Not only was the selection of screenwriter a missed opportunity to amplify South Asian voices but from watching the first episode, it feels as though it may have led to a missed opportunity to call out the part Britain played in years of violent conflict. The show's opening sequence reads: "When India became independent in 1947, it was partitioned into two countries." Partition, the tumultuous division of the newly independent British India into the Republic of India and Pakistan, displaced 15 million people and sent over a million to their deaths in a wave of brutal killings and rapes. But this did not take place in a vacuum. It came about following hundreds of years of colonial rule by the British, who were inescapably complicit. As Yasmin Khan outlines in her book, The Great Partition : "[Partition] stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different—and unknowable—paths."