India fought long and hard for freedom from British rule, but the Partition eclipsed much of the joy and celebration that came with finally savouring freedom. The Partition of 1947, when an empire became two nations, leading to the largest mass migration in history, cost lives, families and tremendous amounts of pain and suffering – a lot of which is still palpable in family lore and personal accounts of tragedy. One man screams Pakistan zindabad, another hails Hindustan and everything is reduced to a frenzied fist fight.
Gurinder Chadha's latest directorial offering, Partition: 1947, transports us to a time when the British rule in India was taking its last gasps of breath.
Lord Mountbatten was brought in to oversee the change of power, which was going to be a messy and tragic affair. The film, dubbed in Hindi and re-christened Partition: 1947, closely follows the workings of the last Viceroy to India and the events leading up to 15 August 1947.
Incidentally, the English title, The Viceroy’s House, is more apt for the film, considering that viewers spend much of the duration of the film within the confines of what is now known as the Rashtrapati Bhawan. This is where Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson brilliantly bring Mountbatten and a rather stunning Edwina Mountbatten to life.
The gaze is decidedly one from the outside. Through snatches of conversations, gathered by peering into keyholes or eavesdropping on the "Indian staff", we learn about the motivations of the various parties involved.
Gandhi (Neeraj Kabi) doesn't want the Partition; Jinnah (Denzil Smith) wants a separate nation carved out, taking with him the whole of Punjab and Bengal. Nehru is vocal about not aligning with the Muslim League, while Mountbatten is shown as a man who cares for India. The result is almost immediate.
Churchill is invoked a few times, by quoting his urgency about granting India its freedom, or his wary assumption about how the “savages” can handle power – this is a film that has definitely been made with a British bias.
Apart from the Mountbattens, we have Huma Qureshi and Manish Dayal as Aliya and Jeet, who dream of a future together. However, the dangerous circumstances they find themselves in threaten to pull them apart, and force them to pick different sides.
However, it is not their love story but the beauty of seeing Om Puri on screen one last time that makes our hearts ache.
The film's biggest undoing is its unflinching commitment to oversimplify an event in history that continues to overwhelm us by the sheer scale of its devastation.
The simplistic retelling and the obvious bias rob the film of its complexity.
The film starts by quoting Churchill – "history is written by the victors". Considering that this is a film that has Mountbatten and his wife distributing food to those ravaged by the Partition, with Gandhi in the periphery and Nehru mostly absent, the victors seem to have funded this film too.
Director Gurinder Chadha talks about how her grandmother lost her youngest child to starvation while fleeing Pakistan for India. Many such memories dot the partition saga and it is through these that one can imagine the human cost of drawing a line through an undivided India – a line that scarred lives and generations to come.
The film fails to highlight the human predicament of the Partition. What it does well is to remain faithful to conjuring up the vintage feel of a world that sat uneasy on the ticking clock of time.
I give it 2 Quints out of 5.
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