India’s Partition: The Forgotten Story
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
Was India’s Partition inevitable? Gurinder Chadha, the writerdirector of The Viceroy’s House, asks one of the questions beloved of A-level examiners, and gets the answer they would have been looking for: “No, until…”. In fact, unlike other more personal explorations of the issue during the BBC season, this is a documentary that could be easily inserted into a school syllabus, with plenty of authoritative voices combining to produce a narrative of what happens when religion is inserted into politics.
The Brits come out of the story badly, charged with stirring up religious unrest as part of a policy of divide and rule, standing aside when violence broke out, and generally overseeing events with far greater concern for the British than the rights and safety of the natives. There are fascinating pen portraits of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and particularly Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the All-india Muslim League, while Chadha – whose travels take in Southall, Cambridge, Delhi and Calcutta – discovers that the pernicious legacy lingers on when she is refused a visa to enter Pakistan. It’s hard to argue with her conclusion that “everyone was a victim”. Gabriel Tate