Freedom At Midnight on SonyLiv explores lesser-known facets of the partition. It takes us inside the closed room discussions of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Lord Mountbatten and many more. Directed by Nikkhil Advani, over a zoom call we quizzed the ace director about the making of the show.
There's a scene when there's a train which is going towards Pakistan and there is an inmate in a psychiatric ward who knows about the plan of certain people to blow up that train. Is that based on an actual historical incident?
The fact was that there was an assassination attempt on Jinnah on the day when he had gone to the assembly to actually formulate the birth of Pakistan, that is undeniable, it’s there in the book also.
So we strung up the fact that there could be somebody who has information about what is going to be the retribution- as first there were attacks instigated by the Muslim League, and then there the retribution that was going to be taken by the Hindu community. The mental asylum bit was definitely dramatized, but the assassination attempt was real, and the Patiala Express was blown up.
It's kind of how we have stitched things together. I mean, why I love the mental asylum scene is because Saadat Hasan Manto is a very favourite writer of mine, and there is an incredible story about the division of assets even in a mental asylum (Toba Tek Singh is a short story written by Saadat Hasan Manto and published in 1955), where Toba refused to go to either the side of Indian of Pakistan and stood on the division line. So that was my way of paying homage to Manto.
What were the challenges you face in making the series once you started, right from the time you started researching to the time you started shooting.
Well, we took 4 years to make the show. I think the biggest fear was that, will I have enough resources? Will I have enough time? The book itself is so loved by so many people.
We wrote for a year and we thought we were there, and then we all said no, not yet. So we wrote for another year, and then we realized we had a fairly good sense of the production and the preparation. Then ofcourse there were challenges constantly regarding the casting and the dialogue, and the building of the sets- we had 86 sets. So there were challenges everywhere, also in thinking would we be able to pull it all off in the schedule that we had.
You also mentioned that season 2 is tighter than the first season, but the reality is that we shot both the seasons together. It's not like after season 1 we had notes and then shot season 2.
Did you cast Anurag Thakur after watching him in Black Warrant?
No, Thakur was cast because he did a film with me called Veda, which a lot of people didn't see it because it got eaten up by some other movies which had released around the same time.
He has an incredible role in Veda, where he plays Sharvari’s brother, and that’s when I saw his talent, and that was one of his first feature films, and he totally impressed not only me, but everybody else on the set.
Madan Lal Pahwa actually is a 17 year old boy, but I took some liberty over there and said that I want Anurag to play the role because I think that he'll be able to pull off the journey through the exodus and the kind of madness and rage that Madanal went though which led to him doing what he did on the 20th of January.
There must have been a doubt in your mind regarding whether to show the backstory of Madan Lal Pahwa or Nathuram Godse, so what made you choose Pahwa.
So both Pahwa and Godse are there in the book. But what I wanted to do through the 14 episodes was to transport the audience either into the rooms where decisions are being taken or in the midst of the riots, so you actually feel what is actually going through the characters as well as are like a firsthand witness to the violence and the carnage.
So in Pahwa’s case, that unravels through his entire journey- while as far as Godse was concerned, no one till then even knew who Godse was till the assassination.
So for all intents and purposes, as of January 30, 1948, Nathuram Godse was a ghost to everybody around him, he was nameless and faceless, and that’s what I've tried to show.
Any plans of making a series showing the next few years after India's independence?
No, now I’m going back. I'm going back to the revolutionaries, young boys who basically had the audacity to actually dream up a plan to throw out the British.
It's more of an action thriller starring Bhuvan Bam, Rohit Saraf, Gurfateh Pirzada and others.
