Viceroy's House review – soapy account of India's birth agonies

‘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.