Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (2-L) talks with Lady Mountbatten
© AFP/Intercontinentale/File NEW DELHI (AFP) - Now Edwina's daughter, Pamela Mountbatten, says in a new book that while "love blossomed" between the "lonely" widowed prime minister and her British socialite mother, the relationship was purely platonic.
She says she knows because she often played "gooseberry," chaperoning Edwina and Nehru when they were together in India.
Pamela was 17 when she was taken out of school to accompany her father, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and her mother to India.
She spent the next 15 months recording the birth of India and Pakistan, and her own transition to adulthood, in a gossipy account of the dramatic days of the subcontinent's independence and partition.
Edwina and Nehru were deeply in love but "the relationship remained platonic," Pamela writes in the book, "India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power."
Pamela recounts that her mother, who was 44 at the time, had already had many lovers but her father "was inured to it" and was delighted to see her mother "so happy with Jawaharlal."
Mountbatten wrote in 1948 to Pamela's elder sister that, "She and Jawaharlal are so sweet together, they really dote on each other in the nicest way... Mummy (Edwina) has been incredibly sweet lately and we've been such a happy family."
Pamela says in the book, based on her own personal diary entries and family letters, that the relationship with Nehru transformed Edwina.
"It made my mother, who could be quite difficult at times, as many very extraordinary women can be... lovely to be with. There were no prickles," she told Indian television network CNN-IBN.
Edwina became Nehru's confidante, says Pamela, the youngest of the Mountbattens' two daughters.
She quotes from a 1957 letter from Nehru to Edwina, in which he wrote: "I suddenly realised and perhaps you did also that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force of which I was dimly aware drew us to one another."
"Although it was not physical, it was no less binding for that. It would last until death," writes Pamela, who now is 78.
She also says that Mountbatten found the relationship useful as he used Edwina to influence Nehru on policy matters during the transition from British colonial rule to independence.
"If things were particularly tricky my father would say to my mother, 'Do try to get Jawaharlal to see that this is terribly important...'" she says in the book.
"There existed a happy threesome," writes Pamela, referring to her mother, father and Nehru, who had been raised in an affluent, westernised family and who "spoke and wrote beautiful English (much better than our own)."
Edwina and Nehru met about twice a year after the Mountbattens left India in 1948, usually once in London and then her mother would include a visit to India in her overseas charity tours.
"We had been on an incredible journey with India which had changed the subcontinent," writes Pamela.
Edwina was on a visit abroad and had just left India to carry out a heavy programme of engagements in Borneo when she died in her sleep aged 58.
A packet of letters from Nehru was found by her bedside.
The letters during this 12-year correspondence "were a diary of everything he had been doing and the people he had seen, his hopes and fears," Pamela writes.
Nehru dispatched an Indian navy frigate to Edwina's funeral at sea off Portsmouth, England, and the sailors cast a marigold wreath into the ocean for him.
©AFP