Devadas Gandhi arrived to press his father’s still-warm arm, and stayed with the body through the night. Dickie Mountbatten was there as soon as possible, but without Edwina, who had stayed in Madras and was trying desperately to organize her flight back. A tin can had been placed on the lawn to mark the spot where the Mahatma had been killed. People were clustered around it, scraping up bits of the bloodstained soil to carry off in their handkerchiefs for posterity.40 Inside Gandhi’s chamber, the silence was broken only by the smashing of glass. The crowds massing outside pressed forwards so powerfully that they broke the windows of Birla House.41
Nehru went outside and climbed up the gates to address the people. Three times during his speech he broke down in tears. When he climbed down, he was visibly shaking.42 His words were not recorded but, soon afterwards, he went on All-India Radio to give another such speech to the nation. ‘The light has gone out from our lives and there is darkness everywhere,’ he began, his voice quavering. ‘And I do not know what to tell you and how to say it.’ But he did know how to say it: and he said it beautifully. ‘The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong. For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. The light that has illumined this country for these many, many years will illumine this country for many more years, and a thousand years later that light will still be seen in this country, and the world will see it, and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. For that light represented something more than the immediate present; it represented the living, eternal truths reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking this ancient country to freedom.’43
The next morning, Gandhi’s body was washed in a Hindu rite, garlanded with khadi and scattered with rose petals. In an inappropriately militaristic gesture, it was placed on an army weapons-carrier, drawn by 200 men of the services in a procession of 5100 troops, surrounded by armoured cars. The cortège took almost five hours to pass through the streets of New Delhi, packed with hundreds of thousands of people clad in the pure white of mourning, up towards Old Delhi and Raj Ghat, on the west bank of the Jumna River. Betty Hutheesing, Indira Gandhi and Padmaja Naidu walked behind the carriage. Though it was January, halfway through the nine-mile walk they were sodden with sweat, and Indira had begun to sway. Some soldiers in a jeep took pity on them and drove them the rest of the way.44 Overhead, three aeroplanes showered petals on to the procession. One million people were estimated to be waiting at the ghat by late afternoon, including Dickie Mountbatten, in full uniform. Edwina, exhausted and grief-stricken after a sleepless night organizing a plane to take her back to Delhi, was sitting next to Jawaharlal Nehru on the dry earth. Unrecognized in the crowd was Gandhi’s eldest son, Harilal, who had never reconciled with his father and was now suffering from tuberculosis. Harilal was drunk. A few months later he, too, would be dead.
Gandhi’s body was laid on a pyre of sandalwood, and Nehru, in a unique departure from his own strict codes against any form of religious observance, went forward to kiss his guru’s feet. The pyre was lit by another of Gandhi’s sons, Ramdas, to a cry from the crowds and a rush forward. The danger of the flames was immediately obvious. Nehru, who had been staring into space in quiet desolation, jumped up and shoved his way through to the front of the crowd, shouting at people to sit down, and pushing them down if they did not comply. Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten sat immediately, forcing the ranks behind them to follow suit. The crowd dropped to the ground, and a further tragedy was averted.45 (The fact that the Mountbattens had deigned to sit on dry earth amid a crowd of Indians raised a few eyebrows in London. A report from the Daily Telegraph with a picture of the Mountbattens sitting cross-legged beside Patel and Baldev Singh was torn out by Winston Churchill. He underlined the description of the Governor General and his wife ‘squatting on the ground’.)46 Prayers were chanted, hymns sung, and the entirety of Gandhi’s beloved Bhagavad Gita read aloud as the sun slowly set. The flames burned until morning.
