The Lost Homestead — a story of colonialism and India’s identity
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The genesis of Marina Wheeler’s The Lost Homestead was Viceroy’s House, the historical drama centred on the end of British rule in India released in 2017, marking 70 years since Indian independence.
Wheeler, the daughter of a mother born in India but who left the country in 1962 and a British father, is well placed to respond to this drama, drawing on family sources in what is both a deeply personal story of identity and a highly relatable journey for many in the diaspora.
In turning to her mother, Dip, who was born in Sargodha, west of Lahore — once part of British India but now Pakistan — Wheeler taps a rich vein of personal history. Her mother’s memories of the last days of the Raj and the early years of free India are evocative: her father growing mulberry bushes and narcissi, of being forced to drink a “foul-tasting [antimalarial] potion” made of bitter neem leaves in the days before quinine, and of the tragedy of her brother’s death at the age of 21.
It is hard not to come away feeling a strong sense of admiration for Dip, who made the bold step to leave an arranged marriage, which she had entered aged just 17, and years later married BBC journalist Charles Wheeler, but the author does not let this book become mawkish. Wheeler, a barrister and Queen’s Counsel who specialises in public and human rights law, presents her mother’s life in an engaging fashion, but does not neglect the broader narratives.
The early section, focused on the shadow cast by Partition and the events leading up to it, is perhaps the most gripping. In one moving vignette from 1947, Dip’s father is said to have left valuables behind at their Punjabi homestead as the situation deteriorated, taking only farm produce and ghee as the family fled to Delhi. That measure of his trust — that the disturbance was only temporary — is a reminder of the enduring cost which Partition inflicted on communities, underlined by the descriptions of the sectarian violence which gave birth to two (and later three) nations.
The Lost Homestead is also about Wheeler’s navigation of the detritus of empire, and the conflicting narratives that surround the end of British rule in India. One such case is the legacy of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Bengali revolutionary who sided with Nazi Germany and then Imperial Japan but is remembered favourably in India for his armed resistance to imperial rule.
At a panel on Bose at the Jaipur Literary Festival, Wheeler struggles to square his efforts to fight colonial rule in India with his support for two other brutally repressive regimes. “I grasp that being ruled by a foreign power can ignite fires of rage . . . but I can’t celebrate this man,” she admits in the book.
On the modern relationship of Indians and the UK, Wheeler ponders early on whether she had developed a secret respect for the empire. Later, she says that she hopes for the Indian diaspora to feel part of British history and culture. It is an optimistic call, although it feels too timid in face of the ongoing culture war.
This January, actor Laurence Fox opined that the appearance of a Sikh soldier in the Sam Mendes’s film 1917 was an example of the “oddness of casting”, later apologising after the scale of Sikh sacrifice in the war was pointed out. On the other side of the coin, the recent graffiti on Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, decrying the prime minister as “racist”, also indicates that reconciliation, under the current status, feels an incomplete solution for many. Wheeler suggests that her young relatives have limited time for such grievances, but this is by no means universal.
At times, The Lost Homestead can feel like it is trying to do too much in too short a space. Decades of Congress party rule, from Indira Gandhi’s first term in the late 1960s to Manmohan Singh’s premiership in the early 2000s, are reduced to a single paragraph. In trying to add the failures of Nehruvian politics and the rise of Hindu nationalism to Dip’s story, the book also suffers from having to compete with dedicated histories, such as KS Komireddi’s Malevolent Republic from 2019, an excoriating examination of free India from 1947 to the present day.
Nevertheless, it makes for a very readable tome in the ever-growing diaspora canon. If it feels diffuse at times, it is made up for with anecdotes, interviews, and in the profusion of historical details. As Wheeler notes in the introduction, the book is “about memory and identity, about what we have, what we lose and what we rebuild.” More than 70 years since the republic’s tryst with destiny, it can only be a good thing that these matters are increasingly discussed.
The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab, by Marina Wheeler, Hodder & Stoughton, RRP£25, 328 pages
Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan is the FT’s acting European technology correspondent
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