Viceroy's House is
British-Indian historical drama film directed by Gurinder Chadha and
written by Paul Mayeda Berges, Moira Buffini, and Chadha. The film
stars Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi,
and Michael Gambon. It has been selected to be screened out of
competition at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival.
The film was
released in the United Kingdom on 3 March 2017
On 30 April 2015, it
was announced that Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson would star in
the historical drama film Viceroy's House to be directed by Gurinder
Chadha, which Chadha scripted along with Paul Mayeda Berges and Moira
Buffini.The film set in 1947 during the Partition of India, and the
life inside the Viceroy's House, would be produced by Chadha, Deepak
Nayar, and Paul Ritchie.[4] Pathé and BBC Films would be
co-financing the film. On 1 September 2015, more cast was announced
including Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi, Tanveer Ghani, Denzil Smith,
Neeraj Kabi, Om Puri, Lily Travers, Michael Gambon, and Simon Callow.
Principal
photography on the film began on 30 August 2015 in Jodhpur,
Rajasthan, India, where it was shot for eight weeks.
The film was
released in the United Kingdom on 3 March 2017.
Chadha described the
film as the Upstairs, Downstairs view of the Partition of India. She
defended her film against criticisms of historical heterodoxy, guided
by Narendra Singh Sarila's 2009 book The Shadow of the Great Game:
The Untold Story of India's Partition, based on secret documents
discovered in the British Library.
Viceroy's
House review – soapy account of India's birth agonies
3 / 5 stars
Hugh Bonneville and
Gillian Anderson play the Mountbattens in Gurinder Chadha cheekily
Downtonised but watchable version of history
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Sunday 12 February
2017 18.45 GMT
Our time frame for
leaving won’t work!” exclaims Lady Mountbatten, for a moment
overwhelmed by the task of quitting India in 1947. Something familiar
about that? As well as an enjoyably soapy and cheekily Downtonised
view of history, director Gurinder Chadha could be offering a
satirical stab at what Indexit meant to a country about to split into
two as a punitive condition of liberty; maybe the UK will also have
to contemplate partition of its own, north and south. With
co-screenwriters Moira Buffini and Paul Mayeda Berges, Chadha creates
a watchable costume drama from India’s birth agonies. And with its
streak of subversive humour, it even reminded me weirdly of Spike
Milligan’s Puckoon, about the division of Ireland.
Hugh Bonneville
plays Mountbatten of Burma, brought in to oversee the running down of
the union jack in India. (Maybe he can play Chris Patten if Chadha
fancies a follow-up film set in Hong Kong.) He is a breezy, charming
and clubbable Mountbatten, occasionally switching to stern rebuke in
private in high Granthamesque style, but of course only with his own
family or staff. Gillian Anderson is very good as Edwina Mountbatten,
straining to repurpose her natural memsahibish hauteur into
high-mindedly favouring India and Indians.
Tanveer Ghani is an
excitable Nehru, and Denzil Smith is the cool and self-possessed
Jinnah. Simon Callow is Cyril Radcliffe, the bewildered functionary
charged with creating partition with his pen across the map, despite
knowing nothing about the country. The late Om Puri gives a
performance of great warmth as Ali Rahim Noor, a former rebel, once
imprisoned, now blind. His daughter Aalia (Huma Qureshi) is on the
viceroy’s staff and drawn into a Capulet-Montague love affair with
a Hindu named Jeet (Manish Dayal) despite being engaged to a
careerist Muslim who is partisan for the new state of Pakistan. This
love affair is offered as an emollient to the geopolitical agonies of
division that are playing out on the larger stage.
The movie is about
the intrigue and gossip of the Viceroy’s House itself, the imperial
seat of administration in Delhi and its microcosmic symbolism for the
country as a whole. As the split dawns, the house and its contents
are to be divided between the new states of India and Pakistan,
including the silverware and the books in the library – India and
Pakistan quarrel about who gets Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen.
