Partition of India & Edwina wife of Lord Mountbatten's role Indian View

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• published: 06 Aug 2014
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The beautiful wife of the chief representative of the occupying power, Edwina, Lady Mountbatten in her letters to Lord Mountbatten has written that her relationship with Nehru was mostly platonic. Nehru never remarried his only love now was his country until he met Edwina Mountbatten. Nehru's mission to liberate his country at a time when war-weary Britain was desperate to get rid of it, the 47-year-old Edwina finally had a focus for her huge energy and political radicalism. Of course, British withdrawal did not go as smoothly as everyone hoped. Mass migration and massacres followed as Indians fought for territory with the new Pakistan. After independence, Edwina spent more and more time with the new prime minister Nehru. This is the point at which her younger daughter Pamela, the biographer in the family, acknowledges that love blossomed between the lonely Nehru and the Vicereine. What's more, says Pamela, her father condoned the friendship, even going so far as to call it a 'happy threesome'. 'My mother had already had lovers. My father was inured to it. It broke his heart the first time, but it was somehow different with Nehru,' she has written.As Mountbatten himself wrote to her sister Patricia at the time: 'She and Jawaharlal (Nehru) are so sweet together, they really dote on each other.' Undignifed as it seems against the backdrop of the huge historic events in which they were caught up, there are those who suspect that Nehru, like both Mountbattens, had bisexual tendencies, and that Dickie, in a last attempt to establish physical intimacy with his unresponsive wife, may have joined them in a physical menage a trois.Whatever went on in the bedroom, the Mountbattens joined Nehru in a very public romance with India. When parted, they wrote to each other constantly - and Edwina made no attempt to keep the letters secret from her husband. As she wrote to Dickie in 1952: 'Some of them have no "personal" remarks at all. Others are love letters... though you yourself well realise the strange relationship - most of it spiritual - which exists between us.' When the correspondence is eventually published in its entirety, perhaps we may know the whole truth. Meanwhile, one of Nehru's own last letters, written ten years after their first meeting, sheds a little more light. 'Suddenly I realised (and perhaps you also did) that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force, of which I was dimly aware, drew us to one another. 'I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this new discovery. We talked more intimately as if some veil had been removed and we could look into each other's eyes without fear or embarrassment. Intense words, yet Nehru was now 68, his romantic friend ten years younger.No longer in the first flush of youth, perhaps there was no great urgency to climb into bed. Little did they realise how little time was left. A year later, in 1960, 58-year- old Edwina, by now leading a selfless life, died alone in her sleep while on a trip to Borneo on behalf of St John Ambulance Brigade. Beside her bed was her collection of Nehru's letters. And the love affair was not over yet. As her body was taken by the Royal Navy to its sea burial off Britain's south coast, Prime Minister Nehru made his last and most public declaration of his devotion, sending his own Indian Navy frigate to cast a wreath into the waters on his behalf.Such a dramatic farewell would make a stirring finale to any film. But as the director Joe Wright, who was behind the scheduled movie says, it will be a long time before it gets made, thanks to the explosive mixture of politics and forbidden love