In the movie “Viceroy’s House,” director Gurinder Chadha delivers a deeply personal story of the lives shattered as a result of the partition of India and Pakistan when British rule ended in 1947.
Unfortunately, that story — of Chadha’s grandmother, one of the 14 million displaced when the Muslim-majority Pakistan was cleaved from Hindu-dominated India — is revealed through a few title cards at the end of a plodding period drama that puts the Brits in the foreground and the suffering Indians in the background.
In early 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten (Hugh Bonneville, from “Downton Abbey”) arrives in Delhi to assume the post of viceroy of India, the British government’s top official.