Raj all the rage as India marks 70 years of independence
As India marks the 70th anniversary of its independence this year, a slew of movies tackling its colonial history are hitting cinema screens, including a controversial account of Partition by the director of “Bend it Like Beckham”.
Gurinder Chadha's “Viceroy's House” is released in India on Friday under the name “Partition: 1947” and tells the story of how India's last governor Lord Mountbatten oversaw the end of three centuries of British rule.
Partition and the British Empire have been the source of dramatic material for filmmakers in the past, from Richard Attenborough's Oscar-winning “Gandhi” to David Lean's “A Passage to India”.
Hindi language film “Lagaan” used cricket to spotlight a village's rebellion against a draconian colonial-era tax.
But experts say the period has often been overlooked by filmmakers in the past, despite its dramatic potential — perhaps because the trauma of Partition was still so fresh in people's minds.
“As a space for stories, 1947 has not been mined as much as WWI or WWII or other historical events that have caught the imagination of the world,” film writer Shubhra Gupta told AFP.
“Now there is enough distance between 1947 and us, and we are able to look back less in anger and anguish,” added Gupta, a film critic and columnist at the Indian Express newspaper.