• “It’s been the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done”

• “History is written by the victors”

• “My intention is to examine how someone like me can look at new historical evidence and explore an alternative historical narrative to what I’d been taught as a girl.”

                                                                                                                       Gurinder Chadha

Gurinder Chadha, the British-raised director of  “Bend It Like Beckham” confesses that “Viceroy’s House” is the story of a Punjabi-British mother who learns about the 1947 partition of India from her 91-year-old mother.  She closes the film,  “Viceroy’s House” with an ode to her grandmother, who sought refuge from Pakistan in India.

The story is based on the books “Freedom at Midnight” by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre and “The Shadow Of The Great Game – The Untold Story Of Partition” by Narendra Singh Sarila.

The film’s narrative is fairly evenly split between the political wrangling of the real historical figures upstairs (the British players); and the emotional downstairs (the Indian players) scenes, centered on the fictional romance between Jeet (a Hindu personal valet to Mountbatten played by Manish Dayal), and Aalia (a Muslim translator for Mountbatten’s daughter Pamela played by Huma Qureshi) who is  betrothed to someone else (another Muslim, chauffeur to the Viceroy) and may end up on the opposite side of a new border.

Famous figures — including Mohandas K. Gandhi (Neeraj Kabi), Jawaharlal Nehru (Tanveer Ghani) and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Denzil Smith) — are supporting but pivotal players. Impeccable production design and some fine performances, including Gillian Anderson as Mountbatten’s wife, hold this film together.

• Director – Gurinder Chadha

• Writers – Paul Mayeda Berges, Moira Buffini, Gurinder Chadha

• Actors – Gillian Anderson, Michael Gambon, Hugh Bonneville,Manish Dayal, Simon Callow

• Music – A.R. Rahman

• Running Time – 1h 46m

• Genres – Biography, Drama, History

At a pre-release screening Q&A in New York city, Chadha emphasizes that her mother, 91, when she was growing up in Rawalpindi (now Pakistan) recalls that everyone (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian) lived side by side very happily with a lot of respect for one another.  Chadha articulates her mother’s words in Punjabi at the Q&A.  In the words of Chadha’s mother, in 1947, the British suddenly did black magic and whatever happened all she knows….. there was a lot of destruction.  Most Indians knew that there was something quite fishy about how partition came about, but no one could quite put their finger on it.

“I decided I wanted to make a film about what I call The People’s Partition,” she explains. “I didn’t just want to explore why Partition happened and focus on the political wrangles between public figures, I also wanted to make sure the audience understood the impact of Partition on ordinary people.”

Chadha’s ancestors lived in the foothills of the Himalayas, now on the Pakistani side of the border. Her grandparents lived through the tumultuous events which saw sectarian violence between India’s minority population of Muslims (many of whom craved their own homeland) and the Hindu and Sikh majority, bring about the greatest refugee crisis the world has ever seen; in a vast diaspora, an estimated 14 million people were displaced during Partition and up to a million died.

To make a purely political film, Chadha quips she might just as well have made a documentary. But to reach a broader audience, she needed to entertain as well as educate. “That’s why I chose to interweave these political events with a love story – after all, even when the world is falling apart around our ears, life goes on – people’s hearts endure pain but also have huge capacity for love!”

As Chadha’s conception of how to tell the story developed, she approached Cameron McCracken (Executive Producer and Managing Director of Pathe in the UK, co-executive producer of Slum Dog Millionaire) to help progress the project.  The combination of British and Indian backers gave Chadha the opportunity to make the kind of film she grew up loving.

Whilst bowing down to their genius, Chadha sees her movie as being in the same tradition as David Lean’s A Passage To India (1984) and Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982).

As a writer-director, Chadha has repeatedly translated her personal experience as a Punjabi-British woman into uplifting, crowd-pleasing movies, from her ground-breaking 1993 debut Bhaji On The Beach to her box-office smash Bend It Like Beckham.

Asked for whom she made the movie, Chadha says that it’s hard to strike those balances between an Indian audience and a western audience.  “In the end,  you have to do what feels right for you and I did what I felt was right for me.  And I so wanted to make the film (to coincide with) 70 years after partition.”

In any event, what happened in 1947 has been pored over for the last 70 years and Chadha believes her interpretation is not the first and it will not be the last. But at least it will stimulate debate!

(Mabel Pais is a freelance writer.  She writes on the arts and entertainment, health and wellness, social issues and spirituality)