The movie does not
respond quite so readily to the tragedy of mass migration and
massacres, an anguish whispered about at receptions and glimpsed on
newsreels, at one move away from the tailored drama. (There is an
interesting anachronism when the Ascot Gavotte from the musical My
Fair Lady is played at an official soiree, music that was composed 10
years later: it could be an intentional, playfully surreal touch from
Chadha.) The movie also does not touch on Lady Mountbatten’s
rumoured affair with Nehru, a subject still painful enough for the
Indian government to have effectively objected to a planned movie on
the subject, Indian Summer, which was to have starred Cate Blanchett
as Lady Mountbatten.
Viceroy’s House
may not have a whole lot of depth, but Chadha always shows her
irrepressible and good-natured flair for storytelling, and sharp
observational eye for the clenched unease of Britain’s patrician
ruling class. The film is also interesting in that this is one of the
very few historical dramas that shows Winston Churchill as the bad
guy. Everyone knows about Churchill’s dig at Gandhi the “fakir”;
this goes further and suggests Churchill’s bad faith in secretly
contriving at partition as a self-serving trick.
Pakistan was
avowedly created as a Muslim state to prevent the victimisation of a
Muslim minority. But, as one character angrily remarks,
divide-and-quit was a well established British technique in Ireland
and Palestine (Cyprus lying in the future). And it could have been
Churchill’s planned bishop sacrifice in the Great Game with the
Soviet Union: the creation of a state distinct from the left-leaning
India, more amenable to British interests and a strategic stronghold
against the Russians. It is a line that Chadha has developed from
Narendra Singh Sarila’s 2009 book The Shadow of the Great Game: The
Untold Story of India’s Partition. Meanwhile, Anderson and
Bonneville show India’s outgoing first couple as increasingly
disorientated and out of their depth.
At one stage, Lord
and Lady Mountbatten earnestly promise each other that they will
“stay on” after independence. Of course they didn’t, but it is
a moment that recalls the expatriate melancholy of Paul Scott’s Raj
Quartet. Viceroy’s House is no very profound work, but it is a
nimble and watchable period drama.
Gurinder
Chadha’s film is a glossy imperial version of India’s traumatic
partition that scandalously misrepresents the historical reality
Gurinder Chadha’s
Raj film Viceroy’s House begins with an ominous warning: “History
is written by the victors.” It sure is. The empire and its
descendants have their fingerprints all over this story.
Fatima Bhutto
Friday 3 March 2017
07.00 GMT
Viceroy’s House,
the story of the Mountbattens’ arrival in India and the
subcontinent’s subsequent breakup, opens to the sight of bowing,
preening and scraping Indians at work on the lawns, carpets and
marble floors that are to greet the last viceroy of colonised India,
Lord Louis Mountbatten – or Dickie, as he was known – played by
the rosy Hugh Bonneville. In one of his first scenes, Mountbatten
instructs his Indian valets that he never wants to spend more than
two minutes getting dressed – fitting for the man who dismembered
India in less than six weeks. As always, it is the Indians, not the
British, who fail in the simplest of tasks set out for them (they
take 13 minutes).
The benevolence of
the Mountbattens and, by association, the British Raj is laced
throughout Chadha’s film. The second world war, we are told at the
start by another pair of Indian valets, has exhausted the British and
that is why they have “announced” they will be leaving India.
There is no mention of the freedom struggle, Gandhian civil
disobedience and resistance that brought the empire to its knees
without firing a shot. Nor of the persecution and imprisonment of
India’s independence leaders, successful economic boycotts of the
industrialised British behemoth or the savagery and theft of
imperialism (at least three million Indians died in the Bengal
famine, a man-made disaster). It is simply that the British were
“exhausted” – and that, too, by the Germans.
