In theory, The Revolutionaries has a lot going for it. The sprawling historical drama tells the lesser-known story of the armed revolutionaries of India’s Independence movement: the underground rebels who fought the British with bullets and bombs before Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent crusades, and the freedom-fighting ‘ancestors’ who set the stage for future folk-heroes like Bhagat Singh, Udham Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad. Its primary antagonist is Lieutenant Colonel Dyer, before he became the world’s most hated Englishman for his role in the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. It’s the natural companion piece to the two seasons of Freedom At Midnight, also created and directed by Nikkhil Advani, who’s one of the more accomplished long-form filmmakers going around; he knows a thing or two about scale and period pieces. And it has a young cast, the kind that draws a ready-made Gen-Z fanbase to a ‘serious’ chapter.
Yet, somehow, against the odds, this lavishly mounted 8-episode show snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. The genre fatigue aside, it feels like the jealous cousin of the far-superior Freedom At Midnight. Be it physically: The sets radiate artifice, the makers don’t have enough fun with blank-cheque storytelling, and there are no good performances to distract us. Or narratively: If Freedom At Midnight treated dialogue and deals as action set-pieces and humanised the euphoria cut short by the Partition, this one uses violence and sacrifice as checklist items rather than an anonymous language of war.
Or culturally: It’s based on economist and controversial historian Sanjeev Sanyal’s book Revolutionaries: The Other Story Of How India Won Its Freedom, which features his great-grandfather and HRA founding member as a primary character, and frames the armed resistance players as the ‘original’ heroes who seem to be retroactively battling for credit from later generations; every other scene has someone declaring “our story cannot be forgotten, the echoes will ignite the spark and inspire others to finish the job” like it’s written in hindsight from the 2020s. Or even structurally: the narrative covers three years up till the 1915 Ghadar Mutiny, but reduces the intricate network of global rebellion to a handful of leaders locked in a Tom-and-Jerry chase with a campy villain across exotic places like Dehradun, Benaras, Calcutta, Chandernagore and Lahore.
The series follows the lives — actually “lives” is a stretch — of three rebels following in the footsteps of fierce predecessors like Rani Lakshmibai. The main man is Rash Behari Bose (internet-star-turned-actor Bhuvan Bam), whom we don’t know much about except that he’s an elusive master of disguises (surely the ‘BB Ki Vines’ influence), super sullen, and a mythical name among upcoming fighters. Then there’s Sachindranath Sanyal (Rohit Saraf), the boyish rookie who idolises Bose and has the sort of YA romcom-ish presence that almost forces the series to change its title to Eternally Confused and Eager for Revolution (or Mismatched: The Revenge); his scenes with fiancee Pratibha (Pratibha Ranta) belong to a parallel Bhansali-lite love story that keeps disrupting the gore-and-assassination storyline. Finally, there’s Bose’s Bengali comrade Bagha Jatin (Gurfateh Pirzada), who crashes the party late but becomes the grumpy senior pro to Sachin and looks capable of killing with his stubble alone.
There are other co-conspirators — Sachin’s older cousin (Toya Roy Chowdury), Bose’s ‘boudi’ (Paoli Dam), messenger-aviator Kartar Singh (Kashish Saluja) — along the way. They’re building towards the Ghadar mutiny, but the Canadian and American expats (namely Lala Har Dayal, played by Neil Bhoopalam) who spearhead it become a footnote lost in a patriotic haze. They are all introduced in passing at some point, but it’s hard to care beyond a Google search or two. There’s no connective tissue, and the one popular event surrounding a Japanese ship and Sikh rebels at an Indian port feels like an indulgent set-piece. Unfortunately, if you look away for a minute, the dry functionality of the series — where every scene only exists to propel multiple plots forward — might have the last laugh.
An ambitious and wide-ranging story like this often hinges on the cast. That’s the fundamental problem with The Revolutionaries. The cosplay vibe is strong with most of the performers; you can tell that they’ve been texting in air-conditioned cars on the way to the set. A period drama doesn’t have to be immersive or authentic (whatever that means these days), but the least one can do is lean into the pulp and weaponise the discord — like Jason Shah as Colonel Dyer (with that filmy stutter), or Sidhant Gupta as Nehru in Freedom At Midnight. The actors here have more to experiment with, but the self-seriousness prevents them from swinging big. It’s enjoyable to hear Shah speak like a Britisher who sounds like an Indian putting on an English twang; he’s the only one in sync with the excesses of the film-making. But the Heeramandi hangover sinks the rest.
