Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  At these words, Edwina burst into tears. Jawahar, too, was inconsolable, and was too upset to listen to Edwina’s eventual speech of thanks. The time came for an exchange of presents: Mountbatten gave the Indian government a set of gold plates, and it gave him a silver tray, engraved all over with the signatures of cabinet ministers and provincial governors. In the centre, it read: ‘with affection and good wishes and as a token of friendship, Jawaharlal Nehru.’ Nehru had tried to secure for Mountbatten something he would have prized even more: he had written to the King just after their return from Mashobra, suggesting Mountbatten be upgraded from an earldom even higher up the ranks of the nobility. The King’s secretary replied that ‘adequate recognition’ of the Mountbattens’ service had already been given.112

  In private, they gave each other more personal gifts. Edwina gave Jawahar an eighteenth-century gold box, an emerald ring and a silver St Christopher medallion that her mother had given to her father. The last bemused him slightly: ‘Am I supposed to wear it round my neck?’ he wrote, tongue in cheek. ‘Heaven forbid.’113 He gave her an ancient coin, a box of mangoes and a copy of his autobiography. Dickie sent Jawahar an engraved silver box with the latter’s name hopelessly mixed up on it. He would never master the spelling, nor for that matter the pronunciation, of the name Jawaharlal, usually rendering it Jawarhalal or Jahawarlal.114 Jawahar wrote to Edwina she must not tell her husband of his mistake, noting that he rather liked it – the inscription reminded him so much of Dickie.

  Early in the morning of 21 June, the Mountbattens drove to Palam airfield in an open carriage drawn by six horses through a parade of cheering Indians. Outside Government House, one of the horses jibbed and refused to move. ‘Even the horses won’t let you go!’ shouted a voice from the crowd. The front pair had to be removed, and the carriage went on to Palam with four.115 A large military assembly greeted the former viceregal family. The band played Rabindranath Tagore’s anthem, ‘Jana Gana Mana’ (‘Thou art the ruler of the minds of all people’), and ‘God Save the King’. Edwina accepted two garlands of jasmine from the crowd. Dickie’s face was tight with emotion; reporters noted that Jawahar, too, was ‘visibly moved’. Edwina hugged Rajagopalachari as Jawahar shook hands with Dickie and kissed Pamela on the cheek. As Dickie moved on to shake hands with his successor, Jawahar bowed his head to Edwina, and clasped, then kissed, her hand. The hour had come. Whatever she was feeling inside, Edwina had to get on the plane with her husband. At half past eight precisely, the York’s propellers began to spin, and it took off for the last time from the tarmac at Delhi.116

  The new Governor General, Chakravarty Rajagopalachari, was a sharply observant man. ‘Lord Mountbatten has wound up Indo-British history in a manner which has secured for Britain a re-conquest’, he wrote to Attlee, before concluding enigmatically: ‘It is only those who have seen with their eyes how our Prime Minister and the people of India have bid adieu to the late Governor-General and his noble wife that can realise the full meaning of what I have said.’117

  PART IV

  AFTERWARDS

  CHAPTER 19

  A KISS GOODBYE

  THAT WAS IT, THEN: THE LARGEST EMPIRE THE WORLD HAD ever hosted was gone. At its peak soon after the First World War, the British Empire had claimed an area of well over 14 million square miles – more than six times the size of the Roman Empire – and 500 million people. Of those, 400 million had been Indian. The day after the Mountbattens left India, King George VI issued a proclamation formally dropping the title ‘Emperor of India’. The new Governor General, Chakravarty Rajagopalachari, wrote to Mountbatten, quoting a piece from the Manchester Guardian that said he ‘ended the long British rule of India not with a whimper but with an unmistakable bang’. Rajagopalachari added: ‘Now we here all know that it was not a bang but with a kiss you left us.’1

  Dickie and Edwina emerged from their plane back at Northolt looking exhausted, lined and rumpled. Edwina arrived back in Britain not, she felt, to a much-needed rest, but to a life of emptiness. ‘Idleness to Edwina was things not happening, and uneventfulness to her was sheer hell,’ one of her friends remembered. ‘You could see the pain on her face – adding to all those lines.’2

