Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  Perhaps with the safety of the Mountbattens in mind, the district magistrate imposed draconian edicts. For seven days, a curfew would run from 6 p.m. until 7 a.m. For a fortnight, no group of more than five individuals would be permitted to assemble for any purpose. For a week, all newspapers, commentary, photographs and even cartoons would be subject to official censorship. These measures did not make much difference. On 25 March, the Chief Commissioner, apparently long past the point of taking his reports seriously, wrote that ‘the night passed peacefully except for a certain amount of shouting’, and noted that there had been seven stabbing and brickbatting incidents on the previous day, in which eleven people had been injured. A police picket had opened fire when it was set upon by a mob armed with stones, a number of arrests had been made and ‘some bad characters have also been rounded up’. He concluded that, ‘All is quiet today up to the time of writing (10.30 A.M.),’ which was not much of a boast. Indeed, another hand added below that, ‘After lunch some stabbings and a clash by the Jumna [sic] Masjid.’22

  If the local situation seemed bad, the national was far worse. On the Wednesday after Dickie and Edwina’s arrival, riots broke out in Calcutta, killing 8 and injuring 111 Patna, the police went on strike and occupied the arms depot at Gaya; the Prime Minister of Bihar blamed communists. By Thursday, casualties in Calcutta had risen to fourteen, and fires ripped through the east of the city. The police were rapidly losing control. First they attempted to subdue the mob with tear gas; when that did not work, they resorted to bullets, and fired eighteen rounds into the crowd.

  By Friday, the Punjab was incongruously quiet – but only, said The Times, because ‘all the members of one community or the other either [had been] slaughtered or [had] fled’.23 In Amritsar, 160 lay dead in the streets after rioting. Fourteen policemen were injured at riots in Mardan, in the North-West Frontier Province. Back in Calcutta, a further eight were killed and thirty-two injured when bombs were thrown. The police gave up, and called in the Army.

  The next Sunday, 30 March, was the god-king Rama’s birthday, a day of celebrations for Hindus. In Calcutta, it was celebrated with even greater rioting, which spread across the Hooghly River to the industrial city of Howrah. The death toll rose again, amid stabbings, bombings and the throwing of acid: 46 dead, 400 injured. In Bombay, a deceptive peace was broken in the evening when three separate riots broke out. Bombs were thrown, and temples set ablaze. Muslims and Hindus pitched battles in the city, fighting with clubs, knives, iron bars and whatever weapons they could improvise. The police were attacked, and responded with gunfire. Hundreds were injured, and dozens killed: the bodies lay uncounted in the streets. A car was ambushed and its four passengers imprisoned inside by the mob while they set it alight. The passengers burned alive, screaming for mercy. The next day, all that remained was four human skeletons within the burnt-out metal skeleton of their car.

  While all this was going on, Mountbatten had to meet the Indian leaders. For that first week, the two least compromising and highestprofile among them declined his invitation – though he had been so anxious to meet these two in particular that he had written to each of them before his viceroyalty had begun.24 Mohammad Ali Jinnah, representing the Muslim League, remained in Bombay, making inflammatory speeches. Mohandas Gandhi, representing Mohandas Gandhi, was living among the outcastes in distant Bihar, and refused to take advantage of the viceregal aircraft. Among those Mountbatten did meet, the impression was already less than encouraging. Many of the princes seemed determined to press for the independence of their states, rather than transferring their allegiance to an independent India – a plan which would fragment the subcontinent into dozens, perhaps hundreds, of private kingdoms. The Maharaja of Bikaner blamed the Nawab of Bhopal for dividing the princes along communal lines. The Nawab of Bhopal said the Maharaja of Bikaner was nothing more than a patsy of Congress. Both begged Mountbatten not to let the British leave India at all.25 This opinion was not confined to the princes. John Matthai, the Minister for Transport, told him that, ‘But for Congress, there was no body in India which would not move Heaven and Earth to keep the British.’26 Other politicians presented further unexpected difficulties. Liaquat Ali Khan subtly suggested that Mountbatten must have made his controversial swearing-in address at the behest of Congress. Mountbatten vehemently denied it, but Liaquat said that three highly placed sources had told him it was so.27 Vallabhbhai Patel of Congress, ominously nicknamed ‘the Iron Man’, was a forceful Hindu-nationalist lawyer, clever and cool. He was impervious to Mountbatten’s famous charm, describing the new Viceroy as ‘a toy for Jawaharlalji to play with – while we arrange the revolution’.28

