“Makes Buckingham Palace look like a bungalow”, Lady Mountbatten opines as she surveys her new digs in THE VICEROY’S HOUSE, the latest picture to depict Partition and the creation of Pakistan.
The dwelling was designed by Lutyens and took 17 years to build. Its imposing architecture was an expression of Imperial power, intended to intimidate. It was completed in 1929, as Wall Street crashed, but few could have imagined that in less than 20 years it would become the home of the first President of India. Interestingly, it remains the largest residence of any head of state anywhere in the world.
Back in 1947, Lord Mountbatten was appointed the last British Viceroy of India, a Horay Henry of the Last Hurrah of the Raj, and this film depicts him as much a hapless pawn in the machinations of the British Government at the time as the creator and administrator of the divvy up.
Director Gurinder Chadha, probably best known for her breakout film, Bend It Like Beckham, split’s the film’s narrative fairly evenly between the political wrangling of the real historical figures upstairs in the seat of Colonial power and the emotional downstairs scenes, centred on the fictional romance between Jeet, a Hindu personal valet to Mountbatten, and Aalia, a Muslim
translator for Mountbatten’s daughter Pamela, and it’s as cheesy as a naan laced with rennin.
The Machiavellian machinations by Britain to appease the Muslims over the Hindu handover is much more interesting, as the modern world’s fault lines and flashpoints are created by frontiers made up ad hoc by a dwindling Imperial power.
At one point Lady Ethel Manners, widow of a former British governor, exclaims, “the creation of Pakistan is our crowning failure. Our only justification for two hundred years of power was unification. But we’ve divided one composite nation into two and everyone at home goes around saying what a swell the new Viceroy is for getting it sorted out so quickly.”
The Viceroy depicted in THE VICEROY’S HOUSE is most certainly a swell, Dickie Mountbatten as channelled through Hugh Bonneville, the boom-tish of Burma, now the monkey of the Boom Crash Opera orchestrated by the organ grinder of post Colonial Britain.
He’s presented as a Father Knows Best type from some cute and sanitised Fifties television series where the head of the house is always outmanoeuvred by the savvier spouse or softly coaxed by the sweet and adorable daughter.
Lady Mountbatten is played with regal relish by Gillian Anderson, the American actress who is more British than the British and has recently set her sights on playing James Bond, that most famous blunt instrument of Queen and Country.
One of the joys, or vices, of a film like THE VICEROY’S HOUSE is the cavalcade of luvvies in incandescent cameos. Here we are presented with Simon Callow as Cyril Radcliff, Michael Gambon as the wily General Hastings Ismay, and David Hayman as the stalwart Scottish house manager, Ewart.
THE VICEROY’S HOUSE is at least a reminder of the follies of the recent past and the pandering to tribalism.
Ironically, the old duffer, Mountbatten, was assassinated years later as a consequence of another botched piece of British partitioning, that of Ireland.