Kapil Komireddi: Indian Winter: A little bit about the prospects of turning Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire into a movie. I can't really see Hugh Grant in the role of Lord Louis Mountbatten, last viceroy and first governor-general of India -- Clive Owen maybe. Hard to improve on Cate Blanchett as Lady Mountbatten. Still, the bigger problem is that it will be all but impossible for a movie based on the principal characters not to compound the book's most serious weakness, which is that it makes so much history turn on the actions of a small number of larger-than-life figures: the Mountbattens, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Churchill. The book tends to fall into the Great Man bag, even if the greatest figure on that list is the Lady. This approach isn't without its insights. In particular, the intense personal dislike between Louis Mountbatten and Jinnah seems to have preceded the prejudice that Mountbatten showed against Pakistan in dividing the empire. On the other hand, it reduces Pakistan to a personal delusion of Jinnah, as if there was nothing more behind it than the ambitions of one determined politician. And it leaves the eruptions of violence mostly unexplained, since they don't much figure into the actions or programs of the principal figures. I finished the book grateful for what I learned but with so many residual questions I wanted to read further.

The "secret history" has much to do with the Mountbattens, but remains rather discreet about Edwina's romance with Nehru. The movie, of course, even if they don't take liberties with the record will inevitably render the affair so explicit as to be undeniable -- and needless to say, the cash register bets that they will go further. And there's the rub. I've seen a dozen or more major movies about India over the last couple of decades, and all ultimately portrayed India in positively glowing terms. I hadn't realized that this is to some extent a consequence of the censorship rights the Indian government demands as part of the price to film there. Despite its much ballyhooed boast to be the world's largest democracy, India is tightly controlled by Nehru's direct heirs, who don't take kindly to publicizing Nehru's dalliance with a foreign woman -- something Nehru himself was very circumspect about. Komireddi does a good job of explaining how this works. Indeed, his notes on the proliferation of Nehru-Gandhi names reminds me of the Ronald Reagan sanctification project here.

For much more from the book, look here.