In the summer of 1979, Mountbatten set off for his usual August holiday at Cliffoney in Eire. He had been warned about the threat of terrorism from the Irish Republican Army, then active on both sides of the border. ‘The IRA are not looking for an old man like me,’ he told his valet.78 On the morning of 27 August, Mountbatten was up early and bustling around Classiebawn Castle, a Victorian gothic house in Sligo that had been inherited many years before by Edwina. Meanwhile, down at the nearby harbour of Mullaghmore, one or more Provisional IRA operatives levered up the green-painted planks in the centre aft of the Mountbatten family’s fishing boat, the Shadow V. They packed twenty-five kilogrammes of ammonium nitrate and nitroglycerine, mixed to form a gelignite explosive, into the hull, and attached a remote detonator before withdrawing to the hillside by the quay.
Mountbatten was to spend the day aboard the Shadow V with his daughter Patricia and her husband, Lord Brabourne, along with their teenaged twin sons, Nicholas and Timothy Knatchbull. Lord Brabourne’s mother, Doreen, and a local lad called Paul Maxwell, completed the party. Shortly before lunchtime they motored into Donegal Bay. As they got into open water Lord Brabourne turned to his father-in-law and said, ‘You are having fun today, aren’t you?’79 At that moment, the terrorists pressed their button, and a massive explosion blasted the Shadow V into woodchips. Paul Maxwell, Nick Knatchbull and Earl Mountbatten of Burma were killed instantly; the others seriously injured – in the dowager Lady Brabourne’s case, fatally. Patricia remembered thinking about how her father had been sunk on the Kelly thirty-eight years before, and how he had told her he covered his nose and mouth to prevent himself from drowning. She was very nearly killed as well and was to spend weeks on a lifesupport machine. ‘My father had always been particular that the boat should be fully painted,’ she remembered years later. ‘I’ve still got some in my eyes, which is rather nice. I like having a souvenir of the boat.’80 Mountbatten was found floating face down in the water. He had told friends he wished to die at sea.81
In the summer of 1907, a Cambridge undergraduate called Jawaharlal Nehru had visited Dublin. He had been thrilled by the reaction of the dissident political group Sinn Fein, when they were excluded from a nationalist meeting at Mansion House. They simply held a rally outside it, attracting far more spectators than were inside – including Jawahar himself. ‘Their policy is not to beg for favours but to wrest them’, he had written to his father, Motilal. ‘They do not want to fight England by arms but “to ignore her, boycott her and quietly assume the administration of Irish affairs”.’82 Had Jawaharlal Nehru been alive in 1979, he would have been horrified by the actions of the Provisional IRA in the name of the same cause. And it would not have passed him by that the target was inappropriate. Mountbatten was no colonial oppressor or Unionist stooge. He died because he was posh.
Mountbatten had spent many happy hours planning his own funeral. ‘How very macabre,’ remarked his son-in-law, Lord Brabourne. ‘Doesn’t it upset you?’ ‘The only thing that upsets me is that I won’t be there,’ Mountbatten had replied.83 Everything for this last great show went off just as the old man would have wanted, from the six scarlet cushions he had ordered to bear his crowns and crests, to the perfectly chosen hymns – ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’ and ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’.84 One unplanned detail was a wreath that read ‘From H.G.S. to H.G.F.’, signifying ‘from honorary grandson to honorary grandfather’.85 ‘Life will never be the same now that he has gone’, wrote the honorary grandson, Charles, Prince of Wales, in his diary.86 Ashley Hicks, Mountbatten’s real grandson, summed it up the best. ‘For Grandpapa, in a way it was the most tremendous of all ends,’ he said. ‘It stopped him from going gaga; it stopped him from fading into obscurity and it stopped people from being sorry for him. It was the most marvellously dramatic end.’87
Today, the India created by the Mountbattens, Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah is on the way up. Mercedes-Benz and BMW cars hurtle around Connaught Circus alongside rickshaws and the occasional wandering cow; glass-panelled corporate headquarters tower over the internet cafés and sportswear shops that now fill the colonnades that were ransacked by a civil war only sixty years ago. The Punjab is rich again, both in India and in Pakistan. New cities have sprung up on both sides of its border to proclaim the proud, modernist ambitions of those nations. The Indian Punjab has Chandigarh, an elegant sprawl designed, at Nehru’s request, by Le Corbusier. The Pakistani Punjab has Islamabad, now the nation’s capital. India’s great cities boom with industry, from the films and finance of Bombay to the infotech and biotech of Bangalore. Pakistan’s great cities have not enjoyed the same prosperity. Despite the patronage it has received from the United States, the burgeoning of radical Islam in parts of Pakistan and its political volatility has made it a less appetising prospect for foreign investors.
