The film, Padmavati, tells the story of an eponymous Rajput queen believed to have died, together with 16,000 other women of the Rajput warrior caste, by self-immolation in 1301. They killed themselves to avoid being captured alive by the invading Delhi Sultan, Alauddin Khilji. Though not yet released, Padmavati has inspired countless front-page stories and debates on the evening news, hysterical threats of violence, and has been banned in four states governed by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The accuracy of Padmavati’s story is dubious: No contemporary account of Khilji’s attack on Chittorgarh, including by historians accompanying his forces, mentions the queen. Yet Padmavati has been a figure of legend since 1540, when the Sufi mystic poet, Malik Muhammad Jayasi, devoted his lyrical epic, Padmavat, to her story.

Jayasi might not have intended his tale to be taken literally and his work might be an example of the Persian mystical-poetic tradition of using romance to represent humanity’s search for the divine. By this interpretation, the poem is an allegory for the union of mind and soul, under attack from external forces. Jayasi chose Khilji’s attack on Chittorgarh as a setting for his epic, because its name includes the word chit (consciousness).

But literature, once published, acquires a life of its own. Jayasi’s tale was retold countless times, by Bengali bards, Rajasthani folk-tellers, and even the English Colonel Tod, who included Padmavati’s tale in his compilation, Annals and Antiquities of Rajputana. Through those retellings, her self-immolation (jauhar) became a noble act of resistance against the lustful Muslim, making her an exemplar of unsullied Hindu womanhood.

Padmavati has effectively been deified. The reputed site of her suicide became a tourist attraction. The head of a Rajput organisation, the Karni Sena, claimed to be her direct descendent. (When confronted with the view that she was fictional, he replied, “I am 37th in her direct line of descent. Am I a ghost?”) With so much riding on Padmavati’s image as a symbol of female honour and purity, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the Bollywood filmmaker who set out to film her story, unwittingly became a target of historical passions. 

The Karni Sena trashed the film set at Jaigarh Fort, in Jaipur, and disrupted further shooting in a new (less “authentic”) location, at Kohlapur, accusing Bhansali of filming a love scene between the Hindu queen and the Muslim invader. The Rajput community is also rumoured to have delayed the release of the film, because it “distorted history,” though Bhansali has denied this.

The film’s detractors, including the four BJP chief ministers who instituted the preemptive bans, had not even seen the film before condemning it. That is how defensive some Hindus in India have become over the version of history to which they subscribe — even when, as in Padmavati’s case, that history may be nothing more than a figment of collective imagination.

No less an ardent secularist than India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, summed up the phenomenon seven decades ago: “Facts and fiction are so interwoven together as to be inseparable, and this amalgam becomes an imagined history, which may not tell us exactly what happened, but does tell us something equally important — what people believed had taken place, what they thought their heroic ancestors were capable of, and what ideals inspired them.”

This “imagined history” — “a mixture of fact and fiction, or sometimes only fiction” — becomes “symbolically true”. This explains the opposition to Padmavati. For some Hindus, the difference between historical fact and cultural myth does not matter; what is remembered and believed is as important as what is verifiable. And in today’s climate, where “taking offence” is the name of the game and “hurting the sentiments of a community” is the name of the crime, that perspective is particularly relevant. The old Hindu boasts of expansive tolerance and acceptance of difference — the very tenets that underlie India’s remarkable diversity — are wearing thin these days.

But there is a precedent for this response. Bhansali should have heeded the backlash against another film, a decade ago. That time, hairdressers objected to Billu Barber, arguing (absurdly) that the term “barber” is an insult to their profession. So they threatened to protest the film, threats that forced the Bollywood star and producer to drop the second word, renaming the film simply Billu. 

It might not seem to matter much what some lumpen elements think of a Bollywood film. But such responses reflect the same narrow-mindedness that led to the notorious pulping of Sanksrit scholar Wendy Doniger’s erudite books on Hinduism. While it may seem alarmist to suggest that freedom of expression in India is in peril, the atmosphere of intimidation by inflamed mobs, to whom governments surrender all too willingly, is palpable. By permitting these intolerant bullies to get away with their lawless intimidation, we are allowing them to do violence to something vital to India’s survival as a civilisation.

A pluralist and democratic India must tolerate diverse expressions of its many identities. To allow self-appointed arbiters of Indian culture to impose their hypocrisy on the rest of us is to permit them to define Indianness until it ceases to be Indian.

Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and former Indian minister of state, is chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on external affairs and an MP for the Indian National Congress. www.project-syndicate.org