- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Radhakrishna N S
By Amit Roy
BARRISTER and QC Marina Wheeler has given her support to the National Trust which is under attack from a section of the Conservative party for publishing a report on the colonial or slave trading links of nearly 100 of the houses that it looks after.
She told Eastern Eye in an exclusive interview: “I absolutely think the National Trust, as many other great British institutions – the British Museum, cultural galleries – need to look at our history.”
“I don’t think it’s right to say this is somehow off limits,” she added. “All of us are going through this period where we are rethinking history, and I don’t see why the National Trust should be separate from that. What it chooses to do with that investigation is another question.”
Marina has just put down the history of how her own Sikh family was caught up in the Partition of India in The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab. She urged British society to be “a little braver about tackling empire and colonialism as a subject.
“I see that both ways. We just need a more sober look at it – neither a preconception of deep shame nor a preconception of celebration. In truth for the health of the nation, we need to have an adult conversation about it.”
She has been commendably open about her own family’s sometimes painful history. Marina, who comes across as a gentle and thoughtful person and is clearly much loved by her many Indian relatives, said: “I’ve tried in the book to give us as neutral an account as I can while flagging up the areas of debate.”
Her mother, Kuldip – shortened to Dip (pronounced Deep) – was born in what is now Pakistan in November 1932 and grew up in Sarghoda in western Punjab. She was 14 at the time of Partition when she had to flee across the new border with her parents and siblings to seek safety in Delhi.
Marina has tried to tell the bigger story of perhaps the biggest population displacement in modern history through that of her mother, who died, aged 88, at the end of February at her home in the village of Warnham, near Horsham, West Sussex. Marina’s father, the BBC journalist Sir Charles Wheeler, died at the age of 85 in 2008. The couple, who married in Delhi on March 26, 1961, had two daughters, Shirin and Marina.
Dip’s first marriage was an arranged affair at 17 to author and journalist Khushwant Singh’s younger brother, Daljit, 10 years her senior. In fact, two sisters married two brothers – Dip’s elder sister, Amarjit, was already married to Khushwant’s elder brother, Bhagwant, son of the famous builder Sir Sobha Singh. But Dip’s marriage was not a success and she showed great courage by walking out within five years – not a done thing in the 1950s.
It was while working as a social secretary at the Canadian embassy in Delhi that Dip met Charles, who was the BBC’s star correspondent based in India. A painting of Dip as a beautiful young woman by MF Husain now hangs in the home of Natwar Singh, former Indian deputy high commissioner in London and later external affairs minister.
After stints in America and in Europe, Charles and Dip built a happy life together with Shirin and Marina at their country home in Sussex.
Marina married Boris Johnson in 1993, and during their 25-year-marriage, had four children – Lara, Milo, Cassia and Theodore. The children helped their mother with her research and even accompanied her on her trips. There were two to Pakistan and at least six to India.
She has now recovered after treatment for cancer. Having started research on the book, Marina writes that “six months into all this, after three trips to India and the first to Pakistan, my life hit turbulence, ending my marriage of 25 years”.
Asian readers, especially younger British Asians, will find they gain fresh insight into their own identifies from her book. There is also what Marina refers to as “shared history” between Britain on the one hand and India, Pakistan and the subcontinent on the other.
Marina feels that in going on a journey to try to find the home in Sarghoda where her mother grew up, she has learnt a great deal about her own history. The property was a single-storey structure with a wide veranda, a central courtyard and “formal rooms with high ceilings and marble floors”. She did not find “the lost homestead” – it has long since disappeared – but the Government Girls High School, where Miss Salek, a Christian convert, was the headmistress, still exists after 70 years.
At Partition, Sarghoda went to Pakistan. Although its population was mainly Sikh, it also had mosques, temples and churches. “What my mother said was there was this sense that the country was falling apart,” said Marina. “Civil war was a true fear. And that this sort of power vacuum and talk and discussion and procrastination was leading to a social breakdown. At the time, Partition was seen as a way of dealing with that.”
British Asians probably will not find it too difficult to navigate Marina’s extensive family network. Her maternal grandparents, Sardar Bahadur Harabans Singh (Papaji), a doctor, a pillar of the local community and quite pro-British in his leanings, and Ranjit Kaur (Beiji) had five children, including Dip, the youngest.
The eldest, Amarjit (born 1917) herself had four children – Pami, Sati, Tejbir (Jugnu) and Geeta.
Another daughter Anup (born 1923) is the mother of Subhag, Kamalbir and Raji.
After the first son, Gurbaksh, also known as Bakshi (born 1928), there is a second, Pritam (Priti, born 1930), the father of Deepa, Simmi, Karan and Gayatri.
That makes 11 first cousins for Marina, who says: “Easy. After that, we’d work our way down to my 20 nieces and nephews.”
Many of them, along with assorted friends and acquaintances, chipped in with information and ideas for her book. The Lost Homestead has been published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, and in India last Friday (20) by Hachette. The book’s cover is a family photograph with Marina on her grandfather’s lap, Shirin on her grandmother’s, with Charles and Dip at the back.
“I have always, unambiguously, loved my Indian family,” writes Marina.
The book came about after she had reviewed Gurinder Chadha’s 2017 film about Partition, Viceroy’s House. A publisher asked her whether she had “considered writing a book”. She began talking to her mother, who had previously shut out the past, so painful were many of the memories. After 1972, Dip stopped going to India.