Neither Nehru nor Jinnah has bequeathed exactly the legacy he would have wanted to his nation. Nehru’s vision encompassed an inclusive democracy, a planned economy, and substantial investment in education. Some of these have fallen by the wayside, and he would have been horrified to observe the religious violence, disregard for the environment, and callousness towards the poor that have beleaguered India since his death. Others have succeeded remarkably, notably in the culture of science and technology, the availability of education, and the principle of secular democracy. But Nehru had seventeen years at the head of India to make his mark. Jinnah had just one at the head of Pakistan. After his death, there was little by the way of strong leadership beyond Liaquat Ali Khan, who was assassinated in 1951 in Rawalpindi. Into the vacuum rushed an assortment of religious fundamentalists and military dictators, and the political history of Pakistan in the sixty years following independence has been one of constant struggle, with democracy pitted against corruption, extremism, the military, and foreign interests. India has suffered no shortage of corruption or extremism either, but, with one brief exception during Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership in the 1970s, democracy has held.
Serious problems face each part of the former British Indian Empire. Like India, Pakistan is a beautiful and fascinating country, with a massive pool of native English speakers, and incredible potential for tourism, commerce and industry. But if it is to catch up with India’s economic pace it will need greater stability and a rebuilding of Jinnah’s progressive ideals. Bangladesh, the nation that was designed to be unworkable, has seen some economic growth, but is constrained by its climate and geography. Every year, the monsoon rains swell the tributaries of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers, and a huge part of Bangladesh floods. Droughts and cyclones add to the nation’s woes, while its population continues to rise. Meanwhile, India’s impressive development statistics mask a society split by some of the most shocking divisions of wealth visible anywhere in the world. Efforts to alleviate poverty and eradicate caste have progressed, but at a painfully slow pace. In many parts of the country, India’s new rich enjoy their fabulous wealth behind the iron gates and armed guards of private towns, from which the poor are physically excluded. India suffers simultaneously from the strictures of poverty and the diseases of affluence. It contains 50 per cent of the world’s hungry, and more than half of all children under five are malnourished.88 Simultaneously, India’s enormous middle class – estimated at around 300 million people – is experiencing an obesity epidemic.
The structures of British rule are visible everywhere but, in a subcontinent that has seen dozens of empires come and go, such relics do not seem out of place. In Delhi’s Imperial Hotel, where Jinnah was nearly murdered by Khaksars, the British raj is now a selling point. Bollywood stars pop in to enjoy ‘memsahib’s tea’ on the lawn, and spend 50,000 rupees on a handbag in the Chanel boutique. Outside, shoeless, half-starved children wait at the traffic lights to beg ten-rupee notes from rickshaw passengers. From each of these notes, in one of the least appropriate tributes imaginable, smiles the face of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
The Viceroy’s House, later Government House, is no
w Rashtrapati Bhavan, the home of the President of the Republic of India. Nehru eventually succeeded in getting rid of the British crown and won republican status in 1950; the first president was Rajendra Prasad, and since then incumbents have included Muslims, a Sikh and a Dalit (the modern name for Untouchables). Birla House, Gandhi’s last residence, and Teen Murti House, Nehru’s home, are tourist attractions. Frozen behind glass panels, Mohan’s and Jawahar’s spectacles, notepads, clothes, shoes and books are displayed like holy relics, gazed upon by crowds of schoolchildren. There is still a picture of Edwina Mountbatten in Jawaharlal Nehru’s study.
