Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  With even his closest adherents condemning him in public, Gandhi’s political star was plummeting. In September 1934, he resigned from the Indian National Congress. He singled out some of his younger followers, and bestowed upon their bowed heads his public blessing. Through these men – including Vallabhbhai Patel, who had organized a successful satyagraha against the land tax in Bardoli, and the Brahmin lawyer Chakravarty Rajagopalachari – he would continue to influence the political sphere from the background. But principal among his followers was always Jawaharlal Nehru. The two men came to depend on each other personally as well as politically. Jawahar’s father, Motilal Nehru, had died in 1931, leaving a vacancy in his life. Gandhi still had four sons; but in 1936, there was a very public scandal involving his eldest. Harilal declared that he had converted to Islam, began calling himself Abdullah Gandhi, and attacked his father in print. He continued to be seen drunk in public, which scarcely suggested fervent adherence to the teachings of the Koran.58 At around this time, Gandhi suffered from the first of a series of nervous breakdowns. He left Kasturba and his followers, and moved into a one-room hut in central India, far from railways or post offices, and among a population mostly consisting of Untouchables.59 As after Chauri Chaura, he withdrew from the political scene, and focused on spiritual leadership. His hope for the future now was Jawaharlal Nehru.

  During much of the drama surrounding Gandhi’s caste campaign and conflict with Ambedkar, Jawahar had been serving lengthy prison sentences for deliberately flouting confinement orders and speaking out against the government. In August 1934, he was briefly released on parole. He saw Kamala who was, by then, critically ill with tuberculosis. He returned to prison desperately afraid. ‘Bad news and the waiting for news made the days intolerably long and the nights were sometimes worse,’ he wrote.60 In October, he was offered a grim choice by the authorities. If he gave his word that he would stay away from politics for the duration of his sentence, he would be freed to tend to his dying wife.

  Jawahar was torn between his anxiety for Kamala and his loyalty to the freedom movement. He was taken again to visit her. She was running a fever and seemed barely conscious. As he was leaving, she called him over, and whispered in his ear: ‘What is this about your giving an assurance to Government? Do not give it!’61 Back he went to prison, full of admiration. But their new closeness was not to last long. A few months later, at the beginning of 1935, Jawahar was allowed to visit Kamala for another couple of days – but found that she had grown distant. ‘Somehow things went wrong’, he wrote in his diary. ‘I felt there was a psychological change. She seemed reserved.’ He brought her poems and pieces of writing, but she showed no interest. Instead, she told him that she had decided to devote the rest of her life to religious contemplation, and no longer wanted a sexual relationship. ‘Apparently I was not to come in the way of God.’62

  In May, with Jawahar still in prison, Kamala went to a clinic in Germany. It proved difficult to book a berth to Europe. King George V’s silver jubilee was coming up and, ironically, India’s most prominent dissident family would be squeezed into a ship crammed with hundreds of loyal British subjects going to celebrate the endurance of their Empire.63 On 4 September, Jawahar was released suddenly from prison on compassionate grounds, and went immediately to his wife.

  It was a long journey, and Jawahar could not help but be worried, despite his semi-estrangement from Kamala. ‘I feel rather lost here’, he wrote to his sister, Nan, on his arrival in Nazi Germany. ‘I was shocked to see Kamala. She had changed greatly for the worse.’64 He was surprised to find German children offering him the Hitler salute: ‘Occasionally as I pass a small group of children their arms shoot out suddenly and without warning and they snap out – Heil Hitler! It is all done very smartly.’65 He made a point of seeking out and using one of the few remaining Jewish shops.66 Every day, he went to the sanatorium to see Kamala. She smiled, her eyes shining, but was too weak for conversation.67

  Kamala died early in the morning of 28 February 1936. She was cremated and her ashes given to Jawahar, so that he might take them to Allahabad and cast them into the sacred confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna. As he flew back over the deserts of Arabia with the sad little urn by his side he thought, ‘She is no more, Kamala is no more, my mind kept on repeating.’ When his plane reached Baghdad, Jawahar sent a cable to the London publishers of his just-finished autobiography. He wanted to dedicate the book: ‘To Kamala who is no more.’68

