Saibal Chatterjee

One of the biggest tinsel town stories of the year 2005 – the much-hyped release of Ketan Mehta’s long-awaited magnum opus, Mangal Pandey - The Rising – was anything but an unqualified success story. But the sort of play that the film got in the media – during the process of its casting, its initial planning, its actual making and, finally, its arrival at the theatres – far outstripped the attention that was attracted by supposedly more successful releases.

The reason was pretty obvious to everybody – Mangal Pandey was Aamir Khan’s first release in four years. The meticulous actor has deservedly earned the status of a cult figure, a man capable of helping Bollywood make the giant leap to the next level – from being a hopelessly insular subcontinental film industry to an outward-looking global player. He came close to achieving just that in 2001 with the self-produced Lagaan.The Rs 35-crore Mangal Pandey, based loosely on a script that Ketan Mehta had first written well over a decade and a half ago for Amitabh Bachchan, got off the blocks primarily because of the international profile that Aamir had managed to garner for himself and his work, riding on the success of Lagaan.

It wasn’t without reason that the star demanded and got a whopping fee of Rs 7 crore, one-fifth of the film’s total budget. He was after all committing three full years of his life and career to the project.

The Hindi-English bilingual Mangal Pandey was planned and executed as a global product, with James Bond villain Toby Stephens roped in to play the pivotal character of a British officer who befriends the Indian freedom fighter.

Producer Bobby Bedi unveiled Mangal Pandey for the international press and distribution outfits at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, making it a point to keep Indian critics out of the show. The film aroused a fair bit of curiosity and was picked up by the Locarno film festival organisers for a gala screening. Mangal Pandey – The Rising went on to earn a decent amount of money at the British box office, but eventually fell woefully short of its avowed target.

If The Rising did not quite rise to the occasion, it was because the attempted marriage between Bollywood narrative conventions, complete with item numbers and mujras, and the rigour of a world-class historical epic was a complete non-starter.