  Only one man seemed to offer a glimmer of hope. ‘Pandit Nehru struck me as most sincere,’ Dickie wrote after their first meeting on 24 March, and praised his ‘fairness of mind’. But even this interview promised greater problems yet to come. Nehru spoke at length about Jinnah, but was too astute to impugn his nemesis openly. Instead, he managed with great subtlety to sow in Mountbatten’s mind the seeds of ill favour, perhaps realizing – either consciously or unconsciously – that criticism always bites harder when it comes dressed up as praise. Thus Jinnah, he said, was ‘one of the most extraordinary men in history’, and a ‘financially successful though mediocre lawyer’, who avoided taking any action that might split his party, such as holding debates or answering questions. The assessment had the taint of sour grapes to it, but Mountbatten did not seem to notice.29 Three days later, Jinnah made a speech in Bombay that confirmed Nehru’s picture of him as a thorn in everyone’s side. He alleged that the British had deliberately conspired against the Muslims: trying to force them into staying in India rather than creating their own state of Pakistan, in order to produce greater bloodshed and destruction after the raj’s departure.30 He was in a better position than anyone else in India to know that the opposite was true, for the person who had been attempting to conspire with the British to create Pakistan for more than seven years was Jinnah himself.

  While the Viceroy struggled to generate a rapport with the Indians, his Vicereine was doing far better. Edwina began by entertaining the wives of her husband’s guests but, within a couple of days of arriving, she established her own political network. In the first few days, she sought out and befriended Gandhi’s right-hand woman, Amrit Kaur, who was to become one of her greatest friends and the new government’s Minister for Health; Vallabhbhai Patel’s influential daughter, Maniben; Liaquat’s wife, the Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, who like Edwina herself was deeply involved in health and welfare work; the Untouchable leader, B.R. Ambedkar; the radical feminist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya; and the poet and politician Sarojini Naidu, who coincidentally had been a childhood friend of her mother’s.31 Very few of the women or, indeed, the men she met had ever been allowed into the Viceroy’s House before.

  Women were prominent in Indian politics, a trend which Edwina Mountbatten, along with many Indian women, attributed to Gandhism. Non-violence, passive resistance and boycotts were all tactics which could be practised by women without breaking social conventions; and Nehru had insisted as early as 1937 that the Congress manifesto pledge to remove all social, economic and political discrimination against women. As a result, there were more powerful women in India’s Congress than there were in Britain’s Labour Party or in America’s Democratic Party at the time. The Muslim League, too, had Fatima Jinnah and the Begum Liaquat, unofficial but significant and visible figures, at the highest level. As Edwina would later tell an audience in London, ‘We shall have to wake up in this country when we see how the women of India have achieved emancipation to such a remarkable degree in spite of the backwardness of the country, the illiteracy of the people, the low standard of life, and all kinds of disadvantages from the point of view of religious feeling and other obstacles.’32

  For years Edwina had been looking for a role in which she could actually do something and, to her surprise, it would be in India that she found it. One of her most
important friendships was quickly established with the sharp and personable Congress politician Vijaya Lakshmi ‘Nan’ Pandit. ‘Edwina plunged headlong into informality,’ remembered Nan. ‘Politics were forgotten and women discussed women’s problems.’33 But it was with Nan’s brother, Jawaharlal Nehru, that she formed the most important connection of all.

  Jawahar and Edwina became close almost immediately on her arrival. Shahid Hamid, the private secretary to Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, alleged that Edwina’s relationship with Jawahar was ‘sufficiently close to have raised many eyebrows’ by 31 March 1947 – and claimed to have heard the gossip from Nehru’s confidant, Krishna Menon.34 At first glance this seems implausible, not least because Hamid’s memoirs have been widely disputed. By 31 March, the Mountbattens had been in India for only a week. Yet even so quickly it is possible to be attracted to a person, to feel a sympathy with them and even to develop the beginnings of a romantic attachment. They were together remarkably often during that first week, and the informality of their friendship was obvious. He addressed a meeting of the Red Cross; she accompanied him, and photographs show her looking up at him, enraptured. At the reception for delegates of the Asian Relations Conference on 28 March, the pair drew their armchairs together for an involved conversation. In one photograph, Nehru is being interrupted, and looks startled. Lady Mountbatten, elegant in a long floral-print dress, has her attention focused entirely on the Congress leader. That same evening, at the Mountbattens’ first garden party, there was a shortage of chairs during a dance recital. The yogic Jawahar forsook his, and instead sat cross-legged on the floor at Edwina’s feet. After the party, Edwina accompanied Jawahar back to his house on York Road for a nightcap – with her daughter, but without her husband.35

