Mutiny’s bounty

This is a pity, really, because Mangal Pandey is eminently watchable. True, it is not short of anomalies and anachronisms — Barrackpore looks beautiful, but is not usually overlooked by the Sahyadris; Lord Canning refers to the white man’s burden a half-century before Kipling coined the phrase; the real Mangal Pandey almost certainly never met Azimullah Khan and Tatya Tope.

Nevertheless, as a mix of history, folk tradition, legend and cinematic licence, the film is worth the price of the ticket. It is visually extremely rich, some of the sets are straight out of Company-era watercolours.

The drama and vibrancy of mid-19th century India is well brought out — snakes and painted elephants, glass bangles and throbbing music. Some of these are cliches, of course, to appeal to the overseas viewer, but in much the same manner as Indian novelists now seem to write only for literary agents in London.

Having said that, there are four ideas that emerge from the Mangal Pandey mini-controversy that need to be addressed. Some are germane to the film, others to perceptions of history and nation.

First, how true does a film have to be to textbook history? Go by empirical comparison. A Delhi tabloid, reviewing Ketan Mehta’s film, claimed it lacked the ‘‘veracity of …Braveheart’’.

Is this accurate? Mel Gibson’s Braveheart implied that Scottish rebel William Wallace fathered the future Edward III, king of England. That was piquant cinema, not quite rigorous history.

What Mehta and Aamir Khan have done is packed in many themes associated with the Mutiny and its period — the opium trade with China, which made the fortunes of, among others, certain Parsi business families; the anger of native princes, which ran parallel to sepoy discontent; sati — and personalised them in the experience of one man. This is cinematic shorthand, but it is not, in the broader sense, made-up history.

For instance, there is the point about Mangal Pandey visiting nautch girls. Nobody is sure if he was actually in love with one. Yet when the girl tells him ‘‘Hum to apna sharir bechte hain, aap apni atma bechte ho (We sell our bodies to the white man, you sepoys sell your souls)’’, it is not just scriptwriter melodrama. It has an anecdotal context.

P.J.O. Taylor, that indefatigable chronicler of 1857, has written of May 10 in Meerut, when the Mutiny formally began, a day after Indian sepoys were punished for not using the new cartridges: ‘‘There is a distinct possibility that it began, almost by accident, as a result of one trooper breaking under the taunts of the courtesans of the bazaar brothels: they were egging on the men to rescue their 85 comrades from the gaol.’’

Second, was Mangal Pandey an Indian patriot, did he see himself as Indian at all? Probably not in the way we see ourselves today. Yet that doesn’t him stop him being a symbol of national identity.

Nations are not invented overnight. They evolve through an accretion of personalities and events, their legacies and inevitable mythologies. The individual action is overwhelmed by its place in collective memory.

The Storming of the Bastille, which freed barely 10 prisoners, is a case in point. So is the Dandi March, a landmark event even if it didn’t actually lead to a change in salt laws.

It is, therefore, pointless to suggest Mangal Pandey didn’t think of India as beyond Avadh. It is like asking Americans to discount Thomas Jefferson because, ‘‘He had no notion of the west coast … For him, mulk was New England and watan his plantation in Monticello, Virginia.’’

Third, Mehta is admittedly guilty on one score — bringing contemporary political biases into his script. In the interests of multiculturalism, Azimullah and Mangal unite against an enemy identified not as ‘‘Angrez’’ but as ‘‘Company’’.

The ‘‘Company’’ is rapacious, likened to Ravana. It believes in dubious concepts like ‘‘market’’ and ‘‘trade’’ and ‘‘fayda (profit)’’. This is completely over the top. Mangal Pandey was not Arundhati Roy.

Finally, as we approach its sesquicentennial, how do we see 1857? As the government suggests, do we celebrate it as a SAARC event, with India, Pakistan and Bangladesh getting together for a nice session of West bashing, a sanitised ‘‘Us versus Them’’ history? That would be a tragedy.

Historian R.C. Majumdar put it best years ago, ‘‘To regard the outbreak of 1857 simply as a mutiny of sepoys is probably as great an error as to look upon it as a national war of independence.’’

The Mutiny is like the Mahabharata. It means what you make of it, its romance lies in a million sub-plots: the chapattis and lotus flowers passed from village to village, regiment to regiment as a sign of rebellion; the haunting line that motivated the sepoys, ‘‘Sitara gir parega (A star shall fall)’’; the British assumption that Azimullah, surely foreign minister in any Mutiny-era ‘‘national government’’, had met Russian agents in Istanbul a year earlier, and that the Tsar’s men were already in India, disguised as Hindu monks; the white men who fought for the ‘‘natives’’ and the many Indian sepoys who won the war for the British; the crucial action of Robert Montgomery — judicial commissioner of Punjab and grandfather of the victor of El Alamein — in disarming four sepoy regiments in Lahore on May 13 itself, and so saving the Northwest; Nana Sahib, hero to Indians, hate figure to generations of Britons, the prototype for Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo; a sepoy band in Delhi celebrating news of the fall of Agra by playing God Save the Queen.

One movie and one interpretation? That enigma of a year deserves a billion. In the end, after all, there are as many 1857s as there are us Indians.