Not to blame it entirely on them, though. The storytelling has no business being so bland, given that it isn’t burdened with the cinema of legacy names like Gandhi, Patel, Nehru or Jinnah. If there was one chance to channel the audacity of Tarantino’s revisionist-history spectacles, this was it. Several episodes have crowded action blocks and annoyingly close calls (how incompetent is Dyer that he keeps missing Bose in the dying seconds?), but the tension in them feels isolated, which tends to happen when makers stage sequences like ingredients instead of utensils. On an unrelated note, if I see one more Durga Puja montage with an ‘Ekla Cholo Re’ riff, I’ll start using barfy review terms like “crisp editing” and “delicious suspense”.
The cold openings and the urge to end every episode on a cliffhanger (it’s mostly Bose almost-caught, or when all else fails, a man randomly turns traitor) work against the present-day portions. Forget the dialects and accents, the emotions are too contemporary — like Pratibha spelling out the subtext that girls aren’t scared because they have to start revolting the day they’re born; like her using Sherlock as inspiration (she looks like she’s referring to the Benedict Cumberbatch-starrer) and abruptly transforming into an activist herself; or every British officer amping up the aura of Bose and gang by literally thinking aloud (“you want to know why he returned? To pull off the biggest theft in history of the British Raj!” or “the fire is coming!”). The geography of the show is so diverse — from the holy bylanes of Benaras to the depths of Calcutta’s Chinatown — but it’s visually flattened in the way old-school and ornamental studio sets tend to be. If not for the subtitles, you wouldn’t know where they are.
The shortcuts are disappointing, too, given the calibre of the production. A plane is shot down, but we don’t see the messy aftermath; we just know the injured revolutionaries escaped. The British outnumber the Indians at Calcutta port and corner them, but the chaos conceals how three of them made it out and only one got captured. Logically as well, it’s all too convenient that Pratibha convinces the leaders to tap the army, purely on the basis of realising that the local soldiers sent as British troops to Europe are aching to revolt because their letters are being censored. When the show runs out of patience and rhythm, there’s a training montage in a quasi-Western ranch, because is it even a revolution if there’s no rousing Sukhvinder Singh song? The brain-waves of Dyer deducing the Indians’ next hideouts become a loop; a torture scene in prison featuring Dyer, a chilly-powdered onion and a naked woman is needlessly provocative. Where is an angry Sunny Deol when you need him?
On paper at least, Advani infuses this stilted revolution story with the secular spirit it deserves. There’s a sense that Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and others unite against a common oppressor, unaware of the horrors of the Partition to come. There’s also a heaviness about their quest, almost as if it wants us to recognise the tragedy of living in a flawed India they died for. But perhaps the central issue is that the series cannot fully soften the intent of the source material presenting the characters as bravehearts fighting for modern recognition (from us) as much as freedom (from the British). They keep reminding the viewer that history has forgotten them, as a result of which their courage mutates into a bitterness to reclaim their stature in the broader movement.
A young Gandhi is mentioned only once as a lawyer in South Africa, but the disdain for the non-violent ways that follow (and succeed) is etched in the zero-backstory journey of Bose and his colleagues. Their rage seems like it’s ‘competing’ with the pacifism that India eventually won freedom with, even though they’re two sides of the same coin. This blind rage — to show India as a defiant aggressor and an aggressive victim — has more in common with the Naya Bharat that appears in movies today. The violence in this pre-independence story unfolds like they’re all trying to prove a point to foreigners and peacemongers a 100 years later: we are not pushovers, boss. If the new-age Indian-ness in the series is a harbinger of things to come, it does a disservice to its path-breaking protagonists. Give me a Rang De Basanti any day of the week. After all, there’s nobody left to defy now. So we look within, and just like that, everyone is a rebel without a cause. And a revolutionary without a pause.