Indian audiences will be intrigued by Gurinder Chadha’s conspiracy theory of history in Viceroy’s House, which she has made in English with a very fine cast and crew from England but which is being dubbed into Hindi — as Partition: 1947, releasing on Friday — for a wider market in India.

The conventional view is that Jinnah forced the Partition of India with his demand for a separate homeland for Muslims at a time when the increasing incidence of inter-communal violence left Mountbatten, sent out to preside over the transfer of power, with no other option.

Gurinder disagrees. She “reveals” that by the time Mountbatten arrived in India in 1947, the British had already resolved to hand over Pakistan to Jinnah. This is because starting with Churchill, who never had much time either for Indian nationalist leaders or the notion of Independence, the British establishment was determined to carry on playing “the Great Game” and keep the Russians out of India. They could not trust Nehru and other leftist leaders in India which might not even join the British Commonwealth of nations. In these circumstances, Britain could best protect its strategic interests by creating Pakistan as a kind of buffer zone which would prevent the Russians getting access to the warm waters of the Arabian Sea and especially the rich oilfields of West Asia.

For her evidence, Gurinder relies on The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition, by the diplomat, Narendra Singh Sarila, who briefed Gurinder before his death in Switzerland. He was, most significantly, an ADC to Mountbatten.

The one who first tipped her off about the existence of the book was none other than Prince Charles, Mountbatten’s great nephew and the current heir to the throne.

LUSH LOOK AND A DOCU FEEL

Gurinder wants her film, which has a lush look with the exteriors shot at Rashtrapati Bhavan and the interiors at the Maharajah of Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhawan in Rajasthan, to stimulate plenty of debate. So it is worth pointing out that in his review (“Not so duplicitous as painted”) of Sarila’s book in The Spectator in 2006, the author Philip Ziegler concedes that “there is evidence to support” the conspiracy theory of Partition. 

“No one can reasonably deny that the schism between Muslim and Hindu in India, though not invented by the British, was fomented by them on the principle of divide and rule,” he writes.

But then he concludes: “But it is a far cry from this to assuming that in 1947 such considerations bulked large in the minds of the Labour government or of Mountbatten.”

Ziegler finds that Sarila “is moderate in his judgements and, for the most part, fair in his treatment of individuals. The only pity is that he is almost entirely wrong.”

“It is a notorious weakness of Indian historians that they assume the British were far more clever and subtle than in fact they were,” says Ziegler.

Gurinder did not set out to make a documentary though it is to her credit that sometimes Viceroy’s House has the feel of one. It could certainly be shown to schoolchildren in Britain who are taught all manner of history except for the period of colonial rule in India.

Gurinder set out to make a feature film but it is evitable that many in her global audience will assume that what they see is what really happened. She also depended for source material on Freedom At Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre.

DOWNTON-ESQUE ELEMENT

She has done well to cast Hugh Bonneville as Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India. For six seasons of Downton Abbey, which takes the TV tale of the aristocratic Crawley family from the start of the First World War to 1924, he plays its patriarch, the good humoured and essentially decent Earl of Grantham. He carries on doing much the same but having swapped his country clothes for the crisp uniforms worn by Lord Mountbatten.

The fine actress Gillian Anderson, as his wife Edwina — she will be known to millions across the world as Dana Scully in The X-Files — is something of a feminist, inclined to speechifying and sacking English staff who are disdainful of Indian servants — and there 500 of the latter to run the Viceregal residence in Delhi. British audiences will certainly detect a Downton-esque element to the film.

There are two other great British actors who lift the sequences where the rulers are discussing how power should be handed over to the ruled. One is Michael Gambon (Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter franchise) as Gen Hastings Ismay, who always favoured Partition and apparently hid confidential documents/instructions on the subject even from Mountbatten.

The other is Simon Callow as the judge Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who has never set foot in India. He is given the impossible task of drawing the Partition line through Punjab and Bengal, adding further fuel to the flame that had already been lit. In his anguish, he declares he will not accept his fee. 

Nehru is played by a British actor, Tanveer Ghani, but Gurinder has probably been wise in not complicating an already complicated plot by giving him any romantic scenes with Edwina. Mumbai-based Denzil Smith is suitably stern and stiff and impeccably suited as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, while another Indian actor, Neeraj Kabi, is engagingly eccentric as M.K. Gandhi. Bapu here could have done with the services of a dentist, though.

EMILY BRONTE VS JANE AUSTEN

Gurinder has been unable to resist giving Viceroy’s House a Bollywood touch by inserting a fictionalised love affair between Jeet (Manish Dayal), Mountbatten’s Hindu dresser, and Aalia (Huma Qureshi), a Muslim girl who acts as interpreter to the Viceroy’s daughter, Pamela. Manish and Huma do make a handsome couple — in the film she is promised to Jinnah’s towering Muslim driver — but this triangle does not always sit easily with the historical drama. 
The late Om Puri turns in a poignant cameo as Aalia’s blind father — this was his farewell to films.

Gurinder dwells over the horrors of Partition and depicts the Mountbattens and Nehru wading into the refugee camps. But she manages a characteristic flash of humour during a division of the spoils in the Viceroy’s House, especially in the library. If Pakistan is unreasonable in taking Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, India will insist on keeping all of Jane Austen.

Gurinder, who was born in Nairobi, arrived in Britain with her parents when she was two and grew up in Southall in West London. What she has done is a very personal British Punjabi take on the Partition of India. She made her name with Bend It Like Beckham in 2002 but Viceroy’s House will remain her most ambitious project. It is certainly worth watching.

Amit Roy