Edwina and Nehru: Love in the Shadow of Empire
The British Raj’s last vicereine and India’s first prime minister shared a profound connection that still captures imaginations today.
Sometime in 1952, Edwina Mountbatten was hospitalized after a hemorrhage. Afraid she might die, she passed on her most valuable treasure to her husband for safekeeping: a stack of letters from her friend, or perhaps paramour, Jawaharlal Nehru. “I think I understand him, and perhaps he me, as well as any human beings can ever understand each other,” she wrote to her husband.
Edwina didn’t die that year, and neither did her marriage. Dickie, as friends and family called Louis, wrote back to her: “I’m glad you realize that I know and have always understood the very special relationship between Jawaharlal and you.”
Historian Andrew Lownie narrates this vignette in his book The Mountbattens: Their Lives & Loves, exemplifying what the last viceroy of India and the first prime minister of India had in common. And it wasn’t just the keys to the future of the Indian subcontinent. In addition to Louis Mountbatten’s role in India’s Partition, what has sustained interest over the decades — sometimes as salacious gossip, at others as a weapon to undermine Nehru’s legacy — has been Nehru and Edwina’s special relationship.