  After Kamala’s death, Jawahar’s relationship with his only child, eighteen-year-old Indira, became more important. With her father in prison and her mother ill, Indira had been an introverted girl. Jawahar’s cosmopolitan sisters had viewed the uneducated Kamala as something of a bumpkin. They could be just as dismissive of Kamala’s daughter. Aged about thirteen, Indira overheard her aunt, Nan, describe her as ‘ugly and stupid’.69 Like her parents before her, Indira reacted to her miserable home life by throwing her energies into politics. Betty returned home one day to find the house full of children dressed in homespun kurta suits. Indira had started her own organization, the Monkey Brigade, to promote nationalist activity among children.70

  Kamala’s beauty and spirit had ensured that, outside her marriage, she had had no shortage of admirers. Most significant among these was a Parsi called Feroze Gandhy. In 1930, Feroze had been an eighteen-year-old student, watching the beautiful, fragile Kamala, twelve years his senior, lead a demonstration at Allahabad. She had fainted, and he had rushed to her aid. He had helped her back to Anand Bhavan, and the very next day dropped out of college to volunteer for Congress work. Over the following weeks and months he had been frequently observed following her on her tours, carrying her lunchbox. Feroze had even taken up the task of cleaning out the tuberculous woman’s spittoon – something from which the servants at Anand Bhavan recoiled.71

  To much raising of eyebrows from those who had observed his devotion to Kamala, Feroze first proposed to Indira three years later. She refused, and he kept proposing until 1937, when she finally accepted on the steps of Sacré-Coeur in Paris. Jawahar was among the disapprovers, and asked her to return from Europe to Allahabad to think it over. She refused to speak to him until he let her return to Feroze.72 After a five-year wait for her to finish her education at Oxford, and many more fights with her father, she would marry Feroze in a Hindu ceremony. During the late 1930s, Feroze had begun to spell his surname ‘Gandhi’ – a small change which would be of inestimable value to his wife’s future career.73

  On 29 May 1932, the People newspaper in London printed a vague allusion to an affair between an upper-class society hostess and a black man.74 The lady was supposedly identifiable as Edwina Mountbatten, and the allegation of an interracial indiscretion horrified Buckingham Palace so much that she was forced to bring a libel proceeding.75 Her supposed lover, also unnamed, was presumed to be the distinguished American actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. Similar rumours swirled around her relationship with Leslie Hutchinson, a nightclub singer to whom she gave a cigarette case engraved with an affectionate message and her own name.76

  The case opened in July, with Edwina’s barrister declaring that, ‘It is not too much to say that it is the most monstrous and most atrocious libel of which I have ever heard.’77 Unusually, she was permitted to give evidence herself: and denied that she had ever so much as met Robeson. The defence replied with an unmitigated apology. Edwina won substantial damages, which she refused to claim. Whether or not there was actually any truth in the story is another of the many romantic mysteries in her life. It was said that Robeson was deeply hurt by Edwina’s denial of ever having met him.78

  Fed up with England, Edwina had a new impetus to travel. She went to the South Seas, where she joined a trading schooner and looked after the ship’s pigs. She took an epic journey to Persia with Dickie’s sister-in-law Nada, Marchioness of Milford Haven, with whom it was rumoured she was having an affair. The two drove themselves from the Black Sea across the Le
vant to the Persian Gulf, and on through Tehran to Persepolis, with nothing but basic camping equipment and a couple of formal outfits in case they met anyone distinguished. They did, of course, stopping to dine in Baghdad with King Feisal.79 In Paris, she went to see a fortune-teller who said she saw her sitting on a throne and ruling with her husband; she laughed the prediction off.80

  ‘Edwina’s travels were a great mystery to me, and to a good many other men who knew her intimately,’ one of her closest male friends later told a biographer. ‘It was as if she wanted to get away from men for a while.’81 Not all men: further travels were undertaken with a boyfriend, the handsome Harold Phillips, known as ‘Bunny’. Dickie knew of the relationship, and enabled it. ‘The fact that I encourage the Rabbit’, he wrote to Edwina, ‘is not that I don’t care but that I love you so very much that I want you to be happy and I like him better than all your friends and have no doubt that he is au fond nicer than me.’82 She occasionally returned home from these travels, bringing some sort of exotic baby animal – Sabi the lion cub, Rastas the honey bear, Bozo the bushbaby – which would be kept as a pet until it became too partial to eating shoes, or grew so large it frightened the guests, at which point it would be deposited at the Whale Island Zoo in Portsmouth. Among this menagerie was a chameleon, which could change its colour at a moment’s notice. Edwina named it Gandhi.

