Director of new British Raj drama says UK owes India trillions ‘for 200 years of enslavement’

The director of a controversial drama about the British Raj has called for the UK to pay India trillions in compensation for what he calls ‘200 years of enslavement’.

Nikkhil Advani, director of The Revolutionaries, which dramatises the violent exploits of a group of Indian ‘freedom fighters’, said he hoped the series would ‘highlight the atrocities’ inflicted by the British.

Advani admits the abhorrent behaviour of the show’s main character, based on the real-life Colonel Reginald Dyer, was portrayed as worse than it was in order to help whip up sympathy for the payment of reparations to India, which it has been suggested should be up to $56trillion (£41trillion).

The eight-part drama, streaming on Amazon Prime, does not hold back on depictions of cruelty. In the opening scenes, a character looks through a book of sketches depicting acts of brutality, which come alive as animations.

One page shows a platoon of British soldiers marching through a wasteland of dead bodies, while another shows soldiers bayonetting the bodies of civilians.

The captions read: ‘They established the Empire on Indian corpses… But our soil witnessed everything.’

Actor Jason Shah playing Colonel Dyer in the film. The show’s decision to choose Colonel Dyer as a representation of the British Empire is likely to prove particularly controversial

Advani, 55, an award-winning Bollywood director, said: ‘I am an Indian who basically feels that the colonisation of 200 years and enslavement of 200 years was a catastrophic time. 

‘More than 100 years later we are still reeling under the fact we were raped, pillaged and plundered – that $56trillion is owed to us.’

The show’s decision to choose Colonel Dyer as a representation of the British Empire is likely to prove particularly controversial.

Dyer ordered British troops to open fire on thousands of unarmed civilians at Amritsar in 1919, killing 379 and leading to him being known as the ‘Butcher of Amritsar’.

In the show, he is shown on horseback dragging a prisoner behind him, and firing a cannon with a prisoner strapped to the muzzle.

Advani has admitted it was ‘not a fair depiction’, but insisted he was using Dyer ‘as a representative of the retribution that happened’ during the Indian uprising.

Historian Jeremy Black accused Advani of offering a ‘clearly prejudiced’ history of the Raj.

He said: ‘In practice, the British Raj relied heavily on Indian cooperation.’