What made Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru exciting to write about?
I had been reading books about the Indian independence movement, many of which hinted at the Edwina-Jawahar romance. That triggered my interest and I set on my quest to show them as real people, not stereotypes. It is the greatest love story of the 20th century.
You show powerful leaders as normal human beings with limitations. Beyond politics and colonial controversies, there was another side to the British Raj—the softer story of friendships, feelings, and emotions. But the adversarial good v/s bad colonial narrative is perhaps why India had difficulty coming to terms with the Edwina-Jawahar friendship.
What brought Edwina and Jawahar together?
There were many things, some of which were a strong physical attraction, their shared love for India, the Mahatma, music, art, poetry and the horrendous circumstances running up to Independence. Edwina was a huge emotional support to Jawahar after Gandhi’s assassination. I am not sure that he had enjoyed this kind of companionship with his wife. For his part, Jawahar gave Edwina an emotional response that, I suspect, had been lacking in her marriage. When Edwina died, she was buried at sea. Jawahar sent the Indian frigate to accompany the ship that carried her, and to cast his wreath of marigolds on the sea.
You have relied on British historian and academic Janet Morgan who had seen the letters exchanged between the two. Where are the letters now?
Jawahar’s letters to Edwina were given to the Mountbatten Archives at Southampton University that are currently held under an embargo there.
While tackling such a controversial subject, did you fear consequences?
Not when I was writing the book. Only now, I worry that the novel might be used as ammunition by those who seek to demolish Nehru’s legacy. I believe you were shocked by the legal read prior.
The term legal read is a euphemism for censorship. It is a velvet glove and detrimental to the creative industries and Indian civil society as a whole.
At Oxford, I was originally trained as a Sinologist, a China specialist. I spent many years working with China before my interests took me to write on India. A legal read is something I might have expected in China under the CCP, but it is the last thing I thought I might encounter in democratic India. It is a pernicious form of lawyer-led censorship based on fear. I had to tone down criticism of Gandhi expressed by characters in my book.