  Edwina’s scandals were nothing compared with the story that was just about to break. On 20 January 1936, after a reign of twenty-five-and-a-half years, King George V died. Mountbatten’s old friend David, Prince of Wales, now became King Edward VIII of Great Britain and Ireland, Emperor of India. David had never been keen on the idea of being King. He thought of leaving it all behind to wed a divorcée as early as 1920, when he repeatedly wrote to Freda Dudley-Ward from his imperial tours about the possibility of their marrying, wondering casually: ‘who knows how much longer this monarchy stunt is going to last’.83 But by the mid-1930s Mrs Dudley-Ward had been forgotten, and he had fallen in love to the point of obsession with Wallis Warfield Simpson.

  That summer, the Mountbattens attended a house-party at Balmoral, Queen Victoria’s beloved castle in Scotland. Their host, the King, was accompanied as usual by the wife of Mr Ernest Simpson. Photographs show David and Dickie playing ‘arrow golf’, of which the precise rules are obscure: they appear to involve breaking things. Others show Edwina and Wallis giggling together, arm in arm, the resemblance between the two unmissable. The liaison between the King and Mrs Simpson was hardly discreet. Esmond Harmsworth, chairman of Associated Newspapers and of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, was also among the guests.84 Despite this, and in fact because of it, there would be no mention of the King’s mistress in the British press until he was actually forced off the throne.

  All over the world, everyone was talking about the King and Mrs Simpson – everyone, that is, apart from the King’s own subjects, most of whom were still completely in the dark. For an Englishman abroad, it could be rather embarrassing. Noël Coward, who was in Washington, took the audacious step of writing to Dickie to ask him to sort it out. ‘It is impossible to pick up any paper here without feeling sick’, he wrote. ‘I am only writing to you on a sort of hunch that … you might conceivably be able to bring a little personal influence to bear.’85

  The Mountbattens refrained from intervening directly until 1 December, when Dickie wrote David an impassioned and supportive letter.86 It made no difference. Ten days later, for the first time in history, a King voluntarily abdicated the British throne. On the evening of 9 December, Edward VIII called his brothers – the Dukes of York, Kent and Gloucester – and his cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten to Fort Belvedere, his country house. Mountbatten’s valet remembered his master emerging: ‘His face was ashen and his lips taut … we returned to London without conversation.’87

  After twenty-four hours of hectic squabbling over money, poor, stuttering Bertie, Duke of York, prepared to take the throne as King George VI, with the air of one condemned. ‘I feel,’ he said, ‘like the proverbial sheep being led to the slaughter, which is not a comfortable feeling.’88 It was said that he collapsed and sobbed for an hour in Marlborough House while David wound up his reign, with their mother Queen Mary attempting to calm him down.

  While the BBC prepared to introduce him on the radio as Mr Edward Windsor, a title was hastily invented and bestowed upon the ex-King Edward VIII. ‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do,’ declared the new Duke of Windsor, ‘without the help and support of the woman I love.’ Millions of people across the Empire listened to that broadcast. Even in faraway Allahabad, Jawaharlal Nehru, his sister Nan and her husband Ranjit Pandit were ‘glued to the radio’ at Anand Bhavan. The ex-King’s words ‘moved me very much’, admitted Nan.89 With those words, Britain was plunged into a tumult of confusion, anger, sorrow and speculation – though very little republican feeling. One exception to the loyalist mood was made by Edwina Mountbatten, who shocked society by turning up to a party immediately after the event in a ‘startlingly gay’ dress of aquamarine with a wrap of bright blue ostrich feathers. Most women were wearing mourning outfits of black.90

