Indian Summer
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Astrologers chose the hour just after midnight as the most favourable for the ceremony. The groom rode to the Kaul family mansion in Old Delhi on a white horse, followed by a procession of guests. Jawahar wore a brocade sherwani and silk turban; Kamala a traditional pink sari. Because Hindu priests usually took the bride’s jewellery as part of their fee, it was customary for her ornaments to be made of flowers – but the Nehrus were wealthy enough that chains of gold as well as blossom could hang around Kamala’s slender neck. She was, according to the groom’s second sister, Betty, ‘one of the most beautiful women I knew or ever have known’.51 Under a canopy, the couple exchanged vows as the priests chanted and poured ghee into the fire, and plumes of black smoke billowed up into the night sky.
The next day brought more celebrations of an even more sumptuous style back at the Nehru Wedding Camp. Kamala wore a stunning cream-coloured sari, embroidered with real pearls, which had taken a group of craftsmen working on the verandahs of Anand Bhavan several months to bead.52 Motilal had designed the jewellery in which he bedecked her, so much of it that she seemed to be ‘ablaze’ with diamonds, pearls, emeralds and rubies.53 A further ten days of rejoicing was declared for the guests, all at Motilal’s expense.
The only person not enchanted by the festivities was the groom, who looked grumpy in every photograph. In chapter six of his autobiography, Nehru announced curtly that ‘My marriage took place in 1916 in the city of Delhi.’54 The strange turn of phrase admitted him no agency: not ‘I married’, but ‘My marriage took place’; he did not name the bride. Immediately, he moved the subject on to a trip to Kashmir and Ladakh that summer, a sort of honeymoon en famille. Motilal hired a fleet of houseboats on the picturesque Dal Lake at Srinagar. But a lazy married life did not hold Jawahar’s attention, and he persuaded his family to trek up into the mountains. Motilal brought his luxuries with him: the party rode up on horseback, with the frail Swarup Rani carried in a sedan chair, and took a dozen servants to wait on them in their palatial, wooden-floored tents.
Even this expedition did not satisfy Jawahar’s urge to escape. Leaving Kamala with his parents, he set off on a perilous climbing adventure to the Zojila Pass with a cousin, during which he was, to his great excitement, nearly killed when he slipped down a crevasse.55 The newlyweds were not especially happy in their marriage, which was later described by their niece Nayantara Sahgal as ‘a grievous mistake for two profoundly different people’.56 Jawahar, rhapsodizing at elegiac length on the beauty of the Kashmiri landscape, was clearly not so taken with the charms of his wife; and she, now living with his parents in a strange half-Westernized household, began to show signs of distress. Soon after their Kashmiri holiday, Jawahar was called back to Allahabad on business. Kamala stayed in Kashmir, where she did little but eat cherries and develop headaches.
The birth of a daughter, Indira, the following year did little to reconcile Jawahar to family life, for he had at last found a purpose outside it. Mohandas Gandhi had kept a low profile since returning to India the previous year, but had caused a scandal and, nearly, a riot when he spoke freely at the opening of Benares Hindu University in February 1916. In front of an audience of British and Indian eminences, and a large number of students who had been angered by the arrest of some of them that day, he launched into one of the most incendiary speeches he would ever make. ‘I compare with the richly bedecked noblemen the millions of the poor,’ he said, indicating the former on the platform behind him. ‘And I feel like saying to these noblemen: “There is no solution for India unless you strip yourselves of this jewellery and hold it in trust for your countrymen in India”…. Our salvation can only come through the farmer. Neither the lawyers, not the doctors, nor the rich landlords are going to secure it.’57 He went on to discuss violent acts of revolution – in the context of dismissing them, but the audience missed the subtlety, and heard only the Mahatma talking of the throwing of bombs and the assassination of viceroys. Several princes walked out, including the chairman, the Maharaja of Darbhanga. The students were thrilled. The speech brought Gandhi to the attention of the nation, and to that of Jawaharlal Nehru.58
Few political figures have been so widely misunderstood as Gandhi, in his own time or today. He emerged at a time when monarchies were falling, and communism loomed; he was contemporary with Lenin. To many listeners, aware of the march of events in Russia, Gandhi’s speech sounded like a rallying cry to Indian socialism, with its talk of the casting off of jewels, and the power of the workers. This was, indeed, the reason that young radicals like Jawahar were so attracted to him. But a closer examination of Gandhi’s words reveals something different, and much more profoundly religious. He had confronted the moral behaviour of society, not its structure. Gandhi called for the princes to stop wearing their finery and instead ‘hold it in trust’ for their subjects. This is not the same thing at all as telling the masses to rise up and seize it. Gandhi was not challenging the princes’ right to hold wealth, nor even their right to reign. He was asking for a change of heart.
