In the late summer of 1947, as the British empire unspooled into the blood and panic of Partition, Nikkhil Advani’s ancestors left Sindh on a commercial flight. They were not among the millions crammed onto wooden train roofs or marching through the dust of the Punjab; his father, Suresh, was an infant, born in 1946 into an affluent, well-connected Sindhi family in Karachi and Hyderabad. When his great-grandfather sensed the geopolitical tides turning, he booked tickets, gathered the family, and flew to Bombay. They landed unmaimed, stepped off the tarmac, and walked straight into the cold, levelling reality of displacement.

On the journey, Advani’s grandfather carried a heavy money belt strapped around his waist. But the cash was not his. He worked for Habib Bank, which was shifting its headquarters to Karachi at Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s behest, and had been entrusted to deliver the funds to its Bombay branch. He handed over every rupee. For Advani’s grandmother, Lila, the story was a testament to her husband’s unyielding integrity—though during the lean years that followed, she would occasionally wonder aloud how different their lives might have been had he simply kept it.

The family’s fortune was gone. In the single-room flat on Raghavji Road that they lived in, Advani’s grandmother nursed no soft, weeping nostalgia for lost estates; she wanted her sons to work towards careers in engineering, and demanded flawless academic credentials.

“I don’t want to belittle those who suffered the horrors of migration by pretending their pain is mine,” Advani says. “My family was fortunate. But the atmosphere in that one-room flat was defined by a single imperative: every generation must outperform the last.”

Growing up in the comfortable, cosmopolitan Bombay of the 1980s—his father by then a corporate executive in a pharmaceutical firm—young Advani initially tuned out his grandmother’s constant monologues about Partition. “To a kid in a safe, prosperous city, it felt like an endless lecture,” he admits. “My reaction was, ‘Who cares? I’m not struggling.’ It took 30 years to realize those weren’t history lessons; they were meant to remind us of how we had built – rebuilt – everything from scratch.”

When Advani announced his intention to forgo a conventional career for the unstable world of Hindi cinema, his grandmother viewed it as sheer madness. How could making movies constitute a proper profession? What she may not have realized just then was Partition wasn’t this family’s only inheritance. A deep love for cinema may have been handed down genetically, too. Advani’s grandfather, the one who had guarded the bank’s cash through that trip from Karachi, had a Friday ritual: he would leave his jacket draped over his office chair so that his manager would assume he’s around, while he slipped out to catch a matinee.

Besides, Advani’s true artistic education unfolded outside formal classrooms. After studying at St Xavier’s College and taking a film appreciation course at FTII, he served an apprenticeship alongside the fiercely political, iconoclastic directors of 1990s Bombay—Saeed Mirza, Kundan Shah, and Sudhir Mishra. These were sets where filmmaking was treated as social inquiry rather than commercial gloss. Nights were spent in messy apartments listening to Hindustani classical records and late-night ghazals; Mishra once dragged him to a gathering at Shekhar Kapur’s house where Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang until daybreak. Advani absorbed the music, the politics, and the intellectual friction without quite knowing where to put them.

“When you’re young, you’re like a sponge,” he says. “You don’t always have the context for what you’re taking in, but it stays somewhere inside you. Then, years later, something happens and you realize, ‘Oh, I heard this before. I saw this before. I was around this before.’”

That delayed understanding eventually collided with his work as a director. When Advani turned his camera to history, he eschewed monumental hagiography in favour of panicky, unscripted friction. In Freedom At Midnight, his epic streaming chronicle adapted from Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s book, Independence arrives through argument, and administrative absurdity—where bureaucrats haggle over splitting railways, treasuries, and even the instruments of a police band in Lahore.

At the centre of the storm, the architects of Indian independence—Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Jinnah, Mountbatten—are stripped of their textbook composure. They sweat in humid rooms. They operate in a lacuna of intelligence.

“Today, we have the privilege of hindsight,” Advani, now 55, observes. “Eighty years later, it is easy to debate what a statesman ought to have done. But in 1947, they were flying blind—there was no precedent, no telemetry, no script. I wanted the audience to be there with them, without knowing what was going to happen.”

That idea also drove The Revolutionaries, adapted from Sanjeev Sanyal’s book. The series turns its lens toward armed anti-colonialists like Rash Behari Bose, Bagha Jatin, and Sachindra Nath Sanyal, whose militant struggles were largely swallowed by official Congress narratives. Yet rather than reducing them to violent zealots, Advani recovers their intellectual world—their debates over Irish resistance, poetry, and philosophy, alongside the quiet, personal sacrifices of women like Pratibha Lahiri.

“I knew after Freedom At Midnight that critics would point at the stories I have left out,” Advani says. “In modern India, if you leave a vacuum in historical storytelling, someone may fill it with cheap propaganda. My job isn’t to hand out moral verdicts, though of course I pull the frame toward the people I admire. My job is to resurrect the volatility of the moment before the history books froze it in place.”

That insistence on context over caricature met its stiffest test in his portrayal of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Freedom At Midnight drew both sharp praise and fierce pushback for humanising the founder of Pakistan.

“Before Jinnah was the Quaid-e-Azam, he was just a Bombay guy,” Advani says. “And he wanted to be in Bombay even as he governed Pakistan. I found that incredibly interesting.”

He has watched that fluid relationship with the past extend to his own filmography. Younger audiences now dissect his earlier mainstream hits like Kal Ho Naa Ho or Chandni Chowk To China through entirely modern lenses—sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with utter bewilderment.

“The people asking me for a Chandni Chowk sequel today were four years old when it was released,” he laughs. “They didn’t care about narrative structure; they just saw Akshay Kumar [who plays a chef in the film] fighting a giant potato and somehow it worked for them.”

Films wait intact for the next generation; family memory does not. With that in mind, on his father Suresh’s 80th birthday this year, after the release of the second season of Freedom At Midnight, the family invited Gitanjali Chandrasekharan’s Talered, a platform that specializes in customised oral histories, to help them document their vanishing memories of Sindh. The result, a custom-made coffee-table book with a record of survival, food, family jokes, and small evasions, was then gifted to family members.