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 do 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’.
‘Now that Nehru is gone we shall no longer have the enormously valuable access to the India Government’s inner councils which Lord Mountbatten’s personal friendship with him gave us at crucial moments,’ complained the British High Commission in Delhi.28 Mountbatten himself had other things to worry about. Douglas-Home’s Conservative government lost an election, and a Labour administration under Harold Wilson came in. Mountbatten soon clashed with Denis Healey, his new boss at the Ministry of Defence. Mountbatten wanted to abandon the separate Chiefs of Staff and integrate the three services into one department; Healey suspected that Mountbatten really wanted more control for himself. ‘I doubt if anyone else in my time could have met the requirements of a Chief of Defence Staff as Mountbatten conceived the post’, wrote Healey; ‘few other officers shared his confidence in his own qualifications for such a job.’29
Mountbatten attracted the disapproval of his colleagues by attempting to have himself made a Field Marshal and an Air Marshal, in addition to an Admiral, prompting an official to write icily to the Prime Minister that ‘only members of the Royal Family have held five-star rank in all three Services’.30 During this period Sir Gerald Templer, Chief of the General Staff, allegedly remarked to Mountbatten’s face that, ‘Dickie, you’re so bloody crooked that if you swallowed a nail, you’d shit a corkscrew!’31
Sidelined, Mountbatten occupied his time with reorganizational fantasies and technological flights of fancy. His great ally was his Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Solly Zuckerman, a scientist distinguished originally in the field of monkey and ape behavioural science. Zuckerman had been involved in government work since before the Second World War, when someone at the Ministry of War, concerned with the effects of bomb blasts on the human body, apparently said: ‘What about calling in that monkey fellow?’32 Many exploded chimps later, it was conclusively established that the effect was detrimental.33 But Zuckerman had caught the eye of Dickie Mountbatten, who had appointed him to his staff at Combined Operations. By the 1960s, the two men formed what was known in Whitehall as the ‘Zuckbatten Axis’, bent on spreading technological innovation throughout the services.34
Mountbatten’s interest in science occasionally crossed the line into science fiction, and he was keen for the Ministry of Defence to spend its time investigating the paranormal. He was excited when a giant carcass was found on the west coast of Tasmania, with no recognizable head, eyes or appendages. He sent news clippings to Zuckerman, wondering whether it might be a sea-monster, and badgered him to take the matter up with the Zoological Society. Zuckerman replied that, ‘It has been determined that it is “a lump of whale meat”.’ Having been defeated over his sea-monster, Mountbatten looked to the skies. ‘I have long been fascinated by Flying Saucers’, he wrote to Zuckerman a few months later, enclosing an imaginative magazine article on the subject. ‘Should Flying Saucers not be investigated further?’ Zuckerman wrote a kindly reply, explaining that it was not possible to establish conditions under which flying saucers might be impartially observed. ‘It is the same problem as with ghosts,’ he noted, perhaps hoping to forestall his friend’s next initiative.35
When the time came for Dickie’s reappointment to be considered, Healey interviewed the top forty people in the Ministry of Defence. Only one supported Mountbatten’s reappointment, and that was an old friend of his – Sir Kenneth Strong, the Director General of Intelligence. ‘When I told Dickie of my decision not to reappoint him, he slapped his thigh and roared with delight,’ Healey remembered; ‘but his eyes told a different story.’36
In retirement, there would be little for Dickie to do – though this never stopped him from doing it. He ran the Nehru Memorial Trust, raising £100,000 by 1966 to fund Indian scholars at British universities.37 He organized the Nehru Memorial Lecture, and ensured a decent attendance: Prince Charles was induced to leave a day’s shooting on his twentieth birthday to show up.38 Harold Wilson considered sending him to Rhodesia to sort out Ian Smith after that country’s white minority declaration of independence in 1965; Mountbatten leapt at the chance, and the Queen was in favour, but her courtiers quashed the idea.39 He was made responsible for a government report on prison reform. He made documentaries, taking a hand in the BBC’s notorious Royal Family, held by many commentators to have been the beginning of widespread public disrespect for the monarchy; in the programme the Queen bought an ice lolly, and Prince Philip was seen to barbecue a sausage.40 There was also a twelve-part series on himself to be fussed over, presenting his reputation as a great British hero. He was unwilling to share his script with the government, which worried about the political effect in Pakistan of his self-aggrandizing attitude.41 It was easy to see what they meant. At the end of the series, Dickie’s summing up was characteristic: ‘All I want to know is: was I right, were they wrong?’ he asked. ‘Will they eventually come round and see it? Or are they so dumb that it will have to be their children or grandchildren who will perhaps see this series of films in fifty years’ time and see that I was fairly reasonable and the people who thought I was wrong were the ones who were unreasonable.’42
