Ketan Mehta is the consummate storyteller in the elegiac form. Mangal Pandey – The Rising is a story he’s been wanting to tell for 17 years. He tells it with sincerity and passion, observes Madhulika Varma, even as she talks to its costume designer, Lovleen Bains.

In 1857, Mangal Pandey was hanged by the East India Company. A 150 years later, they hanged him again, this time, with that gargantuan media hype. In this age of media partnerships and channel tie-ups, Mangal Pandey - The Rising was zapping down from every possible airwave. After four years in retreat, even the elusive Aamir Khan rolled up his sleeves and got out there to dispense interviews to anything that moved – including one to a Johnny Bravo-a-toon character on Cartoon Network! Khan was returning to the screen after four long years. Ketan Mehta was returning too, from cuckoo land where he’d migrated in search of commercial success. And they had 74 crores to lavish on their dream project. The possibilities! That’s why the stampede to the multiplexes on opening night. Mangal Pandey did not stand a chance against this swell of expectations.

Over the weekend we woke up to blistering denunciations of the film’s historical inaccuracies. And slasher reviews dismissed the film off-hand. Those of us, who bunkered down and rode out the raging storms, went to see the film with a clearer mindset.... And were rewarded.

The film works at two levels. On the surface, there’s Mangal Pandey in the tumultuous, colourful landscape of 1857. He’s plagued with all the prejudices and vanities of 19th century India. He’ll exchange levity with the achhoot but will not countenance the slightest brush.... He wears his mighty moustache as a badge. He’s a sepoy in the 34th battalion of The East India Company stationed in Barrackpore. A little foot soldier for hire, fighting nefarious wars for The Mercenary Power.

The red-attired Company Battalion marches down sensuous sandscapes in grand sweeps, fighting the white man’s wars. There are sati processions, and lavish kothas… nautch girls and mujras... wet nurses and the furtive opium trade – wall-to-wall visuals that transport you to a time far away. And there is the subtext, capillaries that lead you to places beneath the surface…. Of course, there are some traces of Bombayana. In a fallback to the Yeh dosti hum nahin todenge...formula, Mangal’s life is seen through the eyes of Captain William Gordon (Toby Stephens). The two share not just kushti bouts and battle scars. Mangal is a Brahmin and that moustache acquires an extra twirl because of it. Gordon is a Brahmin of another kind. He is white. But in the gora saab’s world they’re both underlings....
Into this comfortable equation enters Heera, the gypsy girl (Rani Mukerji). Fiery, free spirited. She’s the spirit of India, being sold at the marketplace.

FABRIC FIESTA

A month before they were to commence shooting for Mangal Pandey, Lovleen Bains got a call. Would she be interested in doing the film’s costumes? “How much time do I have?” she asked immediately.

“About a month,” she was told.

It seemed like a fair amount of time, and she accepted. Then she was handed the details of the film and realised the magnitude of the task!

“I had to dress up entire regiments of people. It was like I’d got onto a roller-coaster ride and there was no going back!” she exclaims. “There were 1000 uniforms to be made – of the 34th regiment of the Bengal native infantry. Then there were the soldiers of the Rangoon regiment of the East India Company and to round it all off there was the Afghan War!”

With no data in India on how the soldiers of the time dressed, Bains caught the first flight to England. She spent weeks at the army museum at Sandhurst cataloguing the uniforms. “It was very fascinating to see real uniforms with bullet holes in them,” she recalls, going into rewind mode.

Outfitting the soldiers
Yards and yards of woollen fabric were dyed the required shade. Buttons, caps, hats, nivarpattis were sewn. Armies of tailors in Delhi and Mumbai worked late into the night to get ready for the first day of shoot at Pataudi. The giant sized-wrestlers and Jats, hired from the neighbouring villages, wouldn’t fit into the average-sized uniforms. Months later, the locals of Satara with their small frames floated in the same uniforms!

Dressing up ‘Heera’
Those days Rani Mukerji was doing Black, a film shot almost in monochromatic tones. She’d return home drained from her taxing schedule. I would be waiting for her with my tawaif’s costume in shocking pinks and peacock blues. Must have been a real schizophrenic experience for her!

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