Marina Wheeler - The Lost Homestead

Contents

Marina Wheeler is a barrister and was appointed Queens Counsel in 2016. Practising from One Crown Office Row Chambers, she specialises in public and human rights law and also teaches mediation and conflict resolution.

She co-authored The Civil Practitioners Guide to the Human Rights Act and writes regularly for the UK Human Rights blog as well as national newspapers, usually on legal subjects. This is her first non-legal book.

Marina lives in east London.

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Marina Wheeler 2020

The right of Marina Wheeler to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: From authors collection

Photographs: Insert, page 16 Imogen Forte. All other photographs are from the authors collection.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 9781473677777

Hardback ISBN 9781473677746

Trade Paperback ISBN 9781473677777

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For my parents, Dip and Charles.

The seventieth anniversary of Indian Independence and Partition was commemorated in the summer of 2017. To mark the moment, British director Gurinder Chadha released a feature film, Viceroys House , about these events. A newspaper editor who knew that my mother Dip (pronounced Deep) had lived through Partition asked me to review it.

I took my youngest child Theo (then studying A-Level History) to the press screening in Soho. As Id hoped, he found the film interesting, but he thought the sub-plot line was cheesy and the acting a little bit patchy. I did my best with the review. I praised the film for trying to convey the impact on ordinary families of the momentous decisions taken by the departing British and the Indian leaders. To this I added a flavour of what Id learnt from my mother, about her privileged life in colonial Punjab and the palatial home that she lost.

But aside from quibbles about acting and plot, I was troubled by something more serious: how the film dealt with the foundational, historical question: why Partition? The answer, it claimed, was that, unbeknown to Lord Mountbatten, the outgoing Viceroy, Britain had a secret plan to partition the country, to secure oil supplies and advance its own geopolitical interests in the brewing Cold War with Soviet Russia.

Really? This didnt tally with what Dip had told me or anything Id read (which, at that stage, was not a great deal). But if it wasnt true, why would the film say that it was? I understand people can perceive the same events in radically different ways. But allowing for interpretation, judgement and opinion, there is still a place for hard fact. Did any serious historians support the secret plan thesis? I wanted to know.

A few weeks later, I received a letter from a publisher who had read my review and asked if I had considered writing a book expanding its themes? I cradled the letter and looked out of my window. In the morning sun, above the trees in St Jamess Park, the gilded face of Big Ben glistened while ostentatiously marking the passage of time. Interesting idea, I thought, but impractical really.

Still, I decided to run it by Cassia, my third child (out of four). She hadnt yet started university, so she was around. She was keen on the idea. For months I had talked vaguely about writing a book. Perhaps something linked to my legal work, for the general reader, maybe on mediation or the law of armed conflict. This book, Cassia said, would be more interesting.

Her next point went to the heart of the matter: to my mother, known to her grandchildren as Nani. In the decade since my father Charles died, Dip had lived alone. Offers to move in with me or my sister Shirin, with our families in London, were always firmly refused. For forty-plus years we had had a family home in Sussex and thats where she was staying, she said.

Nani is getting on, Cassia observed. You want to spend more time with her and she needs your help too. She has a good story to tell, so this is your chance. Who knows what might happen? If you faff around, shell get too old to tell it.

Cassia knew that, after a diagnosis of cancer, Charless decline had been fast. Shirin and I would sit with a pad and note down his stories. But we didnt get very far. He was finishing a radio programme for the BBC to mark the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet fifty years earlier, an event he had reported when posted in India. The evening before it was recorded, Shirin helped him check over the script. The following (heart-rending) day, I went with him to Broadcasting House. He struggled for breath (my job was to administer oxygen from a portable tank). Old colleagues and admirers gathered to well, pay their respects. So I knew my daughter was right. In these situations theres no time like the present.

I had other reasons to embark on this project, which I kept to myself. I was run ragged. I had recently become a Queens Counsel, but had not yet found space to develop my practice. I had moved my large family into this gracious government flat and filled every antique dresser with our unruly clutter. Perhaps, I thought, while I work out my role in all this, I could do with a less punishing pace

So I decided to tell Dips story. Of course, though I was slow to grasp it, it is also my story.

We are a growing number, we for whom the question Where are you from? causes discomfort. It doesnt offend me. I dont mind when a taxi or Uber driver asks it, having glanced in the mirror and concluded, presumably, that I look a little bit foreign. The question is only unsettling because I have never really known how to reply.

With light-ish skin and dark hair, I could be Mediterranean. Add the name Marina into the mix and the assumption is that Im Greek.

There was a mantra I used to trot out. My mother is Indian, I would say, but shes not from India exactly; she was born in whats now Pakistan, in a place called Sargodha not far from Lahore.

Sometimes, this prompted an excited follow-up question, So you are Punjabi? My heart would then sink. My answer could only disappoint. Technically yes, well half-Punjabi at least, but I have never been to the Punjab and dont speak the language or any Indian languages, as a matter of fact.

Many Indians who settled in the UK came with their whole families, leaving no one behind on the subcontinent. Naturally, their ties became loosened. But thats not our set-up at all. We have plenty of family in India in Delhi and in Mumbai. Which makes my detachment all the more puzzling.

My cousins used to chastise my mother for failing to teach us our roots or how to converse in Punjabi or Hindi. But I dont think thats fair. Dip had her reasons. I just never really knew what they were. Just as I never knew why, after 1972, she stopped visiting India.