With Mumbai Diaries 2 exploring domestic violence through Konkona Sen Sharma’s track, creator Nikkhil Advani on how he deliberately cast the ‘affable’ Parambrata Chatterjee as the abusive ex
A still from the series
After the reviews of Mumbai Diaries’ first season poured in, showrunner-creator Nikkhil Advani sat with Aparna Purohit, head of India originals, Amazon Prime Video, and meticulously went through the feedback. The objective was simple: figure out what had worked, what hadn’t and what needed to be done going forward. The result is the Mohit Raina and Konkona Sen Sharma-led second season that revisits the 2005 Mumbai floods. Advani begins, “We found out the term 26/11 [on which the first season was centred] was triggering for people. It [was a subject] many people didn’t want to revisit. Plus, there weren’t enough cliffhangers. But what really worked was that the show was a well-put together ensemble [drama]. Every character had stayed with the audience. The production design, medical jargon, and [treatment] worked.”
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Nikkhil Advani
Before the team began writing the second edition, Advani knew that every episode needed a cliffhanger. “This time every episode has a high ending,” he says. In addition, they needed more of what they had done right the last time around— build memorable characters through which pressing issues can be highlighted. “The second season’s theme is abuse—of infrastructure, media, power, and even in interpersonal relationships. Domestic and sexual abuse became critical to mirror what we had in mind. We spent days staring at statistics [that said] 80 per cent of women have faced abuse in a public place. Chitra [Sen Sharma’s character] is the strength of the hospital, but she is becoming a domestic violence victim again. I wanted to show how even strong women miss [the signs] when they are gaslit.”
Parambrata Chatterjee was an interesting choice to play Chitra’s ex. Through his character of a soft-spoken, kind and brilliant doctor, Advani wanted to show how even seemingly harmless people can be predators. “I could be standing in a room full of people, and every man there could possibly be a predator. Param was the most affable man to cast for this. Another aspect that worked was that Param and Konkona have worked together a lot. We needed to take the character places where she had to be alone with the actor, and it is a dark subject. So, she had to trust her co-actor. When I suggested Param, she instantly [agreed]. There is an incredible scene in the fifth episode, which I could have only pulled off with these two actors.”
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