The film starts out with the charmingly simple and playful narrative one expects from Indian cinema. A small village romance is disrupted when a young man, and others, are convinced by a kangany to go and pick tea in the hills.
Surely the lives of tea pickers were not great, however they were not much different to those of other Indian labourers at the time. The beatings and the scene in which the protagonist's leg is cut after he attempts to "run away" were completely made up. Of course labourers were free to leave, although those with debts would still need to find a way to pay them off. The idea of night patrols chasing down run aways and mutilating them is pure fantasy.
The head planter on the estate was not even played by an Englishman, and speaks with some odd American/German accent. There was little effort to replicate the fashion and costume of the time, with him wearing American aviator shades in one scene.
Perhaps this film does provide a little insight into the hardships of the Tamil tea pickers, and the cinematography is quite delightful throughout, but it is too theatrical and too historically inaccurate to appeal to me.
Surely the lives of tea pickers were not great, however they were not much different to those of other Indian labourers at the time. The beatings and the scene in which the protagonist's leg is cut after he attempts to "run away" were completely made up. Of course labourers were free to leave, although those with debts would still need to find a way to pay them off. The idea of night patrols chasing down run aways and mutilating them is pure fantasy.
The head planter on the estate was not even played by an Englishman, and speaks with some odd American/German accent. There was little effort to replicate the fashion and costume of the time, with him wearing American aviator shades in one scene.
Perhaps this film does provide a little insight into the hardships of the Tamil tea pickers, and the cinematography is quite delightful throughout, but it is too theatrical and too historically inaccurate to appeal to me.