Edwina-Nehru’s romance, Tagore’s Argentina Infatuation

Who can say it better than Shakespeare when describing a love meant to happen…
“When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.”

India is never boring. Recently, two controversial ‘secret romance’ stories on public figures has been published. Reason: the private love lives of two historical public figures are being filmed, one by a British producer and one by an Argentina producer; ‘no love please, it is Nehru’ or ‘no gestures or words of love or affection either, please’. A few objections, as quoted lately in a magazine on these two love stories. It is about two personalities in Indian history, two freedom fighters, one a political figure, another a poet.

Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime minister after independent India, the handsome lover, lonesome widower, the man who penned eloquent letter to the woman he loved- wife of Indian’s last viceroy, Edwina Mountbatten…Rabindranath Tagore, sage-like poet-laureate, Asia’s first Nobel prize winner on literature in 1913, handsome, bearded, dressed in non-Western clothes, a lonely man, who lost his wife at a very young age, was attracted to intelligent women, to Victoria Ocampo, an Argentina to whom he dedicated his last intense thoughts on paper before dying...

Edwina-Nehru
Jawahar Nehru, statesman, visionary, Uncle Nehru, the man who doted on children. A loving father, who wrote letters to his daughter Indira Gandhi, while in prison, a committed socialist and architect of modern India, this and more...he is still being worshipped as a God in India. His romantic relationship with Edwina was never really a secret, still it is ‘not done’ to talk about it in India . In Indian history, nothing is ever mentioned about this ‘so-called’ relationship. Their famous trip to Mashobra, Himachal Pradesh is still vivid in some minds: ‘Edwina and Jawahar met early every morning in the garden. They drove together along the Tibet Road stopping for picnics in the woods. They stayed up late and alone after Dickie (Lord Mountbatten) and Pamela (their daughter) had retired to bed. When Jawahar came to see Edwina in her room, he somehow upset an inkstand. They were both too busy mopping it up to be abashed….’. After her return to England , Jawahar wrote to Edwina that he could still sense her ‘fragrance on the air’ and that he read and re-read her letters. ‘I lose myself in dreamland which is very unbecoming in a Prime Minister’. Edwina’s daughter Pamela says that her mother’s relationship with Nehru was ‘more platonic’ than anything else. ‘Their relationship had worked because it allowed both Jawahar and Edwina their own private space; but suddenly being together around the clock did not seem so undesirable after all. The intensity of their feelings both exhilarated and frightened them…..’

Edwina Mountbatten and Jawahar Nehru found perfect soulmates in each other in each other. Nehru was a widower and Indira Gandhi, his daughter was married and living with her husband, with Nehru almost at the helm of affairs finding solace in a relationship which ’supposedly’ crossed levels of the physical and transcended into something greater. What is even more astounding is the stance of Lord Mountbatten who daughter Pamela reveals confided thus to friends

‘She (Edwina) and Jawaharlal are so sweet together, they really dote on each other in the nicest way and Pammy (Mountbatten’s daughter) and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and help – Lord Mountbatten’

Breaking out from the shackled, conservative mindset must have been quite a task. Lord Mountbatten’s love for his wife bespoke of ‘true love’ where he had accepted her from the deepest core of his heart with all her fads and foibles.
Pamela’s analysis further strengthened by her presence at the time these events took place, helped her in providing for posterity a tale which seems improbable but the authenticity cannot be denied.

‘My mother was so happy with Jawaharlal, she knew that she was helping him at a time when it’s lonely at the pinnacle of power, it really is, and if she could help, and my father knew that it helped her, because a woman can after a long marriage feel frustrated and perhaps neglected if somebody’s working terribly hard. And so if a new affection comes into her life, a new admiration, she blossoms and she is happy’.

That Lord Mountbatten had perfectly understood the relationship and the tenor of its purpose was clear. Edwina died in her sleep at age 58, in 1960. What more proof as to the equation the threesome shared than the fact that Edwina bequeathed the letters from Nehru in her will to her husband. He knew that she knew that there would be nothing in them to disturb him.

