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‘When you watch Freedom At Midnight, I want you to feel like you are sitting on a ticking time bomb.’
IMAGE: RJ Malishka as Sarojini Naidu, Sidhant Gupta as Jawaharlal Nehru, Chirag Vora as Mahatma Gandhi and Rajendra Chawla as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Nikkhl Advani’s Freedom at Midnight.
Nikkhil Advani takes up a new challenge to show Indians how their country attained independence through his Web series, Freedom At Midnight.
It is an adaptation of the book by the same name by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, and takes a closer look at the last few year of the British Raj.
Starring Chirag Vohra as Monhandas Karamchand Gandhi, Sidhant Gupta as Jawaharlal Nehru, Arif Zakaria as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Ira Dubey as his sister Fatima Jinnah, RJ Malishka as Sarojini Naidu and Rajendra Chawla as Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the series is streaming on SonyLIV.
Nikkhil tells Rediff.com Senior Contributor Roshmila Bhattacharya, “What I understood from my reading and research is that Gandhi was madly principled and ideological. Sardar Patel was pragmatic and realistic, with a clear understanding of what was happening on the ground. Nehru was caught between an ideological Gandhi and the pragmatism of Sardar Patel.”
The global political climate is very volatile today with two wars raging and several more which can start any day. Would you say this the right time for a show that takes us back to a volatile period in history and make world leaders think?
I don’t think Freedom at Midnight as a show will stop anyone from taking any decisions globally.
But to quote from William L Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
That’s why I’m drawn to projects like Airlift, Rocket Boys, Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway, Mumbai Diaries and Freedom at Midnight that document a period, whether it happened years ago or is more contemporary.
So, we don’t forget and can learn from it in the future.
For me personally, this show was too big an opportunity to pass up.
Despite Partition, religion differences are being magnified again across the globe. What is your take on it?
I grew up in a home which celebrates every single Hindu festival, including Navratri twice a year.
One half of my family are Sindhis, second generation refugees who came from an undivided India.
The other half are Maharashtrians who were celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi long before it became fashionable to do so.
I went to the temple with father every Sunday, but he took me to the dargah too.
My grandparents wrote in Arabic.
My grandmother, a beautiful Sindhi woman, mother of five and grandmother of 13, would often exclaim, ‘Hai Allah!’
That’s the religion I know.
That’s what was expected from this country by Mahatma Gandhi.
That’s the story I want to tell.
IMAGE: Nikkhil Advani with Chirag Vora who plays Gandhi. Photograph: Kind courtesy Chirag Vora/Instagram
But you come from a generation that has only heard and seen images of Partition, not experienced it firsthand. Was that a handicap while directing Freedom At Midnight?
My grandmother who came down from Karachi would often speak, proudly and sadly, of all that they had to leave behind when they migrated.
She never let us forget it.
She made sure that all her children and grandchildren were well educated.
While documenting those turbulent times in my own humble way, I found myself reliving her stories.
I also watched Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and Govind Nihalani’s Tamas, found myself going back to the devastating photographs of 1947 taken by American photographer Margaret Bourke White, also those from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s India in Full Frame.
You have used a lot of archival footage. Was that difficult to get?
Not at all because by 1946-1947, when it was evident that the British were leaving and India would finally get its independence, the BBC and other news agencies, along with renowned photographers and documentary film-makers from across the world, arrived here and were covering every single moment of history.
All that footage was available to us, it’s just that in a world of intellectual property, you had to be sure you had all the rights and permissions.
We shot wherever we wanted and got all footage we needed from the BBC and Film Division.
We also had access to all the books of the period.
The idea was that the more information we got, the more clarity we would have on events, be able to look at them from different perspectives, which would help us propagate what is there in the book.
IMAGE: Sidhant Gupta, Chirag Vora and Rajendra Chawla in Freedom At Midnight.
You must have taken some creative liberties too?
Of course, I did.
My whole attempt is to make the viewer privy to the private conversations between Gandhi and Nehru, Gandhi and Sardar Patel, Nehru and Jinnah and so on.
While Louis Mountbatten opened his diaries and journals to Larry Colins and Dominique Lapierre, he was privy to conversations between our Indian leaders only till August 15, 1947.
