Under the ‘A Historian Watches…’ series in the column ‘Past Forward’, columnist Kiran Kumbhar will write about articles and books by scholarly historians which help us better understand history-themed cinema and television.One of the central arguments of scholars who study health and medicine is that even though the general public tends to think of these subjects as separate and independent from ‘more important’ topics like politics, economics, and society, in reality health and medicine are completely intertwined with every aspect of society and politics. I myself came to this realisation quite late in life.When the film Mangal Pandey came out, more than two decades ago, I was in the early years of my medical training. I saw it twice in theatres in Pune, but don’t remember coming away with any appreciation of how medical themes permeated multiple scenes and storylines in the film. It was only during a re-watch a few years ago, powered by my newly-acquired scholarly appreciation of the history of medicine and public health, that I began to notice those themes. Indeed the historical context depicted in Mangal Pandey is a striking example of the argument that health, medicine, society and the political economy are fully entangled with each other.“Shortly after landing in India,” writes scholar Erica Wald in Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, “a [white colonial] soldier would be forcibly initiated into a lifetime of drinking. This induction was not complete without both physical aggression and a visit to the lal (or ‘red’) bazaar, an area in which the army’s regimental prostitutes lived and worked and where the men would have their sexual ‘needs’ met. Thus, life in India for the common soldier followed a consistent routine, punctuated by heat and humidity of a sort not experienced in Europe…” As it turns out, precisely every phenomenon in these lines is portrayed exhaustively in Mangal Pandey.To begin with, the movie shows on many occasions the entanglements of medicine, military and colonial warfare. Early in it we see Indian soldiers attacking and killing people in Afghanistan in the name of the East India Company. We witness injuries and deaths on the battlefield, with medical personnel later attending to the injured. Indeed in real life modern medicine (or ‘biomedicine’) was deeply entwined with the colonial military apparatus. For example, the primary reason why the East India Company established what is considered India’s first biomedical college – the 1835 Calcutta Medical College – was to fulfil the rising need for assistants to British military doctors in the subcontinent, and the primary reasons behind that expanding need for medical assistants were the relentless invasions and annexations that the Company had carried out after 1757. Indians also worked as dressers and helpers in the military medical system, and we see one of them in an early scene in Mangal Pandey urging the character of William Gordon (played by Toby Stephens) to lie in bed and not get up.Colonial officials and military doctors blamed Indians, especially Indian sex workers (or prostitutes), for the prevalence of venereal disease among white soldiers. But they also considered sex workers – like the character of Heera played by Rani Mukherjee – to be a necessary evil, preferable over soldiers engaging in homosexuality and masturbation. Wald writes that as per then medical opinion, the latter, “being ‘unnatural’ actions, had the effect of weakening a soldiers’ physique, thus destroying his ability to fight effectively.” Since sex work was thus implicitly allowed, and it was considered difficult to ‘discipline’ errant soldiers, officials and doctors turned their attention to regulating the sex workers themselves and monitoring them for signs of venereal disease. Such monitoring, done by (most likely) an Indian Medical Service (IMS) doctor, is portrayed in a scene midway in the film. The scene also carries one of the more memorable lines of the movie: when Mangal Pandey berates the women for “selling their bodies” to white men, Mukherjee’s character says, “We just sell our bodies, sipahiji, but you all sell your souls.”Early on we also encounter the figure of the punkah-puller, with a memsahib writhing in tropical heat and berating him for not pulling the punkah fast enough. Heat and its ill-effects on health were major topics of discussion in colonial India, and the titles of books by doctors during this time frequently included terms like ‘hot climates’ and ‘warm climates’. The swing punkah – the elaborate fan apparatus which replaced hand-held fans – was an essential feature of European homes in South Asia. Ritam Sengupta writes, in the article Keeping the master cool, every day, all day: Punkah-pulling in colonial India, that the colonial state took seriously the medical necessity of punkahs, and committed in 1848 to take up the expenses of punkah-pulling for white soldiers and officers (race-based ‘pseudoscientific’ medical theories of the time did not consider punkahs to be necessary for Indian soldiers). The use of the punkah was seasonal, lasting six to nine months each year, though in the movie its use occurs in January which perhaps is the least likely month when it was needed.Punkah-pulling was an extremely tedious job, but it was also often dangerous. The burden of the white man’s tropical frustrations frequently fell on his domestic workers (like punkah-pullers) in the form of kicks and blows, leading to serious injury and death. In the article The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?, Jordanna Bailkin mentions the example of a punkah-puller who was fatally assaulted by a white officer for “provoking” the latter by working in a “lazy and inefficient” manner. This officer, like many other white murderers during the colonial period, was spared by the judicial system on the basis of the specious medico-legal argument that Indians tended to have weak and ‘diseased’ spleens which would easily rupture and lead to death even with ‘trivial’ degrees of assault. The judge in this case held that the violent white officer “could not have predicted” the punkah-puller’s death as a probable consequence of his act. In Mangal Pandey we don’t see any assaults on punkah-pullers, but the white man’s boot is shown mercilessly hitting the bellies and bodies of other domestic workers and soldiers.A minor character who plays a crucial role in the film’s storyline is an Indian wet nurse (Kamla, played by Mona Ambegaonkar) working in the house of a British officer. Colonial doctors maintained that the tropical climate was particularly antithetical to the health and nursing capabilities of white women. This necessitated the hiring of Indian women as wet nurses: “a tropical bounty at the service of the European families residing in India”, as Ranjana Saha writes in Modern Maternities: Medical Advice about Breastfeeding in Colonial Calcutta. Saha analyses the multiple strands of opinion on wet nurses, known in the colonial literature by the terms ‘amah’ or ‘dai’, and argues that the Indian wet nurse “was usually viewed with a strange mix of appreciation, suspicion and disdain by most colonial physicians.”In the film, the character of Kamla combines the figure of the wet nurse (amah) and of the ayah. Ayahs, as Satya Shikha Chakraborty writes in Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India, worked as multi-faceted caregivers of women and children in British households. Contrary to the ambivalent attitudes toward amahs, ayahs were portrayed mostly positively in the colonial discourse, and “by the early 1800s, the brown ayah–white child dyad came to be greatly idealized in British cultural representations.” Chakraborty writes that during episodes of political turmoil, like the 1857 Rebellion, “stories and paintings abounded of faithful ayahs ready to give up their lives for the British family.” In the final quarter of the film, we see this stereotype employed deftly by screenwriter Farrukh Dhondy.If the historical context is apparently so well depicted in Mangal Pandey, a pertinent question to ask – a question that always accompanies a period film – is whether the movie is ‘historically accurate’? The way I see it, the most sensible approach for any viewer is to consider every period film and TV series to be, by default, filled with historical inaccuracies, with some having less, some more, and some others supplementing the inevitable inaccuracies and poetic licence with avoidable and deliberate exaggerations and lies (the best example of the latter being the Dhurandar movies’ outlandish portrayal of recent Indian history). With Mangal Pandey, Farrukh Dhondy and director Ketan Mehta seem to have gotten many details about the broader mid-nineteenth century health and medical context right. As regards the more specific details about the social and political history of Mangal Pandey’s actions and of the 1857 Rebellion, a separate article is needed to do full justice to their complexities.Kiran Kumbhar is a historian, teacher and former physician, currently affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.In his column ‘Past Forward’, Kumbhar provides us with a rear-view mirror that ensures we drive straight ahead.