‘Freedom At Midnight’ S2 review: Historical series returns stronger and richer

In the third episode of Freedom At Midnight’s second season, Abhishek Banerjee turns up as an unnamed Hindu rioter. Towards the end, he confronts Gandhi (Chirag Vohra), who’s fasting in yet another attempt to end the terrible sectarian violence in Calcutta. He berates the frail old man, yelling at him to eat, confessing to murder, finally breaking down. Gandhi, barely able to speak, advises him to wipe his heart of hatred.

This is a reworking of a scene from Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) featuring an electric Om Puri, not quite line for line but close. Nikkhil Advani’s series trying its own version feels a bit like payback: you retell our history, we’ll redo your retelling. Unlike Attenborough’s sanctified version, Gandhi is a fascinating conundrum in the show's second season, his undiminished sway over the public at odds with his declining political relevance in the months before and after independence. Vohra’s brilliant performance renders him cussed and ornery, yet able to move mountains through sheer force of will—perhaps the most human screen Gandhi yet.

For all of Gandhi’s blunt wresting of a narrative that resists him, Freedom At Midnight is driven by Jawaharlal Nehru (Sidhant Gupta) and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (Rajendra Chawla), the nation’s first prime minister and home minister. Like the first season, this one is also a tussle between Patel’s pragmatism and Nehru’s idealism on a range of issues: the safety and survival of refugees, the calming of religious tensions, the annexing and seducing of princely states. Invariably, Patel is the one suggesting tough but sensible solutions while Nehru frets about morality and secularism.

Reviewing the first season, I’d suggested the show’s most telling choice was “the elevation of Patel as a pragmatist holding together the freedom movement and managing the fears of divas Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah”. This is still true, but there’s a better balance between him and Nehru. Gupta has grown into the role, his Nehru no longer just a worrier in the shadow of Gandhi but someone conscious that he’s shaping a fragile nation—and his legacy—in real time. Most intriguing are the moments when he loses his cool, over Kashmir of course, but also while addressing a Sikh camp after a massacre of Muslims (he slips into mildly Punjabified Hindi—a nice little touch).

Riots and rioters are a big part of the pre- and post-independence story—and a headache for Advani. The first season was guilty of showing mostly Muslim rioters, leaving the Hindu mobs offscreen. This season, there's a focus on Sikh and Muslim rioters, but again, little onscreen violence perpetrated by Hindus. A similar wariness can be seen in the show’s decision to follow Madanlal Pahwa (Anurag Thakur), who attempted an assassination of Gandhi in 1948, and not Nathuram Godse, who succeeded. Pahwa was something of a wild card, a refugee whose personal losses curdled into hate against Gandhi. Godse was an RSS man, with ideological grounding. To show his journey in an honest manner would be to risk censorship or worse—and so the show sidesteps Godse, not even showing his face as he shoots Gandhi.

Freedom at Midnight can often be blunt, in its storytelling (the subplot about Partition separating two soldiers from the same battalion is ham-fisted) as well as its technique (dividing the screen into twos, threes and more—an inadvertent partition metaphor—negates whatever emotion the scene is driving at). I found it easy to overlook the rough edges, though, since there’s so much diverting historical detail woven into the episodes: a maharaja who flees in the night with his beloved dogs, a young prince who’s bribed by Pakistan with a model car set, Patel's ‘basket of apples’, interpreted literally.

Jinnah is a villain conceived in broad strokes, vampiric and unsympathetic. I had to look up the real Jinnah’s speeches to see if Arif Zakaria’s withering line readings weren’t a massive reach (turns out they are just fine). It's perhaps too much to expect a complex Jinnah from an Indian show in 2026, but Freedom At Midnight does the next best thing: a complex Mountbatten. Luke McGibney's subtle playing allows him to be both the vain, entitled representation of Empire as well as a man in over his head, increasingly aghast at the consequences of his decisions.

Freedom At Midnight is a better, richer show in its second season. It embraces the messiness of India's first steps as an independent nation, deftly moving between genres—comic history lesson in the princely states episode, ticking clock thriller for Gandhi's last days. It may lack the finesse of a Poacher or Paatal Lok, but it's lively, committed and curious. Its blind spots are revealing of the times we live in, and its successes are well-earned.

‘Freedom At Midnight’ is on SonyLiv.