osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2018-04-07 12:00 am
osprey_archer) wrote2018-04-07 12:00 am
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Viceroy’s House
I had the chance to watch Gurinder Chadha’s latest film Viceroy’s House in the theaters last year and I missed it and now I’m kicking myself, because I saw it yesterday on the small screen and it was great but I bet it was even better on the big screen. It’s one of those movies with enough scope and pomp and circumstance to need all that space.
On the other hand, watching the story of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan unfold on the big screen would have been even more emotionally devastating, so maybe it’s just as well I didn’t.
The story begins, as the title suggests, at the Viceroy’s House, where Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, has just arrived with his idealistic, headstrong wife (played by Gillian Anderson), and their daughter. At the same time, a new valet has arrived - a former Hindu policeman named Jeet Kumar - who is just getting his first tour of the house when he is struck dumb by the sight of a girl he hasn’t seen for years: his beloved Aalia Noor! Jeet helped Aalia’s father when he was imprisoned for fighting for Indian independence, and of course Jeet and Aalia fell in love. But Aalia is a Muslim, and also betrothed to another, so it can never be…
This is a timeworn tale and I must confess I was a little impatient with it at first - why waste time on a love story when we could have the various heads of the Indian independence movement bickering about how to move forward now that independence is nearly at hand? - but by the end of the movie it gains real intensity and pathos. I knew a little about the Partition before, but distantly, and the numbers “a million dead and fourteen million displaced” seem rather abstract until you start to connect them to individuals - and then multiply those individual stories by the thousands and tens of thousands - and then you begin to have some idea of the scope of the tragedy.
Chadha uses the staff compound of the Viceroy’s House as a window onto the wider world of India, which I think is very clever. The staff was drawn from all over India so it reflects many of the tensions that were tearing the country apart. (I imagine that the movie dramatizes the history a bit, but who knows, maybe one of Mountbatten’s valets really did pull a knife of him.) And it gives her a clear connection between the high politics story of Mountbatten and Gandhi and Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) and the lives of the common people, which historical movies & shows often strive for but, just as often, can’t accomplish naturally.
And even though I did know basically where the story was going - one of the real triumphs of the movie is that it makes you feel the runaway-train quality of events - no one wants these massacres to be happening and yet no one has the power to stop them. The government keeps moving up the date for independence in the hope that it might help (or, as some of the characters suggest, because the British want to get out before things really get hot), but events have taken on a force of their own, and there may be nothing any government can do except go along for the ride.
I suspect there’s endless historiographical debate over the reasons for the violence of the Partition. Viceroy’s House is arguing that it was the inevitable result of ethnic tension: not only have Jeet and Aalia bridged the divide between Hindu and Muslim, but Jeet comes from a village where people of the two faiths have lived peacefully side by side for years, sometimes even intermarrying.
Rather, the movie suggests that the violence became inevitable when Churchill promised Pakistan to Jinnah, which happened a few years before independence. Once the real possibility for two countries was on the table, Jinnah had a reason to try to create demand for two countries - by fomenting distrust between Hindus and Muslims - and once that ball started rolling down the hill, it quickly went out of control.
Churchill thought that Pakistan would be a comparatively docile client state (it’s dubious whether he got this) - and that a separate India and Pakistan, forever at each other’s throats, would be less powerful than one united India. And that seems very likely true.
(I don’t wish to take anything away from Churchill’s leadership in Britain during World War II - standing alone against the Nazis, “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” and all that - but otherwise, he seems to have been a thorough-going rotter.)
Lord Mountbatten, who comes across as a bit wet behind the ears, poor duck, comes into his position under the impression that everyone is acting in good faith to help India transition smoothly into her long-awaited and well-deserved independence. It’s a nasty shock to him when he realizes that Churchill has been using him as a catspaw for his own ends.
On the other hand, watching the story of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan unfold on the big screen would have been even more emotionally devastating, so maybe it’s just as well I didn’t.
The story begins, as the title suggests, at the Viceroy’s House, where Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, has just arrived with his idealistic, headstrong wife (played by Gillian Anderson), and their daughter. At the same time, a new valet has arrived - a former Hindu policeman named Jeet Kumar - who is just getting his first tour of the house when he is struck dumb by the sight of a girl he hasn’t seen for years: his beloved Aalia Noor! Jeet helped Aalia’s father when he was imprisoned for fighting for Indian independence, and of course Jeet and Aalia fell in love. But Aalia is a Muslim, and also betrothed to another, so it can never be…
This is a timeworn tale and I must confess I was a little impatient with it at first - why waste time on a love story when we could have the various heads of the Indian independence movement bickering about how to move forward now that independence is nearly at hand? - but by the end of the movie it gains real intensity and pathos. I knew a little about the Partition before, but distantly, and the numbers “a million dead and fourteen million displaced” seem rather abstract until you start to connect them to individuals - and then multiply those individual stories by the thousands and tens of thousands - and then you begin to have some idea of the scope of the tragedy.
