Period Drama

Ram Madhvani's SonyLIV series The Waking of a Nation uses the courtroom drama and investigative procedural tropes to depict the lead up to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre

- Suhani Singh

In 2017, INDIA TODAY roped in Ram Madhvani to direct a short, This Bloody Line, for its 'India Tomorrow' series. Premiered at the India Today Conclave in Mumbai, it instantly struck a chord for its subtle, affecting reminder of how the Radcliffe Line ripped the Indian subcontinent apart and sowed seeds of discord from which people still reel.

Seated in his office in Famous Studios, Madhvani says the experience of making the short lit a spark to relook at seminal moments from the British colonisation of India. "It was the most personal thing somebody had asked me to make," he recalls. "Since then, I have been trying to figure out how to speak about all that bothers us—racism and prejudice, cultural colonialism and the white man's burden." The result is the SonyLIV series The Waking of a Nation, which through the prism of a courtroom drama and an investigative procedural follows the sequence of events that led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.