Parents who took their school going children to watch Mohenjo Daro have returned disappointed to find more romance that history in the movie.
“Movies have a big impact on school students and misrepresenting history can lead to confusion,” says Vasav Dutta Sarkar, a Delhi-based history teacher.
She points out how the 2001 Bollywood film Asoka, external, the great Indian warrior king, was “riddled with historical inaccuracies and many students confused the movie for historical facts” in classrooms.
In her book Reel History: The World According to Movies, British historian Alex von Tunzelmann writes that a “lot of people can and do believe some of the things they see in the movies”.
“Many of us will know that a particularly outlandish claim is tosh when we watch it, but years later it may have taken root in our imaginations – and we don’t always remember that we first saw it in a fictional film.”