Huma Qureshi‘s movie titled “Partition: 1947“, which is directed by Gurinder Chadha has released today. The movie which is based on British documents discussed in Narendra Singh Sarila’s book ‘The Shadow of the Great Game’.
Gurinder Chadha is best known for directing movies like ‘Bend It Like Beckham’, ‘Bride’ and ‘Prejudice’. However, the same can not be said with her latest period drama, Viceroy’s House in India in English and dubbed in Hindi as ‘Partition: 1947″.
The movie starts up with a line saying ‘History is written by victors’. Then we see an army with a well groomed, liveried Indians scrubbing, polishing, shuffling around the Viceroy’s House and they all were preparing for the arrival of the last Viceroy to India.
Lord Louis Mountbatten comes to Delhi along with his wife Lady Edwina and their daughter. They get themselves busy with the dynamic between the upstairs (the British officers) and downstairs (the Indian servants) in the house.
The better-executed scenes show that the Lord Louis Mountbatten instructing his valets that he wants to dressed in his official regalia in under two-minutes and for that he sets the timer and the men began with their rehearsal and it takes them 13 minutes.
Then, Mountbatten has a meeting with Jawahar Lal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammad Ali Jinnah etc. Mountbatten gets approval from the British Parliament for the partition and then he returns to put Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a man that has never been to India, in charge of demarcating the new boundary line.
Mountbatten seemingly hurried to handle the handover of India, and the creation of Pakistan is a love story between a Hindu valet Jeet (the role played by Manish Dayal) and a Muslim girl Aalia (the role played by Huma Qureshi).
The impact of Partition demonstrated by the friction between the Hindu and Muslim colleagues and their neighbours. Neeraj Kabi’s acting seen impactful in only one scene as the defeated Mahatma Gandhi while Tanveer Ghani plays Nehru in the film, which is terribly weak with his acting. Hugh Bonneville’s role as Mountbatten is interchangeable with this performance as Robert Crawley from Downton Abbey.
The Indian actors struggle with the theatrical dialogues and the love story between Jeet and Aalia is not even convincing. The script which is written by Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges, and Moira Buffin, which is based on Narindra Singh Sarila’s book ‘The Shadow Of The Great Game’, the book which exposes the top secret government files that revealed that how dividing India was a British strategy for retaining influence as a postcolonial power, but Gurinder has failed to show this conspiracy theory in the movie.
In the movie, you will also see Mahatma Gandhi forces Lord Mountbatten to taste his curd, which is made out of a goat’s milk. A couple of AR Rahman’s tunes can enhance your mood, but the movie fails to contribute anything significant to Gurinder Chadha’s version of the Indian partition.
The years of history crammed into the 106 minutes movie, the narrative feels dreary and barely scratches the surface of the deep impact of Partition.