Made just one year before India`s independence, the film is about a patriotic Indian doctor who goes to China to support the war effort when it has been attacked by the Japanese. Dr Kotnis was inspired by a real-life story of Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis, who responded to national leader Jawaharlal Nehru`s call to serve in China. India is a fairly insular nation?and has the remarkable reputation of never invading any other nation. So it is quite unusual for us to have a film that looks beyond Partition and explores our relations with our Asian neighbours, in this case China. It is a metaphor for Indo-Chinese solidarity in the face of Japanese aggression (the Indo-Chinese war was much later in 1962). But V. Shantaram, who also wanted to make the film in English to reach the widest audience, writes in his autobiography Shantarama, that though he wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi for their support, Gandhiji`s secretary wrote him a one-line postcard, `Don`t harass the Mahatma with requests for blessings for such work,` while Nehru`s secretary said he would not agree to his exploiting his name for commercial gain.