Inside 10 Downing Street, the rhythms of a relentless clock fill the air. “May I have time to think?” Lord Mountbatten pleads, facing the burden of a crumbling empire. “You may,” Prime Minister Clement Attlee responds, “but be warned, Mountbatten—time is the one thing we’re running short of.” The ticking grows louder—steady, cruel—a metronome of impending doom.
Time is everything in 1947 India. Civil war looms, massacres rage, and the British Empire, caught in its web, struggles to find an escape route, a race against time as it slips underneath their anxious feet like sand, unyielding and indifferent to their plight. Nikkhil Advani’s web series Freedom at Midnight, inspired by the eponymous 1975 book by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, captures this ticking tension, at times too much, at others not enough.
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The book’s release carried its own ironical truffle with its times. In 1975, as the Emergency smothered the young Indian state, a book celebrating the birth of freedom arrived to find freedoms being snatched and scraped away. As India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s words from that midnight—“when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance”—found themselves denied and defeated by his own daughter’s government, the midnight of 1947 suddenly felt much further away.
“What if…?” This is the question that haunts history’s greatest moments. What if Germany won the First World War? What if Hitler had stopped at Poland? What if Columbus had missed the New World entirely? What if Napoleon had triumphed at Waterloo? What if the Roman Empire had never fallen? What if Gandhi had not died? What if Jinnah had? Freedom at Midnight walks in these corridors of time, dancing with such moments, tracing the butterfly effects of decisions that changed everything, including time.
The book
Few accounts make history pulse with life the way these 700-odd pages do. The Anglophilic tilt and Mountbatten worship are undeniable, but neither overshadows the masterful account of seismic change. Lapierre and Collins hold the reader captive with conspiracies, riots, and scandals, beginning with Mountbatten’s appointment as “the executioner of his countrymen’s fondest imperial dream”, ending with “the death of the gentle man who had brought them freedom”.
Between these bookends lies a tale threaded with the ambitions of men and the consequent anguish of millions. These ambitions, both lofty and self-serving, etched scars that outlive the ink of the freshly drawn borders.
Lapierre and Collins write history with a dramatist’s pen, each scene charged with raw stakes and electrifying negotiations. Nehru has “his own slightly feline way”; Gandhi’s “ears flared out from his oversized head like the handles of a sugar bowl”; there was a “chill emanating from the austere and distant” Jinnah; and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had a “khadi dhoti whirled about his shoulders like a toga, his bald head glowing”. And thus these leaders become characters worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy.
The quintessential Fool in this tragedy, the ceremonious victim and the fault line running through this narrative is the figure of Mahatma Gandhi. “India for Gandhi was its lost and inaccessible villages, like those hamlets along his route in Noakhali. He knew them better than any man alive.”
Chirag Vohra as Mahatma Gandhi, the quintessential Fool in this tragedy, the ceremonious victim and the fault line running through this narrative.
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He is the “miracle worker” of Calcutta, the pilgrim of Noakhali, a witness to his Congress drifting from his ideals. But the Gandhi here is far from the monochromatic old saint we know. He denounces technology but relies on a microphone every day, shuns the concentration of power while exerting near-dictatorial control over Congress. The nation, like him, is a study in contradictions, caught between the wisdom of its past and the chaos of its present. His philosophy of non-violence forged a nation but could not quell the violence that claimed his life. The tragedy was not his death but the still-unfolding violence that eclipsed his dream even in his demise.
“…love, non-violence, truth, a belief in God of all Mankind. Their relevance to Gandhi had not changed, his faith in them remained intact. What had changed was India.”
However, by revolving around Mountbatten, Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah, the story inevitably excludes others. Patel, though present, feels peripheral, while Ambedkar is glaringly absent. Whether by accident or design, this tight framing sacrifices the diversity of voices that could have stretched further to encompass a broader perspective of the times.
