Mallika Sherawat is going to be cast in a film on Jesus Christ. Yup you heard it right, however sacrilegious it may sound to some but the feisty Jat girl will be seen in Australian filmmaker Drew Heriot's upcoming ‘The Aquarian Gospel'.

The film takes its name from a century-old book that examined Christianity's eastern roots and is in its 53rd reprint. It traces the years in Christ's life from the age of 13 to 30, of which there is no record in history.

There are many theories about what Christ did in those years, one of the popular beliefs being that he visited Kashmir. Mallika will play Saraswati, a loyal friend of Christ, when he travels through India.

The film's producers say the movie will be shot using actors and