asked why, years afterwards, he gave an answer that ought to be better known than it is. "Why? Because it was the second anniversary of Japan's surrender."

Worth being exact here, because the popular version usually is not. Japan announced its surrender on 15 August 1945, which ended the war. The formal instrument was signed in Tokyo Bay on 2 September, and the surrender of Japanese forces in Mountbatten's own theatre, where he was Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, came at Singapore on 12 September. So the anniversary he reached for was not the day the Japanese surrendered to him personally. It was V-J Day, the high point of his war.

That is the origin of India's national day. A British officer, asked a question he had not prepared for, reached for the proudest date in his own career.

The quote comes with a caveat. It is from Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre's Freedom at Midnight, drawn from their interviews with Mountbatten long after the fact, so it is a man recalling his own decision rather than a contemporaneous minute. He was not a modest narrator of his own life. But no rival explanation has ever been produced, and the timing fits.

India already had an Independence Day

Here is the part that gets left out entirely. In August 1947 India was not choosing an independence day for the first time. It already had one, and had been observing it for seventeen years.

At its Lahore session in December 1929, with Jawaharlal Nehru presiding, the Congress adopted the demand for purna swaraj, complete independence, rather than dominion status. It then fixed a date for the country to declare it. On 26 January 1930, across India, people gathered to read a pledge aloud. It was observed every year after that, through the 1930s and the war years, right up to the real thing.

So by the time Mountbatten named a date, Indians had spent seventeen years marking 26 January as the day they claimed their freedom. The date that replaced it was chosen in a Delhi press room by a British admiral thinking about the Pacific war.

The old date was not abandoned, though, and what happened to it is the quietest and most deliberate act in this whole story. The Constituent Assembly adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949. It then held it back for two months and brought it into force on 26 January 1950, so that the date the country had chosen for itself would survive as Republic Day. India could not control the day it was given. It could control the day it became a republic, and it spent that choice on remembering.

The deadline that jumped ten months

The other thing the date did was arrive far sooner than anyone had planned.

On 20 February 1947 the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, told the Commons that it was the government's "definite intention to take the necessary steps to effect the transference of power into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June, 1948". That was the timetable. Mountbatten arrived in March 1947 to work to it.

By naming August 1947 he cut about ten months off. His reasoning was that authority was collapsing faster than the calendar allowed, that communal violence was rising, and that a long goodbye would be a bloodier one. Set against that is the criticism historians have made ever since, which is that the compression itself was the disaster: that boundary commissions, army division, civil service division and the movement of millions of people were crushed into ten weeks, and that the killing which followed was made worse by the hurry.

Both things can be true. What is not in doubt is that the date drove the work rather than the work driving the date.

The astrologers, and the midnight compromise

Then the date ran into an objection nobody in London had anticipated.

Indian astrologers looked at 15 August 1947 and did not like it. This part of the story is usually told as charming folklore, and I expected to have to knock it down. It turns out to be better documented than that. Mountbatten's own report of 8 August 1947 records the problem plainly: the astrologers held that the 13th and the 15th were inauspicious, while the 14th was fine. One astrologer in Calcutta wrote to beg him to reconsider, in terms that are hard to improve on.

For the love of God... do not give India her independence on 15 August.

The solution was a fudge, and an elegant one. In the Hindu reckoning a day runs from sunrise to sunrise, so the hours after midnight on the night of 14 August still belong to the 14th. Hold the ceremony at midnight and you satisfy the astrologers and the Act at the same time.

Which is exactly what happened, and it is why India's founding moment takes place at a strange hour. The official record is precise about it: "The Fifth Session of the Constituent Assembly of India commenced in the Constitution Hall, New Delhi, at Eleven P. M., Mr. President (The Honourable Dr. Rajendra Prasad) in the Chair." Members sang the first verse of Vande Mataram, the President spoke, and Nehru rose to deliver the speech everyone remembers.

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.

As the clock struck twelve the members took a pledge, which Rajendra Prasad read out sentence by sentence, first in Hindustani and then in English, with the Assembly repeating it back. Then word was sent to the Viceroy that power had been assumed, and the national flag was presented.

It is worth sitting with the arrangement for a second. The hour was set so that a British-chosen date would not offend Indian astrologers. Everybody got what they needed, and nobody had to say out loud that the date was wrong.

Why Pakistan celebrates the day before

Now the part that confuses everyone, including, at the time, Pakistan.

The Indian Independence Act 1947 received royal assent on 18 July, having passed the Commons on the 15th and the Lords on the 16th. Its first section is unambiguous about the date, and about who it applies to.

As from the fifteenth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, two independent Dominions shall be set up in India, to be known respectively as India and Pakistan.

One date, both countries. Yet Pakistan's Independence Day is 14 August. The explanation is almost disappointingly practical: Mountbatten intended to be physically present at both handovers, and one man cannot be in Karachi and Delhi at the same midnight. So he went to Karachi first, swore Jinnah in there on the 14th, and flew back to Delhi for the Indian ceremony.

A second reason gets offered afterwards, which is that the night of 14 August 1947 fell on 27 Ramadan 1366, a night of high significance in Islam. That is true, and it is also the kind of meaning a country finds in a date once it already has it.

The clinching detail is that Pakistan itself did not seem sure at first. Its early commemorative stamps, issued in 1948, were printed with the date 15 August 1947. The country's own postage disagreed with its own anniversary. Only later did 14 August settle into place.

Nobody knew where the border was

Which leaves the strangest fact of the lot.

The man given the job of drawing the line between the two countries was Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never been to India. He landed on 8 July 1947 and was given about five weeks to partition Punjab and Bengal, working from maps and census returns, in a country whose geography he did not know.

He finished roughly on schedule. The awards were ready on 9 and 12 August. And then they were not published.

Indian and Pakistani representatives were handed copies at five o'clock on the evening of 16 August and given two hours to read them. The Radcliffe Line was made public on 17 August 1947, two days after both countries had already celebrated their independence.

Read that again slowly. On 15 August 1947, in the districts of Punjab and Bengal where it mattered most, people celebrated independence without being told which country they were now living in. Villages held ceremonies not knowing whether the flag they were raising was the right one. The answer arrived two days later, and for millions of people it was an instruction to leave.

What the date is

So the day India marks every year was named by a British admiral answering an unscripted question, and it commemorates the end of a war in the Pacific. The day Indians had actually chosen for themselves, and observed for seventeen years, was moved to January and quietly turned into Republic Day. The hour was shifted to midnight to get around astrologers who thought the whole date was cursed. Pakistan took the day before because one man could not attend two ceremonies. And the border did not exist in public until the 17th.

None of which makes 15 August any less India's. A date only means what a country puts into it, and seventy nine years of putting things into this one has long since buried where it came from. But it is worth knowing that the country's most repeated date was, at the moment of its choosing, an afterthought in someone else's story.