Lord Dickie Mountbatten arrives at
Viceroy's House in
New Delhi in 1947 with his strong-willed wife
Edwina and daughter
Pamela. As the final
Viceroy of India, he is in charge of overseeing the dissolution of the
British Raj and the establishment of an independent Indian nation. Mountbatten attempts to mediate a disagreement between the two major Indian political leaders,
Jawaharlal Nehru, who wants India to remain intact as one nation after independence, and
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who wishes to establish the separate
Muslim state of
Pakistan. Meanwhile, Mountbatten's newly arrived
valet Jeet encounters the beautiful Alia, whom he had fallen in love with previously. Alia continues to spurn Jeet because he is
Hindu and she
Muslim; she fears that she will disappoint her invalid father Ali, whom Jeet had helped during a spell of imprisonment at British hands. With riots erupting across India, their few non-Indian troops thinly spread and the loyalties of their
Indian troops conflicted between
Sikh, Muslim and Hindu, the British decide to accelerate the independence process. Initially influenced by
Gandhi, Mountbatten is intent upon a one-state solution, but with intensifying violence between Muslims and Hindus he reluctantly accepts the
Partition of India. He is given only a couple months to
carve out a separate state from the existing territory, with the help of an English
King's Counsel,
Cyril Radcliffe, who had no experience of India. Jeet continues to pursue Alia, despite the fact that she has been betrothed since childhood to another man, and like the other servants at Viceroy's House they are forced to choose between staying in India or going to Pakistan. Mountbatten is enraged to find that his Chief of Staff
Lord Ismay has been working covertly to draw the boundaries of Pakistan in order to create a
buffer state between the Indian subcontinent and the
Soviet Union and to allay fears that a socialist-leaning united India would give the Soviets access to the
warm water port at
Karachi. He realizes that he has been used as a pawn and the displacement of millions of people will result. Jeet is devastated to learn meanwhile that his entire family has been slaughtered in
Punjab. Although Alia rejects her fiancé when he returns to claim her, she chooses to depart for Pakistan with her father. Days later Jeet reads in the newspaper that the night train she had boarded was attacked and everyone was killed. In anger he brandishes a knife at Mountbatten, before resigning his post. With Delhi overwhelmed with refugees, the Mountbattens decide to stay on in India to assist where they can. While Jeet volunteers to help with the refugees, Alia is brought in badly injured but alive, the lone survivor of the train attack. She recognizes Jeet and shouts for him, and the two are reunited. ==Cast==