Earlier this month, the Indian government greenlighted a British film project, Indian Summer, based on Alex von Tunzelmann's brilliant book of the same name about the events leading up to Britain's bloody withdrawal from India in 1947 and India's partition. India has an odd tradition -- generally ignored -- of vetting all foreign film projects before granting permission to shoot inside the country. But the focus of Indian Summer -- the alleged love affair between Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, and Edwina, the wife of Britain's last viceroy to India, Lord Louis Mountbatten -- elicited extraordinary responses from a Congress Party-led government that is hyperanxious about the reputation of its founding figures.
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The film's international cast of superstars -- Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett playing Edwina, and Hugh Grant tipped to portray her husband, Louis -- did nothing to deter New Delhi from issuing a series of silly cuts. Among them: no kissing, no scenes of physical intimacy between Nehru and Edwina, and no use of the word "love." The director, Joe Wright, whose previous films include the hugely successful Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, has no choice but to comply if he wants to shoot the film in India. And that's not all: Should Wright go ahead, the completed film will have to be shown to a government "expert" who will judge whether it depicts "a correct and balanced perspective on the topic covered."
Strictly speaking, the Indian government was merely following procedure in vetting the film project. Yet it is also true that New Delhi would not have gone to this length to protect the reputation of any other Indian leader of that time. More than 60 years after independence, Nehru's life is jealously guarded by the Congress Party, which is controlled by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Nehru was not a saint, but his canonization is crucial to those who invoke his legacy to perpetuate their own hold on his party. As one historian damningly noted, the party "which was once the vehicle of a great, countrywide freedom struggle...is now merely a vehicle for the ambitions of a single family.." The rush to sanitize Indian Summer highlights one of the more destructive ways in which the Congress Party maintains its grip on history, particularly when that history deals with the lives of the revered Nehru-Gandhi family: censorship.
Nehru was one of the 20th century's most phenomenal leaders, but even his most ardent admirers will admit that he was not nearly as compelling a figure as his mentor, Mohandas K. Gandhi. Yet while Gandhi's life, including the details of his controversial sex experiments, remains open to the public, Nehru's descendents -- his child, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; grandchild, Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi; and Rajiv's wife, Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi -- have kept his private life locked up. Scholars attempting to access Nehru's letters have been repeatedly rebuffed -- with some unexpected consequences. In 1994, American historian Stanley Wolpert, who has written some of the most scintillating biographies of major South Asian leaders, flew to New Delhi to persuade Sonia Gandhi, the reigning head of the Nehru family and India's most powerful person, to give him access to Nehru's letters. He left empty-handed. The subsequent biography he published, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, made the extraordinary claim that Nehru was partly homosexual. It was based on nothing more than speculation, but was proof, if any was required, that suppressing facts has the unintended consequence of legitimizing fiction.
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