Marina Wheeler is a London-based barrister and QC and the former wife of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose new memoir explores her Indian heritage. The Lost Homestead tells the story of her mother, Dip, the end of British rule in India and its partition into India and Pakistan.
Born pre-partition in the Punjab province of Sargodha, Dip grew up in a very harmonious and sheltered environment where her father held a number of positions of authority. A doctor who specialised in public health, he was the president of the municipal committee, the magistrate and helped to recruit soldiers during both world wars.
Marina Wheeler. Photo: Supplied
"That harmonious life, of course, came under strain as India began to hanker for independence,” Wheeler told Kathryn Ryan.
Dip’s siblings were pro-independence, but her father was, Wheeler believes, content with the status quo.
“But of course, as we know by ‘47 the different communities, the Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs had become violently antagonistic and my mother’s Sikh family lived in a Muslim majority area which became unsafe.”
Dip’s family fled their home during the chaos and violence of partition, and at 14, the family moved to Delhi.
“Reluctantly they left, thinking they were just leaving for a time until as they put it ‘the madness passed’ but of course, the madness only intensified.”
The figures vary but it’s possible up to a million people lost their lives, 10 million people were displaced, Wheeler says.
“They left in ‘47, none of the family were ever able to go back.”
In Dehli, Dip married.
“The marriage itself was connected to partition in the sense that once they got to Dehli, the older sister was married into a very well-to-do influential family and because my mother and her parents had lost everything, they were essentially taken in by this family.
“Part of that arrangement was that my mother, aged 17, should marry the youngest son of that family.”
She walked out on that marriage because they weren’t well matched, something extraordinary for that time, Wheeler says.
In time she found work at the Canadian High Commission as the social secretary. It was on the diplomatic circuit that she met Wheeler’s father, Charles.
Charles had also been married – to a woman who was a producer for the BBC. She was meant to join him in India but in the meantime, she met someone else.
A camp for displaced Indian Muslims next to Humayun's Tomb in New Delhi, 1947, during the period of unrest following the Partition of India and Pakistan. Photo: AFP or licensors
Wheeler was 12 when her family got to the UK – her childhood up until then spent in a range of Western countries. She wasn’t immersed in Indian culture, other than when her family visited.
“My mother didn’t teach my sister or I any Indian languages, despite herself speaking Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu. She said at the time that she didn’t want to confuse us culturally.
“Allowing India to be any more present in our lives I think would have been too hard for her to take.”
As Wheeler researched for The Lost Homestead she traced her family roots and traveled to what is now Pakistan.
“I did find it kind of moving, it wasn’t so much that I felt an affinity for the place, and in a way, what was quite striking was how little what I saw in front of me in Sargodha resembled the picture that my mother had painted.”
She was alarmed at first at how the Hindu and Sikh presence seemed to be completely airbrushed.
“But by the time I made a second trip there I began to see more of that presence, and I began to find links to my grandfather.”
It was on the 70th anniversary of India's independence, in 2017, when Wheeler first thought of writing a book, as she sat watching some of the coverage with her mother.
“There was a reference to an event that really kicked off a lot of what became horrendous violence in Kolkata in ‘46 and she turned to me, and she said, ‘I’d completely forgotten that I’d been there’.”
It struck Wheeler that Dip had lived through one of the great upheavals of the 20th Century, but she had completely buried those memories.
“I think that was also why I’d grown up quite ignorant about her story and also about the history of India.”
Through researching, Wheeler says she learnt to keep an open mind - that history looks different from different perspectives.
“Seeing how differently Indian and Pakistan view that event (the partition), so for Pakistan it’s the realisation of a homeland for Muslims, whereas for India, predominantly Hindu, it’s the loss of a territory and a lasting sore that still festers.
“I think the great lesson is that you have to try and understand the world from different perspectives.”
