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Away from this excitement, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs attacked each other, sparking migrations of terrified refugees. Two million were killed in a frenzy of slaughter, rape and arson. Trains of refugees arrived with every single passenger already slaughtered. Over ten million people moved homes in the largest single migration in history. As the killing started, Gandhi, his life’s work covered in blood, threatened to fast to death, while Nehru filled his residence with refugees, saying, ‘I know, mere bhai [my brother], it is my sorrow too.’ When Indira saw a Muslim about to be lynched, she dismounted from her train and shouted at the mob, overawing them into releasing him.

Nehru was determined to seize as much of India as possible. Kashmir, Muslim but ruled by a Hindu maharaja, was strategically vital, but to Nehru, descended from Kashmiri pandits, it was like ‘some supremely beautiful woman’. In October, Muslim Pathans and Pakistani troops invaded, prompting the maharaja to agree that Kashmir should accede to India, allowing him to request troops. Four days later, Nehru sent in his army.

When Gandhi arrived in Delhi, Nehru, as well as Indira and her elder son Rajiv, aged three, visited him nightly. On 30 January 1948, the day after Indira and Rajiv visited, Gandhi, walking as usual to prayers, was shot thrice in the chest by a Hindu nationalist, linked to the paramilitary RSS. Nehru rushed to Gandhi’s Birla House, falling to his knees beside the tiny body, sobbing. That night, to calm the growing crowds surrounding his house, Gandhi’s body was sat up and illuminated on the roof. ‘The light has gone out of our lives,’ said Nehru, ‘and there’s darkness everywhere.’

The love between Nehru and Edwina intensified in the last months. ‘We talked more intimately as if some veil had been removed,’ wrote Nehru in May 1948, ‘and we could look into each other’s eyes without fear or embarrassment.’ Whether it was sexual or not matters little. Sometimes it caused tensions with Nehru’s younger sister, Krishna: ‘Edwina could do no wrong …’ When Nehru told her off for wearing too much jewellery, she replied, ‘You don’t get angry with Edwina, in fact you keep admiring her jewellery …’ Edwina wept when the Mountbattens left India; Nehru wandered through her rooms in the Viceroy’s House to ‘lose myself in dreamland’.^*

In September 1948, as Indian forces, the cream of the Raj’s army, defeated Pakistan in Kashmir, Nehru invaded his other troublesome princely state, Hyderabad, where the nizam had declared independence. In Operation Polo, a five-day war, India defeated the Hyderabad forces, while Hindu mobs massacred 40,000 Muslims – the biggest bloodbath in modern Indian history. As Nehru dominated an India thriving in its first ten years, he was assisted by Indira, who, living at his residence Teen Murti House, raised her children for the dynastic life. ‘One mustn’t be afraid of getting hurt,’ she told Rajiv and Sanjay. ‘I want both of you to be courageous … there are millions of people in the world, but most just drift along, afraid of death and even more afraid of life.’ Jawaharlal, Indira and her sons – who would rule the greatest democracy for three generations – would not be like that.

As the British left independent India and Pakistan (while planning to keep their African possessions), the Dutch and French, bruised by defeats in the Second World War, were determined to reclaim their Asian empires, French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh declared independence in Hanoi, joining the French initially in a purge of Trotskyites and nationalists. But in 1946, when the French reoccupied the country, Ho and his brilliant general, Vo Nguyen Giap, a history teacher who now put his lessons into practice as an Asian Trotsky, fought a formidable French army in a brutal war. In Jakarta, East Indies, the ex-architect Sukarno declared himself president of a new state, Indonesia, framed by the Dutch colony, but based on his five principles, pancasila

, fusing democracy with nationalism. In July 1947, as Nehru and Jinnah assumed power, the Dutch attacked Sukarno, then exploited a Communist insurrection to reconquer much of the archipelago. Sukarno, aided by his top officer Suharto, crushed the Communists himself but struggled against the Dutch. This European imperial war worried Truman, who threatened to cut aid to the Netherlands. The Dutch withdrew, recognizing the vast new country, which Sukarno, flirting with a large Communist presence, transformed into a Guided Democracy with himself as monarchical president for life.

The British, meanwhile, were also leaving Palestine, where in a multifaceted conflict, two Arab kings vied with a nascent Jewish state and Palestinian militias.

TWO KINGS: FAROUK, ABDULLAH AND THE CARVE -UP OF PALESTINE