Hollywood Movie Interrupted: Nehru-Edwina Romance
Oct 22nd, 2009 | Comments
The production of a Hollywood film on the romance between Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy of India, has been temporarily halted. The Indian government wants an assurance that the movie, Indian Summer, starring Cate Blanchett and Hugh Grant, would not contain physically intimate scenes.
(Nehru’s name was also romantically linked with famous artist Amrita Sher-Gil and Padmaja Naidu, Sarojini Naidu’s daughter).
Film director Joe Wright, whose credits include Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, told Variety magazine: “We were in between a rock and a hard place. The Indian government wanted us to make less of the love story while the studio (Universal Pictures) wanted us to make more of the love story,” reports The Telegraph.
“The film is based on Alex Von Tunzelmann’s book Indian Summer, The Secret History of the End of Empire. The nature of Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten’s relationship is still hotly contested in India, where many prefer to believe the ‘lonely widower’ and the adventurous Vicereine were devoted but platonic.
“Now, Universal Pictures has postponed plans for filming because of the scale of the budget, thought to have been between $30 million (£18 million) and $40 million (£24 million).
“Director Joe Wright is said to have considered making the film for less than $30 million (£18 million) before deciding to wait for more favourable financial conditions.” More here…
What are the objections raised by the Indian government? Please click here…
Here is an interesting video clip in The Times of India…See here…
Did the Nehru-Edwina love story change the course of India’s history? See here…
The Independent reports: “The deep and passionate relationship between India’s first prime minister and the wife of the country’s last viceroy is one of the worst-kept secrets of the Raj.
“Enduring and complex, the bond between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten lasted until the end of their lives. When she died in 1960, letters from Nehru were scattered across her bed, and when she was buried at sea in the English Channel, he (Nehru) dispatched a frigate all the way from India to drop a wreath of marigolds into the waves.”
Edwina’s daughter, Pamela Mountbatten, who fondly called Nehru ‘Mamu’ (maternal uncle), has used diary entries and extracts from family albums as documentary evidence to write India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power. In a section titled “A Special Relationship” Pamela writes: “My mother had already had lovers. My father was inured to it. It broke his heart the first time, but it was somehow different with Nehru.”
She quotes a letter which Lord Mountbatten wrote to her elder sister in June 1948 on the Edwina-Nehru relationship: “‘She and Jawaharlal (sic) are so sweet together, they really dote on each other in the nicest way and Pammy and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and help. Mummy has been incredibly sweet lately and we’ve been such a happy family’.” More here…
Photos show Nehru and Edwina…
