Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  Though such stories were never made fully public, hints of them leaked out. An anti-Nehru party in Delhi began using the slogan, ‘Break open Rama’s heart, you will find Sita written on it; break open Nehru’s heart, you will find Lady Mountbatten written on it.’46 Neither ever bothered refuting the rumours. ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is best to ignore them as any argument about them feeds them or at any rate draws people’s attention to them’, Jawahar wrote to Dickie. Dickie himself had been fending off remarkably widespread speculation that he was planning a coup to install himself as King Louis of Britain, and somehow simultaneously lead a communist revolution. ‘Edwina has told me about the various rumours and stories about you,’ Jawahar added. ‘I was a little surprised as well as amused to learn of them.’ He advised him, too, to make no comment and let them go away.47 Whenever he was in Britain for a conference or diplomatic visit, he would stay with Edwina at Broadlands. During these sojourns, Dickie would remove himself to their London address.

  Several times in the 1950s Edwina threatened divorce. Each time, Dickie responded with tolerant dignity which melted her heart and brought her back. ‘I’ve never attempted to stop you or hold you and I never shall’, he wrote; ‘I’m not that selfish.’48 The Mountbattens achieved a sort of harmony and mutual affection. It was to her husband Edwina entrusted her love letters from Jawahar in 1952. Following a haemorrhage, she had to undergo dangerous surgery. She presented Dickie with a sealed letter before the doctor gave her the anaesthetic, telling him where they were. ‘You will realize that they are a mixture of typical Jawaha [sic] letters, full of interest and facts and really historic documents’, she had written. ‘Some of them have no “personal” remarks at all. Others are love letters in a sense, though you yourself will realize the strange relationship – most of it spiritual – which exists between us. J. has obviously meant a very great deal in my life in these last years and I think I in his. Our meetings have been rare and always fleeting but I think I understand him, and perhaps he me, as well as any human beings can ever understand each other.’49

  It was an odd sort of confession, and not an apology. Edwina pulled through the operation, but Dickie opened the letter. ‘I’m glad you realize that I know and have always understood the very special relationship between Jawaha and you – made the easier by my fondness and admiration for him and by the remarkably lucky fact that among my many defects God did not add jealousy in any shape or form’, he wrote to her. ‘That is why I’ve always made your visits to each other easy and been faintly hurt when at times … you didn’t take me into your confidence right away.’50 Dickie remained, as he had always been, utterly besotted with Edwina. If he had to compromise on, or even facilitate, her relationships with others in order to keep her, that was better than losing her entirely.

  In Delhi, Nehru moved into a grander house, Teen Murti Bhavan (Three Statues House), the former villa of the British Commander-in-Chief. He felt lost in it, though Indira and Padmaja Naidu stayed with him and helped make it his own.51 He went on long and arduous tours of India, to the consternation of his family and friends.52 On a tour of Maharashtra, Jawahar travelled over 200 miles every day; Padmaja went with him, and rested while he made speeches and attended meetings. He had particularly looked forward to seeing the old fort at Ahmednagar, in which he had been imprisoned for almost three years. He arrived to find his nostalgia thwarted. There was a plaque on the wall of a room in which he had not stayed, commemorating his internment in it. He pointed out this error, and was met with indignation. ‘I was told that they had done this on the best authority!’ he wrote to Indira. ‘Indeed they were reluctant to accept my evidence!’53 In the garden, he was confronted by a pomegranate tree with another plaque claiming falsely that the tree had been planted by him.

  Yet he persisted in his tours. Nehru was at his happiest whenever he was in the centre of a crowd of ordinary people. The bigger the crowd, the happier he was; if it became unruly and broke through police cordons, he enjoyed it all the more. If it threatened danger, he would create a distraction by leaping into the fight. Nehru’s security men were required less often to protect him from the crowd, than to protect it from him. His bodyguard G.K. Handoo ‘had to wrestle with him on many occasions to stop him from jumping into the crowd’, remembered his security chief. ‘Held fast by Handoo’s arms, Pandit Nehru would glare at him, but soon he would break into a smile and enquire if anyone had been injured.’54