  After David’s abdication and exile, Dickie had to pursue an unchivalrous damage-limitation strategy, distancing himself as much as possible from the disgraced ex-King. On 11 December – the very day of the abdication – he had written a charming and personal letter to ‘My dear Bertie’. ‘Heartbroken as I am at David’s departure and all the terrible trouble he has brought on us all’, he wrote, ‘I feel I must tell you how deeply I feel for Elizabeth and you having to shoulder his responsibilities in such trying circumstances.’91 Dickie would later gain some notoriety for turning his ship hard a’port at top speed – but, on this occasion, it worked. On the first day of the new year, Bertie, reigning as King George VI, re-appointed Mountbatten as his personal naval aide-de-camp, and handed him another gong, the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. A lesson had been learned: that control is better exerted from above than from below. Henceforth Mountbatten would switch to fostering royal protégés rather than attempting to ingratiate himself with royal patrons.

  On 1 April 1937 the Government of India Act came into force, bringing the vote to almost 35 million people. When the election results came in, Congress, under the presidency of Nehru, had won a great victory. The news was nowhere near as good for the Muslim League, which failed to win any outright victories. In the Punjab, for instance, the Unionist Party commanded the largest portion of the Muslim vote. ‘I shall never come to the Punjab again,’ declared Jinnah; ‘it is such a hopeless place.’92

  Jinnah had not expected to win overall, but he had pinned his hopes on achieving a strong enough share of the vote that Congress would have to offer the Muslim League seats in its cabinets. But so decisive were its majorities that Congress had no need to do so. The British Indian civil servant Penderel Moon called Congress’s rejection of the League at this point ‘a fatal error – the prime cause of the creation of Pakistan’.93

  Congress decided that, while it continued to mistrust Britain’s intentions, it would for once act pragmatically. Elected Congressmen were permitted to take their offices, and lined up to take their oaths of loyalty to the King-Emperor. Nehru’s sister, Nan Pandit, was invited to join the cabinet in the United Provinces – becoming only the second female cabinet minister in the British Empire.94 She remembered mumbling the oath with the greatest disinclination. Afterwards, she looked so shaken that the Governor, Sir Harry Haig, asked her if she was feeling all right.

  ‘Thank you, I’m well,’ she replied. ‘It’s just that the King is stuck in my throat.’

  ‘Well, you must wash him down, then,’ said a smiling Sir Harry, passing her a drink.95

  But, behind the celebrating, Muslim parties all over India were taken aback at Congress’s rejection of League participation – which, they feared, was a sign of the Hind
u arrogance that Jinnah had long been warning them about. Quickly they began to align themselves with him. India’s Muslims were in no way homogeneous, ranging from mystical Sufis to puritanical Deobandis, and previously only a small minority would have argued for separate Muslim representation.96 But now the very moderate Punjabi Unionist Party joined the League; the Muslim premiers of Bengal and Assam both gave their support, too. More important than the politicians, perhaps, was the support of local religious leaders: the League began to attract the support of large numbers of pirs, maulvis and maulanas. Jinnah was suddenly transformed from an electoral failure into the champion of free Islam against Hindu dominance.

  A new idea of Muslim liberation began to gather pace. In 1930, a group of Indian Muslim students at Cambridge University, led by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, had brought out a pamphlet called ‘Now or Never’. Ali and his colleagues set forth a demand for what they called Pakistan – comprising the provinces and the initial letters of Punjab, Afghania (the North West Frontier Province), Kashmir and Sind, and a ‘tan’ from Baluchistan. In Urdu, Pakistan meant ‘land of the pure’.97 This elegant name would soon catch on, not long after Jinnah was presented with the idea by a students’ group in the late 1930s.

  In August 1938 Jinnah met Lord Brabourne, the acting Viceroy, and offered him a deal. If the British recognized the League as the sole mouthpiece for Muslims, the League would support the British. Jinnah said publicly that he was prepared to be ‘the ally of even the devil’ if Muslim interests required it. ‘It is not because we are in love with imperialism,’ he told the League’s annual session, ‘but in politics one has to play one’s game as on a chessboard.’98 At the time, Brabourne saw no great advantage for the British in Jinnah’s friendship. When war broke out the following year, that would change.