Based on the Third Battle of Panipat fought in 1761 between the Marathas and the Afghan King, Ahmad Shah Abdali, Panipat has angered the Jat community across three states—Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh—for portraying Maharaja Surajmal as greedy and not helping a retreating Maratha army. More than joining an ever-growing list of historical films that offend communities due to alleged distortion of historical facts, Ashutosh Gowariker’s Panipat reaffirms Bollywood’s inability to separate fact from fiction when it comes films based on reality.
Panipat’s factual inaccuracies have expectedly enraged people but to time and again expect authenticity from a commercial film is fooling one’s self. Regardless of how one looks at things, distortion is the part of popular cinema’s standard operating procedure when it comes to depicting historical events. This is due to the significance the narrative places on the ‘hero’. Consequently, the format doesn’t give any room for subtlety or nuances and films such as Panipat believe under-appreciating characters like Maharaja Surajmal is the only way to highlight the valour of the hero, Peshwa general Sadashivrao Bhau.
Research suggests that movies are a powerful tool for teaching children about the past and can help in increasing their historical knowledge. However, when it presents incorrect facts, the students continue to believe them even if someone tries to correct them. Quite simply, the impact of a popular medium such as cinema can rarely be undone. According to historical films such as Amadeus or U-571, Mozart was a spoilt brat or the Americans, and not the British, cracked top-secret Nazi codes. In the 1990s, films such as JFK and Braveheart presented a ‘new’ interpretation of much-documented history to the extent that it altered the way people thought. In JFK, Oliver Stone’s fabrications suggested a conspiracy behind the murder of John F Kennedy and Mel Gibson’s Braveheart used an inaccurate and exaggerated timeline to portray Scotsman William Wallace in a new light.
Things have now reached a point where people are wondering, if historical films have to be accurate. Last year’s Green Book explored the 1962 real-life tour of the Deep South undertaken by African-American piano virtuoso Donald Shirley and his Italian American driver, Tony Vallelonga. Despite being called “a symphony of lies” by Shirley’s surviving brother, and his family asserted that there was no close friendship between the pair, the film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Unless the format of a film is not documentary, then its primary responsibility is to entertain. With that in mind, filmmakers find it okay to distort facts to get a more compelling story, which explains why Braveheart continues to enjoy a following. The only thing that a filmmaker can do, or at least make an attempt, is to understand the ‘other’. Unless they were the protagonists, it’d be near-impossible for Bollywood or Hollywood to understand the greatness of Maharaja Surajmal or Robert the Bruce, the conflicted nobleman who, unlike the villain that Braveheart made him out to be, is, in fact, a national hero in Scotland, and the one who actually bore the film’s title name. Do you know why filmmakers have started asking people to watch a historical film before judging? They would rather that you look at an inaccurate film as an excuse to seek the truth elsewhere because for everything else, there’s always a studio-backed historical.
( Gautam Chintamani is a film historian and bestselling author and can be contacted at gautam@chintamani.org )