History in his story
National Award-winning director Nikkhil Advani’s latest web-series ‘Freedom at Midnight’ might have opened to mixed reviews, but has an IMDb rating of 8.4/10. To those having issues with his historical saga, his tongue-in-cheek riposte is, “I am waiting to watch what they make and show what I have not shown… I read everybody’s reviews and am often heartbroken and wonder where I went wrong.”
Creator of ‘Rocket Boys’, ‘The Empire’ and ‘Mumbai Diaries’, one of the biggest challenges of recreating history for Advani was “to get it right”. A history buff, he jokes how he spent most of the money he hoped to make through ‘Freedom at Midnight’ on books recommended by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. Their podcast ‘Empire’ is often his go-to referral point. He adds, “There are far too many experts on Independence and Partition. Hence, the source material had to be correct.”
Many feel the book by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, on which the series is based, reads like a screenplay, a fact which served him tantalisingly well. Since his journey began with Kundan Shah, Sudhir Mishra, Saeed Akhtar Mirza and later coincided with the masters of mainstream like Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra, Advani’s sensibilities were bound to be an amalgamation. He elaborates, “My voice tends to be closer to the Kundans, Sudhirs and Saeeds, but the treatment is more mainstream, highly dramatic.” Precisely why, for the dialogues in ‘Freedom at Midnight’, he wanted the signature Salim-Javed touch — which his dialogue writer Divy Nidhi Sharma delivered on point.
After ‘Rocket Boys’, the creator in Advani realised, “Unlike Hansal Mehta’s ‘Scam 1992’, the punches of dialogues were missing in our story of Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, which, perhaps, stopped the show from being elevated to the level (of popularity) it could have attained.” Today, he is happy as viewer after viewer is mouthing dialogues from ‘Freedom at Midnight’, and even he quotes one of his favourites, uttered by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, ‘Yeh neta apne log dhoond lega...’
On the criticism that the blame of Partition is laid at Jinnah’s feet and the British are given a clean chit, he reasons, “It is my humble submission, wait for the second season. Then, perhaps, we can revisit this question.”
Part two of the series packs many more turns. We will see Lord Mountbatten being lauded as the architect of India’s Independence, ready to pack his bags and leave India, while Cyril Radcliffe is told that instead of 13 months, he has just five weeks to draw the line between two nations. Then, there would be the princes and Kashmir. As he puts it, “If season one was like a ticking time bomb, part two will bring you face-to-face with the repercussions of the decisions made.”
Whether the series will provide a healing touch to the horrors of Partition is met with a counter-question, “Have the wounds of Partition healed? If the answer is both yes and no, so is mine.” There is, however, no ambiguity about what he has chosen to recount. His idea was to transport the viewers to those rooms where all heated discussions were taking place, and the leaders didn’t have the luxury of hindsight and were taking decisions in real time. He avers, “They had no idea Jinnah was dying; if they had, perhaps, things would have been different. I could be giving this interview from Karachi, an undivided India.”
While he stands by all his editorial choices made in conjunction with his writing team as well as SonyLiv head Danish Khan, we wonder if making a series on a period far removed from the current dispensation puts additional pressure. His reply is cryptic, “I am telling the story of 1947, not 2024. If you are drawing any comparisons with India today, all I can say is that one thing that has not changed is the politics of this country.” Advani’s approach certainly undergoes a shift depending upon whether he is making a movie or a web show, since one is a sprint and the other a marathon.
For the director of successful movies like ‘Kal Ho Na Ho’ and ‘Batla House’, OTT spells liberation from trying to figure out which formula works at the box office. He loves OTT. We will see him steer yet another historical saga on revolutionaries of the freedom movement. He shares, “Freedom fighters like Lala Hardayal, Kartar Singh Sarabha and more will figure prominently. After all, two states, Bengal and Punjab, played a stellar role.”
Punjabis are special to him. He simply loves Mahabir Bhullar, who plays Master Tara Singh in ‘Freedom at Midnight’. “I would cast him in every project of mine.” As for his casting choices, which included rather young actors playing stalwarts, he smiles, “I could not have made Akshay Kumar play Gandhi.” Seriously, he didn’t want actors to play these tall leaders in his series and murderers in another and thus the pool became much smaller. But, in the end, he lauds his actors who researched voice, body language and underwent workshops for a year and a half. Net result, they emerged exactly as he wanted them.
Advani is in no quandary, “I don’t stand in a disputable space. Season one begins with Gandhiji saying batwara over my dead body and part two closes with him making the ultimate sacrifice…. Many thought that Partition will quell violence, except for one man, Gandhiji, who paid with his life for standing by his ideology. I am chasing that story.”
As Rudyard Kipling said, “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” Advani creates an unforgettable one.
