In the concluding season of Freedom at Midnight, independence from the British arrives by the second episode itself. The Indian flag flies high and proud; a “tryst with destiny” is proclaimed. But there are five more episodes to go in the Sony LIV series based on the Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre book of the same name.
The first episode gives an indication of what lies ahead. Before 1947, some of the freedom struggle’s top leaders gather over a sample of the tricolour. India will be secular and defined by humanity, says Jawaharlal Nehru (Sidhant Gupta), sounding hopeful but barely convincing.
The mood is anxious and mournful. The men and women huddle around the flag as if it were a misshapen mutant. The rest of the Hindi-English series is about the haemorrhaging that accompanies the birth of the new nation.
Created and directed by Nikkhil Advani and adapted by Abhinandan Gupta, Freedom at Midnight examines the bitterly fought debates, impossible choices and avoidable tragedies that accompanied the end of colonial rule over India. The previous season from 2024 gave a credible measure of the fraught backroom parleying between the Indian National Congress and Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League over the creation of Pakistan.
Jinnah (Arif Zakaria), his sister Fatima (Ira Dubey) and Liaquat Ali Khan (Rajesh Kumar) successfully conceal Jinnah’s tuberculosis diagnosis to force Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel (Rajendra Chawla) and Mahatma Gandhi (Chirag Vohra) into making uncomfortable concessions. Gandhi’s torment over the idea of dividing India is backed by the violence that breaks out on the streets.
British Viceroy Louis Mountbatten (Luke McGibney) serves as an increasingly exasperated match referee, with his wife Edwina (Cordelia Bugeja) frequently speaking up from the Indians’ corner. In the new season, when Mountbatten expresses shock at the carnage that follows the declaration of Independence, Edwina has the last word.
I did my duty, he says. You chose duty over lives, she says.
The British are in a tearing hurry to take the first steamer out of the country. Cyril Radcliffe (Richard Teverson) arrives in India to arbitrarily define the borders of the eastern and western flanks. A date for formal independence is picked despite objections only because it suits the British.
Jinnah, obsessed with hierarchy and increasingly referring to himself in the third person, is proving to be an intractable foe. The hostility gets to Nehru and Patel, who are drawn into squabbles that erode their mutual trust. The second season also looks at the Kashmir problem and Patel’s negotiations with various princely states to join the Indian Union.
Despite the dramatics, creative liberties and some dubious casting decisions, the handsomely produced series reveals how liberation from colonial rule was achieved at a heavy, horrible and lasting price. The Congress leaders are shown to be making the best of a fait accompli, with Nehru, Patel and Gandhi battling in different ways to staunch the inevitable bloodshed.
The careful balance between fiction and fact isn’t always maintained. The British, especially Mountbatten, are treated with kid gloves. The focus on Partition results in moments of carnage that perhaps don’t need to be replayed.
In one of the effective sub-plots, soldiers of the Indian Army – Hindu, Muslim and Sikh – try to sidestep the spreading slick of communalism by reminding themselves of where their allegiances lie. But the question of who killed Gandhi is treated even more cursorily than the British double-dealing.
Madanlal Pahwa (Anurag Thakur), who is seething with anger after losing his family in a riot, devotes himself to killing Gandhi, and nearly succeeds. Pahwa is treated sympathetically, his actions the direct consequence of politicking.
Gandhi’s actual assassination by the Hindu extremist Nathuram Godse barely registers – an anticlimactic moment in a show that has been building up to it. Godse is a shadowy figure, his attack on an icon of non-violence put down to the larger chaos that accompanies Independence. By eliding the role of Godse and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh in the events before and during 1947, the series severs the link between the past and the present.
The second season could easily have done with dispassionate trimming of tense meetings in elegantly appointed rooms while brutality seethes on the outside. This point was already been made in the first season, and didn’t need seven more lengthy episodes.
Some of the more compelling scenes have to do with Patel’s clear-eyed pragmatism, deftly depicted by Rajendra Chawla. Nehru too is treated fairly, especially over Kashmir.
Patel’s schoolmasterly lectures to Nehru for being soft on his adversaries does rub off on the country’s future first prime minister. Nehru suavely gets a group of irate sadhus on his side, showing that he too can be flexible.
Argumentative Indians earned the country its freedom, such as it is – this inconvenient truth lingers amidst the histrionics and convenient gaps in a revisionist history lesson. The show concludes with a moving rendition of Gandhi’s favourite bhajan Vaishnava Jana To, which is backed by a children’s choir.
Also read:
The ‘absolutely incredible times’ that drew Nikkhil Advani to ‘Freedom at Midnight’
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