  ‘Life is lonely and empty and unreal’, Edwina wrote to Jawahar. Her husband dragged her to garden parties at Buckingham Palace – ‘a waste of time’, she thought, ‘but Dickie insists.’3 The pain of her absence was felt in India, too. Jawahar wrote to Edwina that he could still sense her ‘fragrance on the air’, and that he read and reread her letters. ‘I lose myself in dreamland, which is very unbecoming in a PM,’ he confessed. ‘But then I am only incidentally a PM.’4 To Dickie, too, he admitted a sense of loss. ‘It is extraordinary how the Mountbattens seemed to fill Delhi and without them there is a kind of vacuum’, he wrote. He had written ‘seem’, and added the ‘ed’ later.5

  When Rajagopalachari had described the Mountbattens leaving India with a kiss rather than a bang, he had been writing literally. All over the world, newspapers printed a picture of him hugging Edwina as she left Delhi. He sent a cutting of it from the Madras Mail to Dickie. ‘The Madras folk must have frowned at this unorthodox posture,’ he noted with some amusement.6 Some British folk frowned, too: ‘Throughout the British world many an appetite for breakfast must have been ruined,’ opined the weekly Truth, describing the hug as a sign of ‘a lack of respect towards European women’.7 Dickie wrote in disgust about this ‘vile article’, noting angrily that ‘this is what one has to expect from the worst reactionary paper in England’.8

  Not everyone was delighted to have the Mountbattens back. On 25 June, Attlee sounded out Churchill about whether he and his wife would be likely to accept invitations to a dinner for the Mountbattens. Churchill returned a snub.9 At a garden party of Anthony Eden’s, Mountbatten walked over to Churchill with arms outstretched. Churchill scowled, and transfixed him with a sausagey finger. ‘Dickie, stand there!’ he snapped. ‘What you did to us in India was like whipping your riding crop across my face!’ According to Mountbatten, the Conservative leader would not speak to him again for seven years, though from their letters Churchill’s reaction seems to have been less operatic.10 At the party, Churchill had asked a thorny question about the speed of arms transfers from India to Pakistan, but he accepted Mountbatten’s answer and wrote a warm letter afterwards.11

  Both Mountbattens were called upon to speak at the East India Association at the Imperial Institute about their time in India. ‘Dickie … told the story straightforwardly from his point of view, though naturally skating over Kashmir and Hyderabad,’ observed Leo Amery. ‘Then Edwina, looking very handsome and evidently speaking most effectively, though unfortunately I could catch very little of what she said.’12 She began with a friendly crack at her husband: ‘I will confess he has always been my number one pin-up boy.’ But she finished on a tribute to Nehru: ‘My husband has referred to India’s magnificent Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and I would like to say what an inspiration he has been to all of us who have tried to help him in the past difficult months. He has been an inspiration to the doctors and nurses, to the welfare workers, and to the refugees themselves. I shall always remember the help and courage and the wise counsel he gave to me and to my colleagues at all times.’13 The contrast between the pin-up boy and the magnificent inspiration defined her relationships with the two men. With Dickie, she was in an affectionate, sexless companionship; with Jawahar, she had found something more profound and more passionate.

  The importance of the relationship to both Mountbattens is obvious from the correspondence between Jawahar and Dickie. On 3 July Jawahar, noting the seriousness of the situations in Kashmir and Hyderabad, warned Dickie that his proposed visit to Britain in September or October ‘might not come off’.14 Dickie responded with several feverish pages of cajoling, trying every tack from, ‘You will find the experience of getting out of India and looking at your country from the outside world an exhilarating experience’, to ‘You will require a
measure of rest, or at all events a change in your very busy routine’, to reminding him of his ‘valuable contacts in London’, to joking that ‘Unless you can come away for a reasonable while, there must be something wrong with your organisation!’15

  On receipt of Nehru’s letter, Mountbatten had fired off a suggestion to Attlee that they might meet with Cripps, Noel-Baker and Krishna Menon to discuss the situation. In a lapse of fair-mindedness, he omitted any Pakistani or even pro-Pakistan names from this list.16 Afterwards, he reported happily to Nehru that the letter sent to Liaquat had been ‘just about the strongest that has ever been sent’.17 He also noted that he was ‘doing what I can to keep Winston from making any statements about India, though this is not an easy one.’18 But the problems were not so readily fixed and, by 1 August, Nehru admitted to Mountbatten that India was ‘in open, though formally undeclared, war with Pakistan in Kashmir’.19 ‘How I wish I could still be with you in Delhi,’ replied Mountbatten.20 At the end of a long letter to Jawahar, detailing all the things he had done to resolve the situation, Dickie noted that: ‘We all expect you over in October, and the sooner you can come in October, the more we can see of you, and no-one, neither the King, the Prime Minister, nor your late Governor-General, and certainly not his wife, would hear of your not coming, whatever the circumstances.’21

