INTERVIEW | PAMELA MOUNTBATTEN
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'Edwina-Nehru affair got Kashmir deal done'
Published on Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 21:22, Updated on Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 23:18 in 
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Pamela Mountabatten, the daughter of Lord Mountbatten, writes of the passionate relationship between her mother Edwina and India's first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru in her book India Remembered. On Devil's Advocate, Karan Thapar questions her on the affair and how it could have influenced India's history.
Karan Thapar: Hello and welcome to Devil's Advocate. Lord Mountbatten's daughter. Lady Pamela has written a book India Remembered about the time she spent in the country when her father was the last Viceroy and the first Governor General. I shall talk to Lady Pamela about her memories of Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Lady Pamela, let’s start with the subject that everyone is most curious about: the relationship between your mother Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru. In your introduction you write: "…towards the end of the 15 months we spent in India, the immediate attraction between my mother and Pandit ji blossomed into love". What do you mean by love?
Lady Pamela: I mean a very deep love. The kind of love that the old knights of old, a chivalric love really. Now days everybody assumes that it has to be a carnal love, but you can have just as deep an emotional love with two like souls in a way, people who really grow to understand each other, and to be able to listen to each other and to complement each other and find solace in each other.
Karan Thapar: In your book you write with incredible candour: "my mother had already had lovers, my father was inured to it" but then you add: "the relationship with Nehru remained platonic."Can you be really sure of that?
Lady Pamela: I was with them most of the time. We called it a gooseberry. It was very awkward for them, you know, if I was around the whole time. I would say yes, anyway Nehru was a very honorable man who liked my father. There was a great affection between the two, and it was nearly always in my father's houses either in England or in India that they were together, and I think he would have never dishonoured his friends, you know.
Karan Thapar: But you know at the time, and even afterwards, people have speculated about it to say that the friendship went a lot further. Did this speculation hurt your father? Did he ever object to the fact that he must have known behind his back people were joking possibly about the Viceroy being cuckolded?
Lady Pamela: I think it shows what confidence he had and how he was correct in that. My mother died in Borneo, working for Save the Children Fund and St. John Ambulance Brigade, and she died suddenly in the middle of her work. And on her bedside table was a packet of Pandit ji's letters. And in her will we found she had left the whole collection of letters to my father and they were an enormous number, there were suitcases full of these letters. And after, when we found that she'd left these letters to him, he asked me to read them. He said he was ninety nine percent sure there was nothing that would wound him or worry him or diminish him in any way. But there was just that one percent of doubt fluttering in his heart and he said darling will you read them first. And so I read them and they were wonderful letters, but nothing at all that would have distressed my father.
Karan Thapar: Were you yourself at all apprehensive? Did you as a daughter, perhaps a younger generation, think maybe there'd be a sentence, a stray phrase that might give the game away?
Lady Pamela: No, I didn't. Because also I think I didn't really attach the sexual importance to the whole affair that other people did. To me they were two amazing people whose place in history was considerable. What they did, I thought that was the important thing about them. And I loved them both very much, and I wasn't particularly interested if they were tumbling around in bed together. And I was certain they weren't
Karan Thapar: As I said there was a lot of speculation at the time and undoubtedly this must have been the source of jokes which people hid from you, but your father was very generous and understanding. In a letter you quote in your book he wrote to your sister Patricia "she" meaning Edwina, "and Jawahar Lal are so sweet together. They really dote on each other. Pammy and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and helpful." Was it easy to be as tactful as he makes it seem?. It couldn't have been quite that easy?
Lady Pamela: Yes, very easy. Very easy, indeed. We just had to go out of the room!
Karan Thapar: So there were moments when he felt I ought to just leave them alone?
Lady Pamela: Yes, but they were both fully dressed sitting on a sofa in the study or something.
Karan Thapar: There was no tinge of jealousy or perhaps of hurt emotion?
Lady Pamela: No, because I think he trusted them both. And also, my mother was so happy with Jawaharlal, she knew she was helping him at a time when it's very lonely at the pinnacle of power. It really is. And if she could help, and my father knew that it helped her, because a woman can, after a long marriage, and they had had their silver wedding, so they'd been over twenty five years together, a woman can feel perhaps frustrated, and perhaps neglected if somebody's working terribly hard. And so if a new affection comes into her life, a new admiration, she blossoms and she's happy.
Karan Thapar: So both of them in a sense fulfilled a need, both Jawahar Lal and Edwina needed each other.
Lady Pamela: I think they did, and my father understood that need and of course it made my mother, who could be quite difficult at times, as many very extraordinary women can be, and yet when she was so happy with everybody, it was lovely to be with her. There were no prickles.
Karan Thapar: You have a lovely phrase in your book, you say " there existed a happy threesome based on some firm understanding on all sides." What was the firm understanding, not to probe too deeply, just in case you stumbled on something you didn't want to?
Lady Pamela: No, I think that there were no doubts. That my father was convinced that it was just a friendship. That they would like to talk together and be together, and he was convinced that was all it was, and I was certainly convinced that was all it was.
Karan Thapar: Much of this friendship and affection , much of this relationship, actually lived its way in the letters they wrote each other. You reveal in your book that Pandit Nehru wrote to your mother practically every night at 2 o clock.
Lady Pamela: But the letters were, as I think I mentioned, they would have an endearment to begin with and, sadly always, that they were missing each other so much . They wouldn't see each other for six months at a time. And then probably they only saw each other twice in a year.
Karan Thapar: But there is a particular letter that Pandit ji wrote to your mother, where it seems quite obvious to anyone that he's just completely bowled over. He writes "…suddenly I realise that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force drew us to one another." Was he in a sense more in love, because he was a lonely man, than your mother maybe?
Lady Pamela: No, I don't think so. But again I think he is talking about the emotional more than the physical. I think suddenly they've realized that they were two souls together. Not necessarily two bodies together.
Karan Thapar: So all the speculation, that there was a physical side, is in fact unfair? Because its been referred to by historians, its been referred to by biographers, that's unfair?
Lady Pamela: Yes, I think, as I say I don't understand this obsession that people who have a deep emotion with each other must immediately have a physical relationship.
Karan Thapar: Except for the fact that its taken as simply usual today, everyone does.
Lady Pamela: But these were two very unusual people.
Karan Thapar: But Pandit ji was a widower, he needed female affection, he must have wanted it. Your mother was alluring and beautiful, they were so close to each other, it would be natural for the emotional to become sexual.
Lady Pamela: It could be, and maybe everybody will think I'm being very naive, but the fact that she had had lovers in the past, somehow this was so different, it really was. And the letters, I mean if you were deeply, physically in love, your whole letter would be about the other person and your need of them physically, and it would be that kind of love letter. These letters had an opening paragraph of tenderness, and the end would be also tender and romantic and nice like that, but three quarters of the letter was unburdening himself of all his worries and his disappointments or his hopes and all his idealism coming out for the extraordinary time of India at her rebirth in history and it is the history of India as an independent nation.
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URBANEYE
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That was the best comment !!!!
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it was no secret that nehru a widower wanted women friends and the vily mountbatens utilised him.it solved their divide
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We are thankful to Pamela that the real reason behind India's problems has finally been revealed. Without Edwina in his
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Now that's something my 6th standard book didn't tell me. chahcaa Nehru was a womaniser. It's quite clear that Nehru
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Even if it's true, that Mountbatten used his wife's charms on Nehru, to affect the J&K policy as he wanted,
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