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Mountabatten, Nehru and Countess Edwina |
Love forged in the heat of a great moment in history
Martin Sheppard reviews an account of the end of British rule in India which focuses on the relationships between the main players
Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire.
By Alex Von Tunzelmann.
Simon and Schuster £20
INDIAN Independence, at midnight on the night of 14 August 1947, signalled the end to almost 200 years of British rule.
It also marked the birth of two new nations: India and Pakistan. Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer, one of a number of books published to mark the 60th anniversary of this key moment, is described as a “secret history”.
This is going too far, as Von Tunzelmann has no great revelations to make about the traumatic process of Independence or about the main actors in it. What she does is tell a good story about a great event in terms of the personal relations between the leading figures.
Independence was negotiated on behalf of Clement Attlee’s Labour Government by the last Viceroy, Earl Mountbatten, a man Von Tunzelmann has considerable difficulty in taking seriously. A minor royal, and once the bosom friend of the future Edward VIII, he was undoubtedly given to the exaggeration of his own importance.
Mountbatten’s disastrous career as a naval commander had been undeservedly rescued by Noël Coward’s portrayal of him as a hero in the 1942 film In Which We Serve.
Although widely distrusted by most other British commanders, he had been elevated to command in the Far East (which he exercised well away from the front line in Ceylon) and then to the Viceroyalty.
For all the fun that Von Tunzelmann pokes at his pretentions, however, Mountbatten did what was asked of him smoothly, efficiently and quickly.
At the centre of the book is the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first Prime Minister of Independent India, and Edwina, Countess Mountbatten, by inheritance one of the richest women in the world.
Edwina stopped sleeping with Mountbatten soon after the birth of their second daughter, Pamela, in 1929.
She then embarked on a hectic social and sexual life in pre-war London, which was acceptable, but also had affairs with two talented black musicians, the singer Paul Robeson and the pianist Hutch, which was not.
In India she discovered the fulfilment which she had never found at home in heroic dedication to hospital and refugee camp
visiting.
She and Nehru, who comes out of the account as a sane, honest and generous man, clearly fell in love and had a long but discreet affair.
Disappointingly, even here Von Tunzelmann has little to reveal,
having been denied access to the archive of their letters to one another.
The other main figures in the book are Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the head of the Muslim League and chief architect of Pakistan.
By the time of Independence, Gandhi combined huge spiritual prestige with political eccentricity and unpredictability.
His uncompromising insistence on spiritual values included testing his own purity by sleeping naked, not always without
incident, with young girls. Jinnah, often the bogeyman in accounts of Independence, in contrast comes across well.
Neither Nehru and Jinnah, both secular figures, expected such bitter religious conflict at Independence, certainly not on the scale and of the ferocity that broke out in Delhi, the Punjab and Kashmir.
While Mountbatten stayed on as Governor General of India for another year after August 14, the problems and future of the subcontinent were by then no longer those of Britain or its Empire.
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