  The circumstances changed quickly for, on 11 September 1948, Mohammad Ali Jinnah finally succumbed to his illness. He had been on his way to Karachi. Fatima remembered him speaking in delirium: ‘Kashmir … Give them … the right … to decide … Constitution … I will complete it … soon … Refugees … give them … all assistance … Pakistan.’22 According to his doctor, Jinnah saw Liaquat and told him that Pakistan was ‘the biggest blunder of my life’. Further yet, he declared: ‘If now I get an opportunity I will go to Delhi and tell Jawaharlal to forget about the follies of the past and become friends again.’23 It is impossible to prove whether Jinnah actually said these words or not; either way, he was to have no further opportunity for a rapprochement. He was taken from the airport to the Governor General’s house in an ambulance, which broke down after four miles on a main road in the middle of a refugee settlement with traffic honking by. The heat sizzled, flies buzzing around the Quaid-e-Azam’s ashen face as Fatima attempted to fan them away. It was an hour before another ambulance could be found. Jinnah was taken back to Government House, where Fatima watched him sleep for about two hours. ‘Oh, Jin,’ she remembered thinking, ‘if they could pump out all my blood, and put it in you, so that you may live.’ He woke one final time and whispered to her ‘Fati, khuda hafiz.… la ilaha il Allah … Mohammad … rasul … Allah.’24 His head slumped to the right. He had died with the confession of faith just past his lips.

  Two days after Jinnah’s death, India swooped on Hyderabad, the only contentious princely state other than Kashmir that still remained outside India or Pakistan. The Nizam appealed to the UN, but soon dropped his resistance. ‘There is still the most wide-spread misunderstanding over here about the action taken in Hyderabad,’ Mountbatten reported back to Rajagopalachari a week later, ‘since even quite intelligent people seem to regard it as an act of military aggression and conquest.’25

  ‘So your wish is being fulfilled,’ Rajagopalachari teased Mountbatten on 5 October, ‘and Jawaharlalji is put into the plane & despatched to Broadlands!’26 Nehru was officially received at Heathrow, but his first action after that was to go to the Mountbattens’ small flat: ‘it is a change from Govt House’, he wrote to Indira.27 For Edwina, his midnight visit was ‘too lovely’.28 The very next day, she drove him to Broadlands. Dickie tactfully ensured that he would be absent for much of the time at Dartmouth and at a ‘very boring’ Rotary Club dinner. ‘Edwina will be awaiting you’, he wrote to Jawahar.29 The two of them, alone at last in the privacy of her estate, were able to talk, laugh and cry together, to embrace, and to press each other’s hands on walks by the river.30 Even after Dickie turned up, the weekend was a great success, so much so that Jawahar changed his plans so that he might return the following weekend as well.31 The Mountbattens had always been comfortable with ménages-à-trois, and Jawahar was fitted in with their family life without difficulty – though he startled the servants by standing on his head when they brought him his grapefruit and cereal. ‘Funny fellow,’ boomed Dickie. ‘That explains why he sees the world upside down!’32 The days were filled with dinner parties, games on the lawn, riding in the grounds, card games and gossip.33 ‘The Mountbatten family derived a lot of amusement from a letter Dickie received from a gentleman in Calcutta’, wrote Jawahar to Indira, ‘suggesting that in the interest of Indo-British friendship, Pamela should marry me!’34

  Even in London, Nehru spent much of his time in the company of Mountbatten, and more yet in that of his wife. There was a reception for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers in the underwriters’ room at Lloyd’s of London, at which the Mountbattens were greeted with a huge round of applause by the assembled guests. Photographs of the event in the Tatler showed a now familiar scene: Edwina pressed closely to Jawahar’s side and laughing with him, while Dickie hovered in the background.35 He viewed this theoretical rival for his wife’s heart with a sort of proud affection. ‘He has literally taken, not only everyone that matters in England, but all the Commonwealth Representatives, by storm’, Dickie wrote to Rajagopalachari. ‘The King sat down and wrote me one of his rare letters after he had left saying that he wished me to know what a deep impression Jawaharlal had made on him and how much he liked him.’36 Mountbatten had taken great care to make sure this came about, writing a letter to the King to introduce his ‘great friend Nehru’ and enclosing a full briefing on how the latter’s invasion of Hyderabad had liberated the grateful Nizam from the thrall of fanatics. ‘Don’t forget that whereas Jinnah lost no chance of insulting the Crown – Nehru has gone out of his way to be courteous about it,’ he ended, precisely inverting the truth.37 The subject of all this effort had mixed feelings. ‘I am told I made a hit, from Buckingham Palace downwards’, Jawahar wrote to Indira. ‘I basked in all this praise and adulation. But at the same time I felt rather uncomfortable and somewhat out of place and counterfeit.’38

