Mountbattens' family affair

Before you ask, yes, Pamela Mountbatten really does admit that her mother and Jawaharlal Nehru were deeply in love and that her father was well aware of the relationship and leveraged it in his negotiations over transfer of power with India's first prime minister. She doesn't say how in the book but in a TV interview last week, Pamela says Mountbatten convinced Edwina to persuade Nehru to refer the Kashmir issue to the United Nations.

For Pammy, though, the Nehru-Edwina relationship didn't appear to be such a big deal either then or now. She writes that "Mummy" (i.e. Edwina) had "had already had lovers. My father was inured to it," adding that "there existed a happy three-some based on firm understanding on all sides".

The relationship, she insists, was purely platonic but no less intense for it. Yet Edwina willed her correspondence with Nehru""suitcases full of it""to her husband. Pammy herself appears to have adored Nehru, whom she came to call "Mamu", and the close familiarity is best expressed in a family photo of Nehru performing a headstand near the pool in the Vice-roy's House.

The Nehru-Edwina relationship has attracted a disproportionate amount of public interest in the book. This is unfortunate because it has much more to offer. True, the book, an unabashedly commercial venture in India's 60th year of independence, may not offer earth-shaking insights or add significantly to the sum total of our knowledge of the tricky transfer of power that Dicky Mountbatten was given less than a year to negotiate. But this is hardly to be expected of a sheltered 17-year-old girl, born into royalty (she calls Queen Elizabeth "Lillibet" and the King's letters to Mountbatten were signed "Bertie"), pulled out of school and on her first visit to a sub-continent in turmoil.

Written as a memoir built mostly from her diaries and letters, the book is interesting for the glimpses into the small change of daily life of someone in the thick of the action.

Who would think, for instance, that the taciturn Sardar Patel could actually enjoy such levity as trying on Edwina's high-heels under the dining table even as she tried on his sandals. It is also amusing to know that Gandhi mischievously asked Mountbatten to share his meal of goat curd when he dined at the vice-regal residence. Not surprisingly, Mountbatten pronounced it the "most disgusting green porridge he'd ever had".

Coming from the frugality of post-war Britain, with food and clothing rationing (to which even the rich were subjected), the Mountbattens are awed by the lavishness of the vice-regal lifestyle. Pamela recalls how, soon after they arrived in India, a meal of chicken breast was served for the old family Sealyham terrier on a silver salver. "My mother locked herself in the bathroom and ate it," she writes.

All in all, "Mummy" seems to emerge as the more interesting personality than the handsome Dickie, whose royal lineage and experience of the Burma theatre during the war probably counted for more than his political acuity. Edwina was a popular and hard-working vicereine, almost perpetually on tour, inspecting refugee camps before and after Partition and fearlessly confronting hostile Pathans on the north-west frontier against all advice. When she left India, many refugees pooled their money to bring her small farewell gifts.

"Daddy" comes through as hard-working and sincere""his visceral opposition to Partition and his warning to the Maharaja of Kashmir for not deciding in favour of India or Pakistan ahead of independence proved prescient. At any rate, he is owed a good deal of the credit for amalgamating the 500-odd princely states. In this, Pamela also acknowledges the contribution of "the incredible and brilliant" V P Menon, who had redrafted the Mountbatten Plan after Nehru's tantrums in Simla.

For Pamela, the younger of the Mountbatten daughters, life in the Viceroy's House, today's Rashtrapati Bhavan, was almost bizarre. Despite its size and extravagance""even in those days the estate had a staff of roughly 5,000 (much less, to be sure, than today's 8,000-odd) complete with its own Comptroller""she remembers it as an uncomfortable place. It took ten minutes to walk from her bedroom to the dining room and it was possible to have large numbers of guests staying without actually meeting them.

She writes, "I described Viceroy's House in those first diary entries in India, as 'absolutely immense, presumably quite impressive presumably just to come and see and go away again, but a complete headache to live in and it seems to have been built for the express purpose of losing people in'."

Well edited so that we are spared the more breathless confessions of a teenage diary and well produced with its reproductions of old photos and letters, this is an appealing addition to both the coffee table and the history library.

INDIA REMEMBERED

Pamela Mountbatten
Roli Books
Pages: 240