CHAPTER 4
ON 29 JUNE 1920, THE PRINCE OF WALES WROTE TO HIS LOVER Freda Dudley-Ward about his planned trip to India the following year. ‘I’m intent on Dickie coming again!!’ he wrote. ‘I just couldn’t do without that boy on the next trip & the Admiral likes him & wants him too & it won’t harm his naval career, in fact he’ll benefit by it!!’1 When he looked back over his royal career thirty years later, David’s enthusiasm for cousin Dickie was not so obvious; though the influence of his ghost-writer was. ‘It was my impression at the time that his interest in the manifold problems of India was confined to that part of the country bounded by the white boards of polo fields,’ he mused, with the haughtiness that only the pot can muster for the kettle. ‘However, not so many years were to elapse before he was to be established in the Viceroy’s House at New Delhi, engaged in the process of liquidating the immeasurable Imperial trust he and I, each in our own way, had endeavoured to defend in our youth.’2
The peak of the British Empire’s extent and influence is often said to have been in the early 1920s, and thoughts of it ending at that time were widely considered to be absurd. The New York Times had stated boldly on 10 July 1921 that ‘British imperialism would be compelled to evacuate Great Britain itself before it would willingly evacuate India’,3 sentiments with which the future King-Emperor and his retinue would doubtless have agreed. Perhaps they did not realize how close the imperial trust was to being liquidated – without their consent.
On 26 October 1921, Dickie and David left Portsmouth on the battlecruiser HMS Renown. On 12 November, they came ashore at Aden on the south coast of Arabia, the westernmost British colony ruled from Delhi. The pair of them drove past large gatherings of black spectators hemmed in by the occasional white man in a pith helmet. Union Jacks fluttered in the sky, and a huge banner was unfurled. It addressed the Prince of Wales with a loyal exhortation: ‘Tell Daddy we are all happy under British rule’. And it was from this acceptably loyal outpost of his future empire that David embarked finally for the Jewel itself.
For months, the pages of English-language newspapers in India had filled up with advertisements selling printed portraits of the prince for two rupees, and advising ladies to purchase abundant wardrobes of new gowns for the myriad social events during his stay. But the greater part of the excitement was generated by fear: a very real fear that Gandhi’s call for ‘civil revolution’ might explode into a revolution of the more usual, uncivil type.4 If anything were to happen to the Prince of Wales while he was in India, the consequences would be unthinkable. As the Renown drew closer to Bombay across the Arabian Sea, the British administrators, and the media, seemed to hold their breath.
The prince set foot in his future imperial domain at 10.20 in the morning of 17 November 1921 at Bombay. A royal barge ferried him from the Renown across the silver waves to the half-finished, roseate arches of the Gateway of India. He emerged from his barge, a slight, golden-haired figure in a neat white naval uniform, amid clouds of spent gunpowder from the massive salute afforded him by the fleet of British warships anchored just offshore. Preceded by three chaprasis clad in scarlet, the prince progressed to a garlanded pavilion on the quay. There he inspected the guards of honour, and sat on a gilded throne to read out King George V’s message to the Indian Empire. That done, he was put into a state carriage, and drawn by four horses to Government House for a formal luncheon.5 The Times of India estimated that 200,000 people lined the route between Apollo Bunder and Sandhurst Road.
The prince’s itinerary had been planned according to long-established royal tradition. He was to progress around India attending interminable parties, opening buildings, killing as much wildlife as possible and only interacting with the common people by waving at them from a parade. The sentiments of the royal party were made plain in the booklet of Hindustani phrases produced by Dickie and Sir Geoffrey de Montmorency, and circulated on board HMS Renown. It comprised a list of basic numbers and verbs, plus a few everyday expressions. These included:
Ghoosul teeyar kurro – Make ready the bath
Yeh boot sarf kurro – Make clean these boots
Peg do – Give me a whisky and soda
Ghora lao – Bring round the horse
Yeh miler hai; leyjao – This is dirty; take it away
Tum Kootch Angrezi bolte hai? – Do you speak any English?
