Period dramas have lately become something of a signature for Nikkhil Advani, from The Empire to Freedom at Midnight. With The Revolutionaries, he turns to the underground networks of India’s freedom struggle, bringing figures such as Rash Behari Bose and Bagha Jatin into focus. In this conversation, Advani talks about looking beyond the familiar textbook heroes, casting young actors without the burden of preconceived ideas, and why he refuses to compromise on scale when the story demands it.
What made you turn the spotlight on the “revolutionaries”, the unsung heroes of India’s independence movement, many of whom haven’t received the attention they deserved?
Part of the answer is personal, and the other is that whenever we’ve heard the story of revolution and the revolutionaries, it’s always been about Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad. It was actually a movement, and there was cohesion between what was happening in Punjab and Bengal, what was happening in San Francisco, and how they were taking help from the Germans as the war neared.
When we started doing research, I read about Rash Behari Bose, who became that so-called thread that I could actually connect to many like-minded people, like Sachindra Nath Sanyal, who was his fan, and Bagha Jatin. We had an interesting lens into what was happening around 1912, when Rash Behari Bose tried to assassinate Lord Hardinge, and the formation of the Ghadar Party.
I wanted to try and make The Revolutionaries the right way, which shows the science of politics. I don’t think that Rash Behari Bose or Bagha Jatin ever thought that they would be misappropriated by one group, or appropriated by another. There was a right or wrong way of thinking other than the British and colonisation… The 200 years of enslavement were wrong, and they all wanted to end it in ways they thought were right.
So how did you consciously deconstruct the textbook bias to show them as intellectuals rather than just angry young men with weapons?
These are men who quoted from the Irish and Russian revolutions as well as Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai. The relationship between Pratibha (Pratibha Ranta) and Sachin (Rohit Saraf), for instance, is not about romantic poetry; it is about revolutionary poetry. That’s what draws her to him, even though she is already betrothed to him; when she sees his diary, she understands his vision, and she just doesn’t want to marry him but join his cause as well.
She didn’t want gifts but books. She wants to educate herself. She defies the ghoonghat. So, these were people who believed in their cause and studied it. I put in a love story because I feel no revolution can happen without love; your passion is your cause, and that brings you together.
You have a fairly young cast in Bhuvan Bam, Rohit Saraf, and Gurfateh Pirzada. What was the reason behind casting them, and also not Bengali actors?
I didn’t think about it that way at all. I don’t like to see period films or shows where the person already knows the greatness of what the characters they are playing have achieved.
It was easier for me to cast new faces. But I told them, I don’t want them to read everything. That they have to unlearn everything. You have to come and behave as if you are wearing a tuxedo for the first time, and everything that is happening with it. As we know, Bose was the master of disguises, a man who had an ordinary job but could outsmart the British. I wanted the character to understand as if it was unfolding in real time and not come with preconceived notions, because at the end of the day, Bose always had the unknown fear of getting caught.
Also, the scale of your shows is cinematic, totally dismantling the idea that larger-than-life cannot happen on streaming.
I don’t approach the scale of the production or the scale of the shot on the basis of how somebody is going to be watching it. I approach it with the story. If in that story, for example, I need Rash Behari Bose to be carried down the streets of Banaras by hundreds of others, I am going to have it, even if people say it will hardly be visible in the final cut. The story needs it; I will not compromise on the scale.
All the shows I have done intend to have a larger-than-life experience. We have consciously tried to stay away from the big screen these past five years and focused on what we are good at.
How do you gauge the current landscape with people writing obituaries for creativity and and lack of ideas?
It has to become worse before it becomes better. It is also cyclical. I have always been vocal about the fact that we have stopped telling stories. When Imtiaz Ali is making Main Wapas Aaunga, you see the kind of cathartic reception. He has conviction in what he has made. I think that’s important. I’m a big fan of Irrfan Khan, who always said less is more, do less and let people discover. I think that is extremely important, and it will become worse now because a lot of filmmakers that I admire and respect have moved away from the screen. Some of them moved to US, where they are allowed to voice what they want. But it will all come back in good time.