  In March 1957, Edwina would write to Jawahar that it was the anniversary of ‘Ten years … monumental in their history and so powerful in the effects on our personal lives.’ Simultaneously, he wrote to her that March 1957 marked ‘Ten years!’36 Even if their close friendship had not yet developed a romantic aspect, it is obvious that it had been firmly established.

  To Lord Mountbatten, this first week of Indian reality had come as a nasty shock. While Edwina began to find her footing, Dickie rapidly lost his. When he wrote the first of his personal reports to London on 31 March, India – with its impossible politicians, its religious combustions, its villages laid to waste by bloodthirsty mobs, its corpses in burnt-out cars, its tangled, ghastly web of tensions, histories and grievances, and the enormous weight of expectation to fix all of this laid heavily upon his shoulders – had already reduced the beaming new Viceroy of 24 March to jelly. Aghast, he wrote to Attlee:

  The scene here is one of unrelieved gloom … At this early stage I can see little ground on which to build any agreed solution for the future of India. The Cabinet is fiercely divided on communal lines; each party has its own solution and does not at present show any sign of being prepared to consider another.

  In addition, the whole country is in a most unsettled state … The only conclusion that I have been able to come to is that unless I act quickly I may well find the real beginnings of a civil war on my hands.37

  If anything, Mountbatten was understating the case. The real beginnings of civil war were already on his hands, and he was in no position to deal with them. Britain had only 11,400 soldiers in India (a number which would fall to 4000 over the course of the twelve months from April 1947), and the country had been in a state of unrest for at least a year.38 Only one man had ever seemed capable of holding back this swelling tide – and he was the elderly Gujarati who would meet the new Viceroy for the first time that afternoon.

  Mohandas Gandhi arrived at five o’clock, a tiny, flyweight figure leaning on Maniben Patel for support. He posed for photographs in the afternoon sun with the Mountbattens, and formed an instant bond with Edwina. As they went back into the house, Gandhi rested his hand on the Vicereine’s shoulder – a gesture of fellowship, acceptance and trust which he habitually reserved for his ashramites. Most of the photographers were already packing up their equipment, but one shutter in the garden clicked. The next morning, the image it captured was on front pages across the world.

  Whether Gandhi formed so immediate a connection with Lord Mountbatten is uncertain. Back inside the Viceroy’s House, Edwina made an excuse to leave, so that her husband and the Mahatma could get down to business. They did not. Gandhi first assured Mountbatten that he would come back for two hours every day that week; then started to tell his life story. ‘I felt there was no hurry and deemed it advisable to let him talk along any lines that entered his head,’ noted Mountbatten cautiously. Two hours later, having spoken at great length of his legal training in England, his life in South Africa, and his travels in India, and not at all about a settlement for independence, the Mahatma got up and left. The Viceroy was slightly bemused, but determined to remain upbeat. ‘We parted at 7.15, both of us, I am sure, feeling that we had progressed along the path of friendship.’39

  The next day Gandhi returned, bringing an ascetic meal of curds to take under a tree in the garden while the Viceroy pointlessly offered him tea and scones. The Mahatma launched upon an unsuspecting Mountbatten his plan to quell the bubbling discontent between Hindu and Muslim. It was an extraordinary suggestion. Jinnah was to be made Prime Minister, and could form a cabinet entirely composed of Muslims if he wished. Congress would agree to cooperate freely and sincerely. This would, Gandhi believed, satisfy the Muslims that the new India was not to be a ‘Hindustan’, and that their rights and freedoms would be represented.

