After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  One thing was certain: the British could not continue to govern India against its will. Another certainty was that the British incursion into India, which had begun as a profit-making enterprise for merchants, had become a drain on British resources. The war in the Far East had demonstrated that it took very little to make a British stronghold such as Singapore collapse. Throughout the war years, India had seethed with discontent, and the problems of the subcontinent were never going to be resolved until independence was achieved. The dilemma was: what sort of polity would be acceptable to the multitudinous peoples of this vast land mass, which had never been a united nation? Mahatma Gandhi had been its prophet, its Moses, or its Garibaldi leading it into its promise. Jawaharlal Nehru needed to be its Saviour, the modernizing liberal statesman who had to moderate the fervour of the early revolutionary nationalist sentiments of his followers in order to hold together the opposing factions of the new nation. The nub of the difficulty was actually a reworking of a problem which the British themselves, with the best of intentions, had brought to India in the first place. Lord Macaulay, as early as his years as legal adviser to the Supreme Council of India, 1834–8, had made English the official language of Indian law, schools and professions. Those Indians who had absorbed Victorian liberalism were those who were anxious to bring India up to date, and this in time included independence. But their very liberalism was a threat to the ancient religions and customs of the subcontinent. That was what had provoked the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857–9: the fear of the traditionally minded Indian soldiers, the sepoys, that they were being made to defile themselves by biting cartridges which were greased with impure animal-fat. Behind the casual, thoughtless British insistence that such matters were trivial was the much bigger thought that whole Indian ways of living and thinking should be modernized, brought up to nineteenth-century European levels of cleanliness, efficiency, common sense. In time, this meant intrusions by secular liberalism into the Indian home, the Indian marriage bed, even into the Indian funeral pyre.

  Gandhi, by adopting the loincloth and the begging bowl, had tried to reverse this trend and to emphasize that he was at one with the Indian peasant. But the very fact that he was, as Churchill never tired of mockingly reminding the world, a Middle Temple lawyer, lay behind the device; and in his war on the caste system, even he had a touch of the improving Victorian liberal.

  The Old Harrovian Nehru was a modernizer and a would-be democrat. And as soon as you brought democracy to a society as diverse as India’s, you invited a tyranny by the majority. For this reason, the Muslims dreaded a democratic election after British withdrawal, and this was the problem which faced the Attlee government as soon as they had decided upon a speedy and immediate departure from India after the war, a war in which well over 2 million Indian troops had served and over 100,000 had been killed or wounded.

  Since at least Curzon’s time, Bengal had seen itself as separate from its Hindu neighbours. The Punjab had only been brought into the union with the rest of India, as far as modern times were concerned, after the wars of the late 1840s. When Dalhousie had arrived as the youngest (aged thirty-five) Governor-General in history (1847–56), he regarded the Sikhs there as little better than savages. He soon discovered them to be honourable warriors, with a fine religious tradition which respected the equality of men and women rather more than Christianity did. The Sikhs and the Muslims in the Punjab, after Dalhousie’s settlements, had come to an uneasy truce. ‘The modern spirit had come to the Punjab with all its material benefits and spiritual unrest.’4 The idea of asking them, a century later, to submit to a government by Hindus was not so much a pipedream as an impossibility. To this Gandhi tried to blind himself, but it was probably always going to be the case.

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah, originally an ally of Gandhi in the fight for Indian independence, had struck out on his own for Muslim independence from the Hindus. In the great city of Lahore, where little Kim had sat astride the cannon outside the museum in Kipling’s great tale, Jinnah had made his revolutionary proclamation. He had left India for England in 1930 an all but forgotten figure in Indian politics, and returned in 1934. Somehow he got elected as the President of the Muslim League. And in the Lahore declaration of March 1940: ‘If the British Government are really earnest and sincere to secure peace and happiness of the people of this sub-continent, the only course open to us all is to allow the major nations separate homelands by dividing India into autonomous national states.’5

  It was an inflammatory and unstoppable idea which complicated the question of Indian independence immeasurably. Not only did it fly in the face of Gandhi’s (and at first the British government’s) idea of a united India, in which peoples of different ethnicities and languages and creeds formed a common polity. It also posed questions of the greatest difficulty about precise borders of any autonomous state. What, for example, would be the fate of the Sikhs in any independent Punjab? What about Hyderabad, hundreds of miles south of Jinnah’s political stamping grounds in the northwest; a state which was primarily Hindu, ruled over by a Muslim Nizam who said he would prefer to be part of an independent Muslim state under the protection of Jinnah’s Pakistan than to be part of Nehru’s India? What about Kashmir? – a tragic question this, which rages to this very hour. What about Bengal? Jinnah assumed he would be able to take Calcutta into his Muslim state. Terrible violence erupted in that huge city, once the capital of the British Raj, on 16 August 1946, with 5,000 dead, over 15,000 injured and more than 100,000 rendered homeless in only four days of fighting, when the Hindus rose up to demonstrate what they thought of the Muslims taking their city.

