Jawahar Lal Nehru never wanted to marry and the Mountbattens had an open marriage i.e. they could go out with or date anyone they wanted without asking each other.
Edwina’s and Nehru’s respective troubled marriages brought them close to each other.
I’m going to add text from original letters written amongst these people that will explain things better. To understand what they had between them it is important to understand that none of them was happy with their marriage. Let’s go one by one:
Jawahar Lal & Kamala Nehru
He was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, England at the age of 17 where he read a lot and became good at things. He made lots of friends from around the world and was influenced by British & western thoughts and learnt to think freely. It soon became clear that his thought were different from his father and that was ok until it came to his marriage.
It was in 1909 that Motilal Nehru wrote in one of his letters about his opinion about getting married to which Jawahar replied “I’m not violently looking forward to the prospect of getting married to anybody.” Although he was in general against marriage he also in a way made it clear that his enthusiasm would be higher to the idea if the girl would be from outside the Kashmiri Brahmin family.
Being a lawyer and his father Motilal sent a letter stating “Intermarriage between castes is invalid under Hindu law and, because the British had never legislated to overrule that point, a free choice is simply not possible.”
Many letters passed between father and son on this topic, and it became increasingly obvious that Jawahar’s secular upbringing and British thoughts were going to make traditional Hindu matchmaking an awkward business.
‘You express a hope that my marriage should be romantic’, he wrote to his father. ‘I should like it to be so but I fail to see how it is going to come about. There is not an atom of romance in the way you are searching [out] girls for me and keeping them waiting till my arrival. The very idea is extremely unromantic. And you can hardly expect me to fall in love with a photograph”.
But Motilal was not to be put off, and eventually found Kamala Kaul, a girl from Delhi. Pretty though she was, Jawahar found something to object to in the ten-year age gap between them.‘I could not possibly marry her before she was eighteen or nineteen, and that is six or seven years hence’, he wrote. ‘I would not mind waiting as I am not in a matrimonial state of mind at present.
But none of this was going to work and Jawahar Lal Nehru got married to Kamla Kaul (Nehru as she would later be called) on 8th February 1916 and the marriage was believed to be the most amazing Delhi had seen.
After the marriage they went for an honeymoon to Kashmir but Jawahar Lal was so uninterested in the honeymoon that he left his wife wth his family and went for an adventurous trek to Zojila pass with his cousin.
The beauty of the Kashmiri landscape, was clearly not so taken with the charms of his wife; and she, now living with his parents in a strange half Westernised household, began to show signs of distress. Soon after their Kashmiri holiday, Jawahar was called back to Allahabad on business. Kamala stayed in Kashmir, where she did little but eat cherries and develop headaches.
The birth of a daughter, Indira, the following year did little to reconcile Jawahar to family life, for he had at last found a purpose outside it.” To follow Gandhi and to play a role in the Indian Independence struggle.
Kamala was never in good health after the birth of the couple’s daughter, Indira, in 1917. In 1924, she and Jawahar had a premature baby boy, who soon perished. The experience further ruined her condition and she developed tuberculosis. Jawahar was obliged to take her to Europe for long periods so that she could get better treatment and feel better. But even there he was busy with the activities of the congress and didn’t give much time to her.
Kamala and Jawahar with their daughter Indira.
He returned to India to continue the freedom struggle and was jailed for some time. During this time also Kamala kept ill. At the beginning of 1935, Jawahar was allowed to visit Kamala for couple of days – but found that she had grown distant. ‘Somehow things went wrong’, he wrote in his diary. ‘I felt there was a psychological change. She seemed reserved.’ He brought her poems and pieces of writing, but she showed no interest. Instead, she told him that she had decided to devote the rest of her life to religious contemplation, and no longer wanted a sexual relationship”
Her condition got worse in the coming months and she was taken to Germany for treatment. Jawahar was released from the jail on compassionate grounds and he went straight to Germany to meet her only to find that there was a she would only live of for few more days.
Jawahar, Kamala and Indira.
Kamala died early in the morning of 28 February 1936. She was cremated and her ashes given to Jawahar, so that he might take them to Allahabad and cast them into the sacred confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna. As he flew back over the deserts of Arabia with the sad little urn by his side he thought, ‘She is no more, Kamala is no more, my mind kept on repeating.’
When his plane reached Baghdad, Jawahar sent a cable to the London publishers of his just-finished autobiography. He wanted to dedicate the book: ‘To Kamala who is no more”.
The Mountbattens
Louis Mountbatten aka Dickie was related to the king of Britain and was very high ranking navy official and Edwina was from one of the richest families from Britain. Their marriage just like the Nehru’s was a grand affair. But the marriage soon started facing problem as Dickie got busy with his Navy life and Edwina got busy with her parties.