  Dickie’s and Jawahar’s correspondence continued, always following the same pattern. Nehru occasionally brought up his frustration over Kashmir; Mountbatten tried to persuade him to start training up younger politicians to replace the ageing veterans of the freedom fight who still dominated Congress. The latter issue had bothered Mountbatten since before independence. At the end of July 1947, he had told Nehru that his candidates for the Indian cabinet were too old and he should include some new blood, ‘otherwise I fear Congress really will be finished within a year.’55 Five years later, he was still pushing the same line, warning Nehru that he ‘might slip on a banana-peel one day’ and no successor would have been primed.56

  But what Dickie and Jawahar wrote about, more than anything else, was Edwina. They sent each other proud news of her achievements, and updates on her activities, overwork and health. ‘Edwina has been overworking as usual’, wrote Dickie to Jawahar, ‘and has had a cold but won’t give in. She needs a rest but will never take one as we both know.’57 Jawahar noted: ‘The only way, apparently, for her to get some rest is to come to India. So I hope she will do so this winter.’58

  She came almost every winter, often for several weeks. Dickie once went with her, in 1956. Every other time, he left them to each other, writing to Jawahar that he was ‘delighted’ that Edwina was visiting him on her way to Singapore, and adding: ‘Don’t let her go visiting, inspecting, speechifying, and doing her usual round of activities. She has overworked a great deal and really needs a rest.’59 On one occasion, Edwina was due to visit Jawahar in Delhi but collapsed shortly before in Malta, and almost had to call the trip off on doctors’ orders. She concealed the extent of her illness, but Dickie gave her a bland letter to take to Jawahar about politics, and inside hid a five-page update on her condition. Edwina had been desperate to go, for Jawahar had promised her a visit to the Ajanta Caves, a series of 2000-year-old Buddhist retreats carved out of a mountainside in the Deccan. The caves are filled with jewel-like frescoes, revealing ancient Buddhist India to have been a place of extraordinary richness, imagination and sensuality. ‘How beautiful are the painted Bodhisattvas and the women of Ajanta!’ Jawahar had written after first seeing them in the 1930s. ‘One looks at those lovely and graceful figures almost with pain. They have a dreamlike quality, far removed from the vulgarity and cheapness of the life we see.’60 Edwina only agreed to postpone her trip after Jawahar had sent her a telegram promising not to go to the caves without her. They finally went together in 1957, Edwina describing it as ‘an enormous thrill’.61

  The two men in Edwina’s life were open with each other about their feelings. Dickie always emphasized that he would rather that Edwina ‘should really get fit again and take things easy for as long as she likes’ rather than hurrying back to him. Jawahar wrote forlornly to Dickie of ‘a certain emptiness’ that struck him whenever Edwina left.62

  Mountbatten had written very properly to the King in April 1949 that, now he had returned to active service in the Navy, it would no longer be possible for him to advise Nehru: ‘there is obviously no question of my taking part in any discussions’, he wrote. ‘I am sure you will agree that this is right.’63 He was unable to stick to this rule. Both Mountbattens often met with government and opposition politicians on Nehru’s behalf, to ‘put the position of India’.64

  Edwina’s politics caused increasing friction with the British government. She was criticized in the media and in the Admiralty for allowing the communist Yugoslav leader, Tito, to entertain her in 1952. The oft-married Tito had in
vited her to lunch at his villa, and she had been charmed by his ‘fine physique, good looks and vital personality’.65 The Admiralty warned the Mountbattens that they were close to the line, prompting Dickie to write an aggrieved letter to Churchill. ‘You know how strongly I feel that no serving officer should involve himself in politics in any way’, he wrote.66 Yet the archives reveal that he continued actively to advise Nehru throughout the 1950s and even into the 1960s, after he became Chief of Defence Staff for the British government. On matters of foreign policy – Goa, Kashmir, China – the two wrote often.67 As a serving officer in the British Navy, it was injudicious of Mountbatten to advise the Prime Minister of another dominion; to set about selling him arms, on the other hand, was downright reckless. When Nehru stayed with the Mountbattens in 1955, Dickie suggested that he might buy the Gnat, an aircraft manufactured by Follands, and that he could transfer production of it to India. A factory was set up in Bangalore, with parts supplied from England. Gnats would be used extensively in the 1965 war with Pakistan.68

