Witness the Historical Partition of 1947 through the Movie "The Viceroy's House"

Jubayrul Islam^*
*Correspondence: Jubayrul Islam, Department of Mass Communication and Journalism, Jain University, Bangalore, Karnataka, India, Tel: +919019601354, Email:

Keywords

The Viceroy’s House • 1947 partition • Lord Mount Batten • British rule over India • History of India

Introduction

India has three colors on its flag and each color describes how India is standing unbreakable even after so many years. The top band of India's national flag is saffron-colored, symbolizing the country's power and bravery. With Dharma Chakra, the white middle band represents harmony and reality. The last band, which is green in color, represents the land's fertility, prosperity, and auspiciousness. But is this interpretation relevant? In my opinion, India has lost its inner strength, prosperity, and fertility many years ago. The partition of 47 took everything from this holy land. At first, this land was divided into two countries in 1947 India and Pakistan, and then in 1971 Pakistan was divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Today every citizen of these three countries knows and believes that the partition did not just divide their home, it divided their soul and took their peace, their strength, and their fertility. But who was actually responsible for the 47 partitions? People come across various interpretations, some say it was the Muslims who did that, some say it was the Hindus who did that and some say only and only the British were responsible for this act [1].

Portraying an Authentic Plot

The movie Vice Roy’s House did an unusual job getting the plot of the partition and delivering the debated truth among the good people of the world. A valiant worthy film about a terrible time in India's past. History is composed of the victors. That is not an idea that precisely strikes a chord all through this anecdote about the splitting.

Plans of a lowered and dissolving British realm as it pulls out of India. Positively the British give no sign of embarrassing loss as they act formally during the initial scenes, which revel in the monumental wonder of Britain's seat of direct standard, here an enormous house in New Delhi that is staffed by many local Indians who're bossed around by English authorities as though this were the tallness of the Raj. The multitudinous staff prepares for the arrival of Lord Louis Mountbatten (Hugh Bonneville), the country's new and last Viceroy, as he prepares to preside over India's independence and ongoing partition negotiations. The film alternates between Mountbatten's meetings and negotiations and the arrivals and departures of Indian staff that must negotiate the vast interiors of the Viceroy's House (now the Rashtrapati Bhawan) and the similarly byzantine social and religious strata that complicate the apparent uniformity of their labor positions. As national tensions rise, those differences become more evident, resulting in schisms among fellow cooks and manservants that perplex and terrify their Western overseers.

However, for the most part, India's external religious conflict is portrayed as a Romeo and Juliet story involving two servants, the Hindu Jeet (Manish Dayal) and the Muslim Aalia (Huma Qureshi). Their romance is mostly comprised of sly looks and jittery exchanges, never escalating into a passion. On the surface, this makes the relationship unwieldy as a metaphor for the larger religious dispute that develops in Gurinder Chadha's film. As India's splintering threatens to break them apart, Jeet and Aalia struggle to engender any suspense or disaster because they never come together with any sense of urgency. Mountbatten, in reality, appears to be much more shaded than the Indian characters in the film.

Bonneville plays the viceroy as a regal yet liberal figure who represents a late interest in Indian culture now that the British have lost control of the country. But, as the country falls apart beyond the Viceroy's House's preserved order, Mountbatten's calm interest only further marks him as an outsider, and his impotent attempts at an orderly transfer only mark him as a puppet to his colleagues and the Indians alike. Mountbatten's ineffectiveness provides a potentially incisive theme on the hollow niceties of liberalism embedded in colonialism in Viceroy's House, but the film takes an odd narrative turn that makes the official himself the target of British schemes. Mountbatten's plan for a gentler, more prosperous partition is sullied from afar by Churchill's machinations, who concoct a scheme to use the future state of Pakistan as a buffer zone against the Soviet Union, according to the screenplay (by Paul Mayeda Berges, Moira Buffini, and Chada). Mountbatten and his assistants are nothing more than pawns for Lord Ismay (Michael Gambon), an imperious nobleman who disregards the viceroy's commissioned study on how to divide the country and instead draws a boundary that is most favorable to the crown.

Mountbatten is just there for Churchill to redirect the fault for the arrangement, which reorients the effect of this last blow of majestic control not around India but rather the emissary. This viably exonerates Mountbatten's hapless dogooder senses and complete newness to the topography and culture of the space he briefly manages, a long way from the film's underlying, more pointed condition of the man's benevolent neglectfulness with the haughtiness and absence that described the Raj.

The scenes with the viceroy's wife, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, are the only scenes in the film that counteract this self-negating revisionism (Gillian Anderson). Edwina exaggerates her husband's liberal impulses, greeting the viceroy with patronizing smiles and orders to introduce more Indian culture into the mansion and invite more native visitors to official events, and she even fires an overseer on the spot for blatant racism. The servants see this change as an order, while Edwina sees it as a show of gratitude, and the film's best scenes pit Edwina's adamant liberalism against their private grievances.

When she orders the head cook, for example, to make more Indian dishes, he can only grumble about having spent his whole life being taught to cook Western cuisine only to be ordered to make something else. Anderson portrays Edwina as earnest and intelligent but also capable of making a fool of herself, with the vicereine's practiced countenance and bearing only adding to the absurdity of her plan to visit the "real" India from behind the house's walls. Edwina, who is more excited than her husband to get her hands dirty and meet the people, provides the film's most informative glimpse of the limits of change and respect in a society where one country can control the policies and even borders of another.

The truth of the segment is coercively smashed home towards the finish of the film undoubtedly and it merits advising ourselves that by the demonstration of Partition exactly fourteen huge number of men, ladies and youngsters were made evacuees, on 'some unacceptable' side of the boundary and that somewhere close to half and 2,000,000 individuals passed on of starvation, weariness, illness and battling, and that pyro-crime, assault, murder and plundering among as of now destitution stricken people groups caused wretchedness of a large number more. The producer, Gurinder Chadha, is said to have lost family members during the partition as we see at the end of the film [1-5].

Conclusion

Today, we all know about India's struggle during the partition, and no words can adequately describe it. All we can do is remember the brave martyr and pay tribute to them with what we have and our best efforts. And this movie serves the purpose transparently, as we witness the anguish of people being separated from their families, homes, and, above all, their countries. Many films and books depict the unforgettable 1947 split, but "The Viceroy's House" has an aura that conveys the genuine tale of the partition and how people tried to break their own country by obeying an outsider.

References

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