Indian Summer: An Interview with Alex von Tunzelmann by Paul Vlitos
Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire opens with a stunning evocation of the atmosphere in Delhi on the 14th of August 1947. At midnight a new, free, Indian nation would come into being. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour,’ as independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru famously put it, ‘India will awake to life and freedom.’
Indian Summer tells the behind-the-scenes story of the road to Indian independence – as well as to the Partition of India and Pakistan – and of the remarkable personalities that shaped that story. It also tells the moving story of the clandestine love affair between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of India’s last British Viceroy. Breathtaking in scope and insight, brilliantly written, and utterly compelling, Indian Summer announces the arrival, in the words of Victoria Glendinning, of ‘a lively new voice in narrative history-writing.’ I interviewed Alex von Tunzelmann to find out how she came to write the book, about how it has been received around the world, and about her plans for future projects…
Q: Indian Summer is subtitled The Secret History of the End of an Empire. What are some of the new revelations about the events of Independence and Partition that you have uncovered during your research?
The book is a 'secret history' in that it gives an intimate view of events. The personal lives and relationships of the Mountbattens, Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah are at the centre of the story, particularly the romance between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. Most of the previous works on the end of the empire in India have been remarkably coy about this, apparently not thinking it had a political significance. The more I researched it, the more I realised it did have a considerable impact on the independence settlement and afterwards: this is where Indian Summer most obviously breaks new ground.
However, anyone familiar with the immense literature on India's partition and the surrounding events will notice that there is plenty of new information in the book on a variety of subjects, including on the outbreak of hostilities in Kashmir, and on attitudes to independence and the Pakistan movement within the inner circles of the British establishment.
Q: Indian Summer gives an impressively rounded portrait of Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of British India. To what extent do you feel Mountbatten has been treated unfairly by previous historians? If so, why do you think this is?
Lord Mountbatten is one of those people who polarises opinions. Historians, like his colleagues and contemporaries, tend to love him or hate him. He had a very bluff, gung-ho manner, often pushed near the point of self-caricature, which his detractors tend to hear as fingernails scraping down a blackboard. Still, the more I read of his own papers and other people's, the more I thought that some of the more extreme verdicts either way had gone over the top.
Mountbatten may have been out of his depth in India, but under the circumstances he didn't do such a bad job. The popular view of the last 20 years or so – that the holocausts following partition were a direct result of his negligence – is not justifiable. But it is perhaps more entertaining and more politically desirable to eviscerate him for it than to admit that decades of imperialist British policy, and the inability of the British government to send troops or provide resources during 1947, were really to blame.
Q: Indian Summer has achieved a notably warm critical and popular reception in the United States as well as Britain. In what ways if any do you feel that North American readers and critics have responded differently to the book than those in Britain? How has it been received in India and Pakistan?
It's my impression overall that American readers and critics are more drawn to the parallels between India in 1947 and Iraq today. In India and Pakistan, there has been a real diversity of opinion.
Meanwhile, many more of the reviewers in India and Pakistan have commented on the Kashmir chapter. Kashmir remains a constant and dominant theme in subcontinental politics, yet it receives relatively little coverage in the west. With such a controversial subject, you can't please everyone. In Pakistan, some offence has been taken at the evidence I've presented showing Jinnah to have been in cahoots with Winston Churchill, and one or two critics have even refused to accept that this happened. But the papers that I've used are available for any researcher to examine at the Churchill Archive, the British Library and the National Archives of Pakistan. I suppose that, bearing in mind the present political situation, it's hard for some Pakistanis to accept that Jinnah was in league with the British Conservatives, and it's hard for some British Conservatives to accept that their party was devoted to encouraging Islamic nationalism.
Q: Did any aspect or section of the book cause you any particular difficulty or anxiety? I would describe your account as scrupulously even-handed, but you are often discussing issues and topics that are to say the least hotly debated.
Thank you! There is almost no aspect of Indian Summer that is uncontroversial. The chapter that caused me the most headaches was undoubtedly Kashmir. Researching Kashmir is like stepping into an M.C. Escher painting. Every time you think you've found a foothold, it begins to twist round to become a bit of ceiling and you're left tumbling through thin air again. The most basic facts are completely impossible to establish. For instance, no one can determine even a ballpark figure for how many people were exterminated by the Maharaja of Kashmir's troops during 1947. I've seen estimates ranging between 200 people and 200,000 people. There's virtually no independent verification of anything, and it's all incredibly politically sensitive within India as well as across the entirety of the Islamic world. Faced with this sort of thing as a historian you just do your best, but of course it helps if you don't have existing bias towards one side or another.
Q: Which other historians or writers have influenced your work most?
The thing that made me want to write history was the sort of rich, splendid, epic historical writing that is completely out of fashion: a broad sweep illuminated by gorgeous detail. The works I keep going back to are Lytton Strachey's biography of Queen Victoria, Thackeray's The Four Georges, and Macaulay's History of England.
Q: Can you tell us about your next project? Are you planning to write about India and Pakistan again in the future?
I'd love to write about India and Pakistan again. That part of the world is endlessly fascinating to me and I will keep visiting it as often as I can. At the moment, though, there are dozens of things I'd like to write about, and they're scattered all over the globe. I'm considering various possibilities for my next project, so there isn't much I can say yet. You can be sure it will be controversial and full of drama. I can’t wait.
Many thanks for talking to donowdo.com, and very best wishes for the continued success of Indian Summer and for your future projects.
The paperback edition of Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex von Tunzelmann is published by Simon and Schuster on 7 April.