It is an historical film about the annexation of the kingdom of Oude by the British in the 1850s. Oude was one of the provinces of the Mogul Empire; in the mid-18th century it became one of the successor states of that empire. The city of Lucknow was the capital of Oude, and it was the setting of the Ray film: a work of subtlety, looking at the events of the 1850s as they might have seemed to people at the time. The film was more than a comment on 19th-century British imperialism. It also considered – with understanding and melancholy and humour – the decadence or blindness or helplessness of a 19th-century Indian Muslim culture at the end of its possibilities: where the rulers play chess and conduct petty affairs, while their territory (and its people) pass into foreign rule. The British annexation of Oude was one of the things that led to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In colonial times, and for a period afterwards, this was called by some the First War of Indian Independence. But this was a 20th-century view, 20th-century language, and a kind of mimicry, seeking to give to old India something of the socialist dynamism the Russians found in their own history.
