The Lost Homestead by Marina Wheeler, review: the barrister uncovers her Indian roots

The barrister Marina Wheeler, with her first name, her “light-ish skin and dark hair”, is generally taken by chatty cabbies to be Greek. She has to correct them, at complicated length. Her father, the BBC journalist Charles Wheeler, was British. Her mother, she must continue, “is Indian, [...] but she’s not from India exactly; she was born in what’s now Pakistan, in a place called Sargodha not far from Lahore.” Does that make her Punjabi then? Only notionally, she has to say, as her mother brought up her daughters without any strong sense of their Indian roots. “Her explanation when challenged by relatives was that she wanted to spare us a ‘confused identity’.”

The mother in question is Kuldip, who has always gone by “Dip” (pronounced, more or less, “deep”), and knows something about confused identities. Born the daughter of prosperous Sikh parents for the most part friendly to British rule, she spends her early years in a part of the undivided Punjab that would, after the independence and partition of the subcontinent, become a part of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The family is uprooted to Delhi, young Dip married off to a boorish man she finds it hard to love. She walks out, still young, and finds work as the social secretary to the High Commissioner for Canada in Delhi, where she meets Charles Wheeler, South Asia correspondent for the BBC.

In the early years of their married life, Dip must act the foreign correspondent’s wife, accompanying him on his postings (Berlin, Washington, Brussels), but over the years, she asserts herself with progressive vigour: doing an Open University course in psychology, then, after her daughters leave home for university, working as a part-time researcher at Amnesty International’s Secretariat in London, to which she commutes from the family cottage in Sussex, an idyllic place she comes to regard as the rural paradise of childhood regained.

Those, at any rate, are the facts of Dip’s life that her daughter has long known. Of her early life in India and her private struggles, mother and daughter have rarely spoken. Marina Wheeler, a QC with (one assumes) good form as a courtroom cross-examiner, tries to coax her mother to say more. But Dip is frustratingly diffident, pleading that she can’t remember. “As the story darkens, she maintains her restraint.” Wheeler comes to see her mother’s reticence echoed in what she hears from, and of, other members of her Indian family. Silence seems their only way to -protect themselves from the pain of remembering.

Wheeler is protective of her own privacy. Prurient readers will find next to nothing in The Lost Homestead about her ex-husband, the present Prime Minister; the only politician called B Johnson to appear in the index is Lyndon. Her private life declared firmly out of bounds, Wheeler approaches her task with the diligence she must bring to her briefs. She does her research, and she travels, to both India and Pakistan, accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards.

Wheeler tries hard to avoid taking sides in political controversies that offer no safe position immune from accusations of bias. “The best I can do,” she says ingenuously, “is just write how I see it.” The early chapters are a little clunky, suggesting a writer adjusting to an unfamiliar form, working with a surfeit of archival material on one hand and the laconic utterances of her unforthcoming mother on the other.

The book comes into its own as a travelogue. On the Indian side, she has the advantage of a family connection with the journalist and novelist Khushwant Singh and his large, prosperous, liberal, well-travelled family. In Pakistan, she relies on local academics to help her. She allows her informants to speak, at length and often with lacerating honesty, but she always follows up on their stories. Can they be corroborated? Her approach to their testimonies is in the best sense lawyerly, tough but fair.

Wheeler eventually finds a register that works, both for the material and as a good literary approximation of what must be her spoken voice. The forced lyricism of the early chapters (“green as far as the eye can see: field after field of wheat”) gives way to something more elegant. One Pakistan academic she meets informs her that her “line of enquiry... is a feminist one. It is odd to us, for whom the patriarchal line is more important.” She takes his remark to mean “Why such a fuss over your mother?” Well, she replies, her mother, married to a much-lauded broadcaster, spent much of her life in the shadows. Do they not agree “that she has a story worth telling?” The question comes at a point in the story when it’s more than clear that the answer is yes.

The Lost Homestead by Marina Wheeler is published by Hodder at ￡25. To order your copy for ￡19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop