British director Gurinder Chadha is all set to release her new movie ‘Viceroy’s House’ which is set in the period of British Raj in India. However, it is with a difference. Instead of focusing on the terrible violence that lead to the partition of Punjab and the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947, this movie focuses on “the people’s partition”. Gurinder Chadha wants to focus on the lives of those affected by the partition. Gurinder Chadha told the Observer that “The people’s partition” was her actual working title of the movie when she first started making it seven years ago.
“I wanted to show the emotional impact, not the fighting. My maternal grandmother came to live with us in the 1970s and she was still totally traumatized. When she sat with us to watch telly she would be disturbed by conflict of any kind. We laughed at her, but she would say, ‘You don’t know what happened to us!’”
What Gurinder did not expect was that her movie will also challenge accepted history. While researching for her movie, she came across confidential government documents in the archives that supported a revisionist view of the lead-up to Indian independence. The British decision to separate the country in to two religiously defined nations did not entirely result from being forced by conflicting communities. It was, in fact, an idea hatched by Churchill during the war to protect British strategic interests.
“History is always written by the victors, as we say at the outset of the film, and I was told at school that partition was ‘our’ fault because the Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus had fought with each other. But a document in the British Library marked ‘Top secret: only for circulation among chiefs of staff’ makes it clear the British felt they could not just hand all India back just after the war. The solution was for a Pakistani regime, friendly to Britain, to control Karachi, on the borders of Afghanistan, and not India.”
Chadha says that the screenplay was inspired by the story of her own family. Her grandparents were forced out of their home in Pakistan and had to travel as refugees to the new India. Her grandmother was tormented for years and even a slightest violence of any kind would upset her.
Gurinder Chadha’s film stars Hugh Bonneville as Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy in India. Gillian Anderson plays his inflencial wife, Edwina.
The movie premiers in Berlin Film Festival in February this year. It will come to British cinemas in March and will be the only movie released in two languages – English and Hindi.
Gurinder Chadha is best known for her number one box office hit both in England and India, “Bend it like Bekham” which was released in April 2002. It is a story of an 18 year old daughter of a Punjabi Sikh family in London who is infatuated with football but is forbidden to play the game because she is a girl. Like most of Gurinder Chadha’s movies, this movie explores the lives of Indians/ Punjabis living in England and the trails of Indian women living in England and how they must reconcile their converging traditional and modern cultures.
