Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  Jawahar wrote back passionately. ‘How do you think I would fare if months passed without a letter from you?’ he asked. ‘Have you realized what your letters mean to me?’89 Two months later, in July, the Economic Weekly published an anonymous article under the headline ‘After Nehru’, predicting that on his departure Congress would fragment into petty interests of caste, religion and region. Remembering the Chanakya article of 1937, some wondered whether Nehru had written another anonymous diatribe against himself.90 Only the sustained pleading of his colleagues persuaded Nehru to stay in office after his vacation – in opposition to the views of his closest friends. ‘I understand only too well J.L [Jawahar Lal]’s desire to quit his office’, wrote Amrit Kaur to Edwina, ‘and I only wish he had lived up to what his inner voice told him.’91

  Mountbatten believed that Nehru wanted to ‘die with his boots on’, but there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his wish to retire.92 Amrit Kaur wrote to Edwina the following year: ‘I never see JL. I feel sorry for him because he is a lonely person.’93 He talked to Indira’s friend Marie Seton at length about his desperation to visit a tea shop or a bookstore without being mobbed. ‘The trouble with power is that one doesn’t know if one is still a human being or not,’ he told her. ‘I want to remain human.’94

  His depression worsened as India’s relations with China deteriorated. Nehru had always believed in pan-Asian identity. In 1958, China invaded Tibet, sending refugees scattering across the border into India – including the Dalai Lama himself, who set up court at Dharamsala in the Himalayas. ‘It is going to be heavy weather all round’, wrote Nehru to Indira.95 It was she who persuaded her father to offer asylum to the Dalai Lama, which he did – to the intense annoyance of the Chinese government. By the middle of 1959, many were predicting that China would invade India next. ‘Look at the terrain, and tell me how the Chinese can invade,’ Mountbatten told American troops in South Carolina on 12 October 1959. ‘I’d hate to plan that campaign.’96 Nine days later, Chinese troops entered Indian territory in Ladakh, high in the mountains of Kashmir.97 That troubled state would henceforth be disputed between three nations.

  The first society event of 1960 was the wedding of Pamela Mountbatten to the interior designer David Hicks. Noël Coward, among the guests, remembered it as being ‘hilarious and most enjoyable’. Hampshire was hit by a blizzard, and all the lights at Broadlands fused during the reception. Afterwards, when a coach left for the station, it broke down before it got out of the drive. The guests inside, including Walter Monckton’s wife, Biddy, and Coward himself, had to get out into the snow in their morning suits and silk gowns, and push.98

  The following day, 17 January 1960, the Sunday Express reported that the name of Mountbatten was to be restored to the royal house. Three weeks later, the Queen announced that ‘while I and my children shall continue to be styled and known as the House of Windsor, my descendants other than descendants enjoying the style, title or attribute of Royal Highness and the titular dignity of Prince or Princess and female descendants who marry and their descendants shall bear the name of Mountbatten-Windsor.’99

  Edwina did not stay around to enjoy her husband’s triumph. On the day after her daughter’s wedding, she left for Delhi. There she met Jawahar again: seventy now, to her fifty-eight, but still looking remarkably young. The same could not be said for her. Edwina’s face was lined, but her delight at seeing Jawahar illuminated it. The effect was clear to everyone.100 On 26 January, the pair of them attended the Indian Republic Day parade, and a reception afterwards in the Mughal Gardens. Memories of the magical night of 15 August 1947, when so many of the same people had celebrated in the same garden, hung in the air. Edwina and Jawahar chatted with the guest of honour, the Russian President, Marshal Voroshilov. Marie Seton was struck by Edwina’s radiance. ‘She moved easily about, unconcerned, talking to people with unselfconscious vivacity’, she wrote; ‘as she talked she shed the charm of her independent spirit.’ Observing Edwina and Jawahar together, she noted, ‘Some people believed that she exerted a great influence on Jawaharlal, but at least one of his friends was of the opinion that it was she who hung on every word he said.’101 In fact, their admiration was mutual, and undiminished by the passing years.

