Violence and Silence: Ken McMullen's Partition and Gurinder Chadha's Viceroy's House

Abstract

The literary and cinematic representation of violence has always been problematic and has involved ethical imperatives and rational understanding of an event that often defies logical understanding. In this paper, I propose to deal with two films that directly engage with the political negotiations that took place concerning the Partition of India and the cartographic violence that ensued: Ken McMullen’s Partition (2007) and Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House (2017). The work compares the representations of the Partition in these two films to investigate whether the reparative or sentential aspect of cinema heal our memories or compromise with the truth to connect with the audience.