‘Gandhi has been assassinated’, wrote Noël Coward in his diary that day. ‘In my humble opinion, a bloody good thing but far too late.’47 This churlish remark indicated just how far the Mountbattens had come from their London set. Millions felt Gandhi’s loss, but few so personally as Edwina Mountbatten. Yet it did not trigger a reconciliation with her husband. Instead, Edwina sat down and poured her heart out in a letter to Jawahar.48 She had been getting closer to him for several months. Now she turned to him for comfort, and he to her.49 There was little that any of the Mountbattens’ friends could do to repair Dickie’s and Edwina’s marriage, though some of them were involved in it rather too closely. The new year had been followed by another series of scorching rows, prompting Peter Murphy – still living with the Mountbattens in Delhi – to write Edwina a letter begging her to give her husband another chance. ‘It distresses me so that you ever imagine that you are not a very great deep love in his life,’ he said. ‘What it seems you don’t know is the unfailing affection and loyalty that he feels for you and that he has spoken of so freely to me.’50 It may have been true, but it did nothing to help. At one point Dickie, Edwina and Yola had such a bitter and ugly ‘three-cornered row’ that Yola almost left India.51 Mountbatten later confided to his Private Secretary, John Barratt, that Edwina had been ‘difficult’ in India, and put it down to the menopause that she was undergoing at the time. ‘He made several oblique references to her relationship with Nehru,’ remembered Barratt.52
Meanwhile, that relationship became closer. In public, Jawahar and Edwina were formal; in private, they were inseparable.53 Letters became fervent. ‘What did you tell me and what did I say to you … ?’ mused Jawahar to Edwina in a letter written after one of their many late-night meetings. ‘The more one talks, the more there is to say and there is so much that it is difficult to put into words.’54 Edwina’s support was warm, but never controlling. ‘In those days of tension, and later when she came to stay with my brother after he became Prime Minister of the Republic of India, she was one of the few people left who could break his sombre moods,’ remembered Jawahar’s sister, Betty. ‘When she was there, Bhai’s laughter would ring through the house as it used to when we were young.’55 Dickie showed no sign of feeling excluded by the relationship. He pasted into his own private photograph album a selection of pictures from early February, when he and Edwina went to the Kumbh Mela at Allahabad with Jawahar. They rode in an ornate howdah atop a giant elephant to the confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna. Thousands lined the riverbanks and waved flags. One snapshot of Dickie, Edwina, Jawahar and Pamela was captioned simply, in Dickie’s handwriting, ‘Family visit to Allahabad’.56
From the sorrow and tragedy of Gandhi’s death, some hope emerged. Mountbatten took the opportunity to tell Patel and Nehru that Gandhi’s last great wish had been to see the two of them brought together. Weeping, the two men embraced.57 Furthermore, though the long-anticipated final sacrifice had not been made by his own hand, it had, nonetheless, achieved a little of what he had spent much of his life pleading for. After a small spate of attacks on Hindu Mahasabha members in Bombay, India calmed, and the harassment of the Muslim population of Delhi ceased.58 Refugees were rehoused in the Punjab. Stalls and shops reopened in Connaught Place. Unwittingly, with his act of hatred, Nathuram Godse had brought Hindus and Muslims together. ‘What is all the snivelling about?’ Sarojini Naidu asked Gandhi’s mourners defiantly. ‘Would you rather he had died of decrepit old age or indigestion? This was the only death great enough for him.’59
On 2 February, the Indian government outlawed all communal organizations and private armies, specifically the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS, the Sikh Akali Dal, and the Muslim League National Guard. The threat of further assassinations remained, and all eyes turned to the safety of Nehru. Nehru’s friend Krishna Menon, now High Commissioner to London, sent Mountbatten a letter asking him to intervene personally to protect the Prime Minister. ‘I am worried about Jawaharlal’, he wrote. ‘Is it not possible for something drastic to be done to pr
event him taking unnecessary risks. He won’t listen to anyone else.’60 Mountbatten went further than Menon intended. He and Edwina attempted to persuade Nehru to move in with them. ‘We offered him a self-contained flat with a separate entrance and said we would take in thirty other Government servants in one of the wings so that the accommodation vacated by them could be given to refugees,’ Mountbatten wrote, ‘but I was unable to persuade Panditji to move into the safety of Government House.’61 Nehru was, however, persuaded to have his own house surrounded by armed guards. His niece, Rita Pandit, was staying with him at the time and wrote to her mother of his irritation: ‘He hates all these regulations but abides by them – yesterday he said he felt freer in jail than he does now, & I can see why.’62 He endured it all with composure. ‘Jawaharlal is as magnificent as ever, and bearing up in spite of his overwhelming sorrow and responsibility; and so is Amrit’, wrote Edwina Mountbatten to Agatha Harrison. ‘I love them both.’63
In Pakistan, things were not going well for Jinnah. The prospect of open war with India continued to loom on West Pakistan’s southern border. Now, on its northern border, the government of Afghanistan was furious with him, believing he had armed the tribesmen on their frontier.64 In the face of a resurgent Islamic nationalism inside his own state, he continued to insist that ‘Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic State to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims – Hindus, Christians and Parsees – but they are all Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizens and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan.’65 Jinnah’s strategy to achieve Pakistan by exploiting the extremes of identity politics had been extraordinarily successful. Unfortunately, his plan to run Pakistan as a progressive liberal democracy with a moderate Islamic flavour had been markedly less well worked out. Moreover, many of Jinnah’s religious supporters had had a very different idea of what Pakistan might be. The maulvis, maulanas and pirs, whom he had spent two decades stirring up, would not return meekly to their boxes.
