Viceroy’s House Parent Guide

It’s March 1947 and the Viceroy’s Palace in New Delhi is frantically preparing to welcome its illustrious new residents – Lord Louis Mountbatten, his wife, Edwina, and their daughter, Pamela (played by Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, and Lily Travers). Their arrival is portentous: Mountbatten is the cousin of King George VI and is coming to end the British Raj and give India its independence. But as one staff member tells the viceroy’s new valet, Jeet Kumar (Manish Dayal), it’s not just benevolence that has engendered this new policy: “England is all slums and bomb sites. The war has exhausted them. They can’t afford to keep us.”

Whatever the reasons behind Britain’s decision to free India, Lord and Lady Mountbatten arrive in India with high ideals and a desire to do the right thing. Lord Mountbatten befriends the leading politicians on all sides and his wife throws herself into improving the lot of Indians. But it looks like their efforts are too little too late. “India is a ship on fire”, Lord Ismay (Michael Gambon) tells the viceroy as it becomes apparent the subcontinent is being torn apart by religious violence. Muslims make up 20% of India’s population and are agitating for a country of their own, to be named Pakistan. As passions flare, riots and massacres spread, and 40,000 people have already died. Mountbatten will have to figure out how to free India without even greater bloodshed. But he doesn’t know that his own government hasn’t told him everything…

Mountbatten’s ignorance is going to exact a high price, and the young valet, Jeet Kumar, will pay some of it. The young Hindu from the Punjab is in love with Aalia (Huma Qureshi), a Muslim woman from the same district. But her parents have arranged a marriage for her with a man of their faith. And when violence erupts in the staff compound, she must escort her blind father to Pakistan where he will be safe. But there is no guaranteed security anywhere in the subcontinent.

Viceroy’s House is a passion project on the part of its director, Gurinder Chadha, who has pulled a page from her family history. Her own grandmother fled from Pakistan to India when partition led to the greatest migration in human history. Fourteen million people moved across the new borders and one million died, including Chadha’s infant aunt.

Chadha’s passion doesn’t always infuse the film – from time to time it feels like an exposition-heavy historical re-enactment. But, given that most audiences won’t know much about Indian history, the exposition is necessary. Fortunately, the actors are excellent. Michael Gambon plays Lord Ismay with the weary cynicism of a morally bankrupt empire builder. Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson are convincingly earnest and idealistic. Denzil Smith portrays a conniving Jinnah, inflexible in his pursuit of Pakistan. And Manish Dayal is a wide-eyed, innocent caught in the human tragedy of Partition.

Perhaps Chadha’s greatest achievement in Viceroy’s House isn’t portraying the great historical sweep of Indian independence. It’s in depicting the personal heartbreak and grief engendered by Partition. From Mountbatten’s disillusion to Kumar’s personal tragedies, the film manages to give viewers a sense of loss for the human cost of history. Early in the film, the Indian leader Nehru (Tanveer Ghani) tells Mountbatten, “India is her people, held together by indivisible threads.” But when those threads snap and a nation’s social fabric is torn apart, not even the king’s cousin can put it back together again.