Partition Saga

“In 2005, I went to Pakistan to find my grandfather’s home for the BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are?” said Gurinder Chadha, in an interview at the premiere of her latest film Viceroy’s House at the Berlin International Film Festival. “It was the house he was forced to abandon in Pakistan during Partition in 1947, and my father’s sister had starved to death during that time. The house had become home to several Muslim families, whose parents had all fled India during Partition. One woman welcomed me, saying, ‘My family came from India in 1947. I am Indian like you.’ Then an old Pakistani man said, ‘This is your

home, please come back any time. We will be watching the road waiting for your return.’ I burst into tears. I knew then that I had to make a film on my family’s story.” A UK-India co-production, Viceroy’s House stars Hugh Bonne

ville as Lord Mountbatten, Gillian Anderson as Edwina Mountbatten, Manish Dayal as Jeet Kumar, Huma Qureshi as Aalia and Om

Puri as Noor, Aalia’s blind father. The film is timely, as 2017 is the 70th anniversary of Partition.

The film, which played in the Out of Competition section here and opened to mixed reviews, is due for release in the UK on March 3. It is a grand, sweeping period film on the cusp of history, yet zeroes in on the intimate moments that make Partition unforgettable even for those who didn’t experience it firsthand. Set in the Viceroy’s House, later Rashtrapati Bhavan, it looks at life upstairs, lived with pomp and pageantry, and downstairs, where 500 Hindu, Muslim and Sikh servants toil in their service. The central dilemma, of course, is Mountbatten’s: whether to grant India independence as a single, secular nation dominated by 300 million Hindus, or whether to partition it into India and the Muslimmajority state of Pakistan.

We see the behind-the-scenes hard bargaining between the British, Mahatma Gandhi (Neeraj Kabi), Jawaharlal Nehru (Tanveer Ghani) and their rival Mohammed Ali Jinnah (Denzil Smith). As communal violence explodes across India, killing thousands, the Viceroy is forced to accelerate his independence plan by almost a year.

The story is underpinned by the romance between Jeet Kumar, who is on Mountbatten’s staff, and his Muslim sweetheart Aalia, who is on Edwina’s staff. Gillian Anderson steals the show as Edwina. Clearly a more astute politician than her husband, she demonstrates more empathy for the working class and helps in the refugee camps. But the film suffers somewhat by justifying all the villains of history and making them victims of circumstance, including Mountbatten (got the job too late, had no choice), Sir Cyril Radcliffe (implemented a fait accompli drawn by Churchill) and Jinnah (didn’t get all he wanted, all the Muslimmajority areas of India). This takes the punch out of the central good versus bad conflict.

However, there are also poignant moments, as when the blind, ageing Om Puri (one of his last roles before he died in January) realises, too late, that his daughter Aalia, engaged since childhood to a Muslim boy, is in love with Jeet. Aalia was on a train to Pakistan, but everyone on it was killed, except her. The dramatic, last-reel reunion with Jeet in a refugee camp, while cathartic, is trop Bollywood.

Still, many from the younger generation know little about Partition, and the film is a welcome and timely reminder of how the British policy of divide and rule still rules our destiny.