Mai neigh sumujhta – I don’t understand
The words for ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are nowhere to be found.6
So far, it seemed, so good. But a smooth disembarkation could not allay fears that the prince’s four-month tour would end in disaster – and the probable culprit was obvious. Gandhi, according to the prince, ‘was regarded as a sinister if somewhat ludicrous figure’ in government circles. This was perhaps an understatement. The year before, Winston Churchill had astonished a dinner party by suggesting that he have Gandhi bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the Viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample the Mahatma into the dirt.7 Most of the government kept their opinions rather less forthright, and the prevailing mood appears to have been trepidation rather than vengeance. ‘Would he try to spoil my show?’ asked the prince.8 In fact, Gandhi was just as concerned by the possibility of mob violence as were the British. He called for a hartal to mark the prince’s arrival in Bombay, but specifically and repeatedly stated that it should be peaceful and dignified.9
But Gandhi’s hold over the masses was feebler than his reputation suggested. As the prince sat down for his luncheon and the crowds that had greeted him dispersed, celebration turned swiftly to anger. The effect was immediate and terrifying, as the city which had looked so serene only an hour before erupted in violence. ‘From Government House, one could hear the sounds of distant rioting and occasional shots,’ the prince noted.10 For once, Hindus and Muslims were united, as both ganged up on Parsi and Indian Christian communities. Shops were looted. Tram cars were pelted with stones. The police station at New Nagpada was set upon, and three Indian constables were brutally murdered by a howling mob.11 Meanwhile, the royal tour attempted to continue as normal, and the shaken prince was taken to watch some polo at the Willingdon Club. He then returned to Government House for a reception in a very stuffy room, at which he had to shake hands with three thousand people while attempting not to perspire too noticeably. (One guest at the reception was so struck by the frequency with which the prince mopped his reddened brow that he wrote a letter to the Times of India complaining about it.)12
Gandhi appealed for an end to the carnage. ‘The Swaraj that I have witnessed during the last two days has stunk in my nostrils,’ he wrote. ‘I invite every Hindu and Mussalman to retire to his home and ask God for forgiveness and to befriend the injured communities from the bottom of their hearts.’13 The Mahatma’s words did little to calm the situation. By the time that the prince returned to Bombay the following week, several parts of the city had been devastated. A mob had set fire to a barrel of alcohol at the Null Bazaar and burnt the whole building down, causing damage estimated at 100,000 rupees. Errant Gandhians had smashed up liquor shops, and one such establishment had been raided by a marauding band of Pathans. A group of Parsis had attacked a motorcar and forced the Hindu occupants to remove their Gandhi caps. The Hindus fled, leaving the Parsis to tear the car to pieces. Amid reports of attacks on anyone wearing Western dress, seven Europeans were admitted to the General Hospital with injuries over the weekend, and one was killed. The official estimated death toll stood at 36, with between 150 and 200 more lying injured in hospital.14
With both Gandhi and the British authorities railing against the masses, the prince was packed off on his train, heading north towards the deserts of Rajputana. In Bombay, the people had looked poor, the city dirty and crowded, and the atmosphere bleak. In Baroda, the opposite of each of these was true. The prince was greeted with six garlanded elephants, bearing jewelled silver howdahs; a line of silver carriages, drawn by caparisoned oxen with gilded horns; and rows upon rows of plumed horses ridden by Baroda’s state guard. He was driven through vast crowds of people, said to comprise the entire population of the state, to the Nazar Bagh palace. The prince walked on a carpet of cloth-of-gold all the way from his carriage up a magnificent flight of stairs to a hall with a silver sofa, where he and the Gaekwar of Baroda held court for the local dignitaries.15
The Indian states would have many more chances to impress the disoriented Prince of Wales as he travelled on through Udaipur to the extraordinary blue-painted town of Jodhpur. It was there, on 30 November 1921, that the prince got to stick his first pig on a dawn hunt, and then his second soon afterwards. The ladies of the party, spectating from towers built at the edge of the open ground, were disappointed that he stuck both of his pigs out of sight in the jungle. They had to be content with listening to a ‘piercing and long-drawn squeal’ from deep in the undergrowth, the cry of a beast skewered by a princely spear.16