For all his strength and bluster, in private Jinnah was falling apart. He had suffered from tuberculosis for a decade, and his deterioration was obvious to the very few who were allowed to meet him. Margaret Bourke-White was one of them, sent to take a new portrait for the cover of Life. When she arrived at his house, she was fobbed off with a discreet code: ‘The Quaid-e-Azam has a bad cold.’
Bourke-White knew Fatima Jinnah fairly well, and was able to sweet-talk her way into another appointment – on the condition that she would not take any close-up pictures. ‘And when I saw his face, I knew why,’ she remembered. ‘The change was terrifying. There seemed to be a spiritual numbness concealing something close to panic underneath. As I went ahead with my pictures, his sister slipped up before each photograph and tried gently to uncurl his desperately clenched hands.’66
Jinnah’s old loathing of Nehru had spilled over into an even greater loathing of Mountbatten.67 He was convinced that India’s Governor General was working to turn the Commonwealth against him, and he was not wrong. On 8 February, Mountbatten wrote Attlee an extraordinary letter – which, constitutionally, he was not supposed to write at all, for communication with Attlee was supposed to go through Nehru. In it, he implied that British policy was now anti-India and pro-Pakistan, criticized the attitude of the British at the UN, and admitted that ‘I am being attacked on all sides for having given advice which is proving to be so disastrous’ in involving the UN at all. The Indian government, he said, believed that Britain and the United States were backing Pakistan as part of their goal of maintaining Muslim solidarity in the Middle East. ‘It appears to me that Russia may well win India to her side by sponsoring her case,’ he warned. ‘I must point out that if this does come to pass the only result will be that India is thrown into the arms of Russia; and Russia will appear throughout this country as the saviour of India against the machination of the United States and the United Kingdom.’68
The letter was an open threat, and Attlee took it as such, sending back a stinging rebuke two days later. He pointed out that a Security Council resolution exactly in line with India’s request would have led to war. ‘Is it impossible for you to get these sorts of ideas into the heads of the Indian Government?’ he asked. ‘I realise of course that the difficulties are aggravated by Nehru’s own emotional attitude to Kashmir.’ He added that the threat of Russian influence ‘does not make our flesh creep at all’.69
The rebuke prompted a lengthy response, in which Mountbatten complained about ‘British support for American power politics’. He added, in hurt tones, that he did not believe that Nehru’s government would survive if ‘it were tamely to accept an award by the Security Council in favour of Pakistan; and it is for this reason that I drew your attention in my previous telegram to the grave consequences that such an award might entail.’70 Someone at the British end highlighted this paragraph.
‘Mountbatten finds his present constitutional position of friendly adviser irksome at times,’ noted Campbell-Johnson. ‘He can no longer step in between London and Delhi, and his only link now is with the King, who strictly separates his various sovereignties.’71
In the last week of February, alarming rumours began to reach Mountbatten’s ears. The Pakistani government was preparing a genocide case, naming him as responsible for the Punjab massacres. Mountbatten fired off another urgent telegram to Attlee. Attlee’s enquiries revealed the worrying fact that there was indeed reason to believe Pakistan’s suggestion that Sir Cyril Radcliffe had altered the boundary award at the last moment, though it was not known whether this was done at the behest of Mountbatten. If the matter was to be pursued further, they would have to talk to Radcliffe – but this ‘does not seem very desirable’, noted the Commonwealth Relations Secretary, Philip Noel-Baker. Noel-Baker sent a strictly personal message to the Pakistani government, carefully worded so as to avoid denying anything that might well be true: ‘it would be most unwise and highly improper to introduce these allegations’, the draft read; ‘unwise, because we should certainly contest them; and improper because they would affect the honour and reputation of the King’s Representative in India, who has no means of defending himself in public.’ The bluff worked. Pakistan agreed that it would make no reference to a dubious change in the boundary award.72 Britain was saved from a deeply embarrassing investigation, and Mountbatten from potential ruin.