Up in the hills at Simla, the Viceregal Lodge is now the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. Perhaps more than anywhere else in India, Simla provides a snapshot of how the legacy of the raj has been incorporated into independent Indian life. Half-timbered shops sell Scottish knitwear alongside glittering sari fabric; restaurants serve pizzas alongside bhajis. Schoolchildren wear neat uniforms indistinguishable from those of British public schools, and many of the old baronial mansions have become hotels. The locals still tell tales of British ghosts. A group of Victorians in bonnets and breeches is said to appear on the benches on Mall Road; an English gentleman haunts tunnel 103 of the narrow-gauge railway; a beautiful angrez churail, an English vampiress with backwards feet and hands, entices Indian men to their doom if they walk at night near the thick deodar trees at the Boileauganj junction.89 But these imperial nightmares are fading, replaced by the sense that the once-despised British raj is now just another part of history, and that the present is all about pushing forward. ‘Gandhi lived in a different world’, a marketing executive from Delhi told a newspaper. ‘If he were alive now, he’d probably say there was nothing wrong with materialism but you had to get the balance right.’90 He would not; but even the Mahatma cannot be allowed to stand in the way of an economic boom.
India today is not Gandhi’s India, though there remains an enormous affection for him. There are elements of Gandhi’s India in the nation’s spirituality; elements of Nehru’s India in its education, culture and technology; elements of Jinnah’s India in the parts that remain outside; and even elements of the Mountbattens’ India in the continuing membership of the Commonwealth held by India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Though the echoes of 1947 still resonate around Kashmir, and Jinnah’s Pakistans have taken a very different route from the one he might have wanted, the vast and diverse nation of India has its sights fixed firmly on the future.
NOTES
(See Abbreviations in Notes)
PROLOGUE: A TRYST WITH DESTINY
1 The clocks had been set two hours forward that summer rather than the usual one.
2 Clemenceau cited in Muggeridge, The Thirties, p. 76.
3 Mildred A. Talbot to Walter S. Rogers, 27 August 1947. MP: MB1/K148 (I).
4 JN to DM, 22 June 1947. SWJN (2), vol 3, p 179.
5 Manchester Guardian, 15 August 1947, p. 5. It is not clear from reports what form the effigy took.
6 Midnight had changed him, too: DM had been Viscount Mountbatten of Burma until he was granted an earldom at that hour.
7 DM cited in Collins & Lapierre, Mountbatten and the Partition of India, p. 78; see also Collins & Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight, p. 311.
8 EA, report on present position in India, 24 August 1947. TNA: DO 121/69.
9 JN to Krishna Nehru, 23 May 1931. Nehru, Nehru’s Letters to His Sister, pp. 25–6.
10 See Chaudhuri, Thy Hand Great Anarch!, p. 817.
I. EMPIRE
1. IN THEIR GRATITUDE OUR BEST REWARD
1 Wolpert, A New History of India, pp. 128–30; Gilmartin, Empire and Islam, p. 13.
2 Shireen Moosvi (ed.), Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences (National Book Trust of India, New Delhi, 1994), pp. 39, 60–4; Bamber Gascoigne, The Great Moghuls (1971; Jonathan Cape, London, 1985), pp. 86, 95–7.
3 This assessment of England in the 1570s has been drawn from: John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988), pp. 30–52; G.R. Elton, England Under the Tudors (Methuen & Co., London, 1955), pp. 229–51; J.B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558–1603 (1936; second edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1959), pp. 251–67. Modern life expectancy statistics are from the World Health Organization’s World Health Report, 2005.
4 Philip Stubbs cited in J.B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, p. 267.
5 Ralph Fitch, undated letter, c. 28 September 1585. J. Courtenay Locke, (ed.), The First Englishmen in India: Letters and Narratives of Sundry Elizabethans Written by Themselves (George Routledge & Sons, London, 1930), p. 103. An ‘ounce’ is a snow leopard, and a ‘buffle’ a buffalo.
6 William Dalrymple, White Mughals (HarperCollins, London, 2002) is an enjoyable account of this phenomenon.
7 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776; Pickering & Chatto, London, 1995), vol I, p. 115.
8 Thomas Babington Macaulay, 10 July 1833; in The Complete Works of Lord Macaulay: Speeches, Poems & Miscellaneous Writings (Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1898), vol 1 (vol 11 of complete set), p. 559.
9 Judd, The Lion and the Tiger, p. 47. It is sadly not true that General Sir Charles Napier sent a single word Latin telegram – ‘Peccavi’, or ‘I have sinned’ – on capturing Sindh. The quote was attributed to him in a cartoon in Punch. Furthermore, it is probably untrue that Lord Dalhousie sent ‘Vovi’ (‘I vowed’) on taking Oudh, nor that the captors of Lucknow in 1857 sent ‘Nunc fortunatus sum’ (‘I am in luck now’).