  The days were filled with charity work, and the evenings with quiet dinners at Jawahar’s house. One afternoon, Jawahar hosted a display of folk dancing from all over India. Seton was present again, and was able to see the happiness of Jawahar and Edwina first-hand. Every group of dancers wanted to be photographed with Jawahar, and Seton delighted in watching him ‘caper around with group after group’, now wearing a tribal cloak, now a skull-cap, now a garland of flowers. Seton sat down with Edwina on the grass to watch a troupe of war dancers from Nagaland, spinning and dipping fiercely, clad in little more than feathers.

  Edwina turned to Marie and remarked, ‘Don’t they have beautiful bottoms?’

  ‘Very beautiful,’ Marie replied.102

  Soon afterwards, Edwina left Delhi for Malaya, and hopped from there to Singapore, Brunei, and finally Borneo, arriving on 18 February. She was driven to the house of Robert Noel Turner, Chief Secretary of North Borneo, and his wife Evelyn. After only a brief rest, she went on to the St John Ambulance headquarters. That night, Turner was impressed with her vivacity at their dinner party.103

  The next morning, the heavy mountain mists briefly cleared, and Evelyn Turner woke Edwina at seven to show her the spectacular view. Edwina emerged on to the balcony in a silk dressing-gown to look up at the heights of Mount Kinabalu. ‘It’s venerated by the Dusuns who live on the lower slopes,’ Turner told her. ‘They believe it is the resting place of the souls of the dead.’104 The mists rose again only minutes later and obscured the mountain once more.

  When Edwina returned to the house that evening, she complained of tiredness. The Turners’ secretary suggesting calling a doctor, but Edwina would not have it. She got herself up again and went to the St John dinner that evening. When she arrived back at the house, she almost collapsed; but, righting herself, she dismissed it as only a headache and went to bed, refusing even an aspirin. The next day, Edwina grudgingly submitted to a medical examination. The doctor thought she had influenza, or early stage malaria; but she would not be put off her programme, and continued on to two hospital visits and a coffee party before finally allowing Mrs Turner to send her to bed with an egg flip. She insisted on attending a St John parade and an official reception that evening. Guests noticed that she looked pale and drawn despite her efforts to smile, and that she left after only twenty minutes.

  At 7.30 the next morning, the Turners’ secretary knocked on Edwina’s door. There was no reply. She opened it to see the Countess Mountbatten of Burma lying on the bed. Her body was already cold. She had suffered heart failure a few hours before. Still one of the world’s richest women, she had had no splendid possessions with her: only a pile of old letters on the bedside table. She must have been reading them when she died, for a few, having fluttered from her hands, were strewn across her bed. They were all from Jawaharlal Nehru.105

  In Delhi, Marie Seton was waiting to hear the historian Arnold Toynbee lecture at Sapru House, when she saw Jawahar arrive. ‘I noticed that his face was expressionless and self-contained, and that he took no notice of anyone.’ When the audience sat down in the hall, the chairman rose to announce that Edwina Mountbatten had died that morning. A gasp ran through the hall, and everyone rose to their feet for a spontaneous memorial silence. Seton and her friends were deeply concerned for Nehru. ‘Despite the self-control he demonstrated at the Toynbee lecture, I think it [Edwina’s] was the death which left him most bereft of companionship’, she wrote; ‘she was the friend who had stimulated and encouraged him most.’106 Just as after the death of Gandhi, Nehru’s public face would be a mask, hiding his private grief.

  Back in Britain, Mountbatten received over 6000 letters and telegrams of condolence, which were delivered almost hourly to Broadlands by the Post Office. Dick
ie’s valet found him in the drawing room, crumpling one between his trembling fingers and weeping.107 Three months later, Noël Coward met him for lunch, and noted that he had ‘aged a good deal since Edwina’s death’.108 Dickie could not sleep properly for the next three years.109

  Edwina had a horror of being interred in the claustrophobic family vault at Romsey Abbey, and had asked her husband to bury her ‘in a sack at sea’.110 HMS Wakeful was offered by the Admiralty, and sailed from Portsmouth. The coffin was discharged into the waves from beneath a Union Jack. Mountbatten, in tears, kissed a wreath of flowers before throwing it into the sea.111 The Wakeful was escorted by an Indian frigate, the Trishul. Jawaharlal Nehru had sent it all the way to the English Channel, just to cast a wreath of marigolds into the waves after Edwina’s coffin.

