Partition to Kandahar: India's history comes alive on OTT platforms

There is an abundance of historical shows on OTT platforms, and it is a joy to watch past and contemporary history come alive

Nikkhil Advani’s Freedom at Midnight (SonyLIV), based on Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s eponymous book, is a gripping watch. It takes you through the arguments, the highs and the lows, that took place over the months and years preceding the partition of India. It tells you more clearly than ever why the cleaving of India, however abhorrent it was to our founding fathers, was an imperative by the time India got its freedom. For instance, did you know that riots did not happen because of Partition? They were, in fact, engineered to force both the Indian National Congress and the British, who were eager to exit, into dividing up the country on religious lines. It worked and led to more riots in the North, where Punjab was broken into two, and in the East, where Bengal went through the same trauma.

 

It is a joy to watch past and contemporary history dramatised so well. And many creators are doing it — for example, Shiv Rawail’s The Railway Men about an episode on the night of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in 1984, and Anubhav Sinha’s IC814 on the Kandahar hijack in 1999, both on Netflix. There are many more in the making. Roy Kapur Films and UK-based wiip are putting together a show based on William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Applause Entertainment is producing a show based on Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India and Gandhi – The Years that Changed the World . The Hansal Mehta-directed show will star Scam’s Pratik Gandhi in the lead.

 

Much of this action on historicals raises two big questions. One, how do writers create a screenplay and dialogues out of moments in history? What is the brief when there is a published book? “My brief is, just internalise the book and imagine a story,” says Danish Khan, executive vice-president and business head at SonyLIV and Studio Next at Sony Pictures Entertainment. SonLIV has consciously focused on “cerebral shows,” many of which have meant digging into books and contemporary history. There is Hansal Mehta’s Scam 1992, based on Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basu’s book on the Harshad Mehta scam and Tushar Hiranandani’s Scam 2003, “inspired” by Sanjay Singh’s book on Abdul Karim Telgi’s stamp paper scam. There is also the biographical story of India’s journey into space and as a nuclear power with Dr Vikram Sarabhai and Dr Homi Bhabha in Abhay Pannu’s Rocket Boys.

 

 “We try to bring as much authenticity as we can get, without diluting the entertainment portion. Ultimately, people are there for the drama, not a documentary series. The difference between the two is that in a drama every scene has to be entertaining,” says Khan.

 

This brings this to the second question that watching this steady stream of contemporary history shows brings. Since history is being rewritten  and opinions vary so hugely, how does one avoid offending the multitudes dying to take offence? For instance, IC814 raised hackles for showing, accurately, that the terrorists were codenamed after Hindu gods. The series is inspired by Flight into Fear, a book by Devi Sharan, the captain who flew that plane, and journalist Srinjoy Chowdhury, which was published in 2000.

 

If a show or film is inspired by or based on a book or a piece of research that has already been published and has been around for some time, anyone taking offence has little legal recourse. Or if it is a biopic based on living people, like Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013) or Omung Kumar’s Mary Kom (2014). The other way to protect a creative piece of work is self-censorship. It is being widely used these days. In many historical shows, chunks of facts, however accurate they are, are simply being dropped from the narrative to avoid controversy.

 

In the 1980s and ’90s, it was the rare show on Doordarshan—such as Bharat Ek Khoj, Tamas, and Buniyaad—that gave us history in a way that was fun to watch. For now, I am happy to celebrate the fact that there is so much of contemporary history to be absorbed in fiction form. The ideal next step would be making reels out of key moments and pivots so that these shows and their authenticity reach more people, especially those who depend on the fraudulent “WhatsApp University” for their understanding of history. 

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