Before and After Midnight

Well it didn8217;t happen, did it, even though the Muslim and the Hindu did quarrel, and they did produce a quasi-civil war, and even though the newly independent India turned out to be quite friendly to Russians. But, and this is the most intellectually attractive attribute of von Tunzelmann8217;s utterly marvelous narrative history, predictions like Sir Reginald8217;s, which she quotes, were a mirror to the time the British establishment was frantic about letting India handle herself. In debt to Americans 8212; Tunzelmann provides the fascinating factoid that World War II and reconstruction loans were fully paid back by Britain only in December 2006 8212; irritated by American reservations about the imperial venture, overwhelmed by the Nehru-Jinnah fight, perplexed by the Mahatma, wary of Sardar Patel and with neither the resources nor the will to stop sectarian violence, the British establishment gave up India and gave up on India.

Tunzelmann8217;s great strength is fairness liberally mixed with irreverence, topped up by research that is so clearly rigorous but which sits ever so lightly on her story. She manages to exactly convey both the immense importance of the enterprise of giving India her freedom and the shallowness and shabbiness that surrounded it. She8217;s too sophisticated a historian to have a ranking of who8217;s to blame most. But apart from Mountbatten Dickie to his friends, whom she almost lovingly dissects, some of her sharpest observations, at least by this reviewer8217;s reckoning, are reserved for the Mahatma. Gandhi8217;s relevance as India journeyed the last mile to freedom was no more than talismanic, and that symbol trumped substance was largely his own fault. Thank god for Nehru, you feel as you read Tunzelmann8217;s shiningly fair-minded assessment of all members of the cast.

Nehru-Edwina? Tunzelmann8217;s publishers have given the 8220;clandestine love affair8221; top billing. Note to loyal Congressmen and other custodians of Indian history, you will not find a more graceful, fair, humorous, essentially sympathetic interpretation of what transpired between India8217;s first prime minister and her last vicereine. It could have been even better, but the author tells us that neither the Nehru-Gandhis nor the Mountbattens released Nehru-Edwina correspondence held in the two families8217; private archives. That is truly a pity.

It would be a pity as well if this book is read and praised mostly for its wonderful pen portraits 8212; Tunzelmann tells us that Mountbatten was instrumental in getting Prince Phillip, then an impoverished minor Greek royal, engaged to the young girl who became Queen Elizabeth; at a yacht party the young man 8220;impressed the princesses by being able to jump high and eat an abnormal quantity of shrimp, though not simultaneously8221;. There8217;s en eye for detail, proof of superb archival work, and wonderful irreverence about men and women who make history in that sentence. And the book is fairly packed with sentences like that.

This will distract from the author8217;s other, more important achievement: she provides the solid base from which to speculate how India might have fared had some decisions gone the other way. My favourite speculation is this. America was sympathetic to India and alarmed over communism when the 8220;tryst with destiny8221; began. Nehru was impressed by left radicalism and friendly to the USSR and China. What if this polished, sophisticated democrat also subscribed to liberal economic values and saw through the tyranny of the nomenklatura that was communism? What if, while never agreeing with everything the Americans said or did, newly independent India chose the other side in what was soon to become the Cold War? America took to Pakistan, as Tunzelmann shows, because its geo-strategy was threatened by India8217;s ambiguity to the 8220;free world8221;. If India8217;s first post-independent diplomacy was different, where would India be today? It8217;s a delicious contemplation for this reviewer. Readers may well have different takes, but whatever your politics, Tunzelmann8217;s history will provoke you into thinking about your country.

Criticism? Well, the last bit, looking at the subcontinent now, is weak by the standards of the rest of the book. There8217;s a hurried, newspapery feel to Tunzelmann8217;s precis on modern India and not so modern, as she says, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Concluding thought? When will an Indian historian write a book like this? Sixty years after the Brits left, they are still writing the best books on British India. Nehru would have been appalled. Dickie and Edwina too.

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