  When Clement Attlee became Prime Minister in 1945, he knew that the likelihood of Labour surviving more than one term in office was slight. (In fact they scraped in a second time in 1950, to be thrown out in 1951.) He had a huge political programme to push through – the nationalization of the major industries and the setting up of a welfare state at home, and the solution of the Indian problem abroad, as well as many other imperial and post-imperial problems which included the future of Palestine.

  Since 1927, when he had sat on the Simon Commission to discuss the future of India, Attlee had favoured self-government for India, and he believed that ‘but for the violent and obstructive opposition’ of ‘Winston Churchill and his friends we might perhaps have got an all-India solution to the Indian problem before the Second World War’.6 He decided that the only way, in the circumstances, to solve the Indian question was to set a deadline and to tell the various parties, including Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru and the other leaders, that after a certain date they would be responsible for the future of their country.

  With peremptory lack of grace, Attlee recalled Lord Wavell, who was Viceroy. He made him no gracious speech of thanks upon his arrival in London, nor did he reveal to him the name of his successor, the man selected by the Labour government to become the last Viceroy, charged with the responsibility of handing over power in summer 1947.7 Given the egalitarian nature of the times, and the socialist complexion of Attlee’s government, it was perhaps surprising that his candidate was Lord Louis Mountbatten, by now Viscount Mountbatten of Burma (1900–1979), who took up his appointment as Viceroy on 23 March 1947.

  Dickie Mountbatten, who was destined to be blown up in a fishing boat off the coast of County Sligo on 27 August 1979, by a bomb planted by the IRA, was one of the most colourful members of the royal family. His extraordinary popinjay arrogance and self-conceit were marked even in his boyhood when he joined the naval training college at Osborne House in 1913, twelve years after the death of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.8 But he was an energetic and courageous naval officer. As captain of the destroyer HMS Kelly, he displayed extraordinary heroism trying to evacuate British troops from Crete during the disastrous engagement there in May 1941. The Kelly was sunk with the loss of half the crew. Mountbatten had to swim out from under the ship when it turned turtle. Noël Coward, a friend, perhaps lover, of Mountbatten’s, acted the role in a
film, In Which We Serve, which moved cinema audiences in wartime by its demonstration of simple heroism, even though viewed today it seems screamingly camp.

  Even after he had left active service, Mountbatten maintained his links with the navy. When an employee of Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage called on the war hero in his small mews house in Belgravia shortly before his assassination, he found the place ‘awash with young, muscular and suspiciously good-looking Naval ratings, bustling about the place to no apparent purpose’.9 The young genealogist found Mountbatten abuzz with one of his obsessions, namely that the royal family should take his surname. Although he had never met the 25-year-old Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, who had only called on him to discuss the possibility of his writing a foreword to a Guide to the Royal Family, Mountbatten poured out indiscreet talk about the quarrels which had erupted in the family ever since Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten in 1947. When the cabinet refused to allow the new Royal House to take the name Mountbatten, “‘That old drunk Churchill backed up by that crooked swine Beaverbrook (who paid off all Churchill’s debts) objected to this and forced the Queen to announce that ‘the House of Windsor’ would continue as before. My nephew was furious as you can imagine. ‘It makes me into an amoeba’, he said, ‘a bloody amoeba’. Have you ever wondered why there was a ten-year gap between the births of Princess Anne (1950) and Prince Andrew (1960)”?’10 This vignette of Mountbatten in old age (‘Mountbottom’ as old friends knew him) gives an unforgettable picture of his impulsiveness, his indiscretion, his bustling desire to change, reform, interfere. He was destined to be the power behind Queen Elizabeth II’s throne, an eminence less grise than cerise perhaps.

  In his very early twenties he had married Edwina Ashley, granddaughter of Edward VII’s hugely wealthy financial adviser Sir Ernest Cassel, and descended via her mother from the great Victorian statesman Palmerston and collaterally related to the philanthropist Earl of Shaftesbury. Broadlands, Palmerston’s estate near Romsey, became the Mountbattens’ through inheritance (together with £2.3 million, in 1923) from Cassel, and it was here that Philip Mountbatten and Princess Elizabeth spent their honeymoon.

  The marriage of Edwina and Louis Mountbatten was, to put it mildly, stormy, and there were many affairs. Whether or not it was true, there was an inevitability about the claim that both Mountbattens, having arrived in India in 1947, conducted love affairs with Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru’s most recent biographer points out that the war had liberated Edwina Mountbatten to escape the somewhat stultifying world of a 1930s heiress and society flapper and to do something ‘in her own right’ with the International Red Cross. She loved India, and was determined to assist her husband in making the transition from British rule to independence as successful as possible. It was after independence, when Mountbatten stayed on as governor-general for a short period, that Edwina’s relationship with Nehru deepened. The extent to which the relationship between them was ‘in any way physical … pales into insignificance beside the fact that two lonely and complex individuals, both driven personalities, found in each other in middle life a source of inspiration, fun, solace and strength’.11

  Whatever else was going on between Edwina Mountbatten, Nehru and Dickie Mountbatten, it was clearly all very different from what had happened when Lord Dalhousie had gone out to bring British rule to the Punjab a hundred years before. It is difficult to agree with the assessment that the extent of physicality of the relationship was irrelevant. There is the world of difference between highly charged flirtations and love affairs proper. The latter dredge up, irrespective of the lovers’ wishes, all kinds of uncontrollable feelings which in the former case may be kept under control. The highly charged, brittle and almost manic relationship which both Mountbattens had with Nehru seems to the eyes of hindsight to be much more explicable in terms of a non-consummated sexual–emotional passion.

