It’s 75 years since India won independence. Vaseem Khan, who writes historical crime set in the years shortly afterwards, looks back at the process that led to independence and partition, and at the surprising relationship between two of the key political figures of the time.
There’s a wonderful photograph – taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson – of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, standing with Edwina Mountbatten, wife of Louis Mountbatten, Earl, Sea Lord, cousin to the late Queen Elizabeth II, and last viceroy of India.
In it Nehru, in his customary collarless jacket and cap, is bent over laughing as he gazes adoringly at Edwina while Mountbatten stands beside them in a crisp white uniform staring off into space with the ghost of a knowing half-smile playing over his lips.
The alleged affair between Nehru and Edwina has been speculated upon endlessly for over seven decades. Nehru himself always denied the allegations, claiming that his relationship with Edwina was merely one of spiritual connection.
What is a fact is that the pair were brought together in the most extraordinary circumstances; their ‘affair’ played out against events of such momentousness that their impact is still being felt today.
Indeed, India and Pakistan recently marked the 75th anniversary of Independence; yet the celebrations were coloured by a marked sadness at the bitterness that continues to characterise relations between the two countries.
So what exactly happened all those years ago?
In August 1947, India’s decades-long struggle for independence culminated with the departure of the British following a three-hundred-year presence on the subcontinent, the last ninety of which is remembered today as the colonial era known as the Raj. Lacking the resources to continue occupying a nation of 300 million that had turned turning the other cheek into a revolutionary weapon, the British departed in a hurry, practically running out the door, with little regard to the mess they were leaving behind.
That mess was Partition and one of its prime architects was Louis Mountbatten.
Mountbatten arrived on the subcontinent in February 1947 – accompanied by his wife – with the singular mission of supervising the departure of the British from India. What he found was a country riven by communal rioting, and on the verge of self-immolation.
On the face of it, Mountbatten’s task was unenviable. Instead of an orderly changing of the guard – as the martinets back in Whitehall had posited – Mountbatten faced mounting anarchy. To his chagrin, the Indians seemed disinclined to cooperate.
In some ways, the situation had taken everyone by surprise, given that during the early years of the Independence struggle an unprecedented communal harmony had rallied behind the likes of Gandhi, Nehru, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the three men at the heart of India’s leading Congress Party. But once these political titans fell out, the path to divergence became inevitable.
Jinnah, once a strong supporter of Muslim-Hindu unity, came to believe that a separate nation was the only solution to preventing Hindu dominance in the post-colonial India. He became the leader of the Muslim League and the country’s most vocal proponent of Partition.
His demands for a separate Pak-i-stan – a ‘Land of the Pure’ – came to a head when political rhetoric turned to violence on the streets of Calcutta in August 1946.
The so-called Direct Action Day riots left 4,000 dead in a paroxysm of savagery that shocked the British, who looked on from the sidelines, murmuring faint protests like an elderly referee at a bad-tempered football match.
The ever-bullish Mountbatten, a veteran of the school of charge-first-and-think-later, waded straight into the political morass. Unable to find consensus among the political factionalism, he shocked everyone by announcing that, come hell or high water, the British would transfer power on 15 August of that same year – well ahead of schedule.
Partition would become a reality with the country slashed into three: Muslim-majority Pakistan, East Pakistan (later to become Bangladesh), and Hindu-majority India.
As the wheels of Partition ground forward, mass migrations between the newly declared nations began – migrations accompanied by murder on a colossal scale, Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other. By the time the dust had settled, fifteen million were displaced, and anywhere from one to two million lay dead.
Of course, the chaos of Partition cannot be blamed solely on Mountbatten and British policy or even on the machinations of subcontinental politicians.
Ordinary citizens must shoulder their share of the blame, those who allowed themselves to be incited into religious hatred, who set aside decency and longstanding neighbourliness, who took up sword and flame to terrorise their compatriots, to murder men, women, and children in a frenzy of bloodlust that even now is difficult to comprehend.
The India that emerged from the storm was a turbulent nation, haunted by the spectre of communal strife. It is this environment that forms the backdrop for my Malabar House series.
Set in Bombay in 1950, just a few years after Partition, Independence, and Gandhi’s assassination, the first in the series, Midnight at Malabar House, introduces India’s first female police detective, investigating the murder of a senior British diplomat, whilst working with an English forensic scientist. The relationship between my protagonist and the Brits around her reveals the central dilemma of Anglo-Indian relations post-Independence… How do you work with those you’ve learnt not to trust?
The book won last year’s Crime Writers Association Historical Dagger and was shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. The third in the series, The Lost Man of Bombay, now out, continues my exploration of a fascinating period in Indian history, when the new republic is seeking to work out what sort of democracy it will become.
It’s a period rarely explored in literature. So much of history, as we know, is written by the winners.
In these books, I seek to rectify this by answering the question: what did the Indians of the time make of the Raj and the critical period directly after?
And, finally, what of Nehru and Edwina? Were they canoodling while all this was going on? The jury remains out.
In his book, The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves, British historian Andrew Lownie suggests that the Mountbattens agreed upon an open marriage to avoid the shame of divorce, necessitated largely because of a ‘sex-obsessed’ Edwina’s scandalous litany of extra-marital liaisons.
There is no certainty that Nehru was one of those liaisons. What is known is that India’s first prime minister was infatuated, and continued to write to Edwina until his death. Perhaps, in another time and place – like the protagonists of my series – they might have written their own ending.
At least I like to think so, soft-hearted romantic that I am.
The Lost Man of Bombay by Vaseem Khan was published on 18 August, 2022.
Vaseem Khan is the author of two award-winning crime series set in India. His debut, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was a Sunday Times 40 best crime novels published 2015–2020 pick.
When he isn’t writing, he works at the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science at University College London. Vaseem was born in England, but spent a decade working in India. He co-hosts the popular crime fiction podcast, the Red Hot Chilli Writers.
Facebook: www.facebook.com/VaseemKhanOfficial
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If you’re interested in the history of India, you may also like:
1920s Bangalore, a city of diversities by Harini Nagendra
It’s time to remember Ganga Singh: maharaja, reformer, statesman by Alec Marsh
Unforgettable legacies of the East India Company by Vayu Naidu
Re-examining the history of Empire in fact and fiction by Tom Williams
Finding empathy – the complexities of writing Robert Clive by Diana Preston
Images:
- Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with Edwina Mountbatten during their holiday in Simla: Photo Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Lord and Lady Mountbatten strolling during their holiday in Simla: Photo Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Lord and Lady Mountbatten going round Simla in a car during a holiday: Photo Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Making joint efforts: Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi for Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- The dispossessed: Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi for Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Front page of the Morning News, 15 August, 1947, announcing the partition of India: shankar s. for Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
