The Waking of a Nation is more a dry, albeit fictionalised document on Hunter Commission, investigating Amritsar massacre, than a sprightly series. Had to ask director Ram Madhvani why he made it
A still from Sony LIV’s The Waking of a Nation
The core conflict in Ram Madhvani’s series, The Waking of a Nation (drops March 7, on Sony LIV), is that its Amritsari protagonist, Kantilal Sahni (Taaruk Raina), was a lawyer, who helped draft the draconian Rowlatt Act, 1919.
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Which could randomly imprison Indians, without defence or trial, during the British Raj.
After his own moment of awakening, Sahni also argued against the British, at the Hunter Commission, instituted to investigate the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, in Amritsar, that followed.
Except, this character Sahni actually never existed, in life or history. Neither did his three friends, whom we closely follow through the series.
Jallianwala Bagh, of course, did. Wherein around 400 peaceful protesters—as per British official records; over a thousand, by independent estimates—were shot dead, under the orders of the British General Reginald Dyer, on April 13, 1919.
What had also happened, shortly before Jallianwala Bagh, were Civil Lines Riots in Amritsar, leading to 25 deaths. Five of them being British civilians.
Ram Madhvani, the director of the series
In a way, the massacre was seen as retaliation/revenge for innocent Brits slain. This is a lesser known backstory.
Only, as the series argues—through a court-room drama, without a counterpoint—those riots too, like Jallianwala itself, were engineered. Hence, part of a wider British conspiracy.
It’s this deliberately constant switching between fact and theory, myth and reality, that rattles my brain, sometimes—when I can’t tell between history and speculative fiction on the screen; whether with movies, or series.
I tell director Madhvani (Neerja, Aarya) this, soon as I get on the phone with him, after watching The Waking of a Nation.
“It’s fine, if you’re upfront about it—historical fiction, as a [literary] genre, has lined shelves at bookstores forever,” Madhvani argues.
He throws back to practitioners of “New Journalism, such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson, with the term ‘faction’ [for fact plus fiction], that’s been in currency since the 1970s.” The Hunter Commission Report itself was a document of British whitewashing, wasn’t it?
I agree. Creative licences ought to be weighed against emotional intentions, foremost. And the series seems befitting enough, once you consider that “of the 12 British actors in it, none had even heard of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre,” as Madhvani points out.
That’s including Paul McEwan, who brilliantly portrays Punjab’s Lt Governor Michael O’Dwyer. McEwan, you notice, also had a short role of a governor in Peaky Blinders.
O’Dwyer is the one that the revolutionary Udham Singh went on to assassinate, as darkly depicted in Shoojit Sircar’s 2021 biopic (on Prime Video), starring Vicky Kaushal, that’s an apt sequel to Madhvani’s series.
Madhvani tells me he exchanged notes with Sircar and producer Ronnie Lahiri, before filming his show.
The irony of Rowlatt Act was that people would be jailed under the same law they were protesting against; in Amritsar, or elsewhere!
And it’s not like independent India has altogether given up on imperialist notions/ideas of sedition; let alone fresher laws to book activists, even private individuals, in line with ultra-dreaded terrorists, on occasion!
Controlling impulse of the powerful, against dissent, isn’t a colonial monopoly. These are contemporary concerns you could draw from the series, if you like. Take heart from the fact that the Rowlatt Act was eventually repealed.
Madhvani’s lens, though, as he particularly points out, is wholly centred on foreign rule, its “civilizing mission”, racism, and our continued obsession with the English language, or indeed, using knives/forks to eat—the colonisation of the Indian mind, that the British were so successful at.
He says, “In the 1980s, I was on a flight, with my mother-in-law in the [back-row of] economy class. I had to walk across the aisles, when a [white] man blasted, ‘Sit down, you brown b***ard.’ It’s taken me these many years to answer him!”
White supremacists are surely a thing of current western politics.
The Waking of a Nation sounds like a play on the Making of a Nation. The latter was what Nikkhil Advani’s Freedom at Midnight (2024), also on Sony LIV, was about—based on Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s ground-breaking, 1975 book.
Which emerged from talking to key protagonists of the transfer of British power, such as Lord Mountbatten, who were still alive. Madhvani’s series, naturally, lacks that level of material, drama, or cast of characters.
He once made a film on Cyril Radcliffe (1899-1977), though. That’s the guy who had literally drawn a line, named after him—cutting through the sub-continent, splitting it into India and Pakistan, with millions affected, and dead. Radcliffe had visited India for about 40 days to figure this!
W H Auden wrote a devastating poem on him. Madhvani imagined Radcliffe’s last days for the screen. I remember it as such a clever subject for his short film.
The Waking of a Nation seems a drier document, equally reimagining Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and Hunter Commission hearings.
Between my laptop and the phone—I watched the six-part series as I might read a detailed, cracker cover-story in The New Yorker, or Caravan; for a patiently told piece of narrative non-fiction, or historical fiction, in this case.
Glad that streaming/OTT, so inherently personalised, allows you that kinda space. In a way that TV or cinema, for communal/family viewing never did.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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