Making Heroes and Villains out of Nehru, Gandhi, Patel, and Jinnah: Nikkhil Advani Breaks Down Freedom At Midnight

There is a director’s cut of Freedom At Midnight that showrunner and director Nikkhil Advani is excited about. That means what we have seen is, in some sense incomplete, an audience’s perceived desires force-fitted into that of the storyteller’s. Advani speaks of 90-minute episodes, blooming romances, expressed resentments. But what we see is between 40 to 45 minutes. However, that is also the nature of the business, one Advani knows best, having assisted Sudhir Mishra and Karan Johar. He has made films that were hailed — Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), D-Day (2013) — and hauled — Salaam-e-Ishq (2007), Chandni Chowk to China (2009) — besides being one of the directors who made the successful shift to streaming, with the tightly-wound Mumbai Diaries.

Freedom At Midnight is based on Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s book of the same name. A pulpy narration of the chambers and palaces in which decisions were made and unmade for a nation, the adaptation hews close to the arc of the text, even if Advani and his co-writers — Abhinandan Gupta, Gundeep Kaur, Adwitiya Kareng Das, Divy Nidhi Sharma, Revanta Sarabhai, Ethan Taylor — pluck at the text from a different perspective, with an amped tone; Advani insisting on “Salim-Javed dialogues”. The first season dropped a day after Nehru’s birthday, and season 2 — already shot — is being edited.

In this conversation, edited for length and clarity, Advani breaks down the choices of adapting a problematic text, making heroes and villains out of historic figures, the long shadow of style, the fragile casting of Nehru, and that ticking metronome.

Am I wrong in saying that Nehru is your protagonist in the classical sense?

India is the protagonist of my show. But Nehru is a trigger, along with Sardar Patel and Gandhi.

I mean protagonist in the classical sense — the one with interiority, the one with an arc.

In that sense, I am clear that Nehru, Patel, and Gandhi are my protagonists, Jinnah is my antagonist, and the British don’t even know what is happening, because they are at a loss and just want to get out.

But possibly, Nehru is the one who definitely has an arc. He builds to a point where he even says no to Gandhi, “Maine bhi kiye kuch vaade, khud se, iss zameen se.” (I too made some promises, to myself, to this land.)

In that case, why didn’t you pick up Discovery of India instead?

Shyam Benegal has already done such an incredible job. Why would you remake a classic? Freedom At Midnight is a book (executive producer) that Saugata Mukherjee loves, (producer) Danish Khan loves, and I love.

But it is also a deeply problematic text. Because it was written after Jinnah and Nehru died, and it is mostly from the perspective of Mountbatten who has force-fitted words into their mouths. What do you do with this problem of perspective?

We move away from it. The scene in which Gandhi hands over the party to Nehru, despite Patel winning the election, was a line in the entire book; we made it into a full scene. There is a statement in the book’s second half, that when Punjab had blown up and Calcutta was threatening to go crazy, Nehru and Patel came to Mountbatten and asked him to help run the country. That line told me I could only use this book as a starting point; it couldn’t be everything. The team read Patel’s and Jinnah’s and VP Menon’s biographies, and brought that in.

We also spoke to people, like this woman who knew Maniben (Sardar Patel’s daughter) who told us the only person who voted for Nehru was Patel, because he knew he was dying — he had two heart attacks. But we had already shot that scene, otherwise we would have included it. We have taken the larger arc from the book — from 16th August 1946 to 30th January 1948.

But it is also the tone of the text, of Mountbatten coming across as the only one with a sense of perspective, while everyone else is conflicted and shaky around him. In Discovery Of India, for example, Nehru is more confident. You are bringing in new details, but the tone seems to be the same.

The shakiness is not necessarily from the text. I wanted him to play Nehru as somebody torn between the ideology of Mahatma Gandhi and the pragmatism of Sardar Patel. My submission to you is to wait for season 2 — because here, Mountbatten has come with a mission, but in the next season, there is a scene in which he calls himself a patsy, where he is a bumbling fool who does know what is happening.

You have made a curious choice in this show by de-personalizing all the Indian characters. They have no personal lives. Indira Gandhi is entirely absent. Nehru’s late wife is a mere photo on his desk. There is no sense of Jinnah’s marriage, his daughter, with whom he had a complicated relationship. Sardar Patel’s daughter only serves food. These historic figures have become ideas.

The idea was to make a political thriller. 

How do you make a thriller by de-personalizing everyone involved?

Those were decisions taken in the edit. I had scenes with Indira, scenes with Maniben and Sardar, scenes with Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten — brilliant sequences where they were at loggerheads. I wanted to show that the bouncing boards for these men were the women. We had Sarojini Naidu saying “the Congress only keeps me to recite poems…” I think that would have said so much about the way women were treated in the 40’s. I should’ve kept that.

I, however, chose to focus the show on the events that were happening between August 1946 and June 3rd 1947 in Season 1. Every time I went away from it, the edit lost pace and urgency, and the core of the story — that independence did not come without a price — was dissipating. My episodes were one to one-and-half hours. Sony very graciously said we will have a director’s cut!

You say India is your protagonist, but India is also an idea.

And that idea was over by 1947.

But how can you have an idea as a protagonist?

You have to see the end of the show — the second season. The last episode will hopefully answer your question. By the time independence is achieved, the idea of India and the ideal of India is already compromised.

But India is also a country with people. What you and Malay Prakash, your cinematographer, have done is create these gorgeous, open scenes of vacuum sealed rooms. And you wonder, where are the people? They only seem to be in the show when there are riots and incidents of violence. Was this conscious?