Most of all, though, Mountbatten wrote letters. The phrase ‘letters in green ink’ has long been used in the media to denote an eccentric strain of correspondence from members of the public. Mountbatten’s letters were typed in emerald green, on pale mint-green paper, embossed with a forest-green crest, and signed dandyishly with his decisive, upslanting script, ‘Mountbatten of Burma’, in sea green ink. Dozens of these letters are to be found in the British and Indian national archives. ‘What in God’s name has happened in the Ministry of Defence?’ he wrote to Solly Zuckerman, before launching into a diatribe against nuclear weapons.43 ‘I have been so worried about the situation in the sub-continent’, he wrote to General Cariappa of the Indian Army, and confessed that he had been ‘doing everything I can behind the scenes to try and explain India’s case’.44 The letters include multiple invitations, such as that extended to Harold Wilson in May 1966 for a private dinner with Mountbatten. Wilson’s secretary noted at the top that ‘The Prime Minister does not wish to take this up.’45
After Nehru’s death, there had been no more great figures of independence to step into his shoes. The man who succeeded him, Lal Bahadur Shastri, had been chosen as the least objectionable candidate. The possibility of Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, becoming Prime Minister had been dismissed as fanciful. But Shastri made her his Secretary of State for Information and Broadcasting and, when he died suddenly in January 1966, her name came up again. In a restrained and clever campaign which would be echoed forty years later by her daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, Indira played a subtle game of flirtation with the media and the party. This only served to endear her to an electorate which preferred its politicians to play hard to get. Finally, after a great deal of prevaricating, Indira shyly conceded that she would accept the prime ministership if the Congress President wished her to do so. ‘I am wholeheartedly overjoyed at this wonderful turn of events’, wrote Dickie Mountbatten. ‘How delighted your dear father would have been and Edwina also.’46
President Lyndon B. Johnson was similarly smitten when she visited the United States in March. ‘What a nice girl, and how beautiful,’ he said to the Indian Ambassador, describing the forty-eight-year-old woman who had just become Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy. He declared an interest in bolstering her support. ‘You tell me what to do. Send her food? Attack her? I’ll do whatever you say.’ Indira herself, fielding a diplomatic enquiry about how Johnson should address her, showed her true character. ‘He can call me Madam Prime Minister, he can call me Prime Minister, he can call me Mr Prime Minister if he wants,’ she snapped. ‘You can tell him that my colleagues call me “Sir”.’47
Unlike Jawahar, Indira found the processes of democratic government irritating and cumbersome. Soon she started to act without recourse to it. ‘My position among the people is uncontested,’ she declared.48 When she attacked the princes for their privy purses, Mountbatten was shocked and upset. ‘I do hope Indu will do nothing that could in any way dishonour her father’s word’, he wrote to Nan Pandit, ‘and I have written to her to this effect in as friendly a way as possible.’49
But Mountbatten’s main worries were closer to home. In London, the spirit of revolution was also in the air. When the Labour Party had been elected to power, the first person that Harold Wilson invited to lunch at 10 Downing Street had been Cecil King, a large, terse, ambitious newspaper magnate who controlled 40 per cent of the national circulation.50 King had supported Labour throughout the election, but by the summer of 1965 he had lost all faith in Wilson.51 King and Hugh Cudlipp, an old friend and chairman of the Mirror, decided that if Wilson would not change or go, he should be ousted by force. But who could lead the coup and replace Wilson at the head of a new, post-democratic administration? The answer had come to them by 12 August 1967, when King reported: ‘Cudlipp had some talk a few weeks ago with Mountbatten at some dinner. Hugh asked him if it had been suggested to him that our present style of government might be in for a change. He said it had. Hugh then asked if it had been suggested that he might have some part to play in such a new regime? Mountbatten said it had been suggested, but that he was far too old.’52
The idea floated around for some months before Cudlipp finally set up a meeting between Mountbatten and King, on 8 May 1968, in Mountbatten’s flat on Kinnerton Street. Solly Zuckerman also attended.53 King launched into a list of Wilson’s failings. If the government continued as it was, he said, the towns would be awash with blood, and there would be machine guns on street corners. Instead, he proposed a velvet revolution, but raised the question of who could head the replacement government of ‘national unity’: someone competent and non-partisan, who could command the confidence of the public.54 Was Mountbatten interested?