Chadha uses the staff compound of the Viceroy’s House as a window onto the wider world of India, which I think is very clever. The staff was drawn from all over India so it reflects many of the tensions that were tearing the country apart. (I imagine that the movie dramatizes the history a bit, but who knows, maybe one of Mountbatten’s valets really did pull a knife of him.) And it gives her a clear connection between the high politics story of Mountbatten and Gandhi and Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) and the lives of the common people, which historical movies & shows often strive for but, just as often, can’t accomplish naturally.
And even though I did know basically where the story was going - one of the real triumphs of the movie is that it makes you feel the runaway-train quality of events - no one wants these massacres to be happening and yet no one has the power to stop them. The government keeps moving up the date for independence in the hope that it might help (or, as some of the characters suggest, because the British want to get out before things really get hot), but events have taken on a force of their own, and there may be nothing any government can do except go along for the ride.
I suspect there’s endless historiographical debate over the reasons for the violence of the Partition. Viceroy’s House is arguing that it was the inevitable result of ethnic tension: not only have Jeet and Aalia bridged the divide between Hindu and Muslim, but Jeet comes from a village where people of the two faiths have lived peacefully side by side for years, sometimes even intermarrying.
Rather, the movie suggests that the violence became inevitable when Churchill promised Pakistan to Jinnah, which happened a few years before independence. Once the real possibility for two countries was on the table, Jinnah had a reason to try to create demand for two countries - by fomenting distrust between Hindus and Muslims - and once that ball started rolling down the hill, it quickly went out of control.
Churchill thought that Pakistan would be a comparatively docile client state (it’s dubious whether he got this) - and that a separate India and Pakistan, forever at each other’s throats, would be less powerful than one united India. And that seems very likely true.
(I don’t wish to take anything away from Churchill’s leadership in Britain during World War II - standing alone against the Nazis, “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” and all that - but otherwise, he seems to have been a thorough-going rotter.)
Lord Mountbatten, who comes across as a bit wet behind the ears, poor duck, comes into his position under the impression that everyone is acting in good faith to help India transition smoothly into her long-awaited and well-deserved independence. It’s a nasty shock to him when he realizes that Churchill has been using him as a catspaw for his own ends.
no subject
It's deeply depressing to me--but also something I recognize from my own lifetime, but also from history--that people of different groups who **have** been living side by side amicably can be worked up to vicious murderousness. In fact I suspect that there's no assemblage of people you could make that's so similar that a division couldn't be created among them, with this result. Ugh.
no subject
It's been borne in on me multiple times that diversity is something that we as humans have to really work at. It's easy to laugh at the somewhat forced diversity of PBS specials (or indeed at the Indian version: here we have Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim working side by side in harmony!) but there's a reason it gets repeated so insistently.
And yeah, to your last bit, about how it's impossible to make a group of people so similar that you couldn't create a murderous division between them. If there's no obvious ethnic or religious difference there's still always the possibility for Montagues and Capulets: there's no visible difference between the two sides and they don't remember why they hate each other, but they do.
no subject
I've been thinking a lot about the model of an army platoon, or whatever the smaller unit is where everyone gets to know one another and ends up deeply committed to each other--it's in all the movies: they start out different classes, religions, ethnic groups, parts of the country, races--and end up risking their lives to carry each other's dying bodies to safety. And it's **real**--real veterans talk about that commitment and those deep ties. So what makes that? And I think it's that they are forced to be that committed to each other. There's no backing out, there's no moving away. ... But that's against a backdrop of war, threatened death, etc. It's hard to achieve that when it's not forced on you.
... Not quite sure where I'm going with this. And I do think diverse people can live together peacefully without the army model. I'm sighing because i'm realizing I just can't make a generalization. There are cases where people are able to live together peacefully because there are no stresses on them, but when stresses come it all falls apart--that's like the opposite of the army model. People getting along, period, is hard, I guess, and we should support working at it, and stretching our limits and boundaries, because like any skill, it takes practice and pushing to get stronger.
no subject
And there are tons of stories about diverse groups of people pulling together after a natural disaster, say, to work together for survival. But that's short-term stress. I think long-term stress is often more corrosive?
Although in a case like India - the presence of the British was a long-term stress, but working against them was the goal that united disparate groups within India, and once that goal had been achieved there wasn't another shared purpose to draw people together. (Although of course there were lots of other factors: certain factions in the British government doing their darndest to foster disunity, for instance.)