How Nikkhil Advani’s Freedom at Midnight uses Mahatma Gandhi assassination not as a polarising event, but a unifying one

Gandhi is killed five months after India’s Independence and Partition. It’s a phase of extremes — the joy of liberation from a colonial rule of over 200 years, coupled with the irrevocable heartbreak that comes with a nation divided on religious lines. It’s no ordinary territorial bifurcation, but large-scale riots and displacement in both the eastern and western corners of India.

In his seminal 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie narrates that turbulent time in the chapter ‘Snakes and Ladders’ as a macro equivalent of the board game — the ladder of Independence and the snake bite of Partition, the jolting descent with Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and the gradual ascent with a nation that doesn’t want to let that sacrifice go in vain.

Also, in that novel, protagonist Saleem recalls learning about Gandhi’s killing during the screening of a film, which prompts his family to rush back and seek refuge in home, under the assumption that a Muslim killed the Father of the Nation. The escapist fantasy of a film is hijacked by the harsh truths of reality. As it were, the assassinator wasn’t a Muslim, but does that matter?

Would history take a different course if Mahatma Gandhi was killed by a Muslim? Season 1 ends with a hint at that alternate reality, but season 2 spells out how Gandhi ensures that even if his assassination is inevitable, he must make it count. Probably having foreseen and accepted his imminent end, Gandhi goes on fast unto death, once to urge all rioters to drop their weapons and then to ensure the terms of Partition are fairly met not only by Pakistan, but also the Indian government.

By allegedly turning on those perceived as “his own”, whether it’s members of Congress like Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, as well as fellow Hindus, Gandhi takes a firm stand in the face of communal riots. His allegiance lies not with any religion or any half of the country, but with a larger moral code that governs a land divided by politics. If he’s the Father of the Nation, he’s not the Father of the Naya Bharat, but of an India that once was, which extends far beyond the Radcliffe Line.

“Don’t discriminate pain as ours and theirs. Shed as many tears on others’ pain and loss as you do on yours,” Gandhi’s advice to a despondent rioter in Calcutta wasn’t just a tokenistic pearl of wisdom, but his way of life. He made peace in Pakistan as much his mission as harmony in India. Alas, he was killed before he could fulfill his last wish to go to Pakistan. Was it an attempt to thwart the Mahatma from spreading peace in Pakistan like he did in India? Or was it an act of revenge towards the man who cost India its promised sum to Pakistan?

With the way he builds up to that episode, Nikkhil Advani underlines that the religious or nationalistic identity of the killer doesn’t matter as much as their existential one. More than the man who assassinated Gandhi, the show traces the journey of his attempted assassinator — Madan Lal Pahwa. A Partition refugee from Pakistan, Pahwa didn’t attempt to kill Gandhi because he was attached to the land he came from. Surely, he was instigated by those spreading vitriol against Gandhi, but they wouldn’t have been half as impressionable had he not been encountering existential issues of his own.

Freedom At Midnight strips down the primary cause of Gandhi’s attempted assassination to a rather relatable, rampant existential phenomenon — Daddy issues. Pahwa’s fundamental beef with Gandhi was that he was the proverbial Father of the Nation. Having been disowned by his own father for fleeing away alone from a communal encounter, he desperately seeks an opportunity to align himself with an identity. He’s been stripped off from not only his home, but also his family. Killing his own father wouldn’t give him as much of a purpose as killing the father of all fathers.

When Pahwa is arrested after his failed assassination attempt, Gandhi’s actual killer shows up. It’s only his silhouette that’s shown as he shoots Gandhi in the chest. Because his face or religion isn’t as important to the history of the nation as is his state of mind. It doesn’t matter if he’s a Hindu or a Muslim, but the fact that he’s a lost soul in a lost nation trying to make sense of a traumatic past and a challenging future.

Richard Attenborough’s 1982 biopic Gandhi ends with the Mahatma saying his last words, “Hey Ram,” as the screen goes black. It feels like a sudden blow to the head. But in Freedom at Midnight, Advani zooms in on Gandhi as he takes the bullet on his chest. It plays out at a glacial speed, forcing the audience to take in this extreme onslaught in full sight. Because it’s not the interpretation of a British filmmaker who wants to brush it under the carpet, but that of an Indian who knows better. An Indian who realizes what Gandhi was trying to demonstrate all his life — death, even that of the Father of the Nation, is not the death of the nation itself.

Ben Kingsley in and as Gandhi.

The final episode is prophetically titled “Hey Ram,” but Gandhi’s utterance of that expression is only seen, never heard. The two words may have a new context in a new India, but Gandhi’s invocation of Lord Rama was like a brief prayer for peace. He was a practicing Hindu till his last breath, but religion was only a means to a higher end. The screen doesn’t go black either as the writers of Freedom at Midnight can’t divorce Gandhi’s sacrifice with its positive outcome.

What Gandhi couldn’t achieve in life, he did so with death. He brought closer not only two warring religions and countries, but also two political ideologies. Nehru’s socialism and Patel’s iron-grip pragmatism were at loggerheads in a newly independent and divided India. These mirror the crossroads that India has been at in the past 15 years. Does it want to continue to be a country that celebrates unity in diversity or does it want to consolidate its identity on religious grounds? But religion was never a point of contention back then, just like it’s not right now. What’s contentious is the way in which India asserts its identity — by slow, gradual consensus or by brute force?

Gandhi maintained that both Nehru and Patel, the frontrunners of Congress and of a new India, have the nation’s best interests in their respective agendas. But they’re like “the two oxen yoked to the government cart”, where both will have to match their steps and not go astray. There’s a reason why the day of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi is celebrated as Martyrs’ Day. He died a martyr so that Nehru and Patel could put their differences aside and join forces in the interest of an India that couldn’t afford more divisions.

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It’s unfortunate that it took the most extreme violent act towards the most non-violent man to uphold peace and harmony in the country. But with Freedom at Midnight, Advani reminds us that more than the death on this fateful day, it’s the life that Gandhi lived for 78 years that shapes and defines India even today. Patel may have been appropriated now and Nehru may have been villainized, but it’s holding on to Gandhi that gives all Indians an abiding identity.