David enjoyed pig-sticking so much that he and Dickie went again the next day. This time, Dickie’s luck was in. ‘It was one of the best mornings I have ever spent anywhere,’ he wrote effusively in his diary.17 Unwary researchers in the Mountbatten archive may still shake out an envelope bearing the emblem of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, and be confronted by a decaying, matted lump of hair and skin. It is proudly labelled: ‘Tip of tail of Boar speared by me at Jodhpur 1st Dec 1921 – D’.18
If the elephants at Baroda had impressed the prince, the welcome at Bikaner would astound him. For two miles before the palace of Lalgarh, the road was lined with thousands of steeds of the Ganga Rissala Bikaner Camel Corps, bearing the sumptuously robed and jewelled nobility of the state. The prince spent an arduous day inspecting Boy Scouts and, that night, he and Dickie saw an elaborate programme of entertainment at the Junagarh Fort. The inner court was lit with thousands of coloured fairy lights, which were dramatically extinguished as fourteen exquisite nautch girls appeared, bearing lit candelabra on their heads. Dickie burnt himself while inspecting a piece of glowing charcoal that a performer had held in his mouth during a fire-dance. Another performer danced barefoot upon swords, spear-points, saws, and a heap of delicate shells which he left perfectly unbroken.19
It would have been easy for the Prince of Wales to forget about the nightmare he had glimpsed briefly in Bombay – that is, until he got to the United Provinces. The provinces, in the north-east of India between Delhi and the Himalayas, were one of India’s most politically sophisticated regions. This was the home territory of the Nehru family, and would be the scene of the best-organized protests against the prince’s visit. The royal party first arrived in Lucknow on 9 December. It was a destination with particular resonance, having withstood two lengthy sieges by rebel sepoys during the Mutiny. The prince gamely joined in a polo match, and was allowed to win; the Raja of Jahangirabad presented him with the cup.20 But, beyond the white boards of that particular polo field, support for the tour was proving hard to drum up. The royal party blamed Gandhi personally for a range of dirty tricks which they believed had been employed to keep the crowds away. It was said that Congressmen had told the people that they would be shot by police if they went too near the prince’s procession; further, that the prince had been so horrified by India’s poverty that he had poisoned the customary free food, in order to effect a mass cull of the poor.21 Such rumours may have been spread, but not by Gandhi. He went in for far more straightforward persuasion. Meanwhile, David was tickled to see trucks driving around Lucknow painted with the slogan ‘Come and see the Prince and have a free ride’. It was, he admitted, ‘a form of enticement that never had to be employed when my father travelled about India’.22
That night, David was encouraged to dance away his woes at Government House. ‘I am afraid that I prefer native states to British India,’ Dickie complained,23 but the evidence suggests that he had a good time – his card for the evening reveals that he danced with so many new girls that he could not remember all their names. There was a foxtrot with ‘Red Ostrich Feather’, a one-step with ‘Pink Gray Stockings’, and two more foxtrots with ‘Miss Slim Ankles’.24 Despite appearances, though, the girl-crazy days of 1920 were behind him. Miss Slim Ankles was destined for disappointment, for he had been writing to the Hon. Edwina Ashley all tour.
Edwina Ashley was a year younger than Dickie Mountbatten. Her maternal grandfather was Sir Ernest Cassel, an enormously successful banker and close friend of King Edward VII – who had stood as her godfather and after whom she had been named.25 Sir Ernest bequeathed to his first granddaughter the greatest portion of his estate. This included properties in Mayfair, Bournemouth, Newmarket and Switzerland; a considerable collection of art treasures and valuable furnishings; and a trust fund worth something close to £3 million (equivalent to over £100 million today). From her father’s side, Edwina would ultimately inherit even more money, along with the estates of Broadlands in Hampshire, and Classiebawn in Sligo. It was from that side that she also inherited a colourful family tree, ranging from Prime Ministers Melbourne and Palmerston to the Algonquin princess Pocahontas.