Gandhi’s condemnation of princely luxury was part of a much broader preoccupation with returning India to what he supposed had been a prehistoric ‘golden age’ of godliness, simplicity and humility.59 He had begun to reject Western ideals of progress and technology, and insisted that India’s future lay in a return to simple village life, not industrialization. As a symbol of this, he adopted hand-spinning on a wooden wheel, and used only khadi – handspun – textiles. He developed a distaste for synthesized drugs and surgery, which he associated with Western medicine, describing them as ‘black magic’.60 Doctors, he believed, ‘violate our religious instinct’ by prioritizing the body over the mind, and curing diseases which people had deserved by their conduct. Lawyers, meanwhile, had propped up British rule by espousing British law, and were as ‘leeches’ on the people, their profession ‘just as degrading as prostitution’.61 This position had fuelled continual conflict in his own family life. Unsurprisingly, he was far from supportive of his sons’ ambitions to pursue careers in medicine or law. ‘I know too that you have sometimes felt that your education was being neglected’, Mohandas wrote to his third son, Manilal. But, he contended, ‘Education does not mean a knowledge of letters but it means character building. It means a knowledge of duty.’62 His eldest son, Harilal, fared worse. After Mohandas denied him a legal scholarship to London, he ran away from home, married a woman without his father’s consent, was disinherited, and ended up unemployed, destitute and bitter. When Manilal tried to lend Harilal money, Mohandas was so furious that he banished Manilal from his presence for a year. Manilal ended up sleeping rough on a beach.63
It is not easy being a saint, and it is perhaps even less so to live with one. ‘All of us brothers have been treated as a ringmaster would treat his trained animals’, Harilal wrote to his father in the course of a twelve-page letter deploring Mohandas’s treatment of his wife and sons.64 And yet, to a wider audience beyond his immediate family, Gandhi’s charisma, determination and fearlessness were inspiring.
At the end of the First World War, India found itself subject to a new onslaught of oppression. The subcontinent had been heavily taxed, repeatedly hit for loans, and had given 1.5 million of its men into the service of a distant military effort. Indian harvests had been requisitioned to fill European bellies, with the effect that the bounteous land that produced them suffered shortages. Four out of every five British soldiers engaged in defending the vulnerable North-West Frontier against Afghans and tribal warfare had been called away to fight for the Allies. As a result, militant pan-Islamic fundamentalists were able to gain a strong foothold in the Punjab, as well as in Bengal. Across the rest of India, Hindu nationalism seized the opportunity to capitalize on public discontent.
In March 1915, the Defence of India Act had given the courts extraordinary powers to detain suspects without trial, and to imprison, deport or execute political agitators in the Punjab and Bengal. By this stage, even the moderates of the Indian National
Congress began to object. In 1917 Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, made a vague pronouncement about the object of British policy being towards the ‘gradual development of self-governing institutions’.65 The reality did not match the rhetoric.
It is within the context of this tightening of the imperial shackles that the swift and dazzling rise of Gandhi can be understood. The Indians were a people belittled, starved and fearful. ‘And then Gandhi came’, wrote Jawaharlal Nehru.
