Ram Madhvani's The Waking Of A Nation Is Too Busy Teaching Us A History Lesson

OF LATE, Indian history has proved to be the most fertile fodder for storytellers. Take any week in the last year or so and there would be at least one film or show premised around historical events. One could debate over their veracity but the link is undeniable. Ram Madhvani’s The Waking of a Nation, the series centring around the pre-Independence Jallianwala Bagh tragedy, originates from the same space. But it unravels with such abject dullness that it sidesteps the usual questions about propaganda and crashes into a flat lesson in history.

Madhvani is a competent filmmaker. More crucially, he is someone who can lend inventiveness to familiar set ups. In Neerja (2016), he took the known story about the 1986 Pan Am Flight 73 hijack and made it into a personal story by focussing on the valiant air hostess Neerja Bhanot and the vital role she played in rescuing the passengers. In his debut series, Aarya (based on the Dutch show Penoza) he took the premise of a drug cartel and designed it as a coming of age story of the titular protagonist.

On paper, The Waking of a Nation shares a similar intent. The filmmaker upholds the British complicity in the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, where a peaceful gathering of Indians in Amritsar was mercilessly shot by British military personnel Reginald Dyer, through the friendship of three men: Kantilal Sahni (Taaruk Raina), Allahbaksh (Sahil Mehta) and Hari (Bhawsheel Singh Sahni). Among them, Sahni, a London-returned lawyer, has more faith in British rule. He has benefitted from their system. He studied abroad, earned a degree and came back convinced that being called white is the greatest compliment for a brown person. Contrary to his other two friends, who have flung themselves in the Independence movement (Allahbaksh runs a local newspaper with Hari’s wife, Poonam played by Nikita Dutta) Sahni is sceptical about the struggle.

But the mass firing changes something in him. He loses a friend and the tragedy opens his eyes to the colonial conspiracy and treachery. The sweeping title of Madhvani’s latest work can be crystallised in the waking up of one person: Sahni. Spread across episodes, The Waking of a Nation unravels as a courtroom drama that takes place in December 1919 and where Sahni, the Indian member of the Hunter Commission, looking into the massacre, goes on to prove that the mass murder on April 13 was a premeditated ordeal. The timeline keeps moving and incidents from the months are accommodated to arrive at the conclusion.

The sense of urgency embedded in the setting gets completely washed out in the execution. It is curious and puzzling not least because it is unbecoming of Madhvani but because it is unbecoming of any filmmaker. The Waking of a Nation unravels with the pesky craft of a student’s project where subtexts are spelt out, and actors who look like they were born post-2013 are cast as revolutionary leaders (no irony that the protagonist Raina features in the adult romcom series, Mismatched), and dialogues appear to be written by kids. Sample this: when Sahni recounts how General Dyer was instigated, he compares him to an empty gun and says, “The first step to use it is to fill the bullets.” The skill here is only comparable to writers Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal comparing Brahmastra to a pizza in Ayan Mukherji’s 2022 fantasy drama.

There is also something to be said about the way the filmmaker treats the research. If Sahni is a stand-in of a disillusioned country, he also evolves as a stand-in of Madhvani himself. Across the six episodes, the character spends most of his waking time talking down on the people in court, and by extension us, about the incidents that preceded the tragedy. The tone is less persuasive and more condescending, leaning on spoon-feeding us the revelations rather than initiating it into the narrative.

Yet for all the noise, the show makes no effort to depict how Sahni came across the proof. All we see is a blood-stained pamphlet (the same one that comprised Dyer’s diktat that stated a meeting of more than 4 people would be shot at) that was never distributed. The lawyer clutches onto it throughout the show, threatening to reveal the name with a tonal crudity reminiscent of daily Hindi soaps. That he is cut right off before disclosure at the end of one episode only strengthens the comparison.

The Waking of a Nation had promise because it stemmed from a site of awareness, one that can look at Indians and showcase their culpability even when they are victims in the broader picture. One of the things that the British did to incite the crowd before the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was to turn the people against each other and fundamentally alter their nature as they ran, thirsty for blood, after any white people they saw in sight. If the tags are removed, the show could be read as a bigger power brainwashing a populace as they turn against each other. The implication is impossible to miss and Madhvani refuses to gloss it over (in a pivotal scene of some Indians attacking a British teacher, the colour saffron dominates the frame). Yet, like most things in The Waking of a Nation, the underlying significance gets lost in the heavy-handed implementation.

One reason for this is the two-dimensional characterisations of the people. The Britishers are written with a broadness that will put Lagaan to shame. Each is only a variant of evil and there are multiples. The Indians are no better. Conveniently the two closest friends of Sahni comprise a Muslim and a Sikh man and their religion, although never affirmed, becomes their identity. We see them as freedom fighters but with no sense of interiority. There is just one lovely scene where Hari tells his pregnant wife that the names of their children would be George and Victoria. It is a rare light-hearted moment that conveys the complicated relationship between a coloniser and the colonised with more heft than the entire show put together. Sahni himself is an unlikeable man whose arc remains unresolved in the rudeness of the shift.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the tragedy that ties the series together, remains a history lesson. Madhvani shoots it in absence, which is to say that we see bullets piling up on screen. It could have been potent but it comes across as limp, especially when one (inevitably) compares it to the immersive way Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham (2021) captured it in the recent past. The Waking of a Nation need not have reiterated it but it also fails to capture the enormity of the carnage and that, more than anything else, forms the failure of the series.

The Waking of a Nation is currently streaming on Sony LIV.