Despite all this gilding, Edwina had endured an austere and lonely childhood. Her mother had died in 1911, after which her father, Lord Mount Temple, had taken a new wife – described later by Dickie as ‘a wicked woman, a real bitch’.26 Because Edwina and her sister could not get on with their stepmother, they were doomed to a youth of freezing showers and endless lacrosse at a hearty girls’ boarding school in Eastbourne. Edwina was bullied on account of her grandfather being rich, German and Jewish, and later described school as ‘sheer hell’.27 She was afterwards subjected to an internment at a domestic science college in Suffolk, where wealthy young ladies had to wear mob-caps and long green overalls while learning to cook, clean and sew. These privileged girls would never be expected to use their accomplishments in a vocational context: they were being taught how to supervise their future staff, and instilled with a suitably soul-destroying sense of ‘traditional’ femininity.28 Edwina kept writing to Sir Ernest about how unhappy she was. Finally, after six months of button-sewing, table-laying and learning to comport herself, she was rescued by him and packed off to travel round France and Italy. Edwina was to have a grand tour, seeing for herself the art, culture and society of Europe, under the watchful eye of Jane Cranston, a chaperone who was under strict instructions not to let Edwina attend evening parties or befriend bachelors. But Miss Cranston would soon find that her pretty young charge had already had enough propriety to last her a lifetime. Edwina’s photograph albums from the trip juxtapose a few improving classical ruins with a lot of brooding young men in well-tailored breeches.29
Dickie and Edwina had met in October 1920, at a dance given by Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt at Claridge’s Hotel in London.30 They met again at Cowes during the Regatta Week of 1921, when the keener-eyed society doyennes noticed the pair dancing together every night. Mrs Vanderbilt was among those doyennes, and invited them both on a ten-day cruise around Belgium and France on the Vanderbilt yacht. Edwina had several suitors, but Dickie was trying so hard to get her attention she could hardly fail to notice. One evening they slipped away from their maids to dance at a seaside cafe called the Omar Khayyam. On their last night, Dickie seized an opportunity offered by Edwina’s seasickness, convincing her that the way to conquer it was to sleep on deck in a lifeboat in which, so it happened, he too would be spending the night.31
After they returned home, Dickie invited Edwina to meet his parents. Shortly afterwards, the new couple went on another holiday in Scotland, with various friends including Dickie’s princely cousins, David and Bertie. Dickie had been on the verge of proposing to Edwina when he received a severe shock. A telegram arrived with the unexpected news that his father had died following a heart attack. Dickie hastened back to his family. Days later, Edwina returned to London to comfort him. She had meant to go straight to Brook House to tell her grandfather and guardian, Sir Ernest Cassel, about her new boyfriend. On getting off the train, she discovered that she was a few hours too late. Cassel, too, had just died of a heart attack, as unexpectedly as had the Marquess of Milford Haven.32
Under such circumstances, the blossoming romance deepened. When Dickie sailed for India with David, Edwina had been photographed standing on the quay between Dickie’s sister Louise and David’s brother Bertie, a soulful expression on her face.33 Later, Dickie had pressed Edwina to join him. ‘I need you so badly’, he wrote to her. ‘You just don’t know what a difference your coming out to India is going to make.’34 Unable yet to access her grandfather’s estate, Edwina borrowed £100 from her great-aunt for a second-class berth, and studied the passenger lists until she found the name of a vague acquaintance she could ask to act as her chaperone. A long, hot journey followed, through the Mediterranean and the Red Sea: ‘I just lay on my bunk with the ceiling fan slowly turning, and dreamed of the East,’ she remembered.
As Edwina sailed towards Bombay, her beau moved on with the Prince of Wales to the troublesome city of Allahabad. For those on the tour, any remaining dreams of eastern promise were to be rudely interrupted. Here, the peaceful protest was to reach its zenith – despite the local magistrate’s efforts to keep the ringleaders caged by arresting Motilal Nehru and his thirty-two-year-old son, Jawahar.
