The Tumultuous Indian Journey of a British Prince in Love

CHENNAI: He was the future emperor of the country he was visiting, but the actual reason he was being sent was that the British press had gotten wind of his adulterous affair with a married woman. His fetish for other men’s wives would cost him heavily later in history.

His aide de camp was Mountbatten who was Queen Victoria’s great grandson. While he held a grand title, his purse was tiny and rather empty as well. The girl he loved – Edwina – was the granddaughter of a Jewish banker, who left her such an enormous inheritance that she received in a month 10 times what her husband earned in a year.

On October 26, 1921, Edward, Prince of Wales, left Portsmouth to begin a tour of the Indian sub-continent and Japan that covered 41,000 miles, lasting eight months. He spent four months in India, travelling from Bombay to Calcutta and then from Madras to Karachi.

The Indians were, till then, a faithful lot. There were 7,420 nautical miles of deep water between the emperor and them. Technically, too far for fealty or fear. But still When George V crowned himself the Emperor of India at the Delhi durbar, there was an outflow of spontaneous Indian loyalty. Madras even held a competition to write Carnatic songs to express its fidelity to him. The winning poem asked Lord Rama to safeguard the ‘chakravarthi’ and ‘chakravarthini’.

In a decade, his son Edward would visit India but would confront a whopping boycott, one the British royalty had never faced before. Historians would itemise two rationales. The Jallianwala Bagh had created an unbridgeable chasm between the rulers and the Indians. And the Indians had a new leader, a diminutive lawyer from South Africa, named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

After the Amritsar massacre, British politicians felt there was an “urgent necessity to cultivate a sense of unity” with its outlying parts of the empire and suggested sending the future king to the Indian sub-continent to relight the flame of loyalty.

The Prince of Wales was going on an educational tour to know his territory as King-Emperor later on. Gandhi, however, decided to teach him a different lesson. The people were asked to welcome their future king with silence, empty streets and shuttered shops. Gandhi had wanted to drop the prince a quiet hint, but his countrymen wanted something louder.

Those accompanying the prince were very lax in their words about the bitter Indian experience but not Mountbatten. Much of the inside details are obtained from ‘Dickie’, the aide de camp of the Prince. Dickie would, later as Lord Mountbatten, become the last Indian viceroy.

The Mountbatten-couple had left mountains of paper, cataloguing their romantic trail and the oldest letters tabulate the troubles in India. The royal family readily agreed mainly because they did not like the married woman Freda or the affair she was having with the Prince of Wales.

Snatched from his lover, Edward should have been able to banish cupid from his mind. The royal duo left for England thinking all was well in India. Indian soldiers lined up on either side of the Suez Canal and cheered the prince on.

On the Bombay docks, the prince expressed his desire to “appreciate at first hand all that India is, and has done, and can do”, not knowing how fateful his words would turn out to be in the next five months. From day one, there was a boycott and clashes between those welcoming the Prince and those opposed.

Edward was paraded through the Bombay’s city centre and ominously, Gandhi was lighting a bonfire of foreign cloth elsewhere. There were loyalists to the British throne, and then, there were those who stoned the attendants to the prince’s engagements. It degenerated into an orgy of violence with 53 people killed.

In most places, non-cooperation leaders were rounded up. The prince’s visit cost Rs 10 million with 20% spent on policing the population.

However, the Madras Government was confident that the loyal Madrasi would not tolerate the hartal. They arranged great receptions, firework shows and polo matches to ensure it. But they had guessed wrong too.

The story in the Tamil newspaper, Swadesamitran, put it bluntly: “When the Prince lands, it will be a trial for the Madras residents to show whether they possess a sense of self-respect or not. While many eminent people are suffering in jails, will you go witness fireworks and accord cheers?”

Gandhi had decided on 2 leaders who would lead the boycott with specific instruction: “Down the shutters and empty the streets, albeit peacefully.”

Both were very incredible men. The first was a doctor from Tiruchy, TSS Rajan, who had studied in the Royapuram Medical School, and had the honour of upgrading it to a medical college when he rose to be Health Minister. He had studied in London on a scholarship from the Burmese government and was ex-communicated by his orthodox brahmin community for crossing the seas. But he had a very interesting experience in London to compensate for that.

Ironically, the freedom movement was much more uninhibited to function in London than in India. In 1909, among the many intensely-patriotic who had gathered and were mentored by Savarkar and VVS Iyer, was the young medical student.