  That day was April Fool’s Day, but Gandhi’s scheme was not a joke. He intended that Jinnah should be offered a chance to form an exclusively Islamic cabinet, despite the fact that the Muslim population of India was only around 25 per cent, with the majority Congress Party meekly serving beneath them, and apparently did not foresee any potential upset in the already inflamed Hindu and Sikh communities as a consequence of this. Nor did he acknowledge that an artificially constructed and undemocratic minority government would represent a continuation of what India had most loathed about the British raj: it would mean the rule of a very vast number of people by the unelected elite of a culture radically different from their own. Such a government would have had no real chance of success, and must quickly have fallen or been toppled after the British had left. At that point, it could only have been replaced by a predominantly Hindu administration. Moreover, in case Jinnah were wise enough to refuse the leadership, Gandhi proposed a codicil. If Jinnah would not form a cabinet, the same offer was to be made to Congress, with the Muslim League acting as obedient handmaidens to a purely Congress rule. Either way, it was virtually guaranteed to result in disaster for India’s 100 million Muslims, the sidelining of the Muslim League, and the ultimate domination of Congress. The scheme was so risky, and the probable result so obvious, that many Muslims thought Gandhi was conspiring to discredit Jinnah and ensure the long-term goal of a Hindu nationalist state.40

  Gandhi had put forward the same idea several times in the past, and it had been dismissed by previous viceroys as impossible.41 By 1947, even Gandhi’s colleagues in Congress were beginning to suspect that he had gone ‘a bit senile’.42 Mountbatten described himself as ‘staggered’ by Gandhi’s suggestion, but was not yet sure enough of his balance to dismiss the plan outright.43 Nehru was more realistic, and told him it would not work. A note of frustration had become discernible lately in Nehru’s tone when he spoke of the Mahatma. He described the old man as ‘going round with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India, instead of diagnosing the cause of this eruption of sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole’.44 A couple of weeks later, Gandhi was forced to drop the plan on the grounds that Congress was not prepared to accept it. The rejection prompted his withdrawal from formal involvement in negotiations for the transfer of power, though he would continue to contribute from the sidelines.45

&
nbsp; Mountbatten’s initial meetings with Gandhi had been bad. His meetings with Jinnah would be worse. The Viceroy decided that he would open with the same gambit that Gandhi had used on him: to leave politics aside in the first instance, and instead chat about himself. And so he launched cheerfully into the story of his Indian tour with the Prince of Wales in the twenties, his engagement to Edwina in Delhi, his exploits as Supremo and so forth, to the bewilderment of his guest. ‘He could not see why we should not talk business at once,’ Mountbatten remembered, ‘but finally resigned himself to listen to my Indian reminiscences.’46 Fortunately, Mountbatten was interrupted by the arrival of some press photographers. With Lady Mountbatten joining them, Mountbatten and Jinnah went into the gardens to have their pictures taken. ‘A rose between two thorns,’ quipped Jinnah – slightly too late, for Edwina had just moved around from between them to Jinnah’s left-hand side, casting her in the role of a thorn, and him in the role of the rose. Some historians have hinted that Jinnah’s faux pas may not have been entirely unintentional.47 Mountbatten assumed it was, and roared with laughter. Either way, the joke thawed the atmosphere. After they returned to the study, Mountbatten reported that Jinnah relaxed considerably and even started talking about his own background and life in London. ‘In fact we ended on a surprisingly friendly note. He had come in haughty and frigid but the joke at the photograph had suddenly unfrozen him and I felt we had begun to make friends and would be able to do business together.’48

  It is safe to say that Mountbatten and Jinnah never ended up making friends. Much has been made of the former calling the latter various unpleasant names in his notes – including ‘psychopathic case’, ‘bastard’ and ‘evil genius’.49 The remarks presented in context appear less offensive, for Mountbatten was in the habit of writing very lively notes. It is easy enough to find him calling Nehru ‘a demagogue’ and ‘reprehensible’, Patel ‘hysterical’, and Gandhi ‘an inveterate and dangerous Trotskyist’.50 At first, both Mountbattens tried hard with the Jinnahs. When Jinnah returned the evening after their first meeting to dine at the Viceroy’s House with his sister Fatima, they stayed until well after midnight, and according to Mountbatten ‘the ice was really broken’.51 He was adamant that Jinnah should be brought into the government to work alongside Nehru. When he suggested this to Jinnah, it did not go down well. ‘If I had invited the Pope to take part in the Black Mass,’ Mountbatten reported to London, ‘he could not have been more horrified.’52