Freedom at Midnight doesn’t want to be a show that you curl up to watch on Independence Day, a flag by your side and happiness in your heart. Rather than pride about the struggle that led to the end of British rule in 1947, mortification is the prevailing emotion in Nikkhil Advani’s Sony LIV series, based on the Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre book of the same name.
The dismantling of the British Raj, which Collins and Lapierre call “that superb and shameful institution” and “the cornerstone and justification of the Empire, its most remarkable achievement and its most constant care”, is soaked in blood and stewed in hatred between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs over Partition. A ticking clock in Ashutosh Pathak’s background score accompanies Abhinandan Gupta’s revisionist adaptation, which has been worked upon by a team of writers.
The final months of colonial rule inexorably lead to the division of India on religious lines. Time is running out for the fervent proponents of Partition, the Muslim League, and its anguished opponents, represented by the Indian National Congress.
Confabulations in underlit rooms are contrasted with communal fires raging on the streets of North and East India. Departing British midwives oversee the crimson-smeared birth of Pakistan.
Freedom at Midnight opens with Mahatma Gandhi (Chirag Vohra) stating that India will be split over his dead body. Despite Gandhi’s dire declarations, Partition is already underway.
The Muslim League led by Muhammed Ali Jinnah (Arif Zakaria) will not back down from its demand for a separate land that will give Muslims the dignity that Jinnah fears will be lost in a Congress-led India. One of the most effective sequences cuts between a crucial meeting held in separate rooms, one packed with Congress leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru (Sidhant Gupta), Vallabhbhai Patel (Rajendra Chawla) and Maulana Azad (Pawan Chopra), and the other filled with Jinnah and his colleagues.
The twain are not to meet. Viceroy Louis Mountbatten (Luke McGibney) and his wife Edwina (Cordelia Bugeja) arrive in India to broker peace, instead finding themselves mired in acrimony. Mountbatten’s “Operation Seduction” – his attempt to build consensus between warring factions – becomes a mess of gargantuan proportions.
The first season comprises seven episodes, which include flabby and redundant debates about the wisdom of partitioning India. As late as the fourth episode, Indian luminaries and British officials are discussing the demand for Pakistan.
The pace picks up from the fifth episode, with the entry of VP Menon (KC Shankar), Mountbatten’s Indian political advisor. Menon becomes Patel’s man on the inside, helping move the debate in the Congress’s favour.
Despite talk of Britain’s notorious “Divide and Rule” policy, Mountbatten gets away with a sympathetic portrayal. Jinnah emerges as the reliable ogre of a fairy-tale struggle that is ending in ignominy.
Arif Zakaria plays Jinnah as a reptilian-cold obsessive who sucks hard on his pipe and trims his roses rather sharply. Jinnah’s conventional villainy ignores the opportunity to provide the context for the Muslim League’s demand. This historic decision is barely addressed by a show that sees Partition as an entirely avoidable blunder.
The question about the price at which freedom was achieved drums up polarising sentiment in an exploitative way – by repeatedly showing riots. There are allusions to the present in Gandhi’s warnings about the permanent scars of communal violence. But the most immediate parallel between the events in 1947 and the India of today remains in the shadows.
The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha are out of the picture until the very last episode. The Hindu extremist plot against Gandhi is shown to be a reaction to escalating violence. We will have to wait until the second season to see how the series deals with Gandhi’s assassination by a member of his faith.
Drama seethes within the handsome-looking production design by Priya Suhass and Surabhi Verma. Nikkhil Advani and editor Shweta Venkat Mathew offset the tedium of watching leaders haggle away in their chambers with flashbacks and cutaways to the impact of their actions.
Actual archival footage is spliced in to lend authenticity to the creative liberties taken over private conversations. The act of showing real-life leaders alongside actors who barely resemble them does not always benefit the cast. Malishka Mendonsa as Sarojini Naidu, Anuvab Pal as Huseyn Suhrawardy and the Rishi Kapoor-lookalike Rajesh Kumar as Liaquat Ali Khan are among the actors who look like they have wandered in from an August 15 costume party.
Gandhi, played by Chirag Vohra with dedication but also palpable self-consciousness, is undermined by overly dramatised scenes. Did angry Muslims – and they are nearly always the fuming ones – force Gandhi to cross a stream in full spate? Did the sparrow-chested elder risk pneumonia to prove his point?
Gandhi is also free with aphoristic dialogue. The curse that bedevils Indian writers trying to create authentic-sounding lines for British characters continues with Freedom at Midnight.
The show is more successful with Nehru and Patel. An entertaining buddy cop-style dynamic builds between the ambivalent Nehru and the hard-nosed Patel, best seen in the sequence when they lose their way in the Viceroy’s maze of a house.
Rajendra Chawla memorably plays Patel as a pragmatist who prefers a bad choice to a noble but unworkable one. Patel soothes Nehru’s anxieties, replaces Gandhi as the younger man’s mentor, and proves to be a worthy adversary to Jinnah.
Jinnah’s scenes with his sister Fatima (Ira Dubey) somewhat humanise him, while also showing that women were involved with the negotiations. The delicate balance between WhatsApp history and an accepted record of events also gives Nehru his due.
Nehru’s equation with the shrewd Edwina, who is practically ruling alongside her husband, is subtly handled. Nehru’s agony over Partition is unimpeachable. The show’s own attitude towards the tragedy is less cogent, occasionally lost in Bollywood-style flourishes but redeemed by the arguments between serious men and women.
Also read:
The ‘absolutely incredible times’ that drew Nikkhil Advani to ‘Freedom at Midnight’
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