With the drama in Kashmir, the problem of Hyderabad had almost been forgotten. Mountbatten had finally managed to conclude a standstill agreement with the state at the very end of November, though the Hyderabad delegation had objected to every possible detail, kicking up fusses over substituting the word ‘shall’ for the word ‘will’ in one clause, and over the use of a comma as opposed to their preferred semi-colon in another.73 A few days later, a Hindu protester threw a hand-grenade at the Nizam’s car. The Nizam was fortunate to escape without injury.
By the spring, the Governor General and the Nizam had lost patience with each other. Mountbatten wrote to the Nizam’s former advocate, Walter Monckton, that the Nizam had ‘been behaving queerly since your departure’. Almost simultaneously, the Nizam wrote to Monckton to the effect that Mountbatten wanted to force him to join India, but that ‘he had better not interfere with this matter since political situation may aggravate if he does so’.74 Consequently, Mountbatten washed his hands of Hyderabad. Patel took over and, by March, the Indian government had begun to use its geographical encirclement of Hyderabad to start an economic blockade.75 Monckton got into a heated argument over these sanctions with Patel at the beginning of March, and for a moment it looked as if another war might break out. But, during lunch the next day, Patel suffered a massive heart attack, which would incapacitate him for several months. Once again, and with much reluctance, Mountbatten had to step in.
Mountbatten sent a last warning letter to the Nizam at the end of April, but refused to go to Hyderabad himself. Instead, he sent his press attaché. Campbell-Johnson
flew to Hyderabad on 15 May, and was taken to meet the Nizam. The eccentric Nizam was renowned for being the world’s worst-dressed billionaire, and that day was clad in a threadbare dressing-gown. They spoke in a dark, cluttered Victorian reception room, under the arresting gaze of a portrait of King George V. The Nizam expounded his view of Islam, complained about Palestine, and declared troublingly that ‘Constitutional monarchy may be all very well in Europe and the west; it has no meaning in the East.’76
The Mountbattens, meanwhile, travelled the length and breadth of India, trying to fit into a few months the trips to every state that had taken most viceroys the fullness of their five-year terms. They inspected guards and hospitals in Cawnpore, visited the Buddhist temple at Sarnath, went by motor-boat to have tea at Ramnagar Fort, explored the caves at Bhubaneshwar, presented colours to the infantry in Trivandrum, cruised the backwaters in Travancore, ascended the hills at Ooty, laid foundation stones in Bundi, and opened engineering colleges in Anand. Edwina often toured without her husband, visiting Untouchable centres and leper clinics.
The furthest of these trips took the Mountbattens to Rangoon in newly independent Burma. There was a grand party at the President’s house, at which the Mountbattens were presented to a wide array of Burmese notables including Aung San Suu Kyi, the one-year-old daughter of their late friend, Aung San.77 The following day, Mountbatten returned the magnificent thirty-feet-high Hlutdaw Throne to the nation. The mood was happy, but tensions between Aung San’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League and communist factions ran close to the surface. ‘There are the symptoms here of complete political disintegration,’ noted Alan Campbell-Johnson ominously.78 All over the world, hostility was building. A communist coup in Czechoslovakia at the end of February had sparked fears in Washington that Finland, Italy, Austria and France might be next to fall into the Russian embrace. By the beginning of March, there was at least some reassurance from India. Nehru informed the US State Department that it would be ‘unthinkable’ for India to side with Russia in another world war.79 West Bengal outlawed the Communist Party and arrested 400 activists at the end of March, provoking an estrangement between Nehru and his American communist friend Paul Robeson, as well as a strike of 15,000 Bombay mill workers.
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