The Last Days of the Raj

Lord Louis Mountbatten arrives to India in March 1947 as Britain's Last Viceroy. He is committed to transfer administrative and authoritative power to an independent and sovereign India. Six months later India indeed was set free, but it had also been partitioned and overwhelmed by an orgy of sectarian violence involving Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. The British withdrawal had turned into an uncontrollable bloodletting that resulted in the murder of a million people. For many years, the full horror of 1947 was obscured by the simple fact that it was in the interest of neither Britain nor India and Pakistan to describe it. This docudrama is completely filmed in India and charts the events of the final six months of the British Raj (British Rule) in India. The drama centres on the Viceroy's palace in Delhi where Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah fought and squabbled over the future of India and where British officials were charged with carving a Muslim homeland out of the religious and ethnic patchwork of the Punjab.