Hi guys,
I found this writing intresting and wanted to share with you guys.
source: indianexpress.com
throbbing music
Mutiny's bounty
Watch `Mangal Pandey', rescue history from the historians
Each time an Indian film-maker attempts to recreate the past, the
resident bore stands up and yelps, ``But this is not history.'' What
follows is a pedantic discourse that, in effect, insists history is
best left to historians who write for each other, if not for the
government.
So it has been with Mangal Pandey: The Rising. One columnist has
trashed it as ``utter fantasy'', a ``lie'' that ``should not have
been made''. Another hasn't seen the film but says he finds ``jingo-
patriotic themes tiresome''. Few pundits bother with actually
watching the film. Most are happy to use it to peddle pet theories,
or flog ancient PhDs.
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.
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