“Never before had anything even remotely like it been attempted. Nowhere were there any guidelines, any precedents, any revealing insights from the past to order what was going to be the biggest, the most complex divorce action in history, the break-up of a family of 400 million human beings along with the assets and household properly they’d acquired in centuries of living together on the same piece of earth.”
A book preoccupied with the decisions of history’s Gods could be forgiven to forget the mortals trampled beneath. But Lapierre and Collins descend into the wreckage, their lens capturing the ruins: families butchered, lives scattered like ash, communities swallowed whole. The book walks the path from the maps on the politician’s table to the dead peasant’s hut, with no mercy afforded either to the politician or the peasant.
While the book celebrates the audacity of the politicians, the puppeteers who veer power over the people they know nothing of, the politicians puppeteered by the tides of history, it also holds the gaze of those whose lot it is to pay the costs of these games, the collateral damages for freedom long craved for. Yet, for all its dramatisation, the book is both a eulogy and an indictment, a testament to the grit of a nation for freedom and a lament for the price it had to pay for the said freedom.
Lapierre and Collins’s work remains essential, not because it provides all the answers, but for keeping the questions alive: Was it worth it? Could it have been different? And most importantly (and hauntingly): have we learned anything at all?
The web series
Despite the richness of the text and the amount of historical material to draw from, Nikkhil Advani’s directorial venture is by no means enviable. Balancing historical nuances and subtexts with dramatic inclinations for a medium as concise as television is a feat in itself, that too in a nation which revises history in WhatsApp chats on Sunday afternoons. Advani has always understood the complexities of history, not as a series of events to be ticked off but as a collection of human stories—stories full of contradiction, ambition, and failure.
“Nikkhil Advani has always understood the complexities of history, not as a series of events to be ticked off but as a collection of human stories—stories full of contradiction, ambition, and failure. ”
His body of work, from Rocket Boys to Mumbai Diaries, reflects his knack for exploring the messiness of human lives, the contradictions, the impossible choices, and their aftershocks. Freedom at Midnight is no different. He plunges us into the moment-by-moment tension of a nation unravelling under the weight of unbearable and irreversible decisions as time—so crucial, so fleeting—slips by far too quickly.
Arif Zakaria as Mohammed Ali Jinnah, with his mind sharp and his ego fragile.
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It is almost a relief to watch historical figures not reduced to caricatures. There is Nehru, not just the idealist but the one caught between his ambition for India and the painful reality of it; Patel, pragmatic, direct and shrewd, yet never empty of empathy; Gandhi, torn between a nation that is drifting from his vision and his stubborn belief in non-violence, his optimism a bitter counterpoint to the violence of the age; Jinnah, with his mind sharp and his ego fragile; and Mountbatten, trying desperately to manage the storm, but in the end, no different from the men who surrounded him caught between his ambitions and the enormity of his task.
Like the book, the series is unafraid to explore these men in all their complexity, whether Congressmen ridiculing Jinnah after their triumphant electoral win in 1937 or Gandhi’s unyielding love toward Nehru, time and time again.
Gandhi struts away from the Congress headquarters to Noakhali as his party grows further away from him, quietly humming Tagore’s “Ekla cholo re”.
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In particular, Chirag Vohra as Mahatma Gandhi, Rajendra Chawla as Vallabhbhai Patel, and Arif Zakaria as Mohammed Ali Jinnah get to the essence of the figures they portray. In one scene, Gandhi struts away from the Congress headquarters to Noakhali as his party grows further away from him, quietly humming Tagore’s “Ekla cholo re”, the desolation and determination that would likely have surrounded the real Gandhi shouldered well by the reel Gandhi. The use of long silences—Jinnah smoking his pipe, Gandhi staring into the horizon—brings an intimacy that contrasts with the story’s otherwise frenetic energy. It is these quieter moments, these internal conflicts, where you see the range of Advani’s storytelling.
