The summer of 1947 has always been a two-sided coin in India and Pakistan: on the sunny side political independence - free! free at last! - and the departure of the British, on the grim side the millions that partition made homeless and the hundreds of thousands who were stabbed, shot, stoned, beaten, raped and burned to death.
It sounds callous to say so, but this mixture of light and deep shade, the ecstasy and the agony, etc, is a gift to the narrative historian, more so when the five characters at the centre of the stage spent so much time hating or intriguing against or loving each other as they tried to surmount the formidable difficulties of liberating a vastly complicated country and turning it into two, and at top speed. Mahatma Gandhi, by this time a rather irritating saint; Louis Mountbatten, a dreadful showman with, as his prime minister Attlee said, a Ruritanian aspect; Mohammad Ali Jinnah austerely demanding his unworkable state; Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten holding hands in the shrubbery.
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This is familiar territory. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre had a popular success with Freedom at Midnight (though they believed Mountbatten's version of events too readily) and all five principals have been the subjects of extensive biographies. Still, Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: the Secret History of the End of an Empire (Simon & Schuster, £20) is lively and filled with good anecdotes, and she is fair to some vexed questions, including Kashmir and Mountbatten's culpability for the slaughter of partition. She is also persuasive on Edwina's political importance to her complaisant husband, who was a bear of a smaller brain.
The one thing her book is not is a 'secret history'. The last big secrets are still locked in the archives that contain the letters between Edwina and Nehru, and von Tunzelmann is yet another writer who has failed to persuade their caretakers to part with the key. 
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FIRST POSTED JULY 12, 2007
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