[8] Viceroy's House is based on Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, and The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of Partition by Narendra Singh Sarila.

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.

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.

[10] The film set in 1947 during the Partition of India, and the life inside the Viceroy's House, would be produced by Chadha, Deepak Nayar, and Paul Ritchie.

[10] On 1 September 2015, more cast was announced including Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi, Tanveer Ghani, Denzil Smith, Neeraj Kabi, Om Puri, Lily Travers, Michael Gambon, and Simon Callow.

"[18] The Washington Post called it "educational, if melodramatic," concluding that "the movie accomplishes a difficult task, making sense of a complicated period in history.

She defended her film against criticisms of historical heterodoxy, saying that she was guided by Narendra Singh Sarila's 2006 book The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India's Partition, which was claimed to be based on secret documents discovered in the British Library.