The film-maker´s short and personal investigation cannot begin to cover the necessary ground to make convincing arguments for how the partition of India came to beBend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha faced some criticism when her most recent film, Viceroy´s House, was released in March. It told the story of Indian partition, set in and around the palace of the final viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, partly, Chadha has said, to ensure this chapter of history was remembered in Britain. But the film´s version of that historical divide was controversial. In this paper, the writer Fatima Bhutto called it a `servile pantomime of partition`, while Ian Jack wrote that the film takes `a breathtaking liberty with the historical record`. Chadha was defensive, of course, and issued a firm denial of any perceived anti-Muslim bias, stating her sadness that `a film about reconciliation should be so wilfully misrepresented as anti-Muslim or anti-Pakistan`. The Hindi dubbed version, Partition: 1947, meanwhile, has just been banned in Pakistan.It is against this backdrop that India´s Partition: The Forgotten Story (BBC2) emerges, and one suspects that this documentary about Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan has been made carefully, if not as a rebuttal to further criticism, then at least with that in mind. Chadha´s take on the story here is personal and, therefore, she points out, only one version of it. `What really happened 70 years ago?` she asks at the beginning, where she is careful to point out that the answer will depend on who is telling the story. At school, she recalls, it was attributed to the inability of religious groups to get along, while her mother tells her that´s not how she remembers it at all. Continue reading...
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