Gurinder Chadha, who made the 2017 film Viceroy’s House, starring Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson as Lord and Lady Mountbatten, recently opened up about her interactions with King Charles when she was planning to make the film. Lord Mountbatten was the last Viceroy of India and the film was set during the partition era and the eventual independence of India. Gurinder said that she was basing the film on Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’ book Freedom At Midnight but King Charles pushed her in a different direction.
In a chat shared by the YouTube channel of Asia Society, Gurinder said that when she told Charles that she was making a film on Lord Mountbatten and shared that she was basing it on Freedom At Midnight, he asked her to consult Narendra Singh Sarila’s book The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition. “He said, ‘you must get that book. That tells you the true story of what happened and how my uncle was set up by the establishment’,” she recalled. Charles’ statement had her wondering who the establishment was, if not him and his family, since he was addressing them in third person.
“I am in Buckingham Palace looking at him and going if you are not the establishment, who the hell is the establishment? He doesn’t see himself as the establishment by the way. He is the kind of nutter who grows organic food,” she said with a laugh. Gurinder then shared, “Of course, the book puts forward an argument saying that partition was premeditative. It was a brainchild of a few senior politicians of the time, including Churchill. The argument it poses is that during World War 2, Britain really couldn’t afford to be in India anymore and one of the main reasons why it was the dissidents. So all the Bhagat Singhs and everyone that everyone tries to put down, they actually had a massive impact on the British and they could no longer police the country safely. And so they had to try to find a way to get out,” she shared.
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Gurinder further shared her findings from the book and said, “They knew they needed a stronghold in Asia and they knew they had to leave India now. But they still needed to be in Asia somehow and so the opportunity arose with Jinnah. The idea was that they did a deal with Jinnah that ‘yes, we will support you to have your own country but then in your country, we will have our military bases there and it will be our strategic point in India.”
Viceroy’s House also starred Huma Qureshi and Manish Dayal.
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