Blood, death and dancing girls

Guardian Unlimited | Arts Friday Review

In 1857, Indian soldiers turned on their British rulers in a mutiny that led to an unprecedented wave of violence across the country. Is it really a good subject for a musical? Geoffrey Macnab reports

"For too long, we have rusted in the service of foreign masters. All it takes is a bit of grease to remind us who we are." So declares Mangal Pandey in The Rising, an epic new film about the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857. Mangal is a sepoy , a private in the British army. New Enfield rifles have just been introduced. To use them, soldiers are required (quite literally) to bite the bullet. The paper cartridges encasing the gunpowder are heavily greased with tallow. This, the sepoys correctly suspect, contains traces of beef and pig fat. Neither Hindu nor Muslim soldiers are prepared to use the new cartridge, which they term the kartoos.

The Rising is a historical epic complete with all the Bollywood trimmings. There are spectacular battle scenes and even more spectacular song and dance sequences. (The music was composed by AR Rahman, of Bombay Dreams fame.) As the heroic sepoy, Aamir Khan leaps around with an energy reminiscent of Errol Flynn in his heyday. There is strong support from Toby Stephens as Scottish officer William Gordon, saved by Mangal Pandey on the battlefields of Afghanistan, who becomes his closest friend. Director Ketan Mehta provides a rogue's gallery of British officers: Flashman types in red tunics who beat and humiliate the natives; and elderly officers with fat, grey moustaches who think nothing of double-crossing the sepoys. The drama, though, hinges on whether those cartridges really are smeared with animal fat.
Historians have tried to explain the 1857 rising in social, economic and political terms, but it is clear that the kartoos played a key part in provoking the violence that subsequently swept through India. "If you go back to the original Urdu and Persian documents of the mutineers, which I have been translating, the religious nature of the uprising is blatantly obvious," says London and Delhi-based historian William Dalrymple, whose next book, The Last Mughal, about Bahadur Shah Zafar, looks closely at the events of 1857. "The old cliche of the cartridges really was terribly important. It was the issue that broke the camel's back, in every sense."

In truth, the information available about Mangal Pandey's one-man revolt against the fat-smeared cartridges is relatively limited. Christoper Hibbert's book The Great Mutiny (1978), still considered by many as the best English-language, single-volume study of the events of 1857, only contains three pages about him. Hibbert gives an account of the sepoy, "evidently under the influence of some intoxicating drug", rampaging about with a loaded musket, taking pot shots at British officers, and shouting that "from biting these cartridges, we shall become infidels".

"To me, Mangal is a symbol more than a character - a symbol of the spirit of freedom," says Ketan Mehta. He has been trying to make The Rising since the late 1980s. His initial inspiration was a book his father wrote about freedom fighters and the battle for Indian independence. This portrayed Mangal Pandey as a folk hero: the first martyr of the war of independence. Mehta's film does something likewise. The casting of Aamir Khan, one of the biggest stars in Indian cinema, reinforces the sense that Mangal is a kind of latterday Robin Hood.

As ever, Khan threw himself into the project. He spent a year and a half growing his hair long, nurturing a huge moustache, and researching the part, "getting soaked in the period", as he puts it. Unlike other Indian stars, who appear in several films simultaneously, Khan will only make one film at a time. With him on board, financiers finally overcame their suspicion about backing a "historical", a genre that has rarely done well at the Indian box office. "It's disarming when you're in a crowd with Aamir because Indian fans see him as a god, something akin to a deity," his co-star Toby Stephens says. "There is a religious look that comes over their faces when they see him in the flesh."

The first time we encounter Mangal, his head is shown in big close-up in what seems to be an oval frame. It takes a moment to realise that he is staring at us through a noose. Ironically, in British army parlance of the 1850s, the sepoy 's name became synonymous with treachery. A Mangal Pandey was the term that British soldiers gave to all mutineers. Mehta's film ends with black and white newsreel footage of Gandhi and Nehru. The inference is clear. By standing up against the British colonialists, Mangal set in motion the events that led to the formation of modern India. Even so, the director acknowledges that Mangal remains a shadowy figure. Outside the reports of how he attacked the adjutant of his regiment on March 29 1857, and the documents chronicling his court martial, all historical trace of him has disappeared.

Nor is there much information about William Gordon. There are accounts of an unnamed British officer seen in Delhi, fighting with the rebels against the British army. The real Gordon is mentioned in letters and diaries written during the Indian Mutiny as being sympathetic to the Indians, but these don't provide enough material with which to build up any kind of portrait.

The fact that so little is known about Mangal and Gordon enabled Mehta and his screenwriter Farrukh Dhondy to weave together their own riproaring narrative. The Rising is as much bodice-ripper as dry, historical study: "a tale of friendship, love, loss and betrayal" as the publicity boasts.

None the less, western viewers are likely to be startled by the sadism, snobbery and overt racism of the British in India. This is not dramatic licence. William Dalrymple says: "The British undoubtedly were at their very, very worst at this point in history - unbelievably violent and awful. It was through the idea of duty which came in the high-Victorian period."

There are many theories as to why the British began to behave so cruelly. Mehta suggests that it was their transition from being traders in India to being masters of the country. By 1857, the British East India Company was all-powerful: responsible for civil administration and for the running of the army. The film-makers go to great lengths to show how the company benefited from the opium trade and how aggressively it pursued its own commercial interests even as the British were trying to bully the natives into embracing Christianity.

Mehta has tried to be even-handed. In one scene, Gordon intervenes to save a beautiful woman from suttee, the custom requiring widows to be burned. This is a humane and heroic act that upholds the law as passed by the British, but it's also an example of a westerner riding roughshod over the local culture. "It's not white and black," Mehta says. "We're dealing in multiple shades of characterisation and multiple perspectives." Dhondy points out that the mutineers' brutality mirrored that of their oppressors. "Indian rajahs took men, women and children, civilians all, with white skin and put them to the sword. More people died in the Indian Mutiny year than ever before in the history of India."

The Rising is not the first Indian film to explore the background to the Indian Mutiny. The Chess Players, Satyajit Ray's 1977 classic, was set in Lucknow in 1856. It showed two chess-obsessed noblemen playing the game night and day, seemingly oblivious to British plans to take over their kingdoms. Junoon (1978), starring Shashi Kapoor, was adapted from a short story, The Flight of Pigeons, inspired by the memoirs of a survivor of the mutiny. There have been various other Indian films touching on the events of 1857, but it's a subject that the British have left well alone. Even now, close to 150 years later, the story of those fat-smeared cartridges and the chaos they unleashed is one they would rather not tell.

Given how dark the subject matter of The Rising often is, the upbeat musical interludes occasionally seem just a little incongruous. Mehta protests at the idea that the scenes of jewellery-festooned "nautch girls" performing gaudy and elaborately choreographed setpieces look out of place amid the bloodshed. "We have song and dance for almost every incident in life," he says. He adds that the film was conceived as a ballad and that it was always his intention to marry history and folklore. Rahman's music runs the gamut from old Indian folk songs to full-blown, western-style orchestral arrangements.

This may be historical romance, but there is a strong argument that the events of 1857 have a contemporary resonance. For William Dalrymple, the parallels with today's world are self-evident: "In Delhi, where the mutiny took on a largely Muslim aspect, the words fatwa, mudjahadeen and jihad were all in play." And Mehta is surely accurate that the East India Company is an example of an unscrupulous corporation running wild. "The entire Indian continent was run by a company. This is about what happens when you allow free rein to absolute greed."

· The Rising is released on August 12.