Mountbatten was, according to Zuckerman ‘for a moment beguiled’.55 He turned to Zuckerman and asked him what he thought. Zuckerman got up and went to the door. ‘This is rank treachery,’ he said. ‘I am a public servant and will have nothing to do with it. Nor should you, Dickie.’56 Mountbatten tried to restrain him for a few moments, but he walked out. Afterwards, according to King’s diary, Mountbatten told him that morale in the services was low, and the Queen was ‘desperately worried’ over the situation.57 Cudlipp later admitted that Mountbatten told him he had raised the question of a coup with the Queen that month.58
Private Eye magazine would later allege that Mountbatten had gone much further with this plan than this tale allowed, and even that he had begun to compile a list of military friends who might support him. The magazine claimed that it was Zuckerman who talked him out of it.59 Rumours in the highest circles at Buckingham Palace suggest the Eye had the right idea, but the wrong saviour. It was not Solly Zuckerman who talked Mountbatten out of staging a coup and making himself President of Britain. It was the Queen herself.60
On 25 June 1970, Earl Mountbatten of Burma celebrated his seventieth birthday. He threw a weekend party at Broadlands, stocked with British and European royalty and other dignitaries. When the last of the guests left on the Monday morning, Mountbatten patted his valet on the shoulder. ‘Charles, that was the best birthday party of my life,’ he said. ‘Only one person was missing. I wish she had been alive to see it.’61 A decade after Edwina’s death, he was still mourning.
By the 1970s, Mountbatten had outlived most of those whom he felt were his equals or superiors in class, style and outlook. Edwina had died in 1960; Alanbrooke in 1963; Nehru in 1964; Churchill and Ismay in 1965; Peter Murphy in 1966; the Duke of Windsor would go in 1972. He ate his meals alone in front of the television, watching Panorama, World in Action, and Horizon. He still enjoyed the company of women, but would not remarry: a man of his genealogical consciousness would not wish to jeopardize the position of his existing family, especially when – most unusually – he had secured a special remainder so that his title might pass to his daughter, Patricia. He was also obliged to spend some time fending off rumours about guardsmen when, in 1975, his name was whispered in connection with an exposé in the Daily Mirror about gay orgies at the Life Guards’ barracks in London. ‘I might have been accused of many things in my life but hardly of the act of homosexuality’, he wrote indignantly in his diary.62 He was accused of it again after a maid walked in while a photographer was attempting to remove the Admiral’s trousers, for reasons apparently connected with portraiture.63 He had continued his relationship with Yola Letellier.64 But any thoughts Mountbatten had about marrying other women were crowded out by the memory of Edwina. ‘If I lived for another hundred years,’ he told his valet, ‘I would not meet another woman to compare with Her Ladyship.’65
With all his fancies of leading the nation returning to the dust whence they had come, Dickie was left functionless again. He took up any number of charitable presidencies and patronages. No Boy Scout troupe went unaddressed, no dinner-dance unattended, no regional administrative office unopened. The Queen took pity on him and made him Governor of the Isle of Wight, his childhood home. The former Viceroy of mighty India, who had wielded the power of life or, often, death over 400 million people, was entitled in this new role to attend council luncheons. With his great friend, Barbara Cartland, he collaborated on a romance novel, Love at the Helm. The hero is a dashing naval officer, Captain Conrad ‘Tiger’ Horn, with a penchant for neatly kept uniforms.66
Indira Gandhi won a massive victory in the 1971 elections. That year, East Pakistan rebelled against West Pakistan. Indira sent troops to aid the rebels, and following an horrific civil war, East Pakistan seceded from Jinnah’s dream to become Bangladesh.
