Literary Review - August 2007

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INDIA

DAVIDGILMOUR DIVIDED IT STANDS

INDIANSUMMER: THESECRETHISTORYOF THEENDOFANEMPIRE

★

By Alex von Tunzelmann (Simon & Schuster 464pp £20)

THEGREATPARTITION: THEMAKINGOF INDIAANDPAKISTAN

★By Yasmin Khan (Yale University Press 251pp £19.99)

INDIANSUMMER is surely destined for Hollywood. Equipped with a handsome and flamboyant cast, Alex von Tunzelmann has already more or less arranged the settings, designed the costumes and produced a script which flits from place to place and from character to character, deftly interweaving private lives with political events in a racy, dramatic and often humorous narrative. It’s easy to envisage some colourful scenes: ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten and ‘David’ Prince of Wales larking about in a pool and pig-sticking in Jodhpur (frivolous upperclass background); Mountbatten as viceroy and his wife Edwina having nightly rows in midsummer Delhi (marital stress and pathos); Gandhi on his day of silence visiting Mountbatten and answering the viceregal conversation on paper (amusing interlude); Edwina and Nehru (the Great Loves of each other’s lives) rushing off to stop a riot during partition (heroism), walking in the hills around Simla (romance) and being discovered some years later embracing in the lovely hill-station of Naini Tal (sex). The finale is difficult to decide upon. The Mountbattens being cheered by emotional Indian crowds at Independence? The former viceroy whispering into his Queen’s ear that the invasion of Suez is ‘lunatic’? Mountbatten and members of his family being blown up by the IRA? All these would be strong, but stronger and more sentimental still would be the sight of the Indian frigate sent by Nehru all the way to the English Channel so that a wreath of marigolds could be thrown

into the sea after Edwina’s coffin. The audience will appreciate the author’s classification of her characters into good guys, Nehru and Edwina (not only romantic but also brave, philanthropic and politically commendable), bad guys, Churchill (for encouraging Jinnah and Pakistan) and Jinnah (for creating Pakistan), and some figures who manage to be often silly and sometimes astute (Gandhi and Mountbatten). Viewers will find the Gandhi of this film very different from the Mahatma of Richard Attenborough; they will also enjoy a more accurate representation of the period. Although she has been unable to see the Edwina– Nehru correspondence, Alex von Tunzelmann has been resourceful in research and tells her story with verve and fine judgement in a colourful, virtuoso style. Yet occasionally she is flippant and unfair to certain characters, concentrating their defects and inconsistencies into a short passage and thereby giving the impression that they were ridiculous people. Apart from relishing Gandhi’s political blunders, she picks out the silliest of Mahatman views on non-violence (eg that the British should not resist Hitler and that women should not resist rapists), the most heartless of his decisions (eg refusing to let his dying wife have penicillin) and the crankiest of his activities (eg testing his vow of celibacy by sharing a bed with naked girls). Yet she allows him to redeem himself at the end when his heroic fast in Calcutta saves the city from further communal carnage. Mountbatten is also a target for jibes and mockery before he too comes up trumps in an emergency. The author loves to dissect his absurdities, especially his vanity, his love of flags and uniforms, and his obsession with genealogy, a passion which becomes a triumph when his nephew Philip marries Princess Elizabeth and becomes Duke of Edinburgh. She is ruthless about his military shortcomings, his weakness as a strategist, his bungling over the Dieppe raid. The account of his naval career, which relies largely on Philip Ziegler’s masterly biography, is hilarious, a catalogue of accidents that blighted the ships under his command. These would hit a British mine or crash into British ships or attract German torpedo fire because their captain was speeding ‘too noisily’ or making ‘overzealous use of his signalling lights’. On one occasion Mountbatten changed direction when he was

Mountbatten: averting his gaze

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going too fast with the result that his ship rolled so violently that its lifeboats flew off the side into the sea. No wonder he was known at the Admiralty as ‘the Master of Disaster’. Yet there was more to Mountbatten than this, and as viceroy he displayed unusual skills in his dealings with Indian leaders, princes as well as politicians. Much assisted by Edwina, who could empathise with Indians of all classes, he obtained agreement to both partition and the accession of nearly all the princely states to India or Pakistan. Indeed Alex von Tunzelmann recognises some of his achievements when she defends him against accusations that he ignored the problem of the Sikhs, failed to use British troops to stop the communal killing in the Punjab and, by bringing forward the date of independence, prevented adequate preparations from being made to deal with the consequences of partition. Indian Summer does not ignore the atrocities that surround its exotic characters: it has a horrifying description of the tactics used by Sikh gangs when they set out to erase a Muslim village and exterminate its inhabitants. But otherwise it has little in common with The Great Partition, Yasmin Khan’s intelligent and empathic work on the same period. It is unlikely that the second book will have scriptwriters salivating. Most historians of partition like to apportion blame among the leading players, British and Indian, for the

The Society of Authors

Grants for Authors The Society is offering grants to published authors who need funding to assist in the writing of their next book.Writers of fiction,nonfiction and poetry may apply. The grants are provided byThe Authors’ Foundation and the K.Blundell Trust.

Closing date 30 September 2007

For full details write with SAE to: Awards Secretary,The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens,London SW10 9SB. oremail:info@societyofauthors.org website:www.societyofauthors.org

disaster that occurred. Yasmin Khan is not interested in doing so. Nor does she give time to the simplistic and oft-repeated theory that partition was the result of Britain’s alleged policy of ‘divide and rule’. The author’s main interest is in the experience of partition, how people thought of it and how it affected them. Nobody could have predicted that it would lead to a million murders and twelve million refugees. But then nobody thought it through very carefully in the first place. Partition ‘meant myriad things to different people’ even within the same community, even sometimes within the same head. Jinnah himself made ambiguous noises about federalism. So did his supporters. To some of them Pakistan was ‘an imaginary nationalistic dream’ while to others it was contiguous Muslim territory stretching all the way from East Bengal to Kashmir and the NorthWest Frontier. Educated Muslims from Delhi and Aligarh clamoured for partition without apparently realising that, for demographic reasons, their homes could not possibly be included in a Muslim state. Sikh leaders made a similar miscalculation, demanding the partition of the Punjab without understanding that as a result their holiest shrines and a good number of their followers would end up in Pakistan. Instead of examining partition with a contemporary lens, when we know what happened and assume it was inevitable, Yasmin Khan tries to look at it from the standpoint of its participants, for whom nothing was inevitable. She understands the fear of small communities as they hear rumours of approaching violence and suddenly abandon everything to seek safety on the other side of the new and often bewildering frontier. She writes of the fear of women who, even if they were not murdered, faced rape, abduction and – for those who managed to stay put after their ordeal – repudiation by their families for having ‘dishonoured’ them. Later in the book she writes with similar sympathy of the millions of penniless refugees who arrive in ‘Mother India’ or ‘the Land of the Pure’ (Pakistan) to find not much purity and precious little motherliness. As the author relates, many of them never overcame the traumas of massacre, uprooting and divided families. South Asian violence is often considered in the West to be spontaneous and hysterical, a moment of aberration that suddenly takes possession of a normally docile people (as Hindus at any rate are often imagined to be). As Yasmin Khan demonstrates, however, much of the partition violence was planned by nationalist politicians, inspired by political rhetoric and orchestrated by political organisations. Alas, such events set a precedent for modern India. Recent pogroms of minorities, such as the massacres of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, contained a similar mix of ingredients, a similar collusion of the police and a similar immunity for those who carried out the atrocities. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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