Since the days of being ‘a bit of a prig’, Jawahar had undergone a political epiphany. A group of peasants had come to Allahabad to beg the leaders of the freedom movement to take up their case against cruel and oppressive landlords. Jawahar agreed to visit their village and discuss their concerns. This three-day trip had transformed him from a shy and cosseted lawyer – who, by his own admission, was ‘totally ignorant’ of the conditions in which the great majority of Indians worked and lived – into a revolutionary. ‘Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame and sorrow,’ he wrote; ‘shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life and our petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty.’35
By the time of the Prince of Wales’s tour, Jawahar had been confirmed as a rising star of the freedom movement, and one more radical than his august father. Motilal had been opposed to satyagraha in the first instance, and argued that the sending of a few individuals to prison would make little difference. In particular, he was unhappy with the thought of Jawahar ending up there. A doting father does not send his only beloved son to Harrow and Cambridge in the expectation that he will end up in a jailhouse. Yet Jawahar was determined to pursue satyagraha. Though even Gandhi advised him to do nothing that would upset Motilal, he could not be dissuaded. Father and son argued for several days. Jawahar pointedly began to eat bread and milk in the evenings from a steel bowl, amid the rest of the family’s crystal and Dresden china. Before one dinner he was fiddling with a piece of twine from a parcel, and commented: ‘I wonder what it feels like to have a noose round one’s neck?’ Swarup Rani nearly fainted; Motilal walked out and slammed the door. ‘Has this family no sense of humour left?’ asked Jawahar, crossly.36 That night, Motilal secretly tried sleeping on the floor, wanting to understand the hardship his son would suffer in prison.37
On the evening of 6 December 1921, the Prince of Wales was in his train en route for Bharatpur. That same night, Jawahar was up late in the Congress office in Allahabad, when a clerk burst in with the news that they were surrounded by police and that the building was being searched. Jawahar maintained his cool – ‘it was my first experience of the kind, but the desire to show off was strong,’ he later admitted. He refused to flinch while the police went around tipping out files and arresting his colleagues. Eventually, provoked by the news that raids were taking place elsewhere in the city, he returned home to check on his family – only to find the police there too. Both Jawahar and Motilal were arrested.38 Between December 1921 and January 1922, the British authorities arrested an almost unbelievable total of 30,000 people in connection with the hartals.39 It was hard for them not to arrest even more. Jawahar’s sister Betty remembered that everyone was so keen to support Gandhi’s cause that ‘people who were notarrested would pile into prison vans, which arrived at the jails with more prisoners than the jailers expected or could handle. The officials were at their wits’ ends; what could you do with people like that?’40
The arrest of the Nehrus stirred up Congress supporters across the United Provinces and beyond.41 Stories seeped through the tight ring of press censorship suggesting 600 arrests in Bombay, and rioting in Calcutta.42 When the Prince of Wales descended from his train at Allahabad on the 12 December, it was to an eerie hush. Allahabad had been a typical Indian city the day before, filled with noisy, colourful bazaars, bustling rickshaws, children playing and fighting, the fragrant smoke of burning incense, the bubbling of milk boiling for sweets, and the crackling of samosas being fried on roadside stalls. Now the streets were deserted, the houses shuttered. The city was a ghost town, with silent troops lining the empty streets, saluting the lonely state carriage that bore the uncelebrated prince. From a population of 150,000, only a couple of thousand spectators had turned out – and those that had were conspicuously white of skin.43 ‘It was a spooky experience,’ David later confessed. ‘I attempted to maintain a rigid and majestic pose in the carriage in order to show that I had risen above the insult. But curiosity got the better of me; and, peering up the empty side streets, I was gratified to see peeking furtively round the corners of the blocks the heads of many Indians.’44
Though some locals were unable to resist stealing a glance at their future King-Emperor, there was no doubt that the people of Allahabad had administered a ringing slap to the princely face. Even the stalwart Times of India was forced to admit that, ‘There is no use blinking the fact that the non-co-operators have scored their first success.’45 A few days later, the contrast between unpopular raj and popular nationalism was made stark, when large numbers of Allahabad citizens turned out to support the Nehrus as they went on trial. Jawahar’s wife and mother were among the chosen few spectators who watched him go up before the magistrate. Four-year-old Indira sat on Motilal’s knee throughout the proceedings.46 Jawahar was accused of distributing notices asking people to observe a hartal, and responded by stating that he neither recognized the British government of India, nor regarded the court as legitimate. He described the proceedings as a farce, and refused to answer any further questions.47 The magistrate gave him six months in jail and a fine of 500 rupees, which he refused to pay. Motilal was given the same sentence, and both were carted off to Lucknow Prison.
