Lounge
Nikkhil Advani on ‘Freedom at Midnight’: ‘The tone needs to be a thriller’
Summary
Nikkhil Advani on presenting a personal side to great leaders in his new series, ‘Freedom at Midnight’
After producing Rocket Boys, the story of Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai and India’s science and nuclear programme, Nikkhil Advani grabbed the opportunity to helm an adaptation of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s book Freedom at Midnight. The SonyLiv series (streaming from 15 November) stars Sidhant Gupta as Jawaharlal Nehru, Chirag Vohra as Mahatma Gandhi, Rajendra Chawla as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Arif Zakaria as Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Advani, who recently directed the series Mumbai Diaries, spoke about adapting the 1975 book, which traces the last year of British rule in India, into a two-season series. Edited excerpts from the interview.
Why did you think of adapting ‘Freedom at Midnight’ now?
It was during a night of celebration after Rocket Boys when we were discussing what to do next and I was asked if I would like to do Freedom at Midnight, but I didn’t think we would get the rights. People have tried before. Gurinder Chadha made a version called Viceroy’s House, which was an unofficial version, and at the opening of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, he does give grateful acknowledgement to Lord Mountbatten, on whose diaries the book is based. But then the producers said they have the rights and I should start thinking about what I want to do with it.
My first response was, there must be no budget. But there was a budget. The difficulty was adaptation rights, then determining the tone and what we hoped to achieve with the telling of this book. Just like the people within the book are extremely polarised, the book is extremely polarising. Historians think it’s too pulpy, other people think it’s a great read.
I said the tone needs to be a thriller with a ticking time clock. The book goes from the 16 August 1946 till the 30 January 1948, from Direct Action Day till Martyrs Day. You have these great men—Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel—who we have learnt about as leaders, but they were also scrambling to figure out what they needed to do without losing too many lives.
We have studied, read and seen so much about Partition, independence and the freedom struggle. What is the relevance of the book and the show today?
We were following the same instruction that Abhay Pannu (director) and I followed in Rocket Boys, which is that Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Bhabha did not know that they were going to become Dr Sarabhai and Dr Bhabha. It is tougher with this project because we all know the leaders. So we said, let’s talk about the events that nobody knows. Everybody knows about Partition and 15 August, but do you know why the date of 15 August 1947 was chosen? There is a whole story about the date and the debate that went on behind the scenes about that too.
There are many such moments in the book because Mountbatten had documented all this in his personal journal, which became the source material for Lapierre and Collins. Having said that, while the book has been our primary source material, we’ve always backed it up with a second and third source.
What did you learn about that time in Indian history?
I love history. And as producers, we’ve got slotted as period filmmakers. I am now doing Revolutionaries for Amazon, which is set from 1910-15. Rahul Dholakia is directing a movie for us which is set in 1951, and we’re doing another season of Freedom at Midnight. So we are putting all the period costumes and props to good use.
What I learnt from this experience is that the idea of India which these great men had, it changed by 1947. You had Gandhi’s ideology, Sardar’s pragmatism and in between you had Nehru, who was torn between two things—he wanted to be Gandhi’s son and the anointed person but he had to bear witness to what Sardar kept pointing out, which is that the ground reality is very different. We don’t learn about that in the history books. By the end of the first season, you see Gandhi feeling irrelevant, because the Congress is basically saying there is no place for ahimsa in 1947. Sardar tells Gandhi that you have to cut the finger but the body is still getting saved.
We took the dialogues from speeches that these men made. They spoke more openly when they were in private discussions, and there are detailed minutes of every meeting. So it’s all documented.
Udita Jhunjhunwala is a writer, film critic and festival programmer. She posts at @Udita J.