  On 20 November 1949, Princess Elizabeth had flown to Malta to join her husband at the Mountbattens’ villa. It was the beginning of a decade of close association between the Mountbattens and the Edinburghs, as the royal couple were then known. ‘I always feel most bogus in this kind of circle’, Edwina wrote to Jawahar. Then again, Dickie flourished in it.69

  When King George VI died in 1952, Elizabeth became Queen. Quick off the mark as ever, Dickie held a dinner party at Broadlands only days after his cousin’s death. He called for champagne, to celebrate the fact that the ‘House of Mountbatten’ now reigned. Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover was among the guests; he reported the anecdote to the late King’s mother, Queen Mary, and it precipitated an explosive reaction. Winston Churchill had returned to office as Prime Minister the previous year. His Private Secretary was summoned, and sent back to his master with explicit instructions to reverse this coup d’état.70 The secretary remembered that Philip argued not for the name Mountbatten, but for Edinburgh, after his dukedom.71 Neither option appealed to Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the royal household, nor the cabinet. The last of these august bodies came down hard in favour of a reversion to the unadorned Windsor.

  Faced with such trenchant opposition, the twenty-five-year-old Queen Elizabeth II issued a royal proclamation on 4 April declaring that she and her descendants would indeed continue to bear the name of Windsor. Quotes attributed to Philip on receipt of this news range from the petulant (‘I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children’), to the anguished (‘I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba’), to the bitterly angry (‘All they wanted was my sperm. I’m nothing but a fucking sperm factory to them’).72 Each boils down to the same point. ‘What the devil does that damned fool Edinburgh think that the family name has got to do with him,’ Queen Mary remarked shortly afterwards, proving him right.73

  Elizabeth’s coronation the following year brought Nehru back to London. He stayed at Claridge’s, where Nehru’s aide, eager to ensure that the trip went smoothly, took the liberty of sending the prime ministerial pyjamas to the hotel laundry service. When Nehru found out, he rebuked the aide. ‘Do you know that the laundry service in this hotel costs more than the price of the clothes?’ he scolded. He proceeded to wash his own clothes in the hotel sink, and even to iron his achkan neatly afterwards.74 It was one among many economies which, when compared to the spendthrift young Jawahar of his Cambridge days, indicate that Gandhi’s influence was not without its benefits. Nehru travelled on commercial flights rather than private jets, and took buses rather than chauffeur-driven cars.75 He was intolerant of any fuss or ceremony. On 1 June, he had been invited to a pre-coronation party at Buckingham Palace. A long list of protocol instructions arrived, detailing when to arrive, what to wear, how to shake hands, how to back away from the Queen after shaking hands, and so on. ‘I am not going to do any of this,’ remarked Jawahar. ‘Let those who want to shake hands with the Queen do so. I can’t do it.’76

  He took Indira to the party but, as usual, ended up with Edwina. Things went off badly. The pair of them got into a fight with Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, over the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Lyttelton commented on the rebellion’s ‘terrible savagery’, to which Edwina rejoined: ‘On both sides.’ Jawahar added curtly that the British would achieve nothing by shooting Africans. Lyttelton was outraged at both of them. ‘I am thinking of sending Edwina the photographs of some of the atrocities so she cannot repeat her disgraceful remarks’, he wrote to Churchill.77 Churchill promised to take it up with the Queen, and shortly afterwards tried to block Edwina from accompanying her husband on an official visit to Turkey. Dickie reassured him that Edwina denied making the Mau Mau remarks, and that in any case she had already accepted the Turkish invitation. Reluctantly, Churchill allowed her to go, and in fact it would be Dickie who would get into trouble with him on the trip, for inviting a controversial journalist aboard the HMS Surprise.78

  When Nehru emerged from Buckingham Palace with Indira in tow, he saw Churchill waiting for his car, and went to greet him. Afterwards, Churchill said to Indira, ‘I didn’t expect it. This man whom I have jailed so many times has conquered hate. He acts without a trace of rancour.’79 Indira noticed that there were tears in Churchill’s eyes as he spoke.

