Partition: 1947

<p>arrives at in in 1947 with his strong-willed wife and daughter . As the final , he is in charge of overseeing the dissolution of the and the establishment of an independent Indian nation. Mountbatten attempts to mediate a disagreement between the two major Indian political leaders, , who wants India to remain intact as one nation after independence, and , who wishes to establish the separate state of . Meanwhile, Mountbatten’s newly arrived Jeet encounters the beautiful Alia, whom he had fallen in love with previously. Alia continues to spurn Jeet because he is and she ; she fears that she will disappoint her invalid father Ali, whom Jeet had helped during a spell of imprisonment at British hands. With riots erupting across India, their few non-Indian troops thinly spread and the loyalties of their conflicted between , Muslim and Hindu, the British decide to accelerate the independence process. Initially influenced by , Mountbatten is intent upon a one-state solution, but with intensifying violence between Muslims and Hindus he reluctantly accepts the . He is given only a couple months to a separate state from the existing territory, with the help of an English , , who had no experience of India. Jeet continues to pursue Alia, despite the fact that she has been betrothed since childhood to another man, and like the other servants at Viceroy’s House they are forced to choose between staying in India or going to Pakistan. Mountbatten is enraged to find that his Chief of Staff has been working covertly to draw the boundaries of Pakistan in order to create a between the Indian subcontinent and the and to allay fears that a socialist-leaning united India would give the Soviets access to the at . He realizes that he has been used as a pawn and the displacement of millions of people will result. Jeet is devastated to learn meanwhile that his entire family has been slaughtered in . Although Alia rejects her fiancé when he returns to claim her, she chooses to depart for Pakistan with her father. Days later Jeet reads in the newspaper that the night train she had boarded was attacked and everyone was killed. In anger he brandishes a knife at Mountbatten, before resigning his post. With Delhi overwhelmed with refugees, the Mountbattens decide to stay on in India to assist where they can. While Jeet volunteers to help with the refugees, Alia is brought in badly injured but alive, the lone survivor of the train attack. She recognizes Jeet and shouts for him, and the two are reunited. On 30 April 2015, it was announced that and would star in the fictional period drama film to be directed by , which Chadha scripted along with and . The film set in 1947 during the , and the life inside the , would be produced by Chadha, Deepak Nayar, and Paul Ritchie. and would be co-financing the film. On 1 September 2015, more cast was announced including , , , , , , , , and . on the film began on 30 August 2015 in , , India, where it was shot for eight weeks. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 3 March 2017. Three additional tracks were released for the dubbed version of the film. was selected to be screened out of competition at the on 12 February 2017. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 3 March 2017; it was dubbed in , titled , and released in India on 18 August 2017. It was banned in . The film received generally positive reviews from critics. On review aggregator , the film holds an approval rating of 76% based on 41 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. praised the film for “cramming ample history into a compact running time without sacrificing flow or interest.” called it “educational, if melodramatic,” concluding that “the movie accomplishes a difficult task, making sense of a complicated period in history.” Chadha described the film as the view of the . She defended her film against criticisms of historical , saying that she was guided by Narendra Singh Sarila’s 2006 book , which was claimed to be based on secret documents discovered in the . Pakistani columnist described the film as ‘a servile pantomime of partition’. Chadha in response said that “her film about India’s partition of 1947, far from ignoring the freedom struggle, celebrates it.” summed up the response to the film by saying that “Notices by film reviewers have been muted but reasonably kind”, while the reaction from historians was “damning”. The newspaper was very critical of the film’s climax, criticizing the lack of corroborating research to back up the central claim that Pakistan was created as part of a conspiracy by and the British government – particularly as in reality it was a government at the time led by , not Churchill. The film’s postscript reads: “The partition of India led to the largest mass migration in human history. 14 million people were displaced. One million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs died. This film is dedicated to all of those who died and to all those who survived partition.”</p>