After 300 years, the British Raj was coming to an end. For six months in 1947, Lord Mountbatten, great grandson of Queen Victoria, assumed the post of the last Viceroy, charged with handing India back to its people. The film's story unfolds within the Viceroy's House in Delhi, where Mountbatten lived upstairs with his wife and daughter, along with 500 of their Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh servants, who lived downstairs. As the political elite - Nehru, Jinnah, and Gandhi - converged on the House to wrangle over the birth of independent India, conflict erupted. A decision was taken to divide the country and create a new Muslim homeland: Pakistan. It was a decision whose consequences reverberate to this day.