Saare Jahan Se Accha review: Sunny Hinduja and Suhail Nayyar steal the show, which peters off towards the end

Counter-intelligence officer Vishnu Shankar (Gandhi) is tasked with the most important thing of his career by R&AW chief RN Kao (Rajat Kapoor). ‘Intel’, a word much thrown around in this series (the writing credits are shared between Abhijeet Khuman, Kunal Kushwah, Bhavesh Mandalia, Ishraq Shah, Shivam Shankar, Gaurav Shukla, Meghna Srivastava) suggest that Pakistan President Bhutto is obsessively going after building a n-bomb, and has roped in the fanatic ISI chief Murtaza Malik (Sunny Hinduja) to that end.

The building of the time and place is one of the better things about the series, from clothes to cars to rotary phones and their distinctive rings, except all phones working all the time on both sides of the border is a stretch, given how much time they stayed dead: if the creators really are being true to the period, they would have included at least one instrument which refuses to work at a crucial juncture.

Vishnu duly arrives in Islamabad, as an Embassy staffer (the classic route of spies, according to pop culture), along with his newly-acquired Bengali wife (Tillotama Shome). And begins, with the help of a trusty colleague (Ninad Kamat), casting his net wide, corralling double agents, newspaper columnists, and sundry others, to get to his objective.

The details of the Pokhran blast, in 1974, with the active support of then PM Indira Gandhi, and the relentless pushing of the R&AW chief, are in public domain. What this five -episode series does is to give us the backstory, inspired enough by reality to have the courage to use actual names of both people and places, with lashes of creative license and filmi drama : a love-story between an India ‘jasoos’ ( pronounced ‘jsoos’, just the way a Punjabi would) and a pretty Pakistani girl, the sister of an officer ( Kapil Radha, leaving a mark) never feels more like a space-filler.

There’s mention of the Libyan dictator Gaddafi, Mossad chief Ben Adler, ‘HGN reactors’, the Gadani port where the deadly cargo would land, indicative of the research that’s gone into the show. But while attempts have been made to keep everything as realistic as possible, we hear people saying things like, ‘hamaare mulk mein mausam se jaldi PM badal jaate hain’ by the lovely Pakistani journalist (Kritika Kamra) , or even ‘sadly, yehi hamaari life hai’. Sadly? Really? And ‘baby steps in the world of darkness’? These feel dialogue-y, not spoken-in-the-moment lines.

Watch Saare Jahan Se Accha trailer here:

In this solid ensemble, two actors– Sunny Hinduja and Suhail Nayyar– steal the show so comprehensively that everyone else has to struggle for our attention. Pratik Gandhi doesn’t have a showy role; to operate within the shadows means that you have to underplay, and to his credit he does that well enough, whether he is trying to pour water over his troubled domestic life– he is more wedded to his job rather than his wife– or swirling vodka with a stunner. You wish there was more meat to that relationship; certainly Shome’s character needed more to do than serve sondesh and act suspicious. Both Hinduja as the fearsome ISI chief Murtaza, and Nayyar, as the street-smart mover and shaker who knows how to keep everyone happy, add sass to the staid, but the bumps and contrivances keep distracting from the main act.

The best thing about the handsomely-mounted show is that it steers clear of vicious jingoism while waving the flag. You wish it didn’t peter off towards the end.

Saare Jahan Se Accha cast: Pratik Gandhi, Rajat Kapoor, Tillotama Shome, Sunny Hinduja, Anup Soni, Kritika Kamra, Suhail Nayyar, Kapil Radha, Ninad Kamart, Atul Kumar, Hemant Kher, Avantika Akerkar, Rajesh Khera
Saare Jahan Se Accha director: Sumit Purohit
Saare Jahan Se Accha rating: 2.5 stars

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