Member Reviews

With Freedom at Midnight, Nikhil Advani continues looking at big cultural moments through the microscopic gaze of an insider. Across the two seasons of his breakout show Mumbai Diaries, the filmmaker portrayed pressing social crises through the labour of medical practitioners attending to the casualties. This shift in slant sidestepped the showiness prone to cinematic excess and allowed for a more intimate rendering of public events, transforming, therefore, the narrative around them. In his latest long-form work, Advani turns his gaze to the wide spectrum of India’s independence and reiterates his style of focusing on the bureaucratic bottleneck, telling the story therefore of the people living inside towering buildings and not on the street. Freedom at Midnight is about the historicity of 1947 conveyed through the lives of those who curated the history.

The choice of using ‘Freedom At Midnight’, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s account of the tumultuous build-up to India’s independence in August 1947, as the basis for the seven-part web series of the same name achieves one thing above all else: adapting from source material which has been in existence for several years, especially from the celebrity author duo who couldn’t be accused of being either pro-India, or pro-Pakistan, frees creator and director Nikkhil Advani of being accused similar bias.

News is the truth that you choose to bring out, a cunning television journalist tells her artless subordinate early on in The Sabarmati Report. She’s the villain of the piece for concealing inconvenient realities and conveying only what suits her purpose and politics. Funny how The Sabarmati Report’s poorly crafted propaganda masquerading as a crusade for justice is nothing but a blatant embodiment of these very ideals.

सालों लंबी क्रांति और अनगिनत शहीदों की कुर्बानी के बाद अंग्रेजी हुकूमत से 1947 में मिली आजादी के बदले हिंदुस्तान के दिल पर विभाजन का जो जख्म लगा, वह टीस 77 साल बाद आज भी महसूस होती है। मगर क्या धर्म के नाम पर हुआ देश का यह बंटवारा जरूरी था? क्या यह रुक सकता था? देश के भविष्य से जुड़े इस निर्णायक फैसले में शामिल पंडित नेहरू, महात्मा गांधी, सरदार पटेल या मोहम्मद अली जिन्ना जैसे राजनेताओं का क्या रुख रहा? इतिहास के सबसे त्रासद बंटवारे को लेकर ऐसे ही कई अनछ़ुए पन्ने पलटती है, निखिल अडवानी की वेब सीरीज ‘फ्रीडम एट मिडनाइट’। यह सीरीज लैरी कॉलिन्स और डॉमनिक लैपियर की इसी नाम से लिखी बहुचर्चित किताब पर आधारित है, जो ब्रिटिश राज का सूरज ढलने के बाद एक स्वतंत्र हिंदुस्तान के बनने के दौरान हुई राजनीति और सामाजिक हालातों की गहराई से पड़ताल करती है।

The communal bloodshed that tainted Gujarat in 2002 has been told and retold on film, in books, on TV debates. But there’s been a lid on the Godhra tragedy that preceded the riots, a lid that’s lifted occasionally to put out theories that suppress and mislead more than reveal. A gas cylinder, a cigarette? What sparked the fire that roasted 59 kar sevaks including tiny children inside a bogey of the Sabarmati Express outside Godhra station in 2002?

Shivarajkumar’s portrayal of Bhairathi Ranagal in the 2017 movie Mufti was a monumental success. His iconic look—featuring coloured khadi vestis and shirts—became a trendsetter, even inspiring Nandamuri Balakrishna’s style in Veera Simha Reddy. It’s no surprise that the filmmakers were tempted to delve deeper into the character and cater to the audience’s appetite for more. After all, the market rarely gets it wrong, right? Fast forward seven years and director Narthan brings us Bhairathi Ranagal, the origin story of this beloved character.

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom”. This momentous line from Jawaharlal Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech, delivered on the eve of India’s Independence on August 15, 1947, remains etched in the annals of history. What also remains an indelible part of our country’s birth into freedom after 200 years of colonial rule is the bloodied, agonising, gut-wrenching division of one nation into two.

In Freedom of Midnight, showrunner and director Nikkhil Advani, working with a script by a team of six writers, blends solid historicity with elements of fiction and imagination to bring to the screen the agonizing final leg of India’s freedom struggle. The SonyLIV drama series produced by Emmay Entertainment and StudioNext, is crafted with utmost diligence. It blends grandeur with intimacy, swept with precision, sustained gravitas with an acute awareness of the timeless contemporaneity of political decisions of far-reaching consequences made in an era of great upheavals by the architects of a free nation forged in fire.

As children, most of us learn to see 1947 as India’s finest moment. The event is simple: India gained freedom from the greedy British Raj and that’s that. As teenagers, we start to sense that perhaps it wasn’t all smooth and happy. With independence came the pressure to move out and grow up. But it doesn’t matter much because, either way, colonialism ended. As we get older, however, a full and bittersweet picture emerges: a nation is free, only to be violently divided into two on the basis of religion. It was never as simple as the British leaving or a newly born country celebrating its revolutionaries. This fuller picture has been molded — and revised — into shapeless stories by a future reeling from its scars. History is what happened, but these days, history is what we choose to believe.