Passions ruled steamy end to the British raj

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Lord Mountbatten, salutes as the Indian national flag, as his wife Lady Edwina and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru (right) look on during independence day celebrations in 1947.
Today in History
Passions ruled steamy end to the British raj
Marea Donnelly, History writer, The Daily Telegraph
May 14, 2017 7:00pm
IN the week before Britain left the sun to set on a 300-year-old empire, handsome Lord Louis Mountbatten and his elegant heiress wife Edwina hosted formal parties for leaders of an independent India, including her suspected lover Jawaharlal Nehru.

Hours before the midnight split that cleaved the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan, Britain’s last Indian Viceroy and Vicerine turned to US comedian Bob Hope’s latest movie My Favorite Brunette for light relief.

Then as crowds massed in Delhi and Mumbai to celebrate independence, at 11.58pm on August 14 Mountbatten’s final decision was to bestow a royal title on Melbourne heiress Joan Falkiner, wife of Nawab of Palanpur Taley Muhammad Khan.

The Viceroy’s House, a movie based on Mountbatten’s steamy Indian summer as the subcontinent’s last Viceroy from March to September 1947, opens on May 18. The reputed affair between Edwina, then 45, and widower Nehru, 57, is not included, after the Indian government in 2009 refused to allow filming on location for Indian Summer, to have starred Hugh Grant and Cate Blanchett, unless physically intimate scenes were removed.

Lord Louis and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, last Viceroy of India wearing their official regalia in New Delhi before their return to England in 1947.
Away from Mountbatten’s Viceregal Lodge in Delhi, the death toll was climbing in violent clashes between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, feeding off distrust between Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, National Congress head Nehru and his fellow Hindu and former Congress leader Mohandas Gandhi, then leading passive resistance to British rule.

All three were British-educated lawyers who in the 1920s had worked together to demand Indian independence as a secular state offering religious freedom. By the early 1940s Jinnah feared a united India led by the National Congress would favour Hindus and Sikhs, and disadvantage Muslims. He began advocating a separate Muslim state in northwestern and northeastern India, which had the highest concentrations of Muslim residents, although Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus lived across northern India. While the Congress party claimed to represent all citizens, membership was more than 90 per cent Hindu, although about one quarter of India’s people were Muslim.

By the end of World War II, cash-strapped Britain was ready to leave India, especially as the military costs of containing ethnic conflict escalated. But the division between Nehru and Gandhi’s desire for a single state and Jinnah’s insistence on a separate Muslim state complicated the transition to Indian national rule. But British Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, elected in July 1945, guaranteed Indian independence and British withdrawal by June 1948.

Hindus attack a Muslim mosque during pre-partition riots in Calcutta in 1946.

Muslim refugees on a train, fleeing India for Pakistan during partition riots in 1947.
Simmering ethnic violence erupted in Calcutta, then Gandhi’s base, in August 1946, when the Muslim League declared a day of direct action to protest against Britain and Congress. Muslims feared that if the British left, Muslims would suffer at the hands of an overwhelming Hindu majority.

After Muslims attacked and raped Hindus at Noakhali on October 10, Gandhi advised “it is the duty of every Hindu not to harbour any thoughts of revenge”. They “should not die helplessly, but face death bravely and without a murmur”. Women faced with rape should “bite their tongue and hold their breath until they were dead”.

Attlee sent Mountbatten, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, in March 1947 to guide a peaceful transition to an independent, united India. During negotiations in Delhi and the viceroy’s summer retreat at Simla, where leaders joined vice-regal aides to study his draft plans, Mountbatten and Edwina formed close relationships with Nehru, whom they had met in Singapore, and Gandhi.

Mountbatten admitted he found Jinnah difficult, saying he was a “psychopathic case, hell bent on this Pakistan”. Supporters praised Jinnah as a champion of tolerant, open and democratic Muslim leadership. And when a Hindu rival to Nehru allegedly passed Jinnah love letters written by Edwina and Nehru, hoping he would pass them to a newspaper for publication, Jinnah reputedly returned them, saying, “Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion”.

Last British Viceroy to India Lord Mountbatten, salutes as the Indian national flag as his wife Lady Edwina India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru (right) look on during independence day celebrations in 1947.
Given 14 months to wrap up, Mountbatten finished in less than five, surprising everyone in June by announcing August 15 as the date for transfer of power. Pakistani borders were yet to be drawn up.


Within weeks of the jubilant celebrations at midnight on August 14, 1947, tragedy befell northern India. As pogroms rapidly forced more than 2.25 million non-Muslims out of Pakistan, and an equal number of Muslims out of India, Nehru and Edwina were seen together, intervening in disputes in Delhi streets.

The conflict that eventually uprooted 15 million people, and killed between one and two million, is still played out in Kashmir.
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