By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS

Bollywood's depiction of India's 1857 war of independence has been slammed by a British historian and Conservative Party politicians who claim it is historically inaccurate and should not have been funded by the UK Film Council.

The controversy follows the general release of the much awaited "The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey" in cinemas across Britain Friday.

The film accuses the East India Company of murdering civilians and flouting a ban on slavery and shows a British army officer ordering the destruction of a village for refusing to grow opium.

Saul David, military historian and author of "The Indian Mutiny: 1857", said: "I am no apologist for the British East India Company but I have never come across any evidence which supports either of these assertions.

"It is nonsense. Of course a certain amount of criticism is justified but this sounds like vilification of the British just for the sake of it.

"The East India Company did trade in opium but I have no knowledge of a massacre like this and I do not believe it happened," David was quoted as saying by the pro-Conservative newspaper Sunday Telegraph.

Hugo Swire, the Conservative Party arts spokesman, criticised the government-supported UK Film Council for investing 150,000 pounds in the film.

"I would be interested to know by what criteria the Film Council judged this film to be worthy of financial backing," he said. "It is not particularly helpful in the current climate.

"I personally think the council should concentrate on supporting British films. I do not see why they see the need to support a movie financially that has been produced by the Indian film industry."

The British investment was drawn from lottery funds that are meant to support worthy charities and the arts.

A Film Council spokesman said it supported projects for their "quality, not politics".

The controversy reflects a possible lack of consensus among British and Indian historians over many landmark events in India's struggle for independence.

The Sunday Telegraph quoted historian David as disagreeing with the film's central claim that the 1857 uprising followed East India Company's insistence that Muslim and Hindu soldiers used bullet casings covered in beef and pork fat.

The British historian says the cartridges, which had to be bitten off, were never issued in the light of concerns and therefore unused.

However, many historians say the uprising was inevitable once these cartridges had been issued - whether or not they were withdrawn was immaterial.

The film shows the cartridges as being issued and an officer threatening to slaughter soldiers with a cannon unless they used them.

There are also differences between British and Indian perceptions of the events of 1857. Britain still considers the uprising as a mutiny by Indian soldiers. In India, the events were described as a mutiny for a long time until historians and politicians began calling it the country's first war of independence.

David himself has been criticised in the past for showing a pro-British bias in his book on the 1857 war.

In a review published in an Indian newspaper, fellow British historian P.J.O. Taylor said while David's book showed genuine scholarship, it was one written for a British audience by a British historian.

"Even when atrocities by British troops are reported we get the impression that they are retaliatory, provoked and perhaps 'understandable in the circumstances'," Taylor wrote.

More recently, Prince Philip, the husband of British monarch Queen Elizabeth II, said during a 1997 visit to Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar that Indian claims that 2,000 people had been killed in the British massacre there were exaggerated.

Bobby Bedi, the film's producer, accepted that some scenes were conjecture but he insisted the film was against the British East Indian Company, not anti-Britain, the Sunday Telegraph said.

Drawing a link between colonialism and globalisation, Bedi compared the British East Indian company with Enron, the disgraced American energy giant.

"We live in a world where some companies try to exert as much influence over the world as possible and the film should be seen in that context," he said. "The idea of the slave trade being used to staff brothels is conjecture on our part."