Dickie was deeply attached to the Navy, and spent more of his time fussing over it than over her.When he did fuss over her, he fussed too much. Dickie had come from a happy, intimate home, and wanted to recreate a family in which everything was a team effort. Edwina had grown up in a household in which privacy and independence had been the norm, sometimes to the point of dysfunction. Dickie’s marital behaviour was exactly the opposite of what Edwina wanted: starving her of attention for months at a time, then smothering her with domesticity.
They both had 2 daughters and seemed to be living a normal married life but behind this illusion of wedded bliss, Edwina embarked on a long and ostentatious series of affairs. These started very early on, even if one discounts the claim Charlie Chaplin once dropped into conversation about Edwina having made a pass at him during her honeymoon.
Dickie’s posting to other places left his young wife alone to the gaudy pleasures of London’s night life, and she – still quite recently emancipated from her maiden existence – made the most of them. ‘Went to see David at St James’s Palace,’ Dickie wrote warily in his diary on 3 December 1925. ‘He had a queer story about Edwina.
Dickie got to know about all the affairs she was having and the number was high. So high that he was devastated. His younger daughter, Pamela, later said that he had nurtured a romantic dream about ‘a wife that was purer than pure’, whom he could put on a pedestal and would support his career indefatigably: he finds that she’s not like that at all.
He once wrote Edwina a piteous letter:
“I wish I knew how to flirt with other women, and especially with my wife. I wish I’d sown more wild oats in my youth, and could excite more than I fear I do. I wish I wasn’t in the Navy and had to drag you out to Malta. I wish I had an equal share of the money so that I could give you far handsomer presents than I can really at present honestly manage. In other words, I’d like to feel that I was really worthy of your love.
Edwina replied :
“I feel I’ve been such a beast. You were so wonderful about everything and I do realise how hard it all was for you, altho’ I know you think I don’t. I feel terribly about it all.’
But the terrible feeling never prevented her from doing it again. Edwina did not bother to be secretive about her affairs, and hints of her liaisons were scattered through newspaper headlines, gossip columns and the memoirs of nightclub hostesses.
Despite the Mountbattens’ marital dramas, the marriage did not break up. There had been a decisive row, with Edwina sitting in her bath, sobbing, and telling Dickie that she wanted to be free. Dickie agreed to leave the next morning, and retired to bed. His cool reaction worked: it was Edwina who came to his room to make up.They agreed to stay together, though with, effectively, an open relationship.
Dickie had realised, with a commendable grasp of reality that would elude him in his working life, that he could not have his wife to himself. Edwina would be allowed her boyfriends: and Dickie, somewhat perfunctorily, would take a girlfriend. He met Yola Letellier, the wife of a French newspaper owner, at a polo game. According to Dickie’s younger daughter, Pamela, ‘He didn’t fall head over heels, but he found her very attractive, to flirt with, to dance with, and to enjoy life with.’20 Though it may have been adultery in a technical sense, Dickie’s relationship with Yola would demonstrate his instinctive urge for fidelity.
Edwina’s life was a constant rotation of luncheon-parties, garden-parties, cocktail-parties, dinner-parties and weekend house-parties. When she was not at parties, she was planning parties, or buying new dresses for parties, or carrying on illicitly with the men she had met at parties, or recovering from the hangovers she had incurred by going to too many parties. The Mountbattens often received three or four invitations for the same evening. ‘To those who knew her best it seemed she was just burning up energy because she did not know what else to do with it”
All this continued and then came the time when Dickie was made the Viceroy of India. She came to India with him not knowing that she would soon meet someone who too had had a troubled marriage although in a very different way and with whom she’d share a very deep bond for the rest of her life.
The Mountbattens and Nehru meet
It is believed that Edwina and Nehru had great liking foreach other from the moment they first met in India. In fact Dickie himself liked him very much due to his approach which did not trouble the British much.
Edwina and Nehru were together remarkably often during that first week, and the informality of their friendship was obvious. Nehru addressed a meeting of the Red Cross; she accompanied him, and photographs show her looking up at him, enraptured. At the reception for delegates of the Asian Relations Conference, the pair drew their armchairs together for an involved conversation. In one photograph, Nehru is being interrupted, and looks startled. Lady Mountbatten, elegant in a long floral-print dress, has her attention focused entirely on the Congress leader. That same evening, at the Mountbattens’ first garden party, there was a shortage of chairs during a dance recital. The yogic Jawahar forsook his, and instead sat cross-legged on the floor at Edwina’s feet. After the party, Edwina accompanied Jawahar back to his house on York Road for a nightcap – with her daughter, but without her husband.
