HISTORY IS A COMIC STRIP!

BY BISWADEEP GHOSH

I admire Rudrangshu Mukherjee's scholarship of history, and firmly believe what he has to say about the existence of Mangal Pandey and his actual significance in the the first Indian war of Independence in his book 'Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or the Accidental Hero?': "The reason for the attention given to Mangal Pandey lies not in the significance of his own actions but in the actions of the sepoys of north India who took to arms in the summer of 1857. Historians have assumed a link between Mangal Pandey and the uprising of 1857 and thus a legend has been created around his name."

To prove his point, Mukherjee talks of the mutiny in Barrackpore some 33 years ago in which 200 Indian soldiers died. But that was not written about till 2003 and here, I might add, because there wasn’t a single protagonist who started it all, and also since the reason possibly wasn’t as dramatic as greased cartridge with fat of animals that both Hindus and Muslims weren’t supposed to touch. Desecration that would have been, and it indeed was, leading to an uprising triggered off by a man (Mangal)about whose act and life hardly anything is known.

But today, all we can hear is ‘Mangala, Mangala, Mangala, Mangala….” All we can see is a short and well-built guy striding across the screen in a moment that glorifies his death as sacrifice which it was. We have been told about Heera, a sex worker Mangal is supposed to have been in love with. We have heard of Jwala, a woman Mangal’s friend who is a British officer falls in love with.

All of this, and so much more, has happened because of Ketan Mehta’s 'The Rising', the most hyped film in the history of Indian cinema. Now, we know that Mehta’s material is the life story of Mangal although what we do not know is where the story came from. I mean, the film could have been called anything right from Jangal to Dangal Pandey since reality is not the basis anyway, so why Mangal? Simply because Mangal is box-office material, misled as we have been since 1857 that a single sepoy decided the course in which the nation thought and acted.

There is some MTV style choreography in the film too, but never mind! Creative license means anything right from fabricating intelligently and distorting stupidly. Mostly, it is the latter. The film’s hero Aamir has been selling watches with the Mangal look for a while, but so what? If a modern-day Mangal had been able to defeat his rulers in 2005, so many corporates would have requested him to be their brand ambassador isn't it? The life of Mangal has been concocted with the protagonist’s name being the only real thing about it, but should that matter? Not at all, because some will go to see the film without knowing that the story has been cooked up. A few abroad will see it because they will view it as a grand Bollywood musical.

Many will watch it because they are Aamir Khan fans, and very few will give a damn to the fact that fooling around with characters from history and creating their lives when facts do not exist is a very bad thing to do. After all, Mehta and company have tried to make the most of the man’s name. That being the case, shouldn’t they have looked for facts if at all they existed, or gone ahead and worked with material and people about whom enough is known, giving some sort of scope for understanding the situations and interpreting them accordingly?

'The Rising', in short, is a lie. But there is little reason why Ketan Mehta and Aamir Khan will feel sorry about it if this fictionalised story of a martyr with songs and dances doesn’t capsise at the box-office.