1947: The Last Years of the British in India
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The Last Years of the British Empire in India
1947: Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India
REVIEWS: Mountbatten’s ‘last chukka’
Reviewed by Bahzad Alam Khan
Dawn February 25, 2007
There is compelling historical evidence that Lord Mountbatten was not the most suitable candidate for the vice-regal responsibilities with which he was entrusted by the war-weary British Empire in its twilight years. But even the flintiest of historians did not give him the kind of harsh indictment that Lord Mountbatten — remorseful many years after the blood-drenched dismemberment of the subcontinent — himself delivered on his performance as the last viceroy of British India. His rueful soul-searching found expression at a dinner meeting with a BBC journalist shortly after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war. The journalist’s reminiscences appeared in a British newspaper in 2004. He wrote: “Mountbatten was not to be consoled. To this day his judgment on how he had performed in India rings in my ears and in my memory. As one who dislikes the tasteless use in writing of …‘vulgar slang’… I shall permit myself an exception this time because it is the only honest way of reporting accurately what the last viceroy of India thought about the way he had done his job: ‘I f****d it up.’”
Little wonder, then, that Stanley Wolpert’s icy assessment differs very little from Lord Mountbatten’s candid appraisal of his dismal performance. The only difference is that Wolpert’s use of language in his book on the last years of the British Empire in undivided India is a little less colourful. Titled Shameful Flight — an expression employed by Sir Winston Churchill to describe the graceless manner in which the British government fled the subcontinent in 1947 — the book draws heavily on the 12 volumes that contain an extraordinarily detailed account of constitutional relations between Britain and India. Quotes culled painstakingly by Wolpert from the ‘The Transfer of Power, 1942-7’ documents have enabled him to reconstruct, with the utmost precision, the diametrically opposed and often irreconcilable viewpoints that the three principal stakeholders — the British, the Hindus and the Muslims — clung on to with great tenacity during endless roundtable conferences and tortuous negotiations.
But the sins of uncompromising political leaders were visited upon their luckless followers. As a tidal surge of refugees flowed across the erratically demarcated borders in 1947, over 200,000 fleeing migrants lost their lives. According to Wolpert, a more realistic total is at least one million. Therefore, his book is, of necessity, a heartbreaking account of missed opportunities — opportunities that stealthily tiptoed past political leaders engrossed in constitutional hair-splitting and open-ended talks. Wolpert seems to insist, rightly, that both Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah — he has written widely acclaimed biographies of the two — must share equal blame for the wholesale bloodshed that attended partition. They may have had solid political reasons to practise what was regarded by others, especially the British government, as confrontational politics, but their inability to at least temporarily sink their differences cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives. ________________________________________ Governor Jenkins had told him, in unequivocal terms, that the partition of Punjab was “unthinkable” and “impracticable”. ________________________________________
It can be argued with the benefit of hindsight that the Muslim League should have tried to make the 1945 Simla conference a success. Furthermore, if Mr Jinnah had not allowed former Viceroy Lord Wavell’s “fond dream of forging a viable solution to India’s communal division and political deadlock” to be rudely shattered, he would not have had to subsequently deal with a viceroy widely believed to be completely under the sway of Pandit Nehru.
And this brings us — at least according to Wolpert — to the final villain of the gory partition epic: Lord Louis Mountbatten. Wolpert describes the period between December 1946 and June 1947 as “Lord Mountbatten’s last chukka”. While it is evident that Wolpert has little admiration for Mountbatten — “His ego demanded constant adulation and unquestioning support from a team of acolytes” — the expert historian is not amused by Mountbatten’s comparison of his turbulent tenure during the British government’s last year in India to a “hard-fought polo game”. Mountbatten told the King: “The last Chukka in India — 12 goals down.”
Mountbatten may have brought the skills of a determined sportsman to bear on the partition process, but he displayed little compassion for the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were needlessly imperilled by his selfish policy of making “fast work of his India job” so that he could rush back to his promising naval career. “Though the cabinet gave him [Mountbatten] 18 months to complete it, he never had any intention of taking so long to finish off his last chukka,” writes Wolpert, sarcastically.
Not that Mountbatten was in any doubt about the horrific consequences of his ill-conceived policy. Governor Jenkins had told him, in unequivocal terms, that the partition of Punjab was “unthinkable” and “impracticable”. Indeed, Mountbatten moved with such haste that at a June 1947 press conference he confessed that he had approved a Punjab partition plan of the Congrss without even looking at a map. Mountbatten’s ignorance was matched by that of Barrister Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who was chosen to chair the boundary commission. Wolpert points out that Radcliffe, who had never before come to India, flew out “to undertake in a month work that should have taken at least a year to do properly”. Radcliffe never returned to India and feared that both the Hindus and Muslims would try to kill him.
Wolpert’s slim volume on the final and tumultuous days of undivided India shows that the dismemberment of the subcontinent did not have to be attended by so much bloodshed. While his is a sad book, it makes a gripping read. ________________________________________
Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India
By Stanley Wolpert
Oxford University Press. Plot # 38, Sector 15, Korangi Industrial Area,
Karachi Tel: 111-693-673
ouppak@theoffice.net
www.oup.com.pk
238pp. Rs495