In June 1975, Nan Pandit was in London for a wedding. She was queuing for breakfast at the Indian Students’ Hostel when she heard that, following accusations of electoral malpractice, an ‘emergency’ had been declared in India. Indira had suspended all human rights: property could not be owned, professions could not be pursued, and there was no freedom of movement, association, or speech. Total censorship had been imposed, especially on quotations about freedom from the writings of Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore. ‘It was reminiscent of the midnight knock of forty years ago in Hitler’s Germany,’ Nan remembered.67
The emergency was a time of terror. Bulldozers cleared deprived areas, whose inhabitants were given as little as forty-five minutes’ notice to vacate them, in order to make way for property developers under the slogan ‘Make Delhi Beautiful’.68 Indira’s son, Sanjay, ran a programme to tackle overpopulation. His sterilization campaign put so much pressure on provincial officials to show results that stories became common of men being kidnapped and forcibly castrated, and the same men being operated upon two or even three times to make up the figures. Indira had her favourite slogan – ‘Indira is India, and India is Indira’ – displayed in colossal letters around the arcades of Connaught Circus.69
Mountbatten was horrified. ‘I cannot tell you how infinitely saddened I am at what is being done to the memory of your great brother, Jawaharlal’, he wrote to Nan. ‘It is a tragedy, of course, that his own daughter, Indu, and that unfortunate young son of hers, Sanjay, should have behaved in such a way during the Emergency, to make it possible for the name of Nehru to be besmirched.’70 Indira cancelled the emergency on 18 January 1977 and called an election, in the belief that she would win it. She did not, and a rickety coalition of Hindu nationalists, Sikhs, farmers and the extreme right took over. Indira was shocked and hurt, more so yet when the new government imprisoned her. For all her ‘Indira is India’ rhetoric, she had badly misjudged the popular temperature.71
Dickie had agreed with Nan that he would not see Indira publicly on her visit to London after her release in 1978, but would invite her to see him privately.72 Had he not wished to draw attention to the meeting, he could have picked a less conspicuous middleman. On 13 November, Barbara Cartland – in trademark searing pink and feathers, and with a white Pekingese dog under her arm – arrived at Claridge’s to whisk off Mrs Gandhi in her Rolls Royce Silver Cloud. They drove to Dickie’s flat and stayed for half an hour, for what can only have been an uncomfortable chat. ‘We managed to keep off the Emergency’, Dickie reported to Nan, ‘and to talk in a friendly way about the old days with her father and you and the family generally.’73 Reporters congregated to observe the surreal scene. Did Indira read Miss Cartland’s books, they wondered – with an eye to the Indian setting of her 249th novel, Flowers for the God of Love, published that week? ‘Of course she does,’ snapped Miss Cartland.74 And what on earth did the three of them talk about, the crumbling semi-royal playboy, the disgraced Indian dictator, and the romance novelist? ‘We discussed inflation,’ replied Miss Cartland, then slammed shut the door of her car, and drove Indira back to the hotel.75
Dickie’s main focus became that of his own dynastic succession, through the proxy of the Prince of Wales. Mountbatten had been behind the decisions to send Prince Charles to Gordonstoun, Cambridge and the Navy; he had encouraged him to play polo; he had provided the younger man with a weekend place away from his parents at Broadlands, to which girlfriends could be invited; he had even tried, and failed, to persuade Philip and Elizabeth to have their son’s ears pinned back before he went to school, which might have spared him a great deal of bullying from classmates and, later, the media.76 In the summer of 1979, he was orchestrating a putative relationship between Charles and a pretty young aristocrat called the Hon. Amanda Knatchbull. Miss Knatchbull happened to be Mountbatten’s granddaughter, and the opportunity to strengthen the concentration of his own blood in the royal veins was too delicious for the ageing schemer to pass up. He attempted to organize a trip to India, taking Charles and Amanda with him, but the potential for press intrusion put an end to that. Instead, he wrote to Nan that he might come alone, for he wanted to visit ‘the Ajunta [sic] Caves which I have never actually seen myself’.77 The opposition of Amanda’s parents to Mountbatten’s matchmaking, and the apparent lack of attraction between the couple, doomed the relationship.
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 now 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.