Saare Jahan Se Accha Series Review:
In a hilarious scene in Netflix’s latest spy-thriller series, Saare Jahan Se Accha, one of R&AW’s undercover operatives in Pakistan loses it towards his handlers. “My body would have been floating in some gutter, and you guys would still be busy changing soaps.” It’s a reference to an earlier sequence, where he finds a message from his bosses inside a soap cake. It’s one of the few rare instances when a moment or a stray line of dialogue springs up from the show’s genre restraints. Another is when an agent is jealous of his colleague who is operating from Paris (“While we are sweating it out here in Pakistan, he is the one who has got the ‘real’ foreign posting”). It brings life into an otherwise straight-line narrative. It’s amusing when art goes meta.
Cast: Pratik Gandhi, Rajat Kapoor, Anup Soni, Sunny Hinduja, Tillotama Shome and Kritika Kamra
Directed by: Sumit Purohit
Created by: Gaurav Shukla and Bhavesh Mandalia
Streaming on: Netflix
But Saare Jahan Se Accha has no time for fun and games. It’s the 70s. Physicist Homi Bhabha is dead and so is India’s hope of becoming a nuclear nation. On the other hand, enemy country Pakistan is scheming to assemble a bomb and now it is up to the newly-formed Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) to foil their plans. The nascent agency is supervised by R. N. Kao (Rajat Kapoor), based on the real-life spymaster who served as the first chief of R&AW. He sends his subordinate Vishnu Shankar (Pratik Gandhi) to Pakistan to manage and build their agent network. In a hostile country, Vishnu has to face off with his ISI counterpart Murtuza (Sunny Hinduja), a hawk-eyed, chain-smoking agent quick to smell a rat. On the domestic front, Vishnu has a newly-married wife, Mohini (Tillotama Shome), who feels isolated in an alien land while he is caught up with work.
The series attempts to explore the humanity, the interiority and the moral dilemmas of spies, but nothing really sticks. It merely checks off themes like the cost of blind nationalism and the plight of agents, who are faceless patriots, never scratching the surface. We get every cliché in the spy handbook, from clandestine conversation over park benches to cameras hidden in cigarette lighters and pens containing recording devices. Everything is by the book, but there is no reading between the lines. Everything is competent, but nothing is revelatory. An unnecessary voiceover handholds the viewer throughout the show but offers no real insight (“The work of a spy is more difficult than finding a diamond in a coal mine”). You get nothing more than surface-level thrills.
However, where the series scores is in fleshing out its ‘villainous’ characters. Sunny’s Murtuza isn’t just pure evil. There is an emotional complexity he showcases as he hugs a teenager whose father he has killed just moments before, as he was revealed to be a traitor. Thankfully, Pakistanis are not reduced to a bunch of ‘maqsad’-spewing buffoons and are given proper motivation and arcs. The show also sparks in throwaway lines, one of which Pratik’s Vishnu says to a Pak scribe, Fatima (Kritika Kamra): “Mausiqi, zayka, husn ye saari behtareen chize aap log le gaye aur humare hisse reh gaye sirf kisse (Music, food, beauty, all of the great things you took, and what we were left with were stories). Looking at you, Coke Studio.
Whenever Saare Jahan Se Accha gets space to ponder, its plot engine revs up, brushing past all possibilities of reflection. Engagement supersedes enrichment. In her first scene as Mohini, Tillotama leaves a mark and gives a promise to go beyond being just the traditional wife. But like her husband, the narrative chooses to isolate her. A love story between a Pakistani girl and an undercover agent was fertile land, but the show would rather abandon it to get the narrative wheel going. By the climax, plot threads are hurriedly, even clumsily, tied up, and before you can soak in the protagonist’s guilt, the show hints at a sequel. As if nothing really matters. It’s just content. Better click on ‘What’s next?’