On the Shelf book review
Lynn Bonney, Special
Originally published 09:40 a.m., July 5, 2008
Updated 09:41 a.m., July 5, 2008
“Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire,” by Alex von Tunzelmann, Henry Holt & Co., 2007, $30.
Every July, Americans pause to celebrate, raucously and prayerfully, this nation’s independence from England. Next month, the people of India and Pakistan will note the 61st anniversary of their countries’ independence and the dismantling of the once-mighty British Empire.
The creation of the United States was marked by personalities — Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, for example. Just so, the independence of India and the birth of Pakistan were shaped by personalities: Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Al Jinnah and Lord and Lady Mountbatten. Historian Alex von Tunzelmann has chosen to focus on these five individuals in telling the story of the last days of Empire.
“Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire” is history as biography, the interaction of five people — close friendships, deep enmities, one love affair and one most peculiar marriage.
Begin with the Mountbattens, dispatched to India to oversee the last days of British rule. He, known to friends as Dickie, although Richard was nowhere to be found among his string of proper names. Grandson of Queen Victoria, inept military commander. She, Edwina, heir to a fortune, defying her society background with a willingness to stand fearless in frightening situations. Their marriage was marked by dalliances and affairs on each partner’s part. Most notably, she fell in love with Nehru and he with her, although there is no evidence that their love affair involved a sexual component.
Continue with Gandhi. Despite his role in spurring India toward independence, the spiritual leader was not greatly involved in the events of the summer of 1947. He did not always see eye to eye with his political counterpart, Nehru, on the future of the nation, which faced partition, or division, creating Pakistan as an independent state. Jinnah, often criticized by Western historians, fares relatively well.
Dickie Mountbatten’s mission to India was to oversee the move to independence — and do it quickly. He was faced with juggling factions whose names will be familiar to anyone who pays even cursory attention to current events. Sunni and Shia Muslims, Sikhs, a range of Hindu sects, Christians and nonaffiliated radicals battled around the conference table and in the streets, where an untold number of people, perhaps 1 million, likely more, died violently. Their issues remain unsettled to this day, as India and Pakistan remain at fearful odds, now with the added terror of a nuclear component to their differences.
Von Tunzelmann keeps her eye on the personalities, allowing the swirl of events to define them. Gandhi emerges as somewhat petty and it would be a rare reader who could read about his marriage without pitying his wife and the children from whom he was estranged. Mountbatten accomplishes his assignment and, in the bargain, ensures that his nephew, Prince Philip, takes the family name to Windsor Castle.
The story of Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru is poignant and haunting. When her husband took her body to a burial at sea in 1960, Nehru — then leader of India — sent a warship escort to drop wreaths of marigolds at the spot where his unrequited lover would rest.
But readers may be haunted as well by the fate of a region when a foreign power decides to get out and get out quickly — with no real exit strategy.