‘Freedom at Midnight’ Season 1 review: Independence, warts and all

It’s 1946, Partition is starting to look like a real possibility, and the Congress High Command isn’t a happy place. The visiting Akali leaders are militant, Nehru is getting worked up, and Patel’s biscuit, which he isn’t paying attention to, is getting soggy. At the exact moment Nehru asks the Akalis what they want, half of it disintegrates and falls into the tea. The next shot is Jinnah in his garden, snipping a rose stem.

There are six writers and one showrunner on Freedom at Midnight. And yet, Partition is a soggy biscuit. 

Nikkhil Advani’s new series, based on the eponymous book by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, opens in May 1946, 15 months before India’s independence. While the British leaving is a given by now, there’s no consensus on the terms of exit: the Muslim League wants the separate nation of Pakistan, while the Indian National Congress is opposed to any division. Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Arif Zakaria), head of the League, and Congress leaders Jawaharlal Nehru (Sidhant Gupta) and Vallabhbhai Patel (Rajendra Chawla), have come to meet Viceroy Wavell. “We want to leave,” Wavell says, “desperately, in fact. But we can’t because of this deadlock.”  

Most films and series about India’s independence have tended to be about the freedom movement, resistance, sacrifice. Freedom at Midnight, though, focuses on the political manoeuvring of those tumultuous final years. I wouldn’t be surprised if Advani had Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) as a model, the dissection of a monumental historical moment through the lens of behind-the-scenes politicking. I don’t think this season (there’s a second planned) is anywhere near as successful, but it’s still revealing in terms of the version of our history that resonates in 2024.

One notable choice the series makes is the elevation of Patel as a pragmatist holding together the freedom movement and managing the fears of divas Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah. The quartet is memorably described by British PM Atlee as “that babbling battery of London-trained lawyers”—yet Patel is shown to be different, a man with no ego, concerned only with the good of the nation. Wonderfully played by Chawla, he’s also shown implicitly to be more ‘Indian’ than Nehru and Jinnah because he almost never speaks in English, and frequently resorts to Gujarati. It reminded me of the portrayal of Amit Shah in Article 370 as another Gujarati politician calmly making plans to keep India whole.

Another key choice—unsurprising but disappointing—is to make the League outright villains instead of historical players with their own ideals and complexities. The first episode sets the tone. Liaquat Ali Khan’s (Rajesh Kumar) first words are to call Maulana Azad (Pawan Chopra) a traitor. “Aap hukum kijiye, jung chhed denge (just say the word, we'll start a war),” Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (Anuvab Pal) hisses. Jinnah, trying to force the hand of the British, announces Direct Action Day, which leads to riots. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs,” he says when informed of the 3,000 dead (Advani said in an interview that this line was invented). 

Reaching for a convenient villain is one thing. But Freedom at Midnight is more insidious in how it paints the Muslim community with the League’s brush. There were a number of Hindu-Muslim riots in the early 20th century, instigated by both sides. But in the series, the clashes are nearly all Muslim-driven. There’s the feeble decision to show the riots in black and white; Advani has said it’s so the viewer can’t make out which side is which, as if skullcaps don’t make that clear. The one time Hindus are shown causing a riot, it’s because they’re provoked by a sepoy. There’s a scene with Muslim victims of a Hindu retaliatory attack, over in a flash. Contrast this with the long testimony of Sikh survivors, ending with one recounting how a group of women jumped into a bonfire to escape a marauding Muslim mob.

More than Gupta’s morose Nehru and Zakaria’s vampiric Jinnah, I found the depiction of two other players more interesting. The first is Viceroy Mountbatten (Luke McGibney), sent by his cousin King George VI to guide the British out of India. Though he starts off vain and self-serving, he becomes more sympathetic over the course of the season—which wasn’t a tweak I saw coming. The other is, of course, Mohandas Gandhi, whose quasi-sainthood is at odds with his decreasing relevance in the Congress. Chirag Vohra does a close impersonation of Gandhi, but without the piety of Ben Kingsley’s famous effort. The scenes in episode 5, where he first meets the Mountbattens, then Patel and finally Nehru, are beautifully imagined and performed, showing Gandhi’s stubbornness, political smarts and hurt. 

Advani, director of all seven episodes, resorts to the simplest of metaphors. We hear (and sometimes see) a ticking clock at least once every episode. We get it, time is of the essence—but just in case it wasn’t clear, Atlee says “Time is the one thing we’re running short of”, and Gandhi loses his watch at a critical juncture. The filmmaking is mostly unobtrusive, though some of the decisions are strange—the monochrome riots, the moments where characters stare into the camera and deliver stagey dialogue, the split screen in episode 3 with a distractingly mobile camera. There is, on the other hand, a terrific sequence in a later episode that unites characters in different places through a lateral camera move, a trick favoured by Wes Anderson.

Episode 6 is the most successful in achieving the trailer’s promise to show “the history you may not know”. The events in this are seen largely through through the eyes of a supporting player, V.P. Menon (K.C. Shankar). Tasked by Mountbatten with drafting the transfer of power proposal, Menon notices with mounting ease the clandestine meetings between the League and the British. Unlike the other principals, Menon is a bureaucrat, a professional, proud to have served under three Viceroys. It takes all kinds to win a revolution. 

The final episode ends with independence on the horizon, but much work yet to be done. Given what's already been shown, I’m dreading Freedom at Midnight's treatment of Partition. But the season does build to a crescendo, and I’m curious to see where they go from here. Just drop the damn clocks.  

‘Freedom at Midnight’ is on SonyLiv.