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Violence During Partition of India in the Movie Viceroy's House

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Violence During Partition of India in the Movie Viceroy's House Journal of Interdisciplinary Cycle Research ISSN NO: 0022-1945 Violence During Partition of India in the movie Viceroy’s House Minakshi Chauhan Research Scholar Deptt. Of English Baba Mastnath University, Rohtak Supervisor: Dr. Nazar Mohammed Abstract: Viceroy’s House is based on the true story of India‘s transition to independence in 1947. Lord Mountbatten (Hugh Bonneville) is tasked with the role of overseeing this monumental event and is sent to India as the last Viceroy. He‘s accompanied by his wife, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, and daughter Pamela.The British have ruled India for 300 years, and during that time India has been integrated into one large country. There is still, however, much division among the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Congress Party, is determined that India should remain as one country but Muhammad Ali Jinnah , a Muslim leader, wants a separate country for his people. Mountbatten comes to the conclusion that partitioning the country is the only solution. But he doesn‘t realise that Prime Minister Churchill and the previous Viceroy have already drawn up this very plan.Meanwhile, in the servant quarters lies the emotional dimension of the film, as an old love story between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman, Jeet Kumar (Manish Dayal) and Alia (Huma Qureshi), rekindles. Key Words: Violence, Riots, Intensifying, Sub-continent, Horrifying, Territory, Plan etc. The riots erupting across India, the British decide to accelerate the independence process. Mountbatten is intent upon a one-state solution, but with intensifying violence between Muslims and Hindus he reluctantly accepts the Partition of India. He is given only a couple months to carve out a separate state from the existing territory, with the help of an inexperienced English lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe .The subcontinent was divided in 1947 along religious lines into India Volume XII, Issue X, October/2020 Page No:1462 Journal of Interdisciplinary Cycle Research ISSN NO: 0022-1945 (mostly Sikh and Hindu) and Pakistan (Muslim). The number who died in the following violence is still disputed. Most historians believe it was a million civilians or more. What is not in doubt is that they died in the most horrifying circumstances. Arson, torture, mass rape, desecration of temples and indiscriminate murder were commonplace. As many as 12 million people were uprooted in the largest human migration in history. Civilians found themselves on the wrong side of the new border . They travelled to their new nation-state, often encountering—and butchering—those of different religious persuasions heading in the opposite direction. The bloodbath followed a nationalist struggle that had lasted for decades. It will forever remain a dark stain on Britain‘s colonial legacy, with accusation and counter-accusation thrown over who was resonsible. Viceroy's House is a 2017 British-Indian historical drama film directed by Gurinder Chadha and written by Paul MayedaBerges, Moira Buffini, and Chadha. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 3 March 2017, while the Hindi dubbed version titled Partition: 1947 was released in India on 18 August 2017, 3 days after its 70th Independence Day. It was released worldwide on 1 September 2017. Viceroy's House is based on 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. There were many issues within the final weeks of the transfer of power. There‘s the accusations that the British are leaving a country still in poverty, with the work of development still half- done. There is a sense that the British give their preference to Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League to create a greater allegiance amongst Muslims against the Soviet Union. It was a process carried out in great haste, although the film makes it perfectly clear that Britain had simply run out of options: it couldn‘t get any agreement from either side, Hindu or Muslim, and it had run out of time, goodwill and manpower to hold on any longer.The British had favoured a gradual transfer of power to maintain control. Attempts to introduce local governance in the inter-war years was seen by Indian nationalist leaders as a deliberate attempt to avoid progressing to full independence. Consequently, there was widespread civil unrest. Nevertheless, Hindus and Muslims were brought into the Indian Civil Service, there was development in civil Volume XII, Issue X, October/2020 Page No:1463 Journal of Interdisciplinary Cycle Research ISSN NO: 0022-1945 society, professional training in the medical services, the appointment of Indian officers as part of the ‗Indianisation‘ of the army, and expansion