Nikkhil Advani began his directing career at a scale most filmmakers spend years working towards. His 2003 debut, Kal Ho Naa Ho, starred Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta, and became a major commercial success.
His latest series, The Revolutionaries, premieres globally on Prime Video on September 11 and follows young Indians who turn to armed resistance against British rule. Advani says the change began when the apparent security of star-led films fell away.
“I think I was playing it safe when I was doing movies like Kal Ho Naa Ho or Salaam-e-Ishq, because I was working with A-listers and, in some way or the other, mitigating my risk as a storyteller,” he tells The National.
Star power offered no guarantee of success, and the films that followed Kal Ho Naa Ho failed to match it. “They didn’t work, frankly,” he says. “So I made it a point to take a risk and tell the kinds of stories I want to tell.”
The result was D-Day, the 2013 political action thriller in which Indian intelligence agents undertake a covert mission to capture Goldman, a fictional crime boss with clear echoes of Dawood Ibrahim. Led by Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor, the film received strong reviews, and Advani has continued to return to political and historical subjects since.
“As an artist, when you’re at your lowest, it liberates you, and that’s what it did for me when I decided to do D-Day,” he says with a laugh.
Advani later returned to action with John Abraham in Batla House and Vedaa. As a producer and director, he also moved into long-form series including Mumbai Diaries and Freedom at Midnight.
Television gave him more time with his characters and their worlds. “If you’ve seen the run times of my movies, you know I like juicing my stories up for as long as possible,” he says. “This medium allows me around eight hours, give or take, and that’s perfect for me.”
Freedom at Midnight centred on the negotiations preceding Indian independence and Partition. The Revolutionaries moves back to an earlier generation that chose armed resistance against British rule.
Created and directed by Advani, the series is adapted from Sanjeev Sanyal’s non-fiction book Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom. Bhuvan Bam plays Rash Behari Bose, Rohit Saraf portrays Sachindra Nath Sanyal, Gurfateh Pirzada plays Bagha Jatin and Pratibha Ranta appears as Pratibha Lahiri.
“Young people have always stood against injustice,” Advani says. “People who complain about the kids protesting need to look back, and they’ll always find the young ones on the front lines.
“What I hope the show reminds people is that each of the people who took up arms started with peaceful dialogue; it’s what they wanted more than anything.”
He wanted viewers to feel the injustice the characters faced before judging their response to it. “My job as a storyteller was to transport you into their world, make you stand with them and make you feel their helplessness at the injustice,” he says.
He also recognises what Gandhi later achieved through non-violence. “Retrospect is a powerful tool,” he says. “It’s why we now also know that great things can be achieved with non-violence.”
Advani wants the series to explain why, without the benefit of that hindsight, armed resistance could come to seem like the only choice.
“But this is why I made this show. I want people to understand that anger that led to that organised armed resistance,” he says. “Is what they did ‘wrong’? Absolutely, but it was the only choice they were left with.
“It was my attempt to understand a 20-something-year-old who sees, ‘The British have colonised and enslaved us for 200 years,’ finds that wrong and wants to do something to end this. That potent frustration, in its purest, most human form is what I hope I was able to encapsulate in The Revolutionaries.”
The Revolutionaries premieres September 11 on Amazon Prime Video