He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths; like a beam of light that pierced the darkness and removed the scales from our eyes; like a whirlwind that upset many things, but most of all the working of people’s minds. He did not descend from the top; he seemed to emerge from the millions of India, speaking their language and incessantly drawing attention to them and their appalling condition.66
Gandhi’s satyagraha was an alternative to fear, an option more radical and, crucially, more Indian than that proposed by the moderate Congress. His effect on audiences was breathtaking. Jawahar’s sister Nan heard him speak in Allahabad. ‘I found myself struggling to pull off some gold bangles I had on my wrist so that I could put them into the bag when it came. Afterwards I couldn’t think why I’d been so moved. But he had this quality of magic about him.’67 His triumphal entry into Congress brought in its wake great crowds of new supporters: not just Brahmin lawyers, but peasants, farmers and labourers. He ordered the Brahmin lawyers to the villages, to recruit yet more of the common people: the effect was double-sided, for many among them had never truly seen the poverty of their own countrymen. His arrival changed everything, putting the upper classes in touch with the lowest and raising the lowest to a new status of nobility. For the first time since the Mutiny, India had a widely popular political movement that rejected the way of life imposed upon it from the distant chambers of London.
CHAPTER 3
CIVIS BRITANNICUS SUM
ON 28 JUNE 1914, AN AUSTRIAN ARCHDUKE AND HIS WIFE were shot in Sarajevo by a nineteen-year-old terrorist. Assassinations were not unusual at the time – victims in recent years had included the Presidents of Mexico, France and the United States, the Empresses of Korea and Austria, a Persian Shah, and the Kings of Italy, Greece and Serbia. Portugal had two kings assassinated on the same day in 1908.1 But the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would swiftly assume its legendary status as the trigger for the Great War. Swift to feel its tremors was the fourteen-year-old great-grandson of Queen Victoria, His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg.
Prince Louis was born on 24 June 1900, at which point forty-eight people would have had to die, abdicate, or marry Catholics in order for him to become King of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor of India. He was always known within the family as ‘Dickie’. Dickie’s father, another Prince Louis of Battenberg, was the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy; his mother was Princess Victoria of Hesse, the sister of the Tsarina of Russia. This made him cousin to almost every king, prince and grand duke in the monkey-puzzle family tree of European royalty.
The Battenbergs were not especially wealthy, and their provenance placed them firmly in royalty’s second class.2 (The line had been created by Prince Alexander of Hesse, who fell in love with and married a countess considered too lowly, and was summarily demoted by his disgusted family. They had never been keen on him anyway: Prince Alexander was widely supposed to have been the illegitimate son of his mother’s chamberlain, Baron Augustus Senarclens von Grancy.3) Still, even a tangential relationship to royalty proper was a smart thing to have in the early twentieth century, and the younger Prince Louis enjoyed a fairy-tale childhood touring Europe’s palaces, and playing with his Russian cousins, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia and Alexei. He was particularly fond of Marie, who was a year his senior, and wondered if he ought to marry her one day.4 The question would never arise; the First World War would spark a further cull of royalty and neither the House of Battenberg, nor Grand Duchess Marie, would survive.
Four months to the day after Franz Ferdinand’s death, the elder Prince Louis of Battenberg was removed from his position as First Sea Lord. Prince Louis had been British since 1868, and had served in the Royal Navy since he was fourteen years old. But by October 1914 Britain was at war with Germany, and there were far too many Germans visible in high places. For King George V, of the house of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, the public tide of anti-German feeling was alarming. He was largely German; his wife, the former Princess May of Teck, was wholly German; his recently deceased father, King Edward VII, had even spoken English with a strong German accent. It was uncomfortably obvious where all this might lead, and a highprofile sacrifice was required to satisfy the public. Prince Louis was at the top of the list.