of the Indian service sector in the economy. Before the euphemistically named ―difficulties‖ of partition were settled, houses were burnt and looted in the presence of policemen; women and children were flung from moving trains; the district engineer of Lahore was attacked in his office, tied to a post and sawn into pieces; patients were murdered in their hospital beds; babies were taken from their mothers, cut in half and returned to them; villages were mortar-bombed. Furthermore, there were mass suicides; Sikhs were forcibly circumcised; mobs stamped people to death; corpses were thrown into wells to defile water supplies; people were ordered to stand or sit in long rows to be shot one by one; and children were burnt alive in pits.So it went on, week after genocidal week. The anarchy reached a scale where the authorities were able to do no more than note down reports of slaughters. Typical was a report from the commanding officer of the Second Battalion of the First Gurkhas. They had discovered a train in the Punjab filled with 200 dead Muslims who had been ambushed by Sikhs.The moviebegins with an ominous warning: ―History is written by the victors.‖ It sure is. The empire and its descendants have their fingerprints all over this story. It is the the story of the Mountbattens‘ arrival in India and the subcontinent‘s subsequent breakup, opens to the sight of bowing, preening and scraping Indians at work on the lawns, carpets and marble floors that are to greet the last viceroy of colonised India, Lord Louis Mountbatten – or Dickie, as he was known – played by the rosy Hugh Bonneville. In one of his first scenes, Mountbatten instructs his Indian valets that he never wants to spend more than two minutes getting dressed – fitting for the man who dismembered India in less than six weeks. As always, it is the Indians, not the British, who fail in the simplest of tasks set out for them. It is the movie which embeds the fictional story of a love affair between a young Hindu man and a Muslim woman in the context of the last days of British rule. The film sheds light on what went on in the Viceroy‘s house utilizing the age-old concept of upstairs-downstairs feud – upstairs, inside the conference halls between the political representatives of different interests, and downstairs, through the happenings of the servants‘ quarters and their personal lives. While one senses a constant fear and confusion in the minds of Mountbatten and his family as they struggle to forge a nation (or two), free of differences of any kind, and to hand it over to the people, one also sees the unrest disrupting between representatives of different political ideologies including Pandit Jawaharlal Volume XII, Issue X, October/2020 Page No:1464 Journal of Interdisciplinary Cycle Research ISSN NO: 0022-1945 Nehru (Tanveer Ghani), Mahatma Gandhi (Neeraj Kabi) and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Denzil Smith).Meanwhile, in the servant quarters lies the emotional dimension of the film, as an old love story between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman, Jeet Kumar (Manish Dayal) and Alia (Huma Qureshi), rekindles. Despite a bigger latent frame in mind, the film feels like a mere attempt made to remove traces of blame, whatsoever, resting on the shoulders of Mountbatten in the decision of dividing India. It‘s not surprising that Singh is Hindu, and Noor is Muslim; this dash of obvious symbolism signifies the splintered nation at the time, which quashed the prospect of love across religions. It‘s a fact that cannot be contested, but it materialises with such literal force in Partition: 1947 that it fails to make an impact. And that‘s the main problem with this film: nearly everything in it is told, retold, explained, and explained some more. Chadha‘s film is rife with text and surface, but what‘s missing here is subtext and depth, the vacant spaces that allow an audience to ‗own‘ a film, to imbue it with their own meanings and interpretation. The decorated half history lesson of Mountbatten‘s goodwill fails to justify an event as significant as the Partition and in fact, if we may say so, makes the Indian leaders‘ motives look rather facile. Lord Mountbatten (Huge Bonneville) is appointed as the last viceroy of India and he moves to Delhi with his wife Edwina Mountbatten (Gillian Anderson) and his daughter. Jeet is appointed as Lord Mountbatten's personal assistant who is in love with Alia, who is also a helping hand to Edwina at the viceroy's house.But Ali Rahim Noor, who is Alia's blind father, wants Asif to marry his daughter. He is the personal driver of Jinnah. The movie has some extreme violent scenes.Viceroy’s House has some violence. For example: There is a lot of civil unrest, which is shown both in historical and movie footage. There are riots on the streets, buildings on fire, and scenes of police and soldiers beating people.
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