Jeet Kumar (Manish
Dayal), our resident Hindu valet – because Viceroy’s House is
cognisant of India’s multiculturalism only in the way that
census–takers and bureaucrats are, one Hindu, one Sikh, one Muslim,
counting each group so they may assess their value as well as their
threats – has arrived at the viceroy’s house from his former job
as a police officer. He wastes no time in announcing: “Mountbatten
sahib is a heroic man, he has freed Burma, and now he’s coming to
free India.” Freedom is not something fought and won by Indians; it
is a gift from the Mountbattens and the empire they represent.
At the same moment,
the Mountbattens are descending through the clouds as Dickie looks
out of an aeroplane window and bemoans the task ahead of him. “You’re
giving a nation back to its people,” his daughter Pamela reminds
him, as though India had been colonised by some other, alien force
those past 300 years.
This theme is
repeated throughout Chadha’s elegy to her former colonisers. “We
have come to give India its freedom, not to tear her apart,”
whispers Edwina Mountbatten (Gillian Anderson). As though it were the
Nazis or the Ottomans who had held India and its people captive,
subordinating their will and their liberty, for all these centuries.
“How can it be getting worse under us?” Edwina asks, in a
distress that would be genuine but for the insidious message cloaked
behind every line in this unctuous and craven film: India’s
suffering is India’s fault.
India’s
revolutionaries and leaders are portrayed with a comic disrespect.
Not once can they be counted on to hold a civilised conversation with
each other (or even turn up to the same meetings) and are, in turn,
sneering, smug and silly. Mountbatten spends the entirety of this
film lecturing and condescending to finer men than he. Jawaharlal
Nehru, India’s finest orator and architect of the modern Indian
state, is continually patronised by Mountbatten – who reminds every
Indian leader he comes across that they went to Cambridge and that
made them clever and Cambridge is in fact English, so thank you Great
Britain.
It would be criminal
to compare the two men’s intellect or vision, but it is always with
a downward gaze that the subaltern is rendered in Viceroy’s House.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Denzil Smith), the founding father of Pakistan,
is scolded by the viceroy every time he turns up at his damn house
and even Mahatma Gandhi – who, with rotten teeth is depicted like
some mad old uncle – smilingly feeds the Mountbattens goat curd the
first time they meet, as though that is the extent of his meditations
at the time.
Britain gave us
railroads, their language and cutlery (these people eat with their
hands, Lady Mountbatten is warned as she announces her desire to
entertain native guests at Viceroy’s House, the couple’s official
residence). We would be mindful, as Chadha studiously is, to ignore
the bloodletting.
Communal violence
between Hindus and Muslims is spoken of by the Mountbattens and other
Raj imperialists as though it were a cyclone, arriving in India from
some unknown provenance, moved by an unknowable science. Divide and
rule, a staple of British colonial administration, is given no
credence. Three hundred million Hindus and Sikhs want a united India,
she informs us via Raj interlocutors; it is 100 million Muslims who
do not. Mirroring the fractures of modern nationalism wrought by
India’s partition, Chadha seems to take pleasure in laying the
bloodshed and brutality of 1947 at the feet of two particular
villains: Muslims and Jinnah.
Jinnah is at his
Bela Lugosi finest, dark circles around his eyes and his silver hair
roguishly slicked back. To divide India is a tragedy, Mountbatten
sighs, how can we convince Jinnah not to? Well, according to Chadha,
you can’t. Jinnah, a successful barrister and leader of the Muslim
League, is simply introduced to us as a “trouble maker”. The
American ambassador, Mountbatten, Cyril Radcliffe (the man who drew
up the new borders between India and Pakistan), every rotund and
sweating Englishman lays the onus of partition at Jinnah’s feet, as
though centuries of colonialism had been peaceful and joyful and
British rule had not been built on a systematic and brutal
communalism designed to pit brother violently against brother.