After that, his role as the last viceroy of India changed to that of the first governor-general of the Dominion of India and he then had limited access to them.
So I had to pick the event we were chronicling, consider the overall stand of those participating in the discussion or argument on it, and create a scene from it since I too was not privy to these conversations.
What I understood from my reading and research is that Gandhi was madly principled and ideological.
Sardar Patel was pragmatic and realistic, with a clear understanding of what was happening on the ground.
Nehru was caught between an ideological Gandhi and the pragmatism of Sardar Patel.
There are people who believed Nehru and Gandhi gave their nod to Partition, but in your show, they seem completely opposed to it.
Gandhi was completely opposed to it, the others accepted it at various points during that last year of the British Raj.
Gandhi believed that the violence would not stop with the division of the country.
He would point that when you cut the roots of a tree, pedon ko hosh nahin rahta ki woh kahan gir raha hai.
He insisted it would be the same with people when they were uprooted.
And he was right.
From Bengal to Punjab, Lahore and Rawalpindi, the whole country was like a ticking time bomb.
You cut off one fuse and another went off somewhere else.
My editor Shweta Venkat would wail that after seven months, the ticking sound was coming out of her ears.
When you watch the series, I want you to feel like you are sitting on a ticking time bomb too.
IMAGE: Rajendra Chawla and Sidhant Gupta in Freedom At Midnight.
How long was the Freedom At Midnight shoot?
We shot both seasons of the show together over 120 days. With turnarounds and travel, it extended to 150 to 160 days.
It was like running a marathon, you had to pace yourself so you had the stamina to keep going.
Also, you had to be able to show your unit the same level of enthusiasm, from day one right up to day 120.
When you hit the set running on such a mammoth production, you have to be well prepared.
The direction and shot-taking were as per the conversations we had had during the many workshops.
IMAGE: Luke McGibney as Lord Mountbatten and Cordelia Bugeja as Lady Edwina Mountbatten in Freedom At Midnight.
At times, you must have had to improvise on the spot?
I improvise every day and am not known to stick to the script.
In this case, I had to be a little more structured because of the language and characters I was dealing with.
But all my actors had read a lot too and when one of them came to me with a great suggestion, I had to assess if it fell within the larger graph of the storytelling, then allow them to fly with it.
Give us an example.
Well, Sidhant once came with a quote of Nehru’s that he had read and wondered if we could incorporate it in a particular scene.
Luke McGibney, who plays Mountbatten, also wanted to deliver certain lines in a different way.
We had broken the Lahore burning scenes into several days of shoot but finally did it in a single day after a lot of rehearsals.
When you shooting in temperatures rising to 48 to 50 degrees Celsius, all your planning goes out of the window and you have to figure out how to improvise that day without wasting time or resources.
IMAGE: Nikkhil Advani with Sidhant Gupta, Chirag Vora, Rajendra Chawla, Ira Dubey, Arif Zakaria and RJ Malishka. Photograph: Kind courtesy Chirag Vora/Instagram
Today, when you look back on the series, what is it that you will remember of Freedom At Midnight five years from now?
I’m happy that my daughter Keya, who is 18 and worked on the show for a couple of months, is reading more books on Nehru, Gandhi and Patel.
I just hope that all those who turned to science after Rocket Boys will now start reading history thanks to Freedom At Midnight.
We at Emmay Entertainment are constantly punching above our weight category.
Airlift, Rocket Boys, Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway, Freedom At Midnight were all difficult stories and we will keep telling such stories.
(Laughs) Many believe that after Rocket Boys and Freedom At Midnight, we have enough props and costumes to save on the budget of our next film or show.
There are many exciting things on the anvil and you can expect some announcements soon.
But before your next you will surely be taking a much-needed vacation.
What vacation? I have to start on the post production of Season 2 of Freedom At Midnight immediately.
Vedaa, your last film as director with John Abraham as lead actor and co-producer, opened on Independence Day this year, along with Stree 2.
Given that the horror-comedy has gone on to become Hindi cinema’s biggest blockbuster, do you think it would have been wiser to push forward Vedaa‘s release by a few weeks?
Satyamev Jayate and Batla House also released on August 15, 2018 and 2019, along with other films, and still did well.
(Laughs) What I could have done was made sure Stree 2 was not such a good film, but that was not in my hands.