In line with the source material, the series casts Jinnah and the Muslim League as the central “villains”. This framing works for dramatic impact, yet it does so at the expense of nuance. Partition was not born in isolation, nor did it spring from one man’s ambitions. It emerged from centuries of fraught social, cultural, and political forces, from colonial policies to economic insecurities. By placing Jinnah squarely at the centre of blame, the series sidesteps the broader, more complex tug-of-war that ultimately tore the fabric of a united India. Quite akin to the book, Advani also keeps a selective gaze on the events leading to freedom at midnight.
And then, there is the ticking clock—a motif that is, at once, the sound of history breathing down your neck, a constant, unyielding reminder of the ticking seconds that will never return, as well as a tool for magnifying the urgency inherent to the source material. Ashutosh Phatak intertwines it throughout, pushing, prodding, and forcing the story onward, a living, breathing entity in the narrative. Time, in this world, commands, shapes, and governs every choice made, a nation’s heartbeat as it stands on the edge of a new dawn.
The narrative choices
Unlike the 2017 adaptation of the same book by Gurinder Chadha, Viceroy’s House (or Partition: 1947), which shrouded the collapse of the British Empire in an almost farcical, overly genteel portrayal of imperial India “having a jolly good time” under the colonisers, Nikkhil Advani’s Freedom at Midnight strips away the Anglophilic gloss. Where Chadha’s film flirted with frilly tonality, imbued with an Anglophonic gaze, Advani’s series grounds itself in the stark reality of a crumbling empire and the turbulent forces of history.
Lady Edwina Mountbatten (played by Cordelia Bugeja) and Lord Mountbatten (played by Luke McGibney) at their inauguration ceremony.
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Gone is the Mountbatten of Lapierre-Collins, “an intensely serious, ambitious, and dedicated naval officer” with “his charm, his remarkable good looks, his infectious gaiety”, and in his place is a Mountbatten more human, more flawed: vain, bumbling, and, at times, out of his depth. By doing so, Advani’s series doesn’t diminish him but only makes him more human, a man grappling with his own legacy in the face of history’s cruel march ahead.
But history is often viewed through the lens of the present tense. Freedom at Midnight, the series, unlike Freedom at Midnight, the book, takes a choice almost inevitable in today’s climate: portraying one specific religion as the primary instigator of the riots and massacres of 1947. The blame of violence, though, a product of centuries of division, politics, and an empire disintegrating under its own weight, is shifted on the convenient shoulders of the present narratives.
“Horror had no race, and the terrible anguish of those August days in the Punjab were meted out with almost biblical balance, an eye for an eye, massacre for massacre; rape for rape, blind cruelty for blind cruelty.”
Yet, what we get is a story that feels more suited to the divides of today than to the ground reality of the past. The violence preceding Partition was not a single community’s doing but rather the aftermath of a stretched-out disintegration. But this portrayal narrows it down, simplifying it to the extent of missing the point. In post-2014 India, where these divides are often deepened and harkened for political purposes, it is a choice that seems expected and yet… disappointing.
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The series retains the ambition of the book in its bold and often admirable attempt to distil such sprawling historical moments into digestible and consumable drama. At its best, the series captures the inevitability of history’s march, where individual actions carry repercussions far beyond the stretch of their lifetimes. But by leaning on contemporary parallels, it sometimes loses the intricacies, the contexts of the past, and the humane errors that defy the neat and clean foldings of the proverbial laundry.
The first season closes with the announcement of Partition by the Viceroy and the three leaders representing the three chief religious identities. The decisions made and the ones deferred have fractured a nation, leaving little room for the vision of a united India to survive. What follows is no longer about independence; it’s about the cost of that freedom.
The second season will take us to the death of Gandhi, the end of an era. It will be the end of a journey but not the end of the story: a nation’s wounds will remain open, and the questions of what was gained and what was lost will linger. Or, as V.P. Menon tells his delighted daughter on the night of Independence, “Now, our nightmares really start.”
The midnight is here; all that is awaited is freedom.
Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world.