Dickie on the other hand had no problem with her going out with Nehru. They were still in an open marriage, Edwina talked about everything with Nehru and was a good source as well a tool which could be used as and when needed.
They met often during parties, conferences etc and even spent together in Mashobra where Dickie had formally invited Nehru and even on the annual Viceregal retreat in Simla where they really got to know each other better. It was there that they would walk and talk for hours and would find really attracted to each other. They would later get busy with their respective works but would often get time to see each other.
But it was after India’s independence that the Mountbattens returned to England and Edwina and Nehru exchanged a lot of letters which shows just how much they meant to each other.
Life is lonely and empty and unreal’, Edwina wrote to Jawahar. Her husband dragged her to garden parties at Buckingham Palace – ‘a waste of time’, she thought, ‘but Dickie insists.’The pain of her absence was felt in India, too. Jawahar wrote to Edwina that he could still sense her ‘fragrance on the air’, and that he read and reread her letters.
Edwina and Jawahar wrote every day at first. Inevitably, this tailed off to once a week and finally once a fortnight, but the letters remained intimate until the end. Jawahar sent Edwina presents from wherever he was in the world: sugar from the United States (when it was rationed in Britain), cigarettes from Egypt, pressed ferns from Sikkim, a book of photographs of erotic sculptures from the Temple of the Sun in Orissa. ‘I must say they took my breath away for an instant’, he wrote. ‘There was no sense of shame or of hiding anything.’ Edwina replied that she had found the sculptures fascinating. ‘I am not interested in sex as sex’, she wrote. ‘There must be so much more to it, beauty of spirit and form and in its conception. But I think you and I are in the minority! Yet another treasured bond.
As years passed by Nehru and Edwina would often visit each other in England and India. So much and so frequently that it raised eyebrows everywhere.
“It seems to me that the time has come when it should be pointed out to Edwina by one of Her Majesty’s Ministers that these visits of hers to the Indian capital do not further the general interests of the Commonwealth”, wrote the Queen’s Private Secretary to Churchill’s Private Secretary. If a minister ever did get up the courage to point this out to Edwina, it did not stop her. Once, at a reception for Commonwealth leaders in London, Jawahar upset the other delegates by spending all evening deep in conversation with Edwina and then conspicuously leaving with her.
On another occasion, when Jawahar and Edwina were staying together at Nainital in the Himalayan foothills, the Governor’s son was sent to summon the guests for dinner. Unwittingly, he opened the door of the Prime Minister’s suite, and was confronted by the sight of Jawahar and Edwina in an embrace. He tactfully retreated, and nothing was ever said about the incident.
Those were the days of discretion in political life and event hough such stories were never made fully public, hints of them leaked out. In India anti-Nehru party in Delhi began using the slogan, ‘Break open Rama’s heart you’d see Sita and if you open Nehru’s heart you’d see Edwina’.
They went of writing to each other and meeting in different cities of the world and their bond only got stronger as they both got older. In April 1958, Nehru announced that he wanted to resign and return to private life, telling a press conference shortly afterwards that he felt ‘rather stale and flat’. For once, the roles were reversed, and Edwina told him to take a rest.
He took a month’s holiday, trekking in the Kullu Valley, high in the Himalayas. ‘Tell me whether I should continue to write to you or not?’ wrote Edwina tentatively. ‘I shall well understand if you say “not a note for the next months”.”
“Jawahar wrote back passionately. ‘How do you think I would fare if months passed without a letter from you?’ he asked. ‘Have you realized what your letters mean to me?”
January, 1960 was the last time they spent time together in India. One the morning of 21st February, 1960 she was found dead in her room after her health had deteriorated and she had had no splendid possessions with her: only a pile of old letters on the bedside table. She must have been reading them when she died, for a few, having fluttered from her hands, were strewn across her bed. They were all from Jawaharlal Nehru.
After Edwina’s death Jawahar had not permitted himself public grief; but the age he had defied for so many years began to catch up with him. His face puffed, developed liver spots and his health deteriorated.
Jawahar had a minor stroke in January,1964 at the annual Congress session in Bhubaneshwar. Dickie visited again, and found his old friend ‘shockingly weak and uncomprehending’. He urged him not to keep working flat-out. ‘That is what Edwina did, to the great distress of all who loved her whom she left behind’, he wrote.
On 27 May, Jawahar rose at dawn and suffered a second stroke and a heart attack. He lost consciousness and, a few hours later, he died.
They both died with memories of each other and Dickie was the one who was left with love and respect for both. He came to India for his dear friends last rites.
Source: Original letters and pics from the book Indian Summer by Alex Von Tunzelman
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