Now that the Nehru family was enjoying George V’s ‘hospitality’, it was ironic to reflect that, only shortly before, the district magistrate of Allahabad demanded that Motilal Nehru invite King George’s son to stay with him. Because Anand Bhavan was the grandest house in Allahabad, the government intended to requisition it for the prince’s use. Motilal had refused to comply.48 The Nehrus remained in prison until 3 March 1922, when the authorities belatedly discovered that there had been no law against distributing notices asking people to observe a hartal, and that therefore they had never actually committed a crime.49
For Christmas, the royal party had moved on to the old capital of Calcutta. The authorities had prepared for hartals and riots – as well as going to great lengths to drum up cheering crowds. Offices of Congressmen and Muslim agitators were raided; 200 sword-sticks were found in one dissenter’s house; 10,000 arrests were made in the ten days leading up to the prince’s arrival.50 The prince arrived to an unprecedented level of policing, with armoured cars patrolling the side streets and a cordon around the entire city. The city’s shops were shut, its taxis nowhere to be seen, and the roads lined thinly, with hardly any Indians visible. Even the generous British newspapers could only run to estimating 5000 spectators present, with 10,000 police guarding them. The protest passed off with only one or two minor riots in the suburbs.51
The Prince of Wales ate Christmas dinner at Government House, alongside numerous state governors, their wives, their hopeful unmarried daughters, and a few approved Indians, including Captain Raja Sir Hari Singh, son of the Maharaja of Kashmir. A fairy-lit Boxing Day ball was held in honour of the royal guest. It was a dazzling event, and markedly multicoloured. Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Anglo-Indian guests mingled with British officials. Lady Ronaldshay wore a gown of heavy yellow crêpe de Chine; the Maharani of Burdwan wore a gown of gold tissue embossed with roses, with an overlaid sari of gold lace; Mrs Shelley Banerjee wore charmeuse trimmed with lace and jet; and Mrs Sunanda Sen wore purple brocade accented with golden sprigs of maidenhair fern. Dickie danced the foxtrot with Miss Scott, and the Calcutta One-Step with Miss Gamble.52
After Christmas, David opened the Victoria Memorial Hall, a magnificent museum in Calcutta. He quoted his great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 about the Indians: ‘In their prosperity will be our strength; in their contentment our security; and in their gratitude our best reward.’ With impressive optimism, he added: ‘It is fitting that this memorial to the Great Queen-Empress should be opened at a time when her dreams for the Indian Empire have come true.’53 Perhaps, among the fashionable and integrated elites of Calcutta, it was possible to believe that they had.