Not once do you
witness any violence on behalf of India’s foreign rulers; they are
serene and encouraging, weighed down with the heavy burden of
soothing these wild, intemperate people. The valets, cooks and
servants of Viceroy’s House can be counted on to turn viciously
against each other, so much so that Mountbatten must convene a
meeting. “No violence is tolerated in Viceroy’s House,” he
reprimands the barbaric natives. By this point in the film, sadly,
the audience cannot count on the director – or scriptwriters – to
inform us that the very foundations of the viceroy’s residence were
built on violence. The only Indians in this film are servants – or
politicians – as though no other kind of subaltern existed. Chadha
imagines this an innovation and has called Viceroy’s House the
“Upstairs, Downstairs” of partition, as though there has ever
been any other kind of Raj film. However, even Richard Attenborough’s
Gandhi depicted the injustice, savagery and shame of the Raj more
honestly than Chadha dares.
All the riots in
Chadha’s film seem to be caused by Muslims. Riots in the Punjab
interrupt the Mountbattens at a party and, though the disruption is
delivered breathlessly, there is still time to announce that they
have been carried out by Muslims. Dilip, a Sikh valet who spends the
whole film fighting his countrymen instead of his occupiers, leaves
to check on his village in the Punjab, only to return dusty and
dishevelled. It’s gone, all of it burned to the ground by Muslims
who, in this film, are always the perpetrators of violence, never its
victims.
We have some brushes
with symmetry regarding the violence that Muslims, like Hindus and
Sikhs, also suffered, but they are all false alarms. Jeet’s love
interest is Aalia (Huma Qureshi), a Muslim, and as they walk to her
servants’ quarters one evening they find it set ablaze. Aalia’s
home is filled with smoke and her blind father – played by the late
Om Puri – isn’t there. Aalia is distraught and we, too, are
gripped with fear. But don’t worry! Her father didn’t die; he’s
just sitting at a neighbour’s house. No harm, no foul.
Pakistan is a place
so nasty it even destroys Aalia and Jeet’s love when she is forced
to migrate there (not even her strapping fiancé can thwart Jeet and
her romance the way my country can). Towards the end of the film,
Jeet is told that Aalia’s train has not made it to Lahore –
Chadha’s begrudging mention of the ghost trains that left stations
filled with migrants only to arrive at their destination filled with
corpses. He has a bit of a cry, but, again, no need to worry! Aalia
is alive. Muslims don’t die in Viceroy’s House. They are too busy
killing, even their own.
Amid the chaos of
partition, Chadha shows a kindly elder Sikh lady who has brought a
Muslim woman to the police. The Muslim woman is black and blue. Her
father, the old woman tells the cop, threw her under a train, but she
would like to adopt her. The crudeness of this moment is painful and
sad to behold. Even a (pointedly non-Muslim) stranger is more
nurturing than a Muslim parent.
Chadha, who
describes herself as a British Indian film-maker, was born in Kenya,
but her family originally hail from Rawalpindi and Jhelum in what
became Pakistan. Speaking in London ahead of the film’s release,
Chadha described these cities as ending up on the “wrong side”
after partition. I wasn’t aware there was a right or wrong side.
It is true that
India and Pakistan were one people with millennia of history uniting
us, but the forces that broke India and divided us are the very ones
that Viceroy’s House is at pains to exonerate. “This tragedy is
not of your making,” Lady Mountbatten warmly soothes her husband as
the couple preside over the destruction of India.
Lord and Lady
Mountbatten (in white at rear) celebrate India’s first independence
day with prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947. Photograph: AP
As the fires of 1947
rage, the Mountbattens dress up in khaki kit and busy themselves
feeding the fleeing poor (“Feed the children first!” Edwina
cries) and breaking up bloody skirmishes between Indians. It was with
a deep wound that I watched Chadha depict Jawaharlal Nehru being
slapped by a fellow Indian for “breaking the country” while the
British, who laid waste to our country, are celebrated for nothing
and pardoned for everything.
The lie of this
pernicious scene, wilfully ignorant of history if one is generous and
purposely defamatory if one is not, points to a sorrowful truth: the
psychological damage wrought by colonialism festers deeply among some
south Asians.
