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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.
The canvas of Freedom at Midnight, based principally on the 1975 book of the same name by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, is vast, although the main narrative spans only two years and stops with the uncertain future that a newly independent India stares at amid the Partition riots.
Freedom at Midnight has a cast of hundreds but it zeroes in on a handful of men, and a woman or two, who led the negotiations for the transfer of power, a slow and painful process that was inevitably fraught with much tension and to-ing and fro-ing.
Advani, whose 2003 directorial debut Kal Ho Naa Ho re-releases today, has traversed many a mile as a filmmaker and storyteller since then. His Rocket Boys imbues Freedom at Midnight with the gravitas that it demands.
The artistic choices that the director makes are spot on. The actors at his disposal are perfectly attuned to the demands of the project. And the technical attributes of the show are all first-rate. Together, they not only ensure that the spotlight does not shift an inch from the solemn subject matter but also that the burden does not weigh down the endeavour.
No matter what your political leanings are and how much of your knowledge of history is coloured by WhatsApp forwards, you will find it difficult to fault the points of emphasis and the lines of argument that Advani's interpretation of events employs because it is clearly based on extensive research and a book that got everything right, give or take a few stray departures.
If there is anything that is amiss in Freedom at Midnight, it is the fact that each of the key dramatic personae is put into an airtight ideological block that represents a specific line of thinking that is played off against the swirling forces of history for the purpose of generating drama and conflict.
Gandhi is the sage, Nehru an idealist committed to the idea of a unified India, Patel a pragmatist who believes it is fine to amputate a hand to save the arm, and Jinnah an unbudging votary of a separate nation for Muslims. The show does not have much scope for these remarkable men to succumb to human inconsistencies.
Freedom at Midnight isn't driven by A-list stars but by actors who painstakingly and confidently flesh out the aforementioned towering historical figures. Their task is onerous, and even though not all of them may bear exact resemblance to the leaders they play, they succeed in making us believe that they are indeed the men that they portray.
Sidhant Gupta, who broke out in the role of a budding filmmaker in Vikramaditya Motwane's Jubilee, adds another feather to his cap with his performance as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
The show presents India's first Prime Minister as a suave barrister who is perfectly at home in the rough and tumble of politics even as he struggles to wrap his head around the idea of cleaving the subcontinent into two. The fact that Gupta, a thirty-something actor, is consistently convincing as Nehru in his late 50s, is no less than a marvel.
Rajendra Chawla delivers on all fronts as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, projected as a hardnosed man of action who readily embraces the proposal of Partition because he wants to stop the seeds of religious hatred and distrust from spreading across the country.
Chirag Vohra is a bold choice for the character of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It comes off because once the wall of disbelief is breached, he grows on the audience.
At the other end of the spectrum is Arif Zakaria as a tubercular Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Although the character is bereft of shades, the actor is never short of impressive. He is the least conflicted of the main players in Freedom at Midnight and yet Zakaria manages to impart to him significant angularities.
When Jinnah's younger sister Fatima (Ira Dubey, one of the few women in the cast who isn't relegated to the sidelines) points out to him that regional identity is stronger than the religious one, he brushes it off without letting the argument go any further. He goes in just one direction and nowhere else and that robs the portrayal of nuance.
But that certainly isn't the bane of the series as a whole. Freedom at Midnight chooses sustained engagement over mere entertainment as it makes its way through the battlefield on which the clash between conflicting notions of nation and identity played out and presents a composite of resonant, eternally relevant notions.
No historical drama can be deemed successful unless it contains within its folds the lessons that are to be learnt from the watersheds that shape nations, communities and political formations. Freedom at Midnight does not fail to dwell upon the consequences of decisions taken under duress and in response to raging conflagrations.
Although the series depicts events that occurred over 75 years ago, it has many meaningful asides that constitute a commentary on the realities of the times that we live in.
But even if one were to miss these piercing truths about shaking off the yoke of foreign rule, the pursuit of principles in the face of grave provocations and the dichotomy of power and duty, Freedom at Midnight has enough to keep the audience invested in the unfolding of the drama of a nation seeking to steady itself on dangerously slippery ground.
Not only is it competently crafted and acted, it also tells a story replete with known and unknown nuggets of information that are processed with skill and sensitivity. It has no grandstanding, and no hectoring and hollering of the sort that mainstream Bollywood is prone to.
The show gives history its due, meticulously piecing together the fragments that went into the making of an essential and wondrous, if inevitably imperfect, whole.