Absolutely. Outside India comes into play now, in the second season — Radcliffe will come, we have an entire episode on Kashmir, on the princely states, and partition will happen. We spent weeks looking at the faces of people we wanted to use in those scenes.

Can we talk about the riots? There is a tactical decision to show that the perpetrators of these violence were Muslims.

It was not Muslims, it was Jinnah-motivated, Muslim League-motivated. Hordes were sent in by the Muslim League to create riots. In Episode 5, a Sikh survivor says that, “Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs all lived together till a mob from outside attacked their village and everything changed…” Our research showed that.

In the first sequence of Direct Action, there was no distinguishing between the rioters. There was madness. There was fear. There was confusion. Jinnah even says, “Don’t forget Mr. Nehru, in Calcutta more Muslims were killed.” I think even he had realized that he had fired a gun, and it was too late to retract the bullet.

Then you are saying that the Muslim League were petty people, who only wanted power, when there were reasons — some of it could be rational — for doing what they were doing. There is a villainization of the League — are you comfortable with it as a storyteller?

I am very uncomfortable with history. Also, there was retaliation in Noakhali. Hundreds were killed. The survivors took the horrific stories to Bihar which resulted in the “well of bodies.” Nehru asks, “How did this happen. Yahan toh humari Sarkar hai!” (But here our government is in power!) to which Maulana replies “Sunne main aaya hai ki humare Congress workers bhi shaamil the…” (It is said that our Congress workers are also involved.) I have tried to be as true to the research as possible.

You also made Jinnah into a bumbling fool. It’s in the book, but to choose these specific scenes was your choice as a storyteller. Did you not want to complicate him? Layer him?

I am comfortable with the choice of making Gandhi, Nehru and Patel as my heroes and Jinnah as the villain.

Casting Sidhant Gupta is one of the strangest and most rewarding parts of the show. He is the youngest of the lot, and you see this young man in an older body; there is a tension between innocence and experience, and it is in his performance, his gait, his discomfort. I don’t know if it is a good or bad performance, but it is an uncomfortable performance that you slip into over time.

I can’t take credit for that. It is all Sidhant. My only brief to him was: You are being torn. When we showed the first few episodes, lots of people asked why he was being so passive. I wanted to hold him back, to be a boy in a room of men, and I want this boy to become a man. That was the arc.

He doesn’t walk. He struts. He doesn't speak. He pronounces. It is austere.

Sidhant wanted to bring the burden on Nehru’s shoulders — the burden of India. He is also a good foot taller than Nehru, so he had to slouch.

There is also stiffness.

Absolutely.

This was not there in the footage we see of Nehru.

Not at all. Every scene, Sidhant would say that he is burdened.

As a director, did that worry you?

I never direct. I give very few notes to actors. Irrfan taught me that. Let actors be an interpreter. That first scene in the elevator — I wanted to treat it like they are college boys wanting to get into the elevator first. I wanted Nehru to walk in like a rock star, in dark glasses. I hardly give instructions.

Your decision to use that aged black-and-white filter over footage you very obviously shot, is a bit disorienting because you also use actual footage from that time.

I loved what Aaron Sorkin did with The Trials of the Chicago 7 (2020), what Oliver Stone does with mixed media.

Tell me about creating the sound design of the show with Ashutosh Phatak. There is this ticking sound throughout the show. After a point, if you are told constantly something is happening — it becomes a tic. I am sure you have thought of this.

It is annoying. But it is a conscious decision. It is effective in the sense that time is running out — and the decisions these people are taking are because time is running out. And the fact that they are sitting on a powder keg. We have issues with it, but it really works. I wanted clocks, I wanted the sound of typewriters. The sound of typewriters should feel like machine gun bullets — 6,000 dead! Rawalpindi massacred!

Could you talk about the sense of space in this show? In your interview with Baradwaj Rangan, you noted this poignant moment in which Jinnah realizes that he, too, must leave Bombay to go to Pakistan because of the partition he desired. It was then I realized that in this show, Jinnah was supposed to be in Bombay. Did you intentionally want this fluidity, where a character could be anywhere, move anywhere, without the logistics of place?

That came about when Malay [Prakash] came around and said: We are going to burn out the windows. The Crown does it all the time. We are shooting on sets. We can’t have a green screen, because we are shooting from February and wanted to release it in November — so there would not be time for increased VFX work. So we decided to have authentic, beautiful sets, where we couldn’t see outside the windows. So Jinnah needed an art deco house. But the exterior with the colonnade was shot in Patiala. If you notice, Jinnah’s study is the same as Nehru’s study, with wood paneling.

Also, Malay wanted hard light to come in because Jinnah, Gandhi, Patel, Nehru in profile are the images we have grown up with. We don't have to show their faces, their silhouettes are enough. In fact, we began with the backshot of Gandhi.

I want to ask you about your relationship with style, specifically the scene of the Punjab riots. It is shot gorgeously, of this man’s silhouette against the fires, the top shot of women jumping. The question is — when you shoot these women jumping into the fire so beautifully, is it possible to feel the pain of violence? Does style come at the cost of the emotion of the scene?

Would I want to show the scene any differently? If I made it more raw and real, I would not be able to stomach it. So I chose to show the pain on the face of the person who is narrating it — you see the pain on Edwina’s face, her breakdown, and that one close-up of that girl when the last woman jumps across the flame. Unfortunately, if you don’t make these sequences beautiful, it becomes very difficult to watch. You have to pull yourself away from it.