Indian Summer - The Secret History of the End of an Empire, A Review
Indians hold passionate views about the leaders of their anti-colonial struggle. Most are reverential and the foremost figure in the liberation movement pantheon, Mohandas Gandhi, commands the kind of devotion that is generally reserved for a divinely ordained prophet. The fulsome titles “Father of the Nation” and “Mahatma” or Great Soul speak to the unquestioning veneration of a man who is considered a saintly paragon of virtue. Mohammad Ali Jinnah is similarly glorified in Pakistan (which was also part of erstwhile British India), although with relatively less melodrama. He is known as “Qaid-e Azam” or the Great Leader. Extolling the founding fathers of their countries, however, does not incline people of either country to live by the principles that they fought and stood for. Pakistan is worlds apart from the secular republic that the Qaid-e Azam imagined. Intolerance towards minorities, violence against women and a sham democracy characterise present-day Pakistan. And contemporary India would please Gandhi’s assassin, a Hindu-nationalist zealot who thought the Mahatma was too conciliatory towards Muslims, more than himself. Despite the stark difference between the leaders’ aspirations for their states and brute reality, the figures themselves continue to enjoy widespread fondness and respect.
This is perhaps why a volume that exposes that the men had their feet of clay which affected the course of their struggle for freedom is refreshing and fascinating. Alex von Tunzelmann’s impressive book Indian Summer engages the reader right from the get-go with a narrative of that movement examined through the personal lives of its most prominent catalysts. Tunzelmann has a keen eye for the intriguing personal detail which serves to enliven the story of the political trajectory of British India about which a wealth of literature already exists. As the sub-title of the book indicates, the secret history of the influence that Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and the Mountbattens brought to bear on the subcontinent’s future is laid bare in remarkably elegant and sometimes witty prose.
The notion of Gandhi as an epitome of morality, rife in India and beyond, is dealt a decisive blow. When his wife Kasturba, nearing death due to bronchitis, asked her husband for castor oil, Gandhi said, “A patient should never try to be his or her own doctor.” “I would like you to give up using medicine now,” he ordered. He forbade his son Devadas from giving Kasturba penicillin through injection and when an argument ensued, Gandhi asked his son, “Why do you not trust God?” Two months later, Kasturba died. Two years later, in 1946-1947, Gandhi discomfited his own followers by pursuing “brahmacharya experiments” through which he tested his “vow of celibacy by sleeping at night in bed with a naked or partially clothed woman.” When the police turned up to arrest him one day, they found him in bed with a sixteen year old girl. “If I can master this,” Gandhi said of his experiments, “I can still beat Jinnah.”
Some of Gandhi’s unsavoury experiments with “truth” not only affected those around him, but also determined his political views on important matters. By ahimsa or non-violence, he not only meant opposing oppression through non-violent means, but he also encouraged people to suffer violence willingly, thereby appealing to the moral sense of the oppressor. This philosophy, whilst useful in some cases, led him to some ridiculous conclusions on real-world politics. Most disturbingly, he advised the European Jewry under Nazi Germany to engage in passive resistance and “give up their lives as sacrifices.” He even told them to “pray for Adolf Hitler”, in order to supposedly leave behind a rich moral heritage to mankind.
Gandhi’s preoccupation with morality also slowed the achievement of Indian independence. His “need for spotless moral perfection hamstrung his party’s progress,” Tunzelmann writes. He is also adjudged “the most surprising obstacle to Indian independence,” even though he was at the forefront of the campaign towards that goal.
If the myth of Gandhi as an embodiment of rectitude is debunked, the juicy parts of his protégé Jawaharlal Nehru’s private life is laid out in the open. Indeed, the most consuming thread in the second half of the book is the secret affair between Vicerine Edwina Mountbatten and Indian Prime Minister Nehru. Nehru’s wife Kamala, whom he was forced to marry as a young man, had died of an illness in 1936, leaving the charismatic leader bereft of emotional company. As a student at Cambridge, Nehru had indulged himself in sensual pleasures without remorse. “I enjoyed life and I refused to see why I should consider it a thing of sin,” he wrote. Edwina, on the other hand, was similarly emotionally unsatisfied with her husband Dickie. She pursued numerous affairs, always with the full knowledge of Dickie, who raised no objections for fear of losing his beloved wife. As Vicerine to India, Edwina would find in Nehru what he found in her - emotional fulfillment. The pair obviously fell in love with each other, but whether their intimacy entered the physical realm remains unclear.
Although Tunzelmann assiduously brings out hitherto unknown or obscure tales surrounding Indian independence, it leaves something to be desired in its treatment of the movement itself. Whilst she meticulously documents the course of the movement for independence, historical analysis is lacking in most parts. One would’ve like to learn more, for instance, about the reasons behind the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, which proposed a loose union of the whole subcontinent as opposed to partition. This is also the case with independent India’s military rout of Hyderabad, which could’ve been examined in greater depth. However, a mere mention of these events in a popular history of the independence movement serves to reinforce the truth that the union was not a foregone conclusion. Much of patriotic discourse in present-day India emphasises the country’s “unity” and its supposed historical continuity since antiquity.
The chapter titled “A Full Basket of Apples” gives a fascinating overview of the tools of persuasion, subterfuge and sheer threat of force that Viceroy Mountbatten and Vallabhbhai Patel deployed to coerce the numerous princely states to accede to the Indian union. The two men, Tunzelmann writes, created a “larger India, more closely integrated, than had 90 years of the British raj, 180 years of the Mughal Empire, or 130 years of Asoka and the Maurya rulers.” That is certainly true. The land today referred to as India had never been united under a single administration at any point in history. Indeed, as Tunzelmann points out in the book, in addition to the princely states of Kashmir, Hyderabad, Travancore and Bhopal, all of which demanded to remain independent from the Indian Union, Tamils in the erstwhile Madras Presidency also cabled Prime Minister Clement Attlee expressing their desire for a separate state of Dravida Nadu. These examples make it abundantly clear that there is nothing natural or pre-ordained about the union. However, the myth-making agenda of post-colonial India has achieved considerable success in making its population believe otherwise.
The prodigious research that went behind the production of this book reveals itself when some interesting and lesser-known themes of colonial India are addressed. Amongst the most spectacular is its description of the opulence, decadence and debauchery of the princely rulers. Although there were notable exceptions, most of them were despots and sybarites who enriched and indulged themselves in all kinds of pleasures whilst their subjects languished in penury. They did so with the support of their British overlords to whose empire they professed fealty. “The reason that the Indian princely states were uniquely badly ruled was the very fact of British protection,” Tunzelmann writes. Britain handled decisively any internal or external threat to the princes’ authority, insofar as they recognised the paramountcy of the crown. In return, the dynastic despots were granted carte blanche to misrule.
Other than a general lack of depth, one finds little to fault Indian Summer for. And to be fair, there are plenty of other volumes that critically analyse the course of India’s anti-colonial movement. A behind-the-scenes, secret history of those crucial years was what was absent for a long time. Tunzelmann’s book is an excellent work that has filled the lacuna in the subcontinent’s historiography. It is a deeply researched, elegantly written and engrossing popular history that shatters one’s misconceptions about the vanguard of the struggle for independence. It also hits home the crucial message that the union is a product of skilled contrivance that can never be taken for granted.
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