  CHAPTER 20

  ECHOES

  AFTER EDWINA’S DEATH, JAWAHAR HAD NOT PERMITTED HIMSELF public grief; but the age he had defied for so many years began to catch up with him. His face puffed, and developed liver spots. He began to resemble his father in the latter’s last years. He went to London, fell ill, and had to be examined by the Queen’s physician and a kidney specialist. Marie Seton saw him a few months later, and believed him to be ‘dying by inches’, crushed under the burden of responsibility he felt for the collapse of relations with China, and deprived of the close friends who had supported him.1 Politically, he had become erratic. Nan Pandit wrote to Dickie Mountbatten, asking him to tell her brother to delegate more: ‘The only person who could control him was darling Edwina,’ Dickie replied.2 The question of his successor began to bother a wider circle of people. ‘The Prime Minister is like the great banyan tree,’ said S.K. Patil, the Minister for Food. ‘Thousands shelter beneath it but nothing grows.’3 The remark irritated Nehru, perhaps because it was true.

  Another trip was planned, this time to the United States. Relations between India and the United States had long been frosty, owing to American support for Pakistan on one side, and Indian support for China on the other.4 However, when John F. Kennedy became President, heaping praise on Nehru’s ‘soaring idealism’, there was some hope of a thaw.5 A visit by Nehru was planned for November 1961.

  On 6 November, Nehru arrived in New York with Indira. The Kennedys took them aboard Air Force One for the flight to Washington. The President read the papers, while the First Lady immersed herself in the writings of André Malraux. Nehru read the National Geographic and the New York Daily News. Indira flicked through a copy of Vogue.6

  The formal talks began the next day. Kennedy brought up a range of topics which usually interested Nehru very much – Berlin, Vietnam, nuclear testing, Indo-Pakistani relations – and yet the Indian premier seemed out of sorts, and could not be induced to grunt out more than a sentence or two in reply.7 The meeting finally ended at 12.30, and Kennedy, crestfallen, went for a walk on the back lawn with the American Ambassador to India, J.K. Galbraith. ‘He thought he had done badly,’ Galbraith remembered; ‘I fail to see how he could have done better.’8

  That evening Nehru dined with Kennedy. During the dinner, Nehru eased up considerably – not least, noted Galbraith, because he ‘had sat between Mrs. Kennedy and her sister and with the light of love in his eyes’.9 The rest of the trip went without a hitch.

  There was not long to wait for the sequel. On 13 March 1962, Jackie Kennedy descended from an Air India jet at New Delhi, accompanied by her sister, Lee Radziwill. Jawahar himself stood waiting for them at the bottom of the ramp. The next evening, she went to a party at Teen Murti Bhavan. In the light of a half-moon, traditional dancers and musicians performed on a stage. From among a sea of beautiful and elaborate saris, Jackie emerged in a simple, floor-sweeping dress of lambent turquoise. ‘I am having a signal lack of success in soft-pedaling emphasis on clothes,’ admitted Galbraith.10 She sat with Jawahar under a canopy made of flower petals to watch the show. Both she and her sister were charmed, Lee describing him as ‘the most fascinating, gentle and sensual man I ever met’.11

  Two days later was the Hindu spring festival, Holi, and Galbraith took Jackie to Teen Murti Bhavan to say goodbye to Jawahar. Motilal Nehru had begun a family tradition of standing outside his house at Holi, wearing a dhoti and kurta in spotless white, and waiting for the huge crowds which trampled up the driveway to embrace him and cover him in red and purple festive powders. ‘By the time they finished he was a chromatic mess and he loved it,’ remembered Betty.12 Jawahar continued this tradition as Prime Minister. When Jackie arrived, she found him outside the house, wearing a white sherwani, laughing as thousands of people turned up to pelt him with paint, powder and water. ‘Oh, I must do that, too!’ she exclaimed.13

  The First Lady had made a tremendous impression in India. Soon afterwards, Galbraith called on Nehru. ‘I noticed, incidentally, that in his upstairs sitting room where he has pictures of the really important people in his life – Gandhi, Motilal Nehru (his father), Tagore and Edwina Mountbatten – there is now a significant addition, to wit: Mrs. Jacqueline B. Kennedy. It is the picture of J.B.K. and the Prime Minister walking arm in arm in the White House garden.’14

