‘The Revolutionaries’ review: A pacy, stirring and glam take on armed resistance to British rule

Screen chronicles of the freedom movement have mostly concentrated on Nehru-Gandhi-Patel and the Congress party on the one hand and revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh, Uddham Singh, Chandrashekar Azad and Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army on the other. The stories of several men and women who mounted an armed resistance against colonial rule and sacrificed their lives in the bargain have slipped through the cracks of history.

Nikkhil Advani, who paid tribute to the elder statesmen of the independence movement in Freedom At Midnight, turns his attention to relatively lesser known heroes in The Revolutionaries. The Prime Video series is based on Sanjeev Sanyal’s Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom. Sanyal happens to be the grand-nephew of Sachindranath Sanyal, one of the heroes of this story.

The Hindi series moves mainly between Delhi, Lahore, Calcutta, Dehradun and Benaras during the early 1910s. Rash Behari Bose (Bhuvan Bam) is the central pillar around whom the lives of Sachindranath Sanyal (Rohit Saraf), Jatindranath Mukherjee (Gurfateh Pirzada), Pratibha Lahiri (Pratibha Ranta) and Nanibala Devi (Paoli Dam) revolve.

The chief villain is Reginald Dyer (Jason Shah), who later attains notoriety as the butcher of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919. Sanyal’s cousin Abani (Tota Roy Chaudhary) is a dedicated...

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