Nehru (top), Edwina

London, June 29 (PTI): A book on the “love affair” between Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of the last British viceroy of India, will be adapted into a film, a media report said.

Hugh Grant is likely to play Lord Mountbatten and Cate Blanchett his wife, the Sunday Times reported.

The UK production house, Working Title, has bought the film rights for Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer, which details the affair between the two.

The book chronicles the history of Partition through the intertwined lives of the five most significant characters: Mountbatten, Edwina, Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and M.A. Jinnah, the paper said.

The book explains how the relations between the five, specially the Edwina-Nehru affair, shaped the historical moment. “I thought, when I first came across this story, how filmic it was. It’s a real-life Casablanca, it has huge potential,” Tunzelmann said.

“Whenever I read about Mountbatten, this story about Edwina’s affair with Nehru would come up but all historians kept brushing it away.”

The affair was politically explosive, she said, adding its disclosure in 1948 could have sparked war between India and Pakistan. “I believe the scandal would have dwarfed the abdication. It would have decided the fate of nations.”

On a personal level, the affair was also remarkable for the fact that Mountbatten sanctioned, even encouraged, his wife’s relationship with Nehru, she said.

Tunzelmann did not “like to say” how far the Nehru-Edwina relationship went but stressed they “were certainly in love”. “There was extraordinary intimacy there.”