Rocket Boys on Sony LIV: How much of it did actually happen? 

Sony LIV’s period drama The Rocket Boys premiered in 2022, serving as a breath of fresh air in the Indian streaming space. While the new season's reactions might not have been overwhelmingly positive, many viewers were happy that mainstream TV was getting to dramatise the contributions of India’s scientific visionaries like Homi J Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, and Abdul Kalam. 

Now, with its second season having dropped on March 16, 2023, Rocket Boys continues the story of the political and personal challenges the titular scientists went through while developing India’s rocket and space programs. 

What is the time period covered in Rocket Boys?

The show is set between the decades of the 1940s and 1960s and covers the journey of India’s nascent scientific programs, particularly Dr Homi J Bhabha’s (Jim Sarbh) contributions to nuclear research and Dr Vikram Sarabhai’s (Ishwak Singh) work towards rockets and space research.

Who are the real Rocket Boys?

Jim Sarbh leads the ensemble as Homi J Bhabha, the nuclear physicist often remembered as the “Father of Indian nuclear programme”. As Rocket Boys shows in its two seasons, Bhabha was passionate in developing nuclear physics as an active field of study in Indian institutions. 

He was also instrumental as the founding director of the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) later renamed to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre after his death. The Cambridge alumnus was also a professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Both TIFR and AEET are regarded by historians as the cornerstone of Indian nuclear weapons, a large share of credit going to Bhabha who had supervised both institutions. 

But as Season 2 also reveals that Bhabha had his clashes with Vikram Sarabhai, the “Father of the Indian space programme”. Not only did Sarabhai play a crucial role in the founding of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in 1969, but he was also behind programs to provide access to education in remote villages. How did he plan to do this? Through satellite communication which was relatively underdeveloped in India at that time. 

What was Bhabha and Sarabhai’s relationship like? 

To a certain extent, Rocket Boys shows Bhabha as Sarabhai’s mentor. While Sarabhai was younger than Bhabha by a decade, both were exceptionally gifted contemporaries in their respective fields. Rocket Boys dramatises their friendship and occasional enmity. 

Bhabha, who by being in Nehru’s good books, was an integral member of the Indian government’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and had played a pivotal role in setting up the committee for the Sarabhai-led Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR). It is this body that would later evolve into ISRO. It is this era (1960s) that the new season explores. 

With the first season’s focus on the 1940s, it is worth mentioning how Bhabha had founded the state-sponsored Atomic Energy Commission of India in 1948. The aims of this body included organising research in atomic science and to train atomic scientists in the country with Bhabha serving as its first chairman.

Following his death in a plane crash in 1966, Sarabhai carried forward his legacy and took over as chairman. His tenure was notable for the establishment of India’s nuclear plants in the 1960s. 

The political environment of Rocket Boys 

Given the time period and the political landscape of the post-Independence era, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (Rajit Kapur) also appears as a major supporting character with the show detailing his support to the scientists. The second season also introduces Nehru’s daughter and successor Indira Gandhi (Charu Shankar). 

In fact, the political angle is amped up in the new season with Bhabha insisting that India needs to develop its own atomic bomb to be taken seriously as a global power. However, Bhabha’s plans are interrupted by budget cuts induced by pacifist forces and government representatives. 

The melodrama around the buildup to India’s first nuclear test in Pokhran in 1974 is obviously present in good doses but still Rocket Boys doesn’t seem to stoop to the level of the wildly exaggerated Mission Majnu that dropped on Netflix recently. 

ALSO READ: Fact-checking Mission Majnu, from mosque-like nuclear plant to Moraji Desai vs RAW

Apart from covering the challenges by the Indian government, America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also plays a shadowy role in Season 2 with the spy organisation warning India to stay in its lane. The US concerns are understandable given their friendly relations with India’s neighbour Pakistan. But again, thankfully, Rocket Boys even with all its creative liberties, is no Mission Majnu. 

Did the CIA actually conspire to kill Bhabha?

A major plot point in Season 2 is that the CIA was behind Bhabha’s unfortunate plane crash in 1966. The physicist was en route to Vienna to attend an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting. Just like former PM Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death in Tashkent, even Bhabha’s death has spawned some conspiracy theories with the large consensus being that the CIA had a hand in it. 

While it is true that US Intelligence was keeping tabs on India’s nuclear plans, there is no definitive evidence to back this claim. Without giving too many spoilers away, Season 2 does deal with an interesting murder plot around Bhabha. However, the scenes shouldn’t be taken down as actual fact and can be counted as some of the show’s many creative liberties. 

What is Abdul Kalam’s role in Rocket Boys?

Rocket Boys’ mentor-student relationship between Bhabha and Sarabhai might be slightly dramatised but the late Indian President Abdul Kalam did consider Sarabhai as his mentor. Season 1 drew praise for Arjun Radhakrishnan’s portrayal of a young Kalam who helps Sarabhai build his earliest rockets. Kalam was also one of the earliest members of INCOSPAR and later joined ISRO. 

He was also the first director of the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station in Kerala, the spaceport established by Sarabhai in 1963. Dr Kalam’s immense contributions to the Agni rocket program and India’s Pokhran-II nuclear tests in the 1980s are well-known, earning him the sobriquet of “Missile Man of India”. 

But with Rocket Boys’ focus lasting till the 1960s, only Kalam’s formative years and contributions are touched upon. Hopefully, the next season would feature him as the central protagonist and focus on his work after Bhabha and Sarabhai’s death. 

The villainous Raza Mehdi is fictional 

It’s a common trope for biographical stories to have a villain for dramatic purposes. While Dangal had its Coach Kadam (Girish Kulkarni), Rocket Boys has Mehdi Reza (Dibyendu Bhattacharya). Mehdi is depicted as a scientist from Kolkata who builds a cyclotron (a type of particle accelerator in layperson language). 

He is shown to have potential but after being ignored by Nehru due to his favouritism for Bhabha, he ends up having villainous motives to create disdain against the Rocket Boys’ plans. However, the show also offers moments to justify Reza’s motives for he doesn’t happen to be as privileged as Bhabha, a man with immense generational wealth and the right political connections. 

The showrunners admit that he is a fictional character even though historians have drawn parallels with Meghnad Saha, another Kolkata native who had built a cyclotron. The Indian astrophysicist is best-known for developing the Saha ionization equation that describes chemical and physical conditions in stars. However, his death in 1956 meant that he couldn’t be incorporated as a major character for most of Rocket Boys’ two seasons, a factor that might explain his replacement with another character. 

CV Raman to Mrinalini Sarabhai: Who else is real in Rocket Boys? 

Season 1 started with an argument between Bhabha and Nobel laureate CV Raman (T.M. Karthik). You don’t have to be a science student to know about Raman who is regarded as one of the most significant scientists in modern history, thanks to the Raman Effect, a phenomenon explaining the scattering of light. 

Both seasons have also featured Mrinalini Sarabhai (Regina Cassandra), a Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri-winning classical dancer and choreographer. Trained in both Bharatanatyam and Kathakali, she also set up Ahmedabad’s Darpana Academy of Performing Arts. Her marriage with Vikram makes for an important subplot in Season 2, focusing on the strained moments. Getting too involved in his research, Sarabhai couldn’t always be a family man. 

Other real-life personalities featured in Rocket Boys include educator and first faculty member of IIM-Ahmedabad Kamla Chowdhury (Neha Chauhan), industrialist-aviator-Tata Group chairman JRD Tata (Rajeev Kachroo), CIA officer and “killer” Robert Crowley (Mark Bennington), and former CIA Director William Colby (Benedict Garrett).