  Open war with China that year invigorated him briefly. ‘Nehru looked younger and more vigorous than at any time in recent months,’ noted Galbraith, ‘and told me that the tension of the crisis agreed with him.’15 Mountbatten visited in 1963, and they talked extensively about Kashmir, though more extensively still about Edwina. ‘This is almost the first time he has been prepared to talk freely about her,’ Mountbatten wrote in his diary, ‘and we both exchanged sentimental memories of the time we were all together in India.’16 It was a warm remembrance, but Nehru was declining.

  The British High Commissioner in Delhi reported back to London on 3 January 1964 that the succession was ‘sewn up’ for Indira Gandhi, ‘the one thing in which the Prime Minister was now really interested’.17 Overall, the signs were that Nehru had not groomed Indira for the succession. He had supported her when she turned down government jobs, though he had not stood in her way when she took them. But, as his friends and colleagues melted away, she remained a constant companion, and his clarity of democratic vision seemed to blur. There was by no means universal support for her in government circles. When Mountbatten visited India shortly after the British High Commissioner had made his report, he and the President, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, agreed that Indira should not be given the external affairs portfolio that her father was apparently thinking of granting her.18

  Jawahar had a minor stroke in January at the annual Congress session in Bhubaneshwar. Dickie visited again, and found his old friend ‘shockingly weak and uncomprehending’.19 He urged him not to keep working flat-out. ‘That is what Edwina did, to the great distress of all who loved her whom she left behind’, he wrote.20 On 27 May, Jawahar rose at dawn and suffered a second stroke and a heart attack. He lost consciousness and, a few hours later, he died.

  Two enormous blocks of ice were placed either side of Jawahar’s body, which lay in state at Teen Murti Bhavan in temperatures of 110 degrees, surrounded by garlands of lilies, roses, bougainvillea and, of course, Indian marigolds.21 The crowds were so thick that cars could not pass, and Nehru’s sisters were obliged to struggle through on foot.22 His friends came to look upon his sad-looking but peaceful countenance, and pay their respects. The first Englishman to arrive was Dickie Mountbatten, who flew in with the British Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. There were the women who had loved Nehru, too: Mridula Sarabhai, a scion of one of India’s leading industrial families, in a white khadi salwar kameez, self-possessed and meditative; Padmaja Naidu, wandering about sadly as if lost, looking suddenly aged. ‘Padmaja had never married,’ noted Marie Seton, ‘perhaps ever hoping to be asked by the man she so much loved.’23

  Soon, Nehru’s house was filled with uninvited guests – Hindu pandits, Buddhist lamas, Muslim maulvis and Christian priests – who sat by his body and recited prayers. Nehru’s will had stated, ‘I wish to declare with an earnestness that I d
o not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in any such ceremonies and to submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hypocrisy.’24 His daughter and his government had seen fit to disregard this unambiguous wish. The crowds at his funeral were said to exceed even those who had turned out for Gandhi’s, most clad in the traditional white of Indian mourning. Hundreds of thousands – some reports said millions – stood in a mile-long crescent around the ridge. There was an atmosphere of quiet reflection, rather than grief, that impressed all the foreign observers.25

  Jawahar’s younger grandson, Sanjay Gandhi, lit the pyre. ‘The face most contorted by emotion was not an Indian face,’ remembered Marie Seton, ‘but that of the once blithe Louis Mountbatten. He appeared to sag at the sight of the alabaster head of Jawaharlal … Theirs had been a harmony of difference, cemented by their mutual admiration for the Mahatma, on the one hand, and the very human Edwina, on the other.’26 Dickie’s admiration for the Mahatma might have been retrospective, but it was beyond doubt that he and Jawahar had been brought together by their love of the same woman.

  The scent of sandalwood and camphor oil drifted into the afternoon heat as the priests Jawahar had disdained all his life chanted mantras around his body.27 Perhaps inspired by the recurring dream of his childhood, Nehru had requested that most of his ashes be scattered from an aeroplane, ‘so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India’.