Viceroy’s House
betrays the profound inferiority complex that plagues colonised
people, a trauma as severe as the physical assaults and violence done
to the land and bodies of subjugated people. It is exactly this kind
of thinking that infected those who rioted and murdered their
compatriots – a sense of fully absorbing the coloniser’s claims
of racial, moral and civilisational superiority. How else to explain
the damage to the colonised psyche, whose imagination is so deeply
corroded that it can believe that white skins are superior to brown
skins, that the British are greater than Indians, that one religion
prevails over another? It is in accepting these tragic untruths that
nations are crippled with a paralysing fear of others and sincere
loathing of the self.
Viceroy’s House is
the film of a deeply colonised imagination. Its actors are collateral
damage; no ill can be spoken of their talent or their craft. But as a
south Asian I watched this film in a dark cinema hall and wept. This
August will mark the 70th anniversary of the largest migration in
human history. Fifteen million Indians were displaced and more than a
million killed as the subcontinent was torn asunder. What value was
freedom if it did not empower people to think without chains?
If this servile
pantomime of partition is the only story that can be told of our
past, then it is a sorry testament to how intensely empire continues
to run in the minds of some today.
Fatima Bhutto is the
author of memoir Songs of Blood and Sword and novel The Shadow of the
Crescent Moon.
Gurinder
Chadha: My film has been wilfully misrepresented as anti-Muslim
The
director of Viceroy’s House argues that her film about India’s
partition of 1947, far from ignoring the freedom struggle, celebrates
it
Gurinder Chadha
Friday 3 March 2017
17.53 GMT
Fatima Bhutto, in
reviewing my film Viceroy’s House, has every right to express her
opinion about it. Everyone sees history through their own lens; some
only see what they want to see. My film is my vision of the events
leading up to India’s partition. It is not the first and it will
not be the last interpretation, and I am delighted that it is
provoking such heated public debate.
What saddens me is
that a film about reconciliation should be so wilfully misrepresented
as anti-Muslim or anti-Pakistan.
Viceroy's House
review – soapy account of India's birth agonies
In reviewing my
film, Bhutto makes a series of statements that are wildly inaccurate.
I would normally let this pass – the audience will see from the
very first scene that her description of my film is false. However,
Bhutto seems intent on inflaming the racial and religious divisions
that my film is intended to challenge, and it feels irresponsible to
let that pass.
My film does not
ignore the freedom struggle – it celebrates that struggle. (“The
British empire brought to its knees by a man in a loincloth,” as
Lady Mountbatten comments.) It does not ignore the colonial policy of
divide and rule, but challenges it. (As Indian prime minister
Jawaharlal Nehru comments to Lord Mountbatten: “You have divided us
and now you ask us for a solution.”) Above all, it does not show
the Muslim community as sole perpetrators of violence.
In her most
inflammatory allegation, Bhutto writes that the film depicts a Muslim
father throwing his daughter from a train, only for her to be saved
by a Hindu woman. She asserts that I do this to show that “a
(pointedly non-Muslim) stranger is more nurturing than a Muslim
parent”. In fact, what the film depicts is a Hindu mob attacking a
train of Muslim families – the father pushes his daughter from the
train to save her, not to kill her.
In making the film,
I took infinite care to show that responsibility for the violence lay
on all sides, and all communities were victims of the violence,
irrespective of race or religion. Part of that process was to share
the script and the film with many Muslim, Hindu and Sikh academics
and historians to ensure that the scenes I depicted were a fair and
reasonable representation of events.
I made Viceroy’s
House so that this key moment in our shared British-Asian history –
the 70th anniversary of the independence of India and the birth of
Pakistan – would not be lost. The events of 1947 are largely
forgotten in the UK, and they were and continue to be of huge
importance. I do not for one minute expect every person watching the
film to agree with my take on history. However, what alarms me most
about Bhutto’s piece is that it plays straight into the hands of
those who promote communal division – something that plagues India
and Pakistan to this day.
1 comment:
The costumes and the settings are enough to make me want to see this film.
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