What's love got to do with it?

There are no full stops in India. A few months ago a largely insipid book by a Hindu right-wing politician offering faint praise of Pakistan's founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah, led to the expulsion of the writer from India's main opposition party. The nation erupted in an orgy of debate over whether Jinnah was the villain of the partition of India.

Now India's chatterati, again egged on by a hysterical section of the media, is deliberating ad nauseum on the alleged affair between India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten.

The provocation for this latest gabfest over India's most famous love affair is the Indian government's Orwellian-sounding Information and Broadcasting Ministry throwing a spanner into the works for a planned British film on Nehru and Lady Mountbatten, based on the book, Indian Summer, by British historian Alex Von Tunzelmann.

The killjoy mandarins at the ministry who vetted the script - presumably because the film had to be shot in India - apparently have a few grouses.

Firstly, the film is not based on "recorded facts" - whatever that means in native bureaucratese and whose facts are they anyway - and so it should be declared a work of fiction. Also no scenes of physical intimacy between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten are allowed, no gestures or actions or words of love or affection between the two.

The damning word "love" has to be excised from six dialogues in the film. No intimacy and sex please, we are Indians. Joe Wright, the hapless director, is now free to film a sterile dirge on one of the most interesting relationships in India's history. (One report says the film has been shelved for the moment.)

Now let's clear the air on the book on which the film is based. Tunzelmann's book is a first class, scholarly account of the Independence and the partition of India.

Only 31 pages before the end of her book, Tunzelmann delves into the relationship between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten. She paints a picture of a deep and complex affinity bound by fondness and a strong sense of mutual respect and concern. The two, says the historian, wrote "intimate letters" to each other until the end. Nehru sent her presents - sugar from United States when it was rationed in Britain, cigarettes from Egypt, ferns from Sikkim, a book of erotic photographs from Orissa's famous sun temple.

The book of photographs evoked a stirring response. Lady Mountbatten wrote to Nehru that she found the photographs of the sculptures fascinating. "I am not interested in sex as sex," she wrote. "There must be much more to it, beauty of spirit and form and its conception. But I think you and I are in the minority. Yet another treasured bond." The two also spend a lot of time with each other - there is even a scene of the two in embrace as a governor's son opens the door of the prime minister's suite in an Indian hill station in what is Tunzelmann's only concession to the sensational, as far as I can remember.

There was a whiff of scandal about the relationship in those less prurient times. "Break open Nehru's heart and you will find Lady Mountbatten written on it", an anti-Nehru party in Delhi purred. The two ignored the chatter. "I have come to the conclusion that it is best to ignore them as any argument about them feeds them or at any rate draws people's attention to them," Nehru wrote, interestingly, to Lord Mountbatten.

In fact, Tunzelmann writes that before undergoing a risky surgery in 1952, Edwina entrusted her love letters from Nehru in a sealed envelope to her husband. "..they are a mixture of typical Jawaha (sic) letters..some of them have no 'personal' remarks at all. Others are love letters in a sense, spiritual - which exists between us. J has obviously meant a very great deal in my life in these last years and I think I in his. Our meetings have been been rare and always fleeting but I think I understand him, and perhaps he me, as well as any human beings can ever understand each other," she wrote movingly about the correspondence. Tunzelmann writes "it was an odd sort of confession, and not an apology."

Edwina recovered after the surgery, and her husband opened the envelope. He later told her that he did not feel jealous about her relationship though "faintly hurt" at times when "you didn't take me into confidence right away."

That the two were more than fond of each other is fairly clear from the correspondence. Even Pamela Mountbatten Hicks, daughter of the last viceroy, has said in the past that she believed that her mother and Nehru were in love. A relative of Mr Nehru also agreed on a recent TV interview that the two "had a relationship of love." So what is the big deal about a film on the two?

Indian politicians and bureaucrats have a a schizophrenic relationship with history - figures like Nehru and Gandhi are treated as 'sacred cows', and hagiographic accounts of their lives abound in school and many college books. The censoring of the the latest film script also, according to a top social scientist, boils down to the colonial mantle that the Congress party "finds difficult to shake off". Journalist MJ Akbar says the "desire to guard a reputation is institutional."

On the street, Indians no longer care whether Nehru and Lady Mountbatten had a relationship or not; a film on the two will not scandalise them. And Indians, so far, haven't even cared much for the sex lives of their politicians. Even when a news channel ran fuzzy black and white tapes purportedly of some local politicians making out in a guest house in what looked suspiciously like a Buster Keaton film on high speed, viewership rocketed for an evening or two, and then plumetted again. Especially after one of the politicians alleged to be on one of the tapes exclaimed: "But I am in that film with my wife!".

One historian says that talk about Edwina-Nehru liason is much ado about nothing. "Did the relationship impact the course of events?," she asks. There is no evidence to show that it did. But personal lives sometimes offer interesting cues to how people perform in public and even impact decisions they make. "I think it's the personal lives that make our politicians more interesting," says sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan. I couldn't agree more. But try explaining that to India's touchy politicians and the information and broadcasting ministry.

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