Returning to The Lady, there’s one scene where Aung San Suu Kyi, held under house arrest, paints a series of big character posters. Among slogans for democracy and human rights is a comment from Jawaharlal Nehru: “The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds.”

I have no way of knowing whether this scene is factual. When Aung San Suu Kyi delivered the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on November 14, 2012, 123 years on from his birth and 17 years on from her own receipt of the Nehru Memorial Prize, she revealed that just before the great man’s centenary in 1989 she copied a long paragraph from his autobiography onto a large sheet of paper. She then hung the sheet in the entrance hall of her house so that security personnel, her only visitors, would have no choice but to see it. That paragraph, though, does not contain the sentence cited in the film.

As depicted, then, the scene may or may not have taken place. Still it’s a neat touch because it effortlessly signals the significance of Nehru for Aung San Suu Kyi, stemming from close family ties built after Panditji, as he was widely called, became known to Aung San in the 1930s. In her lecture, Aung San Suu Kyi tells a nice story from the final months of her father’s life.

In January 1947, Aung San travelled to London via Delhi for independence negotiations with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee. In the two days he spent in India, Nehru insisted on having two thick winter uniforms made for him, and also gave him a British Army greatcoat. It was in that coat, in the garden of 10 Downing Street, that the most famous photograph of Aung San was taken.

I like this historical footnote. From time to time, Yangon artist Zwe Yan Naing uses defunct Aung San banknotes to make collages of major national and international figures. His images of Aung San replicate the Downing Street photo. I also like the Nehru comment from The Lady. The belief it expresses is the foundation on which thukhuma is built.