Midnight Memorial

Agar aap hamare saath nahin chal sakte hain toh hamare saamne mat ayiye (If you can’t walk along with us, at least don’t come in our way).” So says Jawaharlal Nehru to Mahatma Gandhi in SonyLIV’s new series, Freedom at Midnight. Nehru, played by actor Sidhant Gupta, looks embarrassed; Gandhi, played by Chirag Vohra, is understandably shocked. The scene comes towards the end of Season One of the series adaptation of Larry Collins’ and Dominique Lapierre’s bestselling Freedom at Midnight, created by Nikkhil Advani who has been obsessed with the book since he read it as a teenager. It’s a sweeping series, covering the cataclysmic events leading up to the Partition, shot on 86 sets, with a prep of two years, and a cast of thousands.

It takes us into rooms where some of the biggest names of the Indian free­dom movement are grappling with the horrors of Partition. One after the other, they hear of datelines soaked in blood, Calcutta, on Direct Action Day; Noakhali, where communal riots broke out; and then from Rawalpindi and Lahore in Punjab. It shows us both the greatness and frailties of the leaders of the freedom movement. It also shows how they were helpless at the violence and evil they had unleashed in people, and were not able to fully comprehend the consequences of their actions.

The rampant rage on the streets and in the fields has been seen in cinema before, from Govind Nihalani’s Tamas (1988) to Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram! (2000) to Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth (1998) to Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House (2017).

But few have been able to capture the relationships between the leaders. The most remarkable is well known to historians but misconstrued by the know-nothings: the friendship between Nehru and Patel, one an impulsive Cam­bridge-returned heir apparent, the other a beloved lieutenant of the Mahatma, happy to step aside when told to do so. “Jawahar and Sardar are like my sons,” says Gandhi at one point. “Nehru was caught in a tug of war between the Ma­hatma’s ideology and Sardar’s pragma­tism,” says Advani, also the creator of SonyLIV’s Rocket Boys which brought to screen the lives of scientists Homi J Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai.

Video: Kaveree Bamzai in conversation with Nikkhil Advani, director Freedom at Midnight

Nehru and Patel were like brothers. Typical of this, points out Advani, is when Patel holds his heart and talks dra­matically about not living long (he died in 1950 and was 14 years older than Nehru), when Nehru goes into a spiral of vacillation and procrastination. Both men are shown as being loyal to the Mahatma but also impatient to get on with the work of building an independ­ent India. Their relationship is far more equal than has been shown before, even in Attenborough’s Gandhi, where the focus is on Nehru as the Mahatma’s chosen one, and played exquisitely by Roshan Seth. Incidentally, Seth escaped the ignominy of being dressed in powder blue and pale pink achkans and jackets thanks to Indira Gandhi’s last-minute in­tervention. When she saw the costumes for Nehru’s character, she fished out his clothes and asked the costume designers John Mollo and Bhanu Athaiya to redress the mistake. Sidhant Gupta was not so lucky, and ends up dressing like a metro­sexual version of Nehru.

Gupta (as Nehru) is lucky however in being able to portray the friendship with Edwina Mountbatten as just that, with­out the odour of anything inappropriate. Advani does take us to Nehru’s visit to the Viceregal Lodge in Shimla at Lord Louis Mountbatten’s invitation, and there is much laughing, walking and cycling between Nehru and Edwina but there is nothing romantic about it.

Freedom at Midnight has its heroes and its villains as well, the biggest of them all being Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He is an implacable foe here, his tuberculosis making the deadline to Independence even more urgent. There are enough clocks in the background art and back­ground music to remind us that time is of the essence. But mostly it is Jinnah’s persistent cough and incessant smoking that characterise a man with one motive only, to ensure a Muslim majority state. His innate contradictions are shown too. He was not a religious man, he had never been to jail unlike his compatriots (Nehru for nine years, Patel for five years and eight months, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad for ten years), and he barely spoke Gujarati, unlike the Mahatma and Sardar.

