While looking back at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in his recent web series The Waking of a Nation, creator and director Ram Madhvani was conscious not to infuse a false sense of jingoism into the narrative. Instead, he chose to focus on building a case about how the incident was a pre-planned conspiracy, evoking themes of racism and prejudice along the way. It is a thoughtful blend of fact and fiction. “I wanted to make something on colonialism and how the Britishers ruled over our country for so long,” he says and in doing so, the filmmaker steers away from melodrama. He wanted the tone to be right from the get-go. “I don’t know how to make a ‘filmy’ movie. That's not how I am as a person too,” he says.
In the show, Ram looks at the past without the burden of invoking nostalgia or undue romanticism. The visuals don’t feature heavy, VFX shots but are mostly shot on location capturing the heat of the action. The second episode of the show has a protest scene which boils into a riot. Ram makes it an immersive experience, employing what he calls the ‘system 360’, a method that involves shooting through multiple cameras for a longer duration, to capture the action in detail. It is a carefully choreographed sequence, reminiscent of the racy portions of his earlier much-acclaimed hijack-thriller Neerja (2016). Actors Taaruk Raina, playing a lawyer Kanital Sahni and his friend Allah Baksh, played by Sahil Mehta, are at the centre of this riot. They were told to act in the middle of a huge crowd. What was the brief given to them? “Don’t get hurt”, Ram pitches in with a smile.
“It actually happened in real-time. Both of us were put into the riot. There were a lot of people around and some of them didn't even know that we were actors,” says Taaruk. Sahil adds that they were told not to ‘act’ but to ‘be’ the character they were playing. “Due to this, even the people who were part of the crowd became so involved in the process that all of us were reacting to the riot,” Sahil says.
“Acting ke liye aansu chahiye lekin khoon bhi chahiye (For acting, you need tears, but you also need blood)”, Ram quips. The ‘system 360’ also allows the actors to be open to improvisations as Ram places them in the middle of some unplanned setups in order to get an authentic reaction. For Nikita Dutta, this happened during a vital scene in the courtroom when her character recounts losing a loved one during the massacre. “When you are in the scene, there is actually no planning. Ram sir is capable of throwing surprise improvisations at you which are not in the script and you have to continue because there is no rule of saying cut,” says Nikita.
This room for improvisation also led to a minor problem. “All four of us (actors) used the phrase ‘Ek second’ in the show and people in the 1920s did not speak like that,” Nikita says, adding that they struggled a bit to get the language of the time right. Ram adds that he didn’t want the language to be formal as is usually seen in historical films where characters speak in ‘pure Hindi’. “I wanted to remove that barrier of seeing a ‘historical’ and just recreate how people lived and talked back then in a way that doesn’t seem heavy,” he says.
All of this contributes to the show's contemporary feel. The restrained performances, simplicity of the background score, and the balanced handling of the subject make its portrayal of patriotism feel authentic. Along with Ram, even the actors are quite clear on what it means to be ‘patriotic’. “We all love our country but none of us are sitting and screaming out here to prove ourselves,” says Nikita. Bhawsheel Singh Saini, playing her on-screen husband, agrees. “Real patriotism is not just in saying ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai (Victory to mother India)’; real patriotism is in doing something for the country,” he says. Ram sums it all up by adding, “Ask not what the country does for you, ask what you can do for the country.”
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