  Despite his lifelong insistence that Indian freedom demanded a total rejection of all ties to Britain, Jawahar was soon to agree to keep India in the Commonwealth. This controversial decision was widely described as the ‘Great Betrayal’ within India, and as ‘The most extraordinary volte-face my brother made’ by Nehru’s own sister, Betty Hutheesing. It was during talks with the Commonwealth Prime Ministers, she wrote, that Nehru became convinced that India should remain within the Britannic orbit. True, the Commonwealth provided links of trade and foreign policy; but ‘to this must be added the pull of his strong friendship with the Mountbattens’, Betty noted.39 Once again, it seemed the Mountbattens had saved India for Britain.

  The Mountbattens had spun out the end of their personal empire. Their interventions over Kashmir, Hyderabad and the Commonwealth were welcomed, and even solicited, by the Indian government. But they were still only in their forties, and could hardly spend the rest of their lives acting as India’s occasional agents in Britain. Shortly after Nehru’s departure from London, they returned to Malta, and Dickie to the command of a cruiser squadron. Having been the first gentleman among 400 million in India, he was now only thirteenth in precedence on a tiny island. Officers who had served under him a few years before at South East Asia Command, and in India, now stood senior to him. Moreover, there was no longer a war on; and peace deprived both Dickie and Edwina of their primary function, which had been to make war and to clean up after it, respectively.

  Edwina had no more interest in pursuing a life of tedious naval wifedom than ever. Instead, she threw herself back into the only work available. Over the next few years, tours for her charities would take her around England and the Channel Islands, to Germany, Austria and Trieste on the continent, and around Africa. But, most often of all, they would take her to the e
ast: to Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya and Ceylon, always by way of Delhi.40

  Edwina and Jawahar wrote every day at first. Inevitably, this tailed off to once a week and finally once a fortnight, but the letters remained intimate until the end. Jawahar sent Edwina presents from wherever he was in the world: sugar from the United States (when it was rationed in Britain), cigarettes from Egypt, pressed ferns from Sikkim, a book of photographs of erotic sculptures from the Temple of the Sun in Orissa. ‘I must say they took my breath away for an instant’, he wrote. ‘There was no sense of shame or of hiding anything.’ Edwina replied that she had found the sculptures fascinating. ‘I am not interested in sex as sex’, she wrote. ‘There must be so much more to it, beauty of spirit and form and in its conception. But I think you and I are in the minority! Yet another treasured bond.’41

  Whenever possible, they spent time with each other. Edwina went to India every year, a fact that did not escape criticism. In 1953, Nehru was forced to defend Lady Mountbatten in the Indian parliament when Communist Party members accused her of trying to manoeuvre him into committing India to a defence pact with the Middle East. A dramatic scene ensued, with Nehru shouting, ‘That’s a lie!’ and banging his fist on the table, while the Communists shouted, ‘No lie!’ back at him. The incident was struck from the official record, but made it into British newspapers.42

  ‘It seems to me that the time has come when it should be pointed out to Edwina by one of Her Majesty’s Ministers that these visits of hers to the Indian capital do not further the general interests of the Commonwealth’, wrote the Queen’s Private Secretary to Churchill’s Private Secretary.43 If a minister ever did get up the courage to point this out to Edwina, it did not stop her. Once, at a reception for Commonwealth leaders in London, Jawahar upset the other delegates by spending all evening deep in conversation with Edwina and then conspicuously leaving with her.44 On another occasion, when Jawahar and Edwina were staying together at Nainital in the Himalayan foothills, the Governor’s son was sent to summon the guests for dinner. Unwittingly, he opened the door of the Prime Minister’s suite, and was confronted by the sight of Jawahar and Edwina in an embrace. He tactfully retreated, and nothing was ever said about the incident.45 These were the days of discretion in political life.