On 13 January, the prince arrived at the wealthy city of Madras. A complete hartal had been planned, but did not come off in the manner Gandhi would have intended. As Dickie wrote, ‘As in Bombay, so here, on finding that their Non-Violence system produced no results they resorted to Violence.’54 It ended up as a riot, with troops and policemen stoned, cars and buildings vandalized. British troops were forced to use armoured cars and bayonets just a stone’s throw from where the prince was staying at Government House. In the heart of the European quarter, the mob came across a pavilion decorated with flags and palms, under the protection of a solitary policeman. They knocked him over and destroyed the decorations, trampling the torn remnants of the Union Jack into the mud. They smashed up and attempted to burn down the Wellington cinema and a car showroom next door. A British journalist was horrified to discover a dead body with its head beaten in, lying in the road outside the cinema.55 Dickie reported another casualty: a Government House taxi deliberately ran over a man aiming a brick through the windscreen, ‘leaving him a somewhat shapeless mass in the road’.56
By the next day, order had been restored and the prince was cheered at the races.57 Swiftly, the tour got back on track. On 15 January, Dickie went to visit the Theosophical Society in Madras, which was presided over by the eccentric Baroness de Kuster, a friend of his sister. The baroness attempted to explain reincarnation and astral projection to a sceptical Dickie, and imparted to him that Annie Besant had recently identified the future Emperor of India, David, as the reincarnation of a former Emperor of India, Akbar the Great. ‘David was not over-pleased at the idea of having been a “black man”, so I did not inform him that his soul had previously been shared by a group of horses,’ Dickie noted.58
The royal tour ground on, zigzagging up through the belly of India and stopping in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Indore. By 4 February, it had reached Bhopal, where Dickie and David were the guests of the only woman ruler in Asia, the Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum. The Begum was an ardent Muslim, and usually ruled from behind a purdah screen. The rare sight of her tiny figure, swathed in a blue burka, next to the white-uniformed Prince of Wales, gave the tour’s photographers some of their best opportunities.59 But it was an image more connected to the past than to the future. Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement had reached a crescendo. Protests against the prince had been extensive, and had come from all quarters of Indian society – crossing boundaries of wealth, caste and religion. Elsewhere in the Empire, colonies were being offered self-government. The provisional government of the Irish Free State had just met for the first time, under the leadership of freedom fighter Michael Collins. Collins had, controversially, accepted a form of dominion status within the British Empire, providing a model for what might shortly be offered to India. The Irish Free State was not to prove a resounding success, but its inception revealed an empire shifting gear from conquest to retreat.
Gandhi could have had every expectation of a swift victory. Best of all, the British were just about to do the worst thing possible from their point of view and arrest him. Gandhi’s imprisonment would be met with an international outcry; his trial would make headlines all over the world; inevitably, he would have to be released, and subsequently listened to. This would put the British in exactly the same position as they had recently occupied in Ireland, where they had had to overlook Michael Collins’s terrorist activities and negotiate with him. Gandhi would be offered a deal, just as Collins had been offered a deal. All he had to do was stand firm.60
It came as some surprise, then, that Gandhi did not stand firm. Instead, he called off the non-cooperation movement, cancelled all further agitation against the British and backed down, declaring that his followers had sinned against God; that to continue the campaign would be to obey Satan; and that India was not ready for self-government. His reason was a single incident of mob violence that occurred in the small town of Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces, the day after the Prince of Wales had been photographed with the Begum of Bhopal.
Gandhi was nowhere near Chauri Chaura at the time of the incident: he was 800 miles away in Bardoli. But the facts that were reported to him three days later overwhelmed him with a sense of personal responsibility. A peaceful demonstration had been taking place in the town. The Indian constables policing it had attacked some demonstrators. The demonstrators had turned on the constables; this had upped the stakes, and the constables shot into the crowd. When their bullets ran out, they ran to the police station for shelter. The demonstrators surrounded the station, set fire to it, and burned the constables alive. Twenty-two policemen were killed.61
The event differed neither in character nor greatly in scale from the previous riots in Bombay or Madras. Yet something about Chauri Chaura particularly upset Gandhi. ‘Let the opponent glory in our humiliation or so called defeat,’ he wrote. ‘It is better to be charged with cowardice and weakness than to be guilty of denial of our oath and to sin against God.’62 He went on a five-day fast to purify himself, and withdrew from all further satyagraha activities, with the exception of the boycott on British goods. He declared an intention to concentrate henceforth on ‘constructive’ activities: absolute non-violence; the setting-up of Congress organizations in every village; a spinning-wheel in every home; the rejection of ornamentation; Hindu–Muslim unity; ‘purification’ of the Hindus by abstention from drink and drugs; and ‘killing the snake of untouchability’.63 Put simply, these were unachievable aims. The British themselves could not have drawn up a more prohibitive list of conditions against their own departure.
