LONDON: They are images that will change the way we think about the British Empire. Since the last days of the Raj, historians have wrangled over the imperial legacy in India, but the full extent of the suffering inflicted when Mountbatten, the last Viceroy in charge of the continent, pulled out in 1947, is about to be revealed as never before.

Following the enormous success of the TV series The Second World War in Colour, Britain’s ITV network is now to screen The British Empire in Colour, an astonishing collection of original colour film footage shot at the far-flung outposts of empire and now restored for its first public viewing.

The three-part television series, broadcast later this month, will feature unseen colour sequences from Africa, Australia, Canada and the West Indies. Yet it is frames shot at the time of the Partition of India that have stunned audiences at early screenings and already provoked argument among eminent historians.

The British, and in particular Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s great uncle and adored mentor, come across as vainglorious interlopers who left the continent when trouble loomed. Terrible scenes, not seen before, of thousands of dispossessed refugees trailing across the newly-created border with Pakistan will make it hard to defend the memory of colonial India as a caring, orderly place, which was run in increasing collaboration with Indians.

But for the outspoken historian Andrew Roberts, and for Professor Judith Brown, the Oxford academic who advised the programme-makers on India, these distressing pictures will be a welcome jolt to Britain’s complacent self-image.

“At the time of transition the British establishment admitted that around 100,000 had died,” said Roberts. “But from my own researches the figure is more like three quarters of a million. A figure not unadjacent to what happened in Rwanda and worse, I think, than in Bosnia. It is high time that programmes such as these should bring us sharply up against our own failed responsibilities at the end of Empire.”

Brown also believes the Carlton/TWI series will at last show viewers ‘the human cost’ of Mountbatten’s fateful decision to pull out of India at short notice and leave the Muslims and Hindus to fight over the new division of territory.

“This is going to be something of an eye-opener,” she said. “We talk now about the awfulness of ethnic cleansing and, well, here it was. Once you start talking to any family in Delhi they all have their own terrible story of partition, and it is the same on the other side of the border in Pakistan.

“The footage shows terrible trails of people and much of this is not known about in Britain where it was described at the time as ‘a peaceful transfer of power’.”

Brown argues that the British were obviously ‘delighted to extricate themselves’, but admits that the problems of partition cannot all be laid at Mountbatten’s door. He had, after all, opened up the Viceregal Lodge to Indians and banned racist remarks.

“The diaries of the previous Viceroy, Wavell, show that he already knew the British were living on borrowed time,” she said.

The horrifying new footage paints an unfair picture of the Raj, however, according to the historian Jan Morris.

Morris agrees with Brown that Mountbatten was something of a showman, but she argues that the Raj was maintained by ‘generations of decent people who went out there selflessly’.

The controversial footage was bequeathed to the Imperial War Museum in the 1990s, but has been watched by astonished curators for the first time this summer.

While there are impressive familiar images of colonial regalia and imperial pomp, it is the scenes of partition that struck the museum’s archivist, Kay Gladstone.

Series producer Lucy Carter is prepared to face criticism about editorial bias against Mountbatten and the British decision to pull out of India at high speed.

“I knew we were going to get asked about our objectivity,” she said. “But the fact is that when you get into a story like this, your natural views come over. This is a story that still divides academics. Some think Mountbatten created chaos; all I can say is that this is the most historically breathtaking material I have ever seen.

“This was the largest forced migration the world had known and it manages to capture the epic proportions of it. It makes history suddenly become very real and we used as much of it as we could.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.