Dead-weight historical tale

Gambling for a sentiment rousing expose without the technical accomplishment to support it, Gurinder Chadha’s take on India-Pakistan partition which accords blame to Churchill and Wavell’s 1945 document that incorporated Jinnah’s plan and made the line of control one of strategic importance, is a damp squib delivered in hyperbole.

There’s a love story delineating the anguish of displacement and religious turbulence that overtook the country during those times – between a young looking turban less Sardar Jeet (Manish Dayal) and a much older looking muslim girl Aalia (Huma Quereshi) daughter of a Freedom Fighter, Rahim Noor (Om Puri). There’s an orchestrated separation, in the name of duty leading up to a presumption of death in ill-fated ‘Train to Pakistan’.

Central players in this historical blunder of a movie includes Lord Mountbatten (Hugh Bonneville), Lady Mountbatten (Gillian Anderson), their daughter Pamela (Lily Travers), Lord Ismay (Michael Gambon), Gandhi (Niraj Kabi), Nehru (Tanveer Ghani), Jinnah (Densel Smith) and many others from the freedom movement. The Mountbattens have been projected as saviours who were dealt a bad card when they were endowed with the responsibility of setting India free. Even the document that supposedly exposes the British chicanery, is bandied about like a piece of trash.

Nehru’s inspiring speech that followed the fixing of dates for the declaration of India and Pakistan as secular democratic republics, plays in the background while refugees scatter about looking on in anguish for having lost their loved ones. There’s no real feeling to the experience because Chadha’s hopes of garnering empathy rest largely on the momentous occasion rather than drawing up believable arcs for characters within.