Gandhi’s sudden withdrawal sent the British into a panic. Sir George Lloyd, the Governor of Bombay, was ready to take him into custody. Back in London, Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, was preparing to announce the Mahatma’s arrest in the House of Commons. But it was obviously absurd to arrest an agitator immediately after he had stopped agitating. The Viceroy, Lord Reading, summoned his emergency council, but it could not reach a decision. In the end, he himself made the call. Soon after midnight, his secretary telegraphed a coded message to London, informing Montagu that the arrest was off.64
Lloyd was so furious he threatened to resign, and later declared, with a touch of hyperbole, that ‘Gandhi’s was the most colossal experiment in world history, and it came within an inch of succeeding.’65 But his shock, confusion and anger could not compare to that felt by Gandhi’s own followers. ‘The drastic reversal of practically the whole of the aggressive programme may be politically unsound and unwise,’ Gandhi told them with lucid self-awareness, ‘but there is no doubt that it is religiously sound.’66 Jawaharlal Nehru, still languishing in a British jail for his own part in the satyagraha campaign, was devastated. Fifteen years later, the sense of disappointment was still tangible when he argued that ‘the non-violent method was not, and could not be, a religion or an unchallengeable creed or dogma. It could only be a policy and a method promising certain results, and by those results it would have to be finally judged. Individuals might make of it a religion or incontrovertible creed. But no political organization, so long as it remained political, could do so.’67
The split between Nehru and Gandhi was deeply damaging for Congress. Nehru, who declared that religion ‘filled me with horror’ and was ‘the enemy of clear thought’, had never signed up to fight a holy war; Gandhi, who believed that ‘no man can live without religion’ and that ‘those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means’, could never have envisaged anything else.68 Exhilarated though he had been by Gandhi’s whirlwind arrival on the political scene, Nehru quickly realized that the Mahatma’s argument provided the British with the permanent means to defeat him.
The rest of the tour passed in relative calm, with the only story being the gossip about Dickie Mountbatten and Edwina Ashley. Edwina had finally reached the east she had dreamed of, and swiftly discarded her chaperone. She arrived in the riot-torn city of Bombay to realize that she could only afford a third-class train ticket to Delhi. It would have meant sitting, eating and sleeping on bare boards for two days, clumped together with poor Indians and their livestock. Edwina was happy to do so, but the clerk flatly refused to sell the elegant young Englishwoman a third-class ticket.69 This functioned as a useful opportunity for the handsome former prince Dickie to come gallantly to a fair maiden’s rescue – he sent to her aid an Indian Army colonel, who put her on the mail train.70 Her beau met her at the station on 12 February, and they fell happily into each other’s arms. Two days later, there was a St Valentine’s Day dance at the Viceregal Lodge. Mountbatten wrote in his diary: ‘I danced 1 and 2 with Edwina; she had 3 and 4 with David, and the 5th dance we sat out in her sitting-room, when I asked her if she would marry me, and she said she would.’71 Edwina chose an old Indian ring from Schwaiger’s art gallery.72 Three days later, Dickie was off with David to Patiala. The Vicereine, Lady Reading, dispatched a dismissive letter to Edwina’s father. ‘I am afraid she has definitely made up her mind about him,’ she wrote of the happy couple. ‘I hoped she would have cared for someone older, with more of a career before him.’73 Dickie did not believe that his youth was a problem. ‘I have never really sown any wild oats,’ he confessed to his mother, ‘and as I never intend to, I haven’t got to get over that stage which some men have to.’74
On 17 March the Prince of Wales boarded the Renown at Karachi, and sailed for Ceylon and Japan. The breath that had been held since his arrival in Bombay exactly four months before could finally be let out. ‘Regret not unmingled with relief may be said to sum up the feelings of most loyal subjects of the British Crown, on the occasion of the departure of the Prince of Wales from our shores to-day,’ commented the Statesman. ‘Probably the feeling of relief is predominant.’ It concluded that ‘the reception accorded to His Royal Highness has been such as to make every true friend of this country hang his head in shame.’75 A sense of shame and depression would be felt on both sides. The prince’s tour had revealed the acute unpopularity of the British in India. Gandhi’s campaign against it had revealed the weakness of the alternative.