Jinnah eventually gets a “motheaten Pakistan” but as he says, it is better than nothing. Arif Zakaria plays him with a theatrical touch, but with a menace wor­thy of Sholay’s Gabbar Singh. As Advani says, half in jest, he thought of Freedom at Midnight as a period version of the 1975 Sholay: Nehru and Patel are Jai and Veeru, the Mahatma is like Thakur, Jinnah is Gabbar Singh. But equally if Jinnah is shown as being inflexible about the sta­tus of the Muslim minority under what he thinks will be Hindu rule, the Akalis are shown as realists. As Baldev Singh of the Akalis says: For the Sikhs, whether it is Hindus or Muslims in power, they will continue to be a minority, so they’d rather choose independent India.

This is not a monochromatic view of the freedom movement. It is instead the sacrifice of many men and women, the ambition of one man, and the machinations of the English who had had enough of a country they had exploited to the hilt but never quite understood. In Lord and Lady Mountbat­ten, Freedom at Midnight shows both the naivete, the vanity as well as empathy of the couple. Just as well, since much of the book was based on Lord Mountbatten’s recollection when the writers spoke to him in retirement. As Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre write in the book; “Mountbatten had a phenomenal mem­ory; he could remember the colour of the rose Nehru wore in his buttonhole for such and such a meeting, or the brand of cigarettes Mohammed Ali Jinnah chain smoked. But, above all, we were fortu­nate that every memory, every event that occurred during the crucial weeks prior to India’s independence, had been recorded in writing and stored in the meticulously ordered files in the depths of Broadlands’ cupboards, Mountbatten had not received a sole visitor, made one move, been present at a single demonstration or had one telephone conversation without imme­diately dictating a report to one of the innumerable secretaries on his staff. The texts were so precise and so detailed that we were able to reconstruct situations as if we had been there ourselves.”

That is the spirit the series tries to capture as some of history’s greatest heroes decide the fate of 35 crore Indians. When in flashback the Congress chooses Gandhi over Jinnah in the 1920 Congress session, Jinnah mutters: “Aap logon ne apna leader chun liya hai, yeh leader apne log dhoondega (You have chosen your lead­er, this leader will find his own people)”. At one point, he calls Gandhi a “chalak Baniya” (clever Baniya) who is fooling the whole world. Nehru is no less than “Peter Pan” who gets special treatment from the British. The English are seen for what they are: men in a hurry to abandon a country that has ceased to be their gold­en goose. As Patel tells VP Menon: “Angrez sirf apne bare main sochte hain (The English think only of themselves).”

THERE IS A poignancy to Free­dom at Midnight. At a time when India should have been rejoic­ing, it was torn apart by a hatred that had entered the soul of people. At a time when the Mahatma should have been celebrat­ing with his anointed successors, he was left stranded, the only one still seeking peace and a united India, even at the cost of making Jinnah prime minister. As he tells Patel: “Kal tak Angrez lathi chala rahe the, aaj hum chala rahe hain (Till yesterday, the English were assaulting, now it is us).” That was zulm (torture), this is zimmedari (responsibility), says Patel. When the Mahatma meets Patel, the latter tells him quite firmly, “I followed you throughout, not now.” When Patel climbs on a chair to fix Gandhi’s portrait on the Congress office wall because it is askew, Gandhi, who has just walked in, tells him: “Dil se to hata hi chuke ho, deewar se bhi hata do (You have removed me from your heart, might as well remove me from the wall).”

This is what freedom looked like 77 years ago to those who had yearned for it, fought for it, given up their lives and lifestyles for it. It was not merely a battle between satya (truth) and satta (power). It was about a new dawn everyone had been waiting for. But the divisions were no longer merely on the ground but in the hearts of people. A division that perhaps never quite healed, and whose poison continues to spread in today’s deeply politicised times.

Chirag VohraentertainmentFreedom at MidnightRajendra ChawlaSidhant Guptatelevision