10 Mike Dash, Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult (Granta Books, London, 2005) is a very readable investigation into thuggee.
11 Abul Kalam Azad, in Sen, 1857, p. x. Azad overstates the case by suggesting that the British deliberately concealed a motive of conquest behind a trading company. Even MKG admitted that the East India Company was not set up to conquer: ‘They had not the slightest intention at the time of establishing a kingdom’, he wrote (Hind Swaraj, p. 23). But he is certainly justified in arguing that the unofficial capacity of the East India Company allowed it to behave in ways the Crown could not; and it is true that the great Mughals would not have tolerated a similar incursion by an army.
12 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 23.
13 It is politically correct in India to refer to the revolt of 1857 as the ‘First War of Independence’. But this is misleading, for it had no connection to the later independence movement; moreover, there was no second war of independence. Its traditional British name, the ‘Indian Mutiny’, may be offensive to some, but retains an authentic flavour of the attitudes of the time.
14 David, The Indian Mutiny, pp. 52–5.
15 Karl Marx, ‘Investigation of Tortures in India’, 28 August 1857. Marx & Engels, The First Indian War of Independence, pp. 59–63. Progressive Indians as well as the British favoured the end of suttee, and a notable campaign against it was led by Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarakanath Tagore. Many Indians were also supportive of the Company’s policies on education and social welfare. Sen, 1857, p. 5; Abul Kalam Azad, in Sen, 1857, pp. xiv–xv; also Nehru, The Discovery of India, pp. 293–4.
16 David, The Indian Mutiny, pp. 80–4, 90–1; Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, pp. 106–7.
17 Sen, 1857, pp. 67–8.
18 Some Gurkhas mutinied at Jutogh, near Simla, causing panic among the Europeans. But the town itself was left alone by the rioters. Pubby, Shimla Then and Now, pp. 30–3.
19 Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, 22 July 1853. Marx & Engels, The First Indian War of Independence, p. 26.
20 Sen, 1857, pp. 114, 150; Abul Kalam Azad, in ibid, p. xvi; Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, pp. 442, 455, 510; Wolpert, A New History of India, p. 235.
21 David, The Indian Mutiny, pp. 305–6; Sen, 1857, p. 110. Bahadur Shah II was eventually transported to Burma and kept in obscurity until he died.
22 Hutheesing, We Nehrus, p. 16.
23 Patrick French has rightly pointed out that the term ‘the raj’ was popularised by
DM. ‘Raj’ means ‘rule’ – it is possible to have ‘Mughal raj’, ‘Congress raj’, ‘swaraj’ (self-rule) and so on. In Britain and the West, ‘the raj’ is understood to refer specifically to the British raj, and it has been used in that sense throughout this book. In India, the term ‘Angrez sarkar’ was usually employed. French, Liberty or Death, p. 442.
24 Cited in Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol 1, p. 2.
25 There is an account of their tour in Liversidge, The Mountbattens, pp. 34–7.
26 Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 417.
27 See Prithwis Chandra Ray, Indian Famines: Their Causes and Remedies (Cherry Press, Calcutta, 1901), table opposite p. 10.
2. MOHAN AND JAWAHAR
1 Gandhi, An Autobiography, pp. 34–40; Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 28–9, 33; Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol 1, p. 31.
2 Kasturbai’s surname is sometimes given as Nanakji or Kapadia.
3 Gandhi, Daughter of Midnight, pp. 16–18.
4 MKG cited in ibid, p. 212.
5 The Raj became less keen on Congress when Hume tried to broaden its base and recruited Muslims, peasant proprietors and townspeople over the next two years. ODNB, vol 28, pp. 735–7; Hamid, Disastrous Twilight, p. 3.
6 Gandhi, An Autobiography, pp. 42–4. This analysis is indebted to Koestler, The Lotus and the Robot, pp. 145–9.
7 Gandhi, An Autobiography, pp. 52–4; Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 35; Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol 1, p. 33.
8 Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 56.
9 Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol 1, pp. 32–3.
10 Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 37.
11 Symonds, In the Margins of Independence, p. 88; Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 87.
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