Deciding to hold a get-together of Indian students to spread the word, they proposed a subscription dinner consisting of a dinner and a post-meal talk. As many as 125 people signed up but most of the Indian politicians who were in London at that time refused to preside. The organisers settled on an unknown Indian barrister from South Africa. But he had an odd condition — the meal must be pure vegetarian.

The inspired volunteers went one step further and decided to cook Indian dishes by themselves. A few hours before the meeting, Rajan welcomed a thin wiry volunteer who was more than willing to do the odd jobs. He cleaned vegetables, washed vessels and plates and set the tables.

VVS Iyer would turn up an hour before the meeting and was stunned seeing the volunteer and chastised Rajan and the rest for having made the chief guest Mohandas Gandhi work in the kitchen. Dr Rajan had met the man who would inspire him for the rest of his life.

The other was Singaravelu who should have been the last person to take up the proletarian problems. He came from a reasonably wealthy family and had an urban upbringing. He had studied law and had a thriving practice. He was dabbling in labour politics of Madras, when Gandhi named him one of the two leaders of the non-cooperation movement in Madras to protest the Prince of Wales. An emotionally-charged Singaravelu burnt his lawyer coat on the High Court grounds to announce his renouncing of a prosperous career for the sake of national issues. Not very later, Singaravelu would celebrate the first May Day in India on the Marina Beach.

On Jan 13, 1922, the Prince landed in the harbour and drove straight to the government house. A simultaneous and unprecedented hartal closed down the Madras town, but there were clearly instances of compulsion. Throughout the royal route of three-and-a-half miles, there were only children of 50 schools who stood waving the British flag. Along with them were ex-service men and pensioners.

However, the two Indian leaders lost control of the hartal soon thereafter. There was a strike going on in the biggest mill in Madras – Buckingham Mills, and those protesting there joined as well.

The non-violent hartal malformed into hostility and chaos. Mountbatten recalled: “Policemen were stoned, cars and buildings vandalised, a crowd stormed a pavilion decorated with palms and British flags guarded by a solitary policeman. He was knocked down, the flags torn and stamped into the mud. A protestor’s body lay outside the vandalised Wellington theatre for a day. A protestor who aimed a brick at the taxi was mowed down by the driver.”

In addition, Justice Party leader Thyagaraja Chetti (after whom T Nagar is named), supporting the visit, had his house ransacked. However, he slipped out of the house and presented an address from the Municipality to the prince.

Home guards resorted to unprovoked firing, and at least two deaths and scores of injuries were reported.

Edward spent 4 days in Madras, two of them in the Guindy race course. One day, he played polo near St Thomas Mount. The government thoughtfully stocked the galleries with guides and scouts.

In another meeting 15,000 school students greeted their future emperor on the banks of the Cooum river. The royal visit was becoming embarrassingly a farce. Edward despaired: “The crowds, if there ever are any… are herded together into pens like sheep and guarded by constables.”

A party was held in the government house, which the British and the elite Indian crowd including princes and zamindars attended. The chandeliers above, the Indian ladies’ Kanjeevaram silk or the Rajahs’ diamonds could not uplift the mood of the party. The orchestra playing European music from behind a screen of plants could not drown the sounds of rioting from nearby Triplicane and Mount Road.

But far from being happy, the violence irked Gandhi, who in an article in Young India, criticised the hartal, and Singaravelu, for not imbibing the true spirit of the non-cooperation movement. Gandhi said it was a complete proof of non-co-operators not being fit for self-government in Madras. It’s not known how much this affected Gandhi, but on February 4, a mob in Chauri Chaura, a small town in Uttar Pradesh, stormed a police station and burned it to the ground, killing 22 policemen inside. Soon, he decided to abandon the civil disobedience campaign.

Historians say that freedom was almost within Gandhi’s reach at that moment but he decided to call off the agitation. If this was true, then India had to wait 25 years to get free.

After this visit, Edward literally lost interest in administration. His father lamented, “This guy is goners a year from my death.”

No prediction came truer. Within a year of his tenure as emperor, most of which he spent cruising in the Mediterranean, Edward abdicated to marry his lady love. Technically, his weakness – another man’s wife.

But there were gains.Mountbatten’s psyche of India changed forever. Little would he have known he would return to this country and sign its freedom deed a quarter century later. He turned out to be the most sympathetic of the governor generals.