And so the King and his First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, agreed to throw one of their most senior military experts on to the pyre at the beginning of the war, because his name was foreign. The Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, wrote cheerfully to his confidante Venetia Stanley that ‘our poor blue-eyed German will have to go’.5 There was another reason, too, though it was not discussed openly: both Churchill and Asquith had lost confidence in Prince Louis’s abilities. No one was honest enough to say this; Prince Louis was, therefore, asked to resign, and was told to say publicly that he was doing so out of a patriotic desire not to embarrass the government with his Germanness.6 Churchill avowed to Prince Louis that, ‘No incident in my public life has caused me so much sorrow,’ though privately he had been pushing to install his old friend Lord Fisher in the job for some time.7 Prince Louis maintained great dignity in the face of this shameful treatment, aside from briefly bursting into tears on the shoulder of George V.8 He tendered his resignation as requested, and faded away into a private life of unemployment. For his teenaged son Dickie, a naval cadet at Osborne, the sense of injustice was devastating. Many years later, he would still describe it as ‘the worst body-blow I ever suffered’. He was seen standing to attention on his own beside the flagpole at Osborne, weeping.9 ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ he told a friend, when he had calmed down. ‘Of course I shall take his place.’10
But the humiliation of the Battenbergs was not complete. On 17 July 1917, a mass rebranding of royalty was ordered by George V. The King led by example this time, dropping Saxe-Coburg Gotha (which was, in any case, a title – nobody knew what his surname was, though they suspected without enthusiasm that it might be Wettin or Wipper), and adopting the British-sounding Windsor. Much against their will, the rest of the in-laws were de-Germanized. Prince Alexander of Battenberg became the Marquess of Carisbrooke; Prince Alexander of Teck became the Earl of Athlone; Adolphus, Duke of Teck, became the Marquess of Cambridge. The unfortunate Princesses of Schleswig-Holstein were demoted, in the King’s words, to ‘Helena Victoria and Marie Louise of Nothing’.11 And the unemployed Prince Louis of Battenberg would be Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven.
The former Prince Louis detested both his inelegant title and the reasoning behind it. ‘I am absolutely English,’ he told George V. ‘I have been educated in England and have been in England all my life. If you wish me to become now Sir Louis Battenberg I will do so.’12 It was a noble offer, dimmed only slightly by Prince Louis’s presumption of a knighthood – he dismissed the idea of being Mr Louis Battenberg as ‘impossible’ – and the Teutonic cast of his sentences.13 The compromise was rejected. Henceforth, Prince Louis would be a marquess, and Battenberg a cake.
But the family’s losses in the Great War were far more devastating than the misplacement of a little social prestige. Exactly one year to the day after the Battenbergs became Mountbattens, a massacre took place that would decimate their family and shock the world beyond. On 2 March 1917, Prince Louis’s brother-in-law Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had been forced to abdicate. A little over a year later, the ex-Tsar and his family were moved to the mining town of Ekaterinburg. There they were incarcerated in a mansion which the Bolsheviks had renamed, with their usual
knack for the ominous, the ‘House of Special Purpose’. That purpose was to become apparent within just two months. Early on the morning of 17 July 1918, the former imperial family was ordered into the basement, along with a doctor, a serving-girl, a cook and a valet. The family and staff were shot, and the survivors, Marie and Anastasia, repeatedly bayoneted as they screamed and struggled. The Tsarina had made them sew jewellery into their bodices for safe keeping, and the gemstones deflected both bullets and blades. The bodies were dragged outside, one of the grand duchesses still wailing and another choking on blood. The squad was reduced to bludgeoning the girls with the butts of rifles. The bodies were loaded on to a cart and dumped in an abandoned mineshaft in the Koptyaki Forest. Shortly afterwards they were retrieved, set on fire, doused in sulphuric acid and buried at the roadside.14
These events haunted the young Lord Louis Mountbatten, as Dickie had been renamed now that he was the son of a peer, rather than the son of a prince. The teenaged Dickie took to keeping a portrait of his first sweetheart, Grand Duchess Marie, beside his bed. Once in love, Dickie rarely fell out of it, and the portrait of Marie would hang in his bedroom for the rest of his life.15
Young Dickie’s challenge for the war years was to make his mark in the same Royal Navy from which his father had been so rudely ejected. Dickie was, from childhood, adventurous: quick and deft of thought; intrepid, but usually slapdash with it. A school report from the spring term of 1915 noted that ‘He is very diligent and interested in his work. At present he is rather inaccurate but I think that his steadiness should soon overcome this failing.’16
Three distinguishing features of his personality were beginning to emerge. The first was a strong streak of romanticism. Aged fourteen, he broke his ankle while tobogganing and was confined to bed. He placed an advertisement in a local newspaper, billing himself accurately, though misleadingly: ‘A young naval officer, injured and in hospital, desires correspondence.’ He received 150 replies, many from women proposing marriage. Always too coy to act the rake, Dickie passed the letters on to the crew of his brother’s ship, the New Zealand, without answering a single one of them himself.17