The ‘absolutely incredible times’ that drew Nikkhil Advani to ‘Freedom at Midnight’

Nikkhil Advani’s Freedom at Midnight revisits the final, brutal years of British rule in India. The Sony LIV series is an adaptation of the well-known non-fiction book of the same name by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre.

Like their previous collaborations Is Paris Burning? (1965) and O Jerusalem! (1971), Freedom at Midnight is a popular history based on research and interviews. The 1975 publication claims to provide authentic, previously unknown details about far-reaching decisions, especially Partition and its horrific aftermath.

The book covers the communal violence that gripped India as it counted down to Independence, the politics surrounding Partition, and the activities of key historical figures, such as Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Louis Mountbatten. One section is devoted to the plot to assassinate Gandhi by Hindu fanatics led by Nathuram Godse.

The series is a co-production between Advani’s Emmay Entertainment and the Sony group company Studio NEXT. Apart from being a prestige project for Sony LIV, the show continues the streaming platform’s interest in Indian history. Rocket Boys (2022-2023), which Advani created and co-produced, profiled the foundational figures behind India’s space and nuclear programmes. An upcoming series will revisit the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.

Freedom at Midnight will be premiered on November 15. The series stars Sidhant Gupta as Nehru, Chirag Vohra as Gandhi, Rajendra Chawla as Patel, Arif Zakaria as Jinnah, Luke McGibney as Louis Mountbatten and Cordelia Bugeja as Edwina Mountbatten. Ira Dubey plays Jinnah’s sister Fatima, while radio jockey Malishka Mendonsa plays Sarojini Naidu.

In an interview, Advani told Scroll about what drew him to the book and why this phase of Indian history needs to be re-examined.

Is Freedom at Midnight one of your most ambitious shows?

Ambition is possibly the cure and the boon with which we function with at Emmay Entertainment. Rocket Boys was ambitious. Then we say, let’s do something more ambitious with Freedom At Midnight. Abhay Koranne [story writer of Rocket Boys] is working on something that is even more ambitious than Freedom At Midnight. I too am trying to do something more ambitious.

The two keywords are ambition and hard work. We live in hope and die in despair.

What was it about the book that attracted you?

As young men, before we understood what good writing and reportage and real history was, Freedom at Midnight was one of the most engrossing books for us.

It’s pulpy, it’s not a heavy read. I don’t think both authors are pretending to be anything else than chroniclers of history. It tells you about events and also keeps talking to you about common people on the ground, their stories of exodus and migration. It’s a Hindi film!

I was approached by Danish Khan [Sony LIV head] and Saugata Mukherjee [Sony LIV content head] during Rocket Boys. Season one had done pretty well. I told them that we would never get the rights. They said, we have the rights.

The book is pretty much a white man’s gaze. So the first thing the writing team had to do was understand that we were not going to have that point of view.

What is the significance of revisiting a book that is nearly 50 years old, which itself chronicles Independence that was attained 77 years ago?

These were absolutely incredible times. This is a phase of history that we need to know of. Why are we forgetting it?

These days, young people derive everything from the internet, which is populated with opinion. I am trying to give perspective to the opinion.

It’s undeniable that the gentlemen that we are talking about were responsible for the independence of India – whether you like them or don’t like them today, whether you vilify them or celebrate them. But the youth of today won’t watch a show if it doesn’t have racy dialogue or a great soundtrack by Ashutosh Pathak. What I’m trying is to make sure that once they get into the show, they watch it.

When we did Rocket Boys, everybody told us, who’s going to watch a show about scientists, it’s boring, what are they going to do, solve equations? We decided to have fun with it. That’s what I've tried to do with Freedom at Midnight too – make it as interesting as possible.

The show revolves a great deal around debates and discussions. How did you ensure momentum?

We are telling the events from August 16, 1946, to January 30, 1948 – 20 months. There’s a ticking time clock even in the background score.

The first thing we discussed was that several fires needed to be erupting all over the place. You shut down one and three others began.

The logline, which is ‘A sacrifice of many and the ambition of one’ is something that the writing team took on. What also worked for us was that while people knew about the public events, such as India being partitioned and gaining independence, they might not have known about certain private interactions that happened and that were there in the book. We used these as beat points.

There’s a fair amount of mixed media. There was a lot of footage between 1946 and post-independent India. The idea was to keep mixing in those things, which made it more difficult. I had to make sure my Nehru looked like Nehru, who was a beautiful-looking, lovely man, but I had also had to keep cutting it with reality. That allowed me to get the kind of movement that I wanted.

There was also so much violence. We needed to keep telling people what was happening on the ground.

There was much to explain. Like, the Cabinet Mission Plan [the failed 1946 proposal about the transfer of power to India, which was hotly debated between the Indian National Congress and Jinnah’s Muslim League]. So we had the two parties [Congress and Muslim League] in similar rooms, talking about the same thing from different points of view.

There’s a fair amount of drama and creative licence in the writing and characterisation. Viewers might need a disclaimer similar to the one used by the BBC series The Serpent: “All dialogue is imagined.”

Take a show like Scam 1992 – the dialogue was incredible. Indian audiences love dialogue.

I told the writing team, let there be Salim-Javed dialogue. You’ll never have heard Gandhi speaking in this way.

I am taking liberties. We are seeing the leaders only in private conversations. I am also cognisant of the fact that nobody wants to see 60-year-old men taking decisions. It’s a tough one to balance.

So we decided to keep the look as authentic as possible, the production design and lighting to be beautiful and, for lack of another word, as Crown-ish as possible, with hard burnouts on the walls and silhouetted figures and depth in the foreground and background. But we also worked on ensuring that the interactions between the characters was human.

What guided your casting decisions?

The main requirement was that the actors couldn’t work on anything else. That’s very difficult in the current scenario. We asked the actors if they were willing to not do anything else for a year and a half. We were happy to figure out how to compensate them. The actors submitted themselves to the scripts and the ideas.

Other than Chirag Vohra as Gandhi, Rajendra Chawla comes close but doesn’t really look like the Sardar Patel that we have seen in photographs. Sidhant Gupta is a good foot taller than Nehru.

Partition features heavily in the book and the series. Given whatever is happening to Muslims today, do they need a reminder of this phase in Indian history?

There’s Maulana Azad in the show too, who’s trying his damnedest to make sure that Partition does not happen. There are atrocities and madness and violence being committed by both sides. I wanted to show the chaos, confusion, anxiety, fear.

It was the hottest summer after a very, very long time. There’s a beautiful scene in the second season when VP Menon whispers into Mountbatten’s ear that the violence has started. Menon says, three to four. Mountbatten says, a thousand? Menon says, no, million. Then we cut to the exodus.

Yes, many Muslims don’t want to be reminded of Partition, many Punjabis don’t want to be reminded of Partition. But it’s a moment in our history that we should not forget. My favourite book is William L Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which has the quote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.