Diasporic visions: colonialism, nostalgia and the empire in Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House

ABSTRACT

Released on the 70th anniversary of Partition, Gurinder Chadha’s film Viceroy’s House, which is narratively and stylistically constructed in the fashion of heritage cinema, chronicles the last days of the empire in India and is said to provide a ‘British Asian perspective’ on Partition. This article addresses the debate that followed the release of the film and, in particular, the analysis focuses on the interplay between Partition, diaspora, and representations of the imperial past. Through the analysis of the film’s structure and narrative, the article discusses its representation of British India and argues that, notwithstanding its potential to unsettle traditional representations of the empire of period dramas, the film’s glamorous depiction of the British rulers ultimately feeds into the contemporary wave of colonial nostalgia.

KEYWORDS:

• Indian diaspora
• Partition
• colonialism
• empire
• nostalgia
• heritage cinema
• imperialist fantasies

Acknowledgements

An early draft of this article was presented at the Challenging Perspectives on Indian Diaspora Conference held during 5–7 October 2017 in the city of The Hague, The Netherlands. The author wishes to thank participants for their precious feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Clelia Clini is a Research Associate at Loughborough University London, where she works on the project Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination. Her research interests lie at the intersection of migration and diaspora studies, South Asian postcolonial cinema and literature, race and gender studies and cultural sociology. Before joining the MMPI project she was a Research Associate at UCL, where she worked on a project on forced displacement, creativity and wellbeing. Clelia has taught Media, Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at John Cabot University and at The American University of Rome. She has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Venice Ca' Foscari, the University of Roma Tre and at Vilnius University. She received her PhD in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies from the University Orientale of Napoli (2011).

Notes

1 Most notably Channel 4’s Indian Summers (2015–2016), Stephen Frears’s Victoria and Abdul (2017), but also films such The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden 2011) and its 2016 The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden 2015). In popular music, see Rashmee Kumar’s criticism of Coldplay for reproducing colonial fantasies on the video clip they made for the song Hymn for the Weekend (2016). Kavi Raz’s The Black Prince (2017), on the story of the maharajah Duleep Singh, was also released in 2017. While less successful than the aforementioned films, it is notable for providing a counter-narrative to this wave of colonial nostalgia.

2 The idealised image of the multi-religious village complies with Nandy’s observation that, after Partition, ‘resorting to an idyllic past was a way to relocate people’s journey through violence in a universe of memory that is less hate-filled, less buttered by rage and dreams of revenge’ (1999, 323).

3 A 2014 poll conducted by YouGov revealed that 59% of the British public were still proud of the British Empire, with only 19% claiming to feel ashamed of it. Moreover, the same poll revealed that a third of the British population would have liked Britain to still have an Empire (34%), while only under half of it declaring to not wanting it (Dahlgreen 2014).

4 In Britain in particular, where it is not part of the British national curriculum (Elahi 2017).