Gurinder Chadha on Viceroy’s House: why I had to make a film about partition

It was rumoured in Agra that, during the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, Pakistani bombers would be guided to their target by the gleaming marble of the Taj Mahal. Yet it stands as a towering example of how Islamic culture is so organically part of India’s heritage, despite the sometimes uneasy relationship between the two countries. I am sure that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will have no such thoughts of territorial dispute in mind when they visit Agra today, but for many of us who have been following Prince William’s first visit to India, we cannot help but be reminded that his great-great uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India and mentor to Prince Charles, presided over the independence of India and birth of Pakistan – events that have shaped our entire lives. For 300 years, the British in India exerted a profound influence. Prince William’s ancestors ruled my homeland efficiently and ruthlessly, and my ancestors supported that rule, holding senior posts in the British-Indian police force and army. But by the end of the second world war, the empire was politically and economically untenable. In India the imperial policy of divide and rule had flowered into evergrowing sectarian violence. Although many, like Churchill, felt that Indians were unfit to govern themselves (“a beastly people with a beastly religion”), Mountbatten was appointed by King George VI as his viceroy, and charged with peacefully transferring power from Britain to India. In so doing, Mountbatten agreed the division of the country on religious grounds: the separation of Hindus and Sikhs from Muslims to create a new Islamic country, Pakistan. Partition, as it became known, sees its 70th anniversary next year. It involved the largest mass migration in human history, as 14 million people were displaced, and up to a million died as a result of sectarian violence, starvation and disease. Half of the Punjab was given to Pakistan, and my Sikh relatives and their Hindu friends suddenly found their homes were no longer in India. They fled for their lives in the clothes they were wearing, grabbing what possessions they could carry. The homes they abandoned would soon provide shelter for Muslim refugees, themselves fleeing from violence in India. My uncles and aunts were only small children when they were forced to flee. My father’s youngest sister never made it – she starved to death. My aunt, who now lives in the leafy English town of Chertsey in Surrey, remembers, aged 10, watching her mother, my grandmother, wrap her dead child in a yard of cotton and place a heavy stone on her chest so that she would sink to the bottom of the river that was to be her grave. I find it extraordinary that anyone could come to terms with the tragedy that flowed from such sectarian violence. Yet when I was growing up in a corner shop in London, my dad had longstanding customers who would come round in the evenings to keep him company in the shop. Most of them were not fellow Sikhs. They were Muslims from his ancestral town. I didn’t think much about it as a child, but that sense of a common humanity, spanning the religious divide, really struck me in 2005 when I went to Pakistan to find my grandfather’s home for the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? programme. When we eventually found the house, it had become home to several Muslim families whose parents had all fled India during partition. One woman handed me a shawl and a bouquet of bright plastic flowers, saying: “My family came from India in 1947. I am Indian like you.” Then an old Pakistani man smiled and said: “This is your home, please come back any time. We will be watching the road waiting for your return.” I burst into uncontrollable tears, tears held back over years of trying to contain the injustices of history to which my family had been subject, tears now released as I wept with the inhabitants of my ancestral homeland, now a different country, but one where we still shared the same Punjabi language and sense of family. It was at that moment that I vowed I would make a film that told the story of partition. Although I had been a film-maker for many years, I had never had the courage to tackle the political tragedy that tore my family apart. As I researched the script, I also began to realise how little I really knew of the bigger picture, of the global interests at play as India was divided. One book in particular was revelatory: The Shadow of the Great Game by Narendra Singh Sarila. Narendra had been aide de camp to Mountbatten. In 1997 he was in the British Library researching a book about his family when he was approached by an Indian librarian. She had been given a box of papers to index – secret government documents that had recently been declassified. The documents appeared to confirm a secret strategy for the protection of British interests in Asia that inexorably led to partition. So much for it being the fault of the warring Indians, as I had been taught at school in London, or principally the fault of Mountbatten, as many of my relatives believed. It was far more complex, and this revelation provided me with a way into the story. By setting the entire film in Viceroy’s House in Delhi, I was able to bring under one roof the Mountbattens, the key Indian leaders (Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi), and the 500 ordinary Indians Hindu, Sikh and Muslim – who served the Mountbattens as domestic staff. To reach a global audience, I knew that I had to make my film entertaining and accessible. What better way than to visually embrace the splendour of the Raj, of Viceroy’s House, and to use humour and passion to tell a tale of upstairs and downstairs life in the grand tradition of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey. In the microcosm of that great house, I was able to explore the multiple points of view of the protagonists, and grapple with the idea of partition without being overwhelmed by its tragedy. I do not believe that anyone but a British Indian – a product of Britain and India’s inextricable links – could truly inhabit these differing perspectives. I only hope that I do them justice. After five years of research and development, I will complete the film at the end of this year. I will have written my history, the history of my family, intertwined with that of Prince William’s great-great uncle and the end of the Raj. As a British-Indian woman, I doubt Churchill had me in mind when he said: “History is written by the victors.”