Victoria’Bijaya’ -Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore, a mystical, magical world known poet, beautiful to look at, restless and an indefatigable globe-trotter. Rabindranath came from a family, who owned estates mostly in what is now called Bangladesh. His personal life was, in many ways, an unhappy one. He married in 1883, lost his wife in 1902, and never remarried. He sought close companionship, which he did not always get. Even during his married life, he wrote to his wife, Mrinalini: ‘If you and I could be comrades in all our work and in all our thoughts it would be splendid, but we cannot attain all that we desire’. He maintained a warm friendship with, and a strong platonic attachment to, the literature-loving wife of his elder brother, Kadambari. He dedicated some poems to her before his marriage and several books afterward, some after her death at the age of twenty-five, four months after Rabindranath's wedding…

Much later in life Rabindranath met the very beautiful Victoria Ocampo. A highly cultured, high society, talented young woman, feminist and writer, born into an aristocratic Argentinean family. She was married in 1912 and was divorced in 1922. To free herself of the oppression of loneliness, she sought refuge in the world of her favourite writers and literature. She read Tagore’s ‘Gitanjali’ in 1914; it moved her deeply. She said ‘it fell like celestial dew on my anguishing 24-year heart’. In 1924 she wrote a book called: ‘The Joy of Reading Tagore’, which was set for publication a few days after Tagore’s entrance in South-America, Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina.

Tagore set to travel to Peru, in September 1924, to celebrate its independency. During his travel he fell ill and when arriving at Buenos Aires on November the 7 th , the doctor's advice prevented his proceeding to Peru . Soon after his arrival he met the 34-year-old ravishing beauty, Victoria Ocampo. She offered her villa San Isidro for his recovery…a bond was forged.

They became close friends, but it appears that Rabindranath deflected the possibility of a passionate relationship into a confined intellectual one. His friend Leonard Elmhirst, who accompanied Rabindranath on his Argentine tour, wrote:
‘Besides having a keen intellectual understanding of his books, she was in love with him—but instead of being content to build a friendship on the basis of intellect, she was in a hurry to establish that kind of proprietary right over him which he absolutely would not brook’.

Tagore spent almost three months in the garden house in San Isidro with Victoria . The memory of the garden and the piazza had become indelible in Tagore's mind. Years later, he wrote from Santiniketan, "... Time and again, my mind flies back to that verandah in San Isidro . I still recall quite vividly the exquisite festival of red and blue flowers glittering in the morning sun. And the endless display of colors atop that great river." One of Tagore’s most famous songs starts “I know you, foreigner” and goes on to say “I have seen you in the middle of the heart… I have heard your song when I listened to the sky, I have dedicated my life to you… I have come to you after roaming the world, I am a guest at your doorstep.”

It is no secret that Tagore enjoyed Victoria’s company and was very much attracted by her. Their relationship was a very sensitive one. He named her by the Bengali equivalent of her name, Bijaya and dedicated the poems he wrote in Argentina to her under the title Purabi. He wrote to Bijaya, "I am sending you this book written in Bengali. I would have preferred to give it to you personally. It has been dedicated to you, even though you will not know what is contained in it. I trust it will spend more days at your side than did its author." Many years later, in 1939, he wrote, "... Those unforgettable days, and her tender and compassionate care have been enshrined in my poems; they may well be among the best I have written." Tagore had expressed the desire to return to Buenos Aires several times, but due to political turmoil back home, which afflicted his mind deeply, probably prevented him. 

His affection for Victoria can best be understood from the following poem:’I can but litter your life with the torn shreds of my pain, and keep you awake at night with the moan of my lonely dreams. It is better that I remain speechless and help you to forget me’.
In a letter to Rani Chanda, Tagore wrote, ‘Bijaya would discuss various subjects with me. Often she would complain, why did you not learn any Spanish, I cannot explain everything to you in English. I too would deeply regret my ignorance of Spanish.’ It was this barrier of languages that contributed to Tagore's inability to assimilate or comprehend Latin culture. From the ship on his return trip, he wrote to Bijaya: ‘...
I have not the energy and strength needed for knowing a strange country and helping the mind gather materials from a wide area of new experience for building its foreign nest ... For me, the spirit of Latin America will ever dwell in my memory incarnate in your person.’

They wrote letters to each others for fifteen years; ‘Gurudev ( thousands times dear…), I must admit that I miss you too much. It is becoming quite uncomfortable, quite inconvenient, because I can’t think of anything else…’ , Bijaya would reply. In his poem Exotic Blossom, he wrote: 

‘Exotic Blossom, I whispered again in your ear
What is your language, dear?
You smiled and shook your head
And the leaves murmured instead’.

In April 1941, only months before his death, he directly addresses to Bijaya, which appears as the fifth poem in Shesh Lekha or The Last Words :

Her language I knew not
Her eyes that spoke a language of their own
Forever shall awaken in my mind
Their plaintive message, though unknown.

How I wish I could once again find my way to that foreign land
where waits for me the message of love!
Her language I knew not,
but what her eyes said
will forever remain eloquent in its anguish...


Rabindranath Tagore died on August 7, 1941.