Marina told Eastern Eye: “I’m glad to have this moment of the book coming out, but obviously sad that my mother isn’t around to see it. However, she shines through it, I hope. She died at the end of February. So I had a little time to make some further tweaking. In essence she read it, which was great. She just didn’t see it actually being produced.”
She has also gained a new understanding of herself. “Absolutely I think I am changed,” she enthused. “My life is certainly enriched by both the greater understanding of India and Pakistan and that history, but also a greater understanding of my mother and her personal journey – the courage that she had to leave her first marriage and the determination she had to build something else. And also the way she brought so much to their shared life together with my father.
“I also feel enriched by being able with my mother to go over some of her life in India for the last two years of her life. I think because of the book that brought her a kind of peace as well – a sort of reconciliation in a way.”
Marina records that her mother “never encouraged Shirin or me to build a close connection with India. Her explanation when challenged by relatives was that she wanted to spare us a ‘confused identity’”.
She now favours a different explanation: “I had always assumed that the reason she kept ‘India’ away from us was because she was somehow angry that she had been forced into this arranged marriage. It turned out that wasn’t it at all. It turned out it was more of a feeling of pain and the loss of having left India. What I’m trying to do in the book is all about nuances.”
Her mother “felt she had let down her parents-in-law, but she was clear that she couldn’t stay (in the marriage). That made the whole experience in India more complicated. That doesn’t mean it was wrong to leave India. But that departure also brought with it pain and sorrow. And the way she dealt with that was to just essentially block it off.
“I wouldn’t judge that as right or wrong. That’s how she coped with something that was very difficult in her life. But I’m very pleased that now I’m able to make my own choice and discover a lot more about the place she came from.”
In fact, she has been considering whether she should get an OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) card, to which she is entitled as Dip’s daughter.
She remembers attending a “khadi poppy” lecture at the London School of Economics that focused on the Indian and Commonwealth contribution to the First World War.
She was “very struck by a woman, who stood up at the end and said, ‘Having grown up here, I had no idea this wasn’t just a white war, that Indian troops had a role in this and that it’s our history, too.’”
That resonated with Marina. “I feel very strongly it is important for all of us here (in the UK) to understand better that this is a shared history of people – from India, from the subcontinent – who are here. Their parents came here years ago; many came much more recently.
“But I think the point is not to always be looking at differences but to find the common shared experiences, certainly of the First World War, the Second World War. In both conflicts Britain and the Commonwealth were fighting for freedom and democracy. I think that is a very important thing to underline.”
On one of her trips to Pakistan, she carried a card on which her mother, who had learnt Urdu as a schoolgirl in Sarghoda, had scribbled a few lines from the poet, Muhammad Iqbal.
“I took it but I did not pay it a lot of attention,” admitted Marina. “But then it’s part of her whole experience and being in Pakistan. I looked at it and then I started to know who Iqbal was and I saw his tomb and it just all came together. That was a very poignant thing, this little bit of card that she had scribbled this Urdu on – she couldn’t have written Urdu for decades.”
A loose translation was: “Develop the self so that before every decree God will ascertain from you: ‘What is your wish?’”
Her mother later explained: “I understood it to mean that you shape your own fate. It isn’t just mapped out for you.”
“I started out trying to be as neutral and dispassionate as I could be about the history,” Marina said. “But it was a very emotional and completely fascinating experience writing the book. I don’t pretend to have or aspire to find an answer to many of these difficult historical questions. But I certainly feel I understand the discussion in a way that I never had before. And I understand the role of emotion I got through discussions with some of my cousins who appear in the book.”
Sometimes, on landmark historical events such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, Marina, reflecting the British point of view, and her cousins, the Indian, got into spirited debate, though email exchanges were signed with expressions of “love”. She was, after all, family.
Her view of the role played by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the British judge sent to India in 1947 and given barely five weeks to partition the country, is not the conventional one. The view in India is that Radcliffe, who had not set foot in the country before and knew nothing about cartography, botched up the job of drawing lines on a map in creating the new state of Pakistan.
Marina is sympathetic to the thesis put forward by the American academic Lucy Chester that “Radcliffe’s line, rushed and inexpert as it was, may in fact have minimised the violence”.
Radcliffe was advised by four Indian judges – two Muslim, one Hindu and a Sikh, Marina said. “What I found interesting – reading some of the transcripts of the hearings held in Lahore in the high court – was how polarised the arguments were between those for the Muslim League and the different parties on the Indian side. They were arguing for a line being drawn there…. or there. In the end, it was sort of drawn somewhere in the middle. All I’m saying about Radcliffe is the idea that he just turned up one day and went bang – drew a line – is too simplistic a view of the history.”
She added: “I’m using him as an as an example of a historical figure who has been drawn in two dimensions. He was asked to do such an extraordinary thing. He was given the brief of coming and drawing that line, creating two separate states. That decision was not his. It was a decision taken by [Lord] Mountbatten (the viceroy) in collaboration with the Indian leaders, [Jawaharlal] Nehru, [Muhammad Ali] Jinnah, Baldev Singh.
“My point is all the focus is on Radcliffe. But that’s not, in my view, the right way to look at it. If he had another two years, would he have actually drawn the line in any other place? Scholars, when they look at it, think probably not. He was trying to balance the interests that were essentially irreconcilable.”
The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab. By Marina Wheeler (Hodder & Stoughton; £25).