  The defrosting of relations between Churchill and Nehru which occurred at the coronation seems to have precipitated a change in the former’s attitude to India. ‘If I had been returned in 1945 I would have introduced a constituent assembly for India,’ Churchill told Rab Butler and Lord Salisbury over lunch at Chequers shortly afterwards. ‘Of course, they might have got rid of us anyway, but I’d have liked to try.’ He regretted that the British had not befriended the Indians, and had instead dealt with them only in political terms.80

  Churchill even invited Nehru’s sister, Nan Pandit, then Indian High Commissioner to Britain, to visit him at Chartwell while he recovered from a stroke. He was not supposed to drink alcohol or walk in the garden to show her his prized carp, and within minutes had done both. When he noticed his security guards following discreetly down the garden, remembered Nan, ‘he flared into a temper that was so like my father, the similarity could not be ignored and I had difficulty in restraining a smile.’ The pair of them sat on a bench, and Churchill put his hand on Nan’s arm.

  ‘We killed your husband, didn’t we?’ he said. Ranjit Pandit, a gentle, unassuming Sanskrit scholar, had been imprisoned with Jawahar and most of the rest of the family following Quit India. A sentence in a British jail had made his asthma and pleurisy worse, and he died in 1944, shortly after his release. Nan was so taken aback at Churchill’s words that she did not know what to say.

  ‘Every man only lives to his appointed hour,’ she replied eventually.81

  Britain’s wrongs against the Nehru family were not so readily forgiven by Nan’s cook, Budhilal. Some years after her meeting with Churchill, Nan was hosting an ambassadorial dinner for his successor, Anthony Eden. Budhilal, who had been at the ale, staged a strike in the kitchen, declaring that he would never cook for the prime minister of a nation that had imprisoned Nan, and wielding a soup ladle in an emphatic manner. Taken aback, Nan returned to her guests in the drawing room, and whispered her plight to Edwina Mountbatten. Having organized refugee camps for hundreds of thousands, Edwina had little trouble getting the dinner party together. Over dessert, she revealed the truth to Nan’s guests, who found it rather funny. ‘My mother, slowly emerging from a state of shock, was even able to manage a wan smile,’ added Nan’s daughter.82

  After forty years of effort, Mountbatten finally stepped into his father’s shoes and became First Sea Lord in 1955. The following year came the Suez crisis, that last and most foolhardy flourish of British imperial delusion. ‘Thank goodness Philip isn’t here,’ remarked the Queen, on being told that the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal.83 Dickie Mountbatten was around, and he op
posed Britain’s invasion wholeheartedly, as did his wife and Jawaharlal Nehru. Mountbatten was told by the Ministry of Defence that he had no right to give political advice. Immediately, he offered his resignation to Eden; it was refused.84

  There were other ways to make his views heard. In his unique position of confidant to the monarch, Mountbatten was heard to whisper in her ear that, ‘I think they are being absolutely lunatic.’85 Acting on Mountbatten’s word, Elizabeth exercised her constitutional right to advise Eden not to invade. He exercised his constitutional right to ignore her. Britain invaded; the United States cut off its credit; and Eden was forced into a humiliating withdrawal. He resigned the following year. Mountbatten was promoted to Chief of the Defence Staff.

  It is said that Dickie became a particularly close confidant of the Queen during the 1950s.86 He always carried four pictures with him: Edwina as a young woman in white fur and pearls, one each of Patricia and Pamela, and one of Elizabeth, smiling, relaxed and unusually sexy in a white gown and long gloves. It was signed ‘Lilibet’, the nickname by which her intimate circle have always known her.87

  In April 1958, Nehru announced that he wanted to resign and return to private life, telling a press conference shortly afterwards that he felt ‘rather stale and flat’.88 For once, the roles were reversed, and Edwina told him to take a rest. He took a month’s holiday, trekking in the Kullu Valley, high in the Himalayas. ‘Tell me whether I should continue to write to you or not?’ wrote Edwina tentatively. ‘I shall well understand if you say “not a note for the next months”.’