  It is against this background that we read the extraordinary and tragic events of the Partition.

  By the time the Mountbattens arrived, the pressure from Jinnah and the Muslim League to establish an independent Pakistan was already all but irresistible. Mountbatten and Attlee shared a Pontius Pilate-like desire not to be held responsible for any of the ensuing violence, so that the British line, until the last possible minute, was to press for a united independent India. The dissension and subsequent bloodshed was to be seen as the responsibility of the Indians alone. In Mountbatten’s case there was also an obsessive desire to get the Indian business finished before his nephew Philip’s wedding to Princess Elizabeth, a ceremony in which he had every intention of playing a major role, as in the subsequent marriage.

  One of the most grotesque things about the rush to independence, and the British acceptance of Partition as an idea, was the way they eventually decided on the boundaries of the new states. They brought in a clever Inner Temple lawyer (Haileybury, like the Prime Minister, and New College, Oxford) by the name of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India in his life. He was given a house on the viceregal estate in early July 1947, just weeks before independence, and, with a pile of maps of a country he had never visited, he was asked to devise the boundaries. Judges sitting in Calcutta and Lahore submitted to him further evidence to help him in his deliberations. He had to make a hasty pronouncement about the tremendously complicated question of which territories in the Punjab should be given to the Sikhs and which to the Muslims. On 17 August East Punjab was deemed to contain the whole of the Jullundur and Ambala divisions, and the Amritsar district of the Lahore division. The East Punjab gained control of three of the five rivers (Punjab means Five Rivers), the Beas, the Sutlej, and the upper waters of the Ravi – a decision with devastating consequences for tens of thousands of people whose irrigation was now in the hands of those they considered their enemies. West Punjab, however, was granted, by a stroke of Radcliffe’s pen, 62 per cent of the area and 55 per cent of the population. For the Sikhs, the loss to Pakistan of Lahore as well as the canal colonies of Shekhupura, Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) and Montgomery (now Sahiwal) was grievous; the Muslims resented not getting the whole of the Lahore division.

  No sooner had he made his decision than Radcliffe skedaddled. ‘People sometimes ask me whether I would like to go back and see India as it really is. God forbid. Not even if they asked me. I suspect they’d shoot me out of hand – both sides.’12 Within days of his boundaries decision, one of the greatest migrations in human history overtook the Punjab. A sea of humanity broke across the steamy plains. Massacres on both sides were of appalling savagery. Muslims set fire not only to Sikh homes but to Sikh beards, even though being bearded was something which the men of both religions had in common. No one has ever calculated the exact numbers killed in the Punjab, but probably half a million is about right.13 The tryst with destiny which Nehru envisaged was to be a bloody one. They had stepped out of the old world, in which a few hundred people being massacred in Amritsar by General Dyer was rightly regarded as an intolerable outrage, into a world where Amritsar and Lahore had become scenes of unspeakable butchery, where whole villages were put to fire and sword, and where religious and racial hatred was allowed to rage unchecked. They had made their tryst with a new world in which Islam would be perpetually at war with its neighbours and rival religions, ever more paranoid, ever more violent, ever more detested and feared, its noble intellectual and moral traditions less and less highly regarded.

  Much of the blame for the way that Partition was handled – its brusque haste, its insufficient policing, the genocidal carelessness with which the fine print and the borders were decided – must be laid at the door of Louis Mountbatten, whose government awarded him an earldom in October 1947. By his superficial haste, his sheer arrogance, his inattention to vital detail, and his unwillingness to provide the huge peace-keeping forces which could have protected migrant populations, Mountbatten was responsible for as many deaths as some of those who were hanged after the Nuremberg trials.

  On 21 July 1947, President Harry S
. Truman wrote in his diary: ‘Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine [sic]. Told him I would talk to Gen[eral George] Marshall about it.’14 That day, the world had heard that the ship Exodus, containing 4,500 Jewish refugees, had tried to land at Haifa, and been seized by British troops. These displaced persons, as they were called in those days, were moved on to three other vessels and taken to Cyprus for detention. The homeless families, who included 1,000 children, were kept in cages on board. The aim was to return them to Europe, where they had come from.

  The United States had refused any more Jewish refugees. The British, whose job it was to keep the peace in the Mandated territory of Palestine, believed that any more Jewish immigrants would exacerbate an already explosive situation in which Jews and Arabs were killing one another. On 22 July 1946 Jewish terrorists led by Menachem Begin, a future Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner, blew up the British HQ in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. Twenty British servicemen were killed in that year. A year later the same group captured two British army sergeants and hanged them in retaliation for three of their own members having been executed.15 One hundred thousand British personnel – 80,000 troops and 20,000 special police – were trying to keep peace between the Jews, desperate for somewhere to live free of persecution, and the Palestinian Arabs who saw Jewish arrivals as a threat to their freedom.