Quotes of the Day

Few good historical films come out of India. Movie buffs remember Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players, a classic in which the British seize the Indian kingdom of Avadh, and Lagaan, a crowd-pleaser nominated for an Oscar in 2002, in which the Indians thrash the British at cricket. But these are the exceptions. Most Bollywood films focus predictably on ishq—love—and little else. The travails of The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey, India's most ambitious historical movie in years, show why.

Two plaintiffs claiming to be descendants of a brother of Pandey, the film's central character and a hero of a 19th century uprising against the British, filed a lawsuit in the Delhi High Court on Sept. 1 in the hope of stopping the movie from showing. They charge that it impugns their ancestor's character, and they're seeking nominal damages from the director, screenwriter, producer and two co-stars. The lawsuit came after the film had already been blasted by critics and academics, as well as by indignant politicians from Pandey's home state, Uttar Pradesh. In fact, so many people have attacked the film, and for so many different reasons, that it's become an intriguing piece of history itself.

In March 1857, Pandey, a soldier in the armies of the British East India Company, the commercial venture of freebooters and merchants that ruled India, attacked his officers and called on his fellow soldiers to join him. He was apparently incensed by the army's new gun cartridges, which were rumored to be coated with the grease of pigs and cows, thereby forcing him to violate his Hindu beliefs. Pandey's putsch failed; he was court-martialed and executed. But the rebellion spread, with soldiers rising up across India and proclaiming an aging Mughal ruler as Emperor. The British brutally won back city after city, and extinguished the mutiny. But when the Indians finally threw the British out 90 years later, they celebrated 1857 as their first war of independence, and Pandey as its first martyr.

All this is solid material for a movie, and The Rising has been keenly anticipated, not least because it stars Aamir Khan, widely considered Bollywood's best actor. An aggressive marketing campaign saw images of Khan, looking livid but dashing in his red British uniform, plastered on billboards across India. Theaters were sold out on opening day. Then the protests began.

First to criticize the film were nationalistically minded viewers who didn't like the fact that it shows Pandey cavorting with prostitutes, consuming the narcotic bhang, and even befriending a "Britisher"—the film is structured around a friendship between Pandey and an English officer named Gordon. The director, Ketan Mehta, has a reasonable defense: the movie begins with a disclaimer, stating that it's a hybrid of fact and fiction. Not much is known about Pandey's life, and the film invents liberally; yet there is some plausibility to its inventions. No one knows, for example, whether or not Pandey used drugs, but the historical record shows that his officers did think he was under the influence. The friendship between Pandey and a British officer is invented and improbable, but it's justifiably in the film to prevent it from tipping over into chauvinism. The friendship also reflects the historical truth that not all British soldiers were racists, and that amidst its looting and profiteering, the Company did some good—for instance, by banning sati (wife burning).

In any case, the charge of character assassination is preposterous. The Rising isn't particularly good, but Khan is splendid: by turns virile and pensive, he has created a thinking hero of a kind rarely seen in Indian movies. And that's riled up another set of the movie's critics—an iconoclastic group that delights in punching holes in the heroes that many Indians hold sacred. This lot, shooting off columns in magazines and papers, has suggested that Pandey wasn't fighting for India, which didn't even exist in 1857, but was just a village boy furious that he couldn't be a good Hindu because of the animal fat on his cartridges. The iconoclasts might be onto something—the film's portrayal of Pandey as a progressive democrat committed to equality and religious accord is howlingly implausible, given the era in which he lived. Still, it's a harmless piece of idealization in a country that could do with more harmony.

It seems hardest to defend the film from the last group of detractors: those who complain that it panders to the West in the hopes of repeating Lagaan's success abroad. The movie does come with a full load of Orientalist clichés. There are far too many elephants, dancing girls, and cows walking about, and the British officer gets a suspicious amount of screen time, suggesting that this film was carefully calculated to do well with audiences in Britain and America. But for all its stereotypes and implausibilities, this is a movie worth defending: because if everyone attacks The Rising, who in India will dare to make another historical film? And if provocative period pieces become a thing of the past, we are doomed to a future in which confections about ishq rule unchallenged.

• Aravind Adiga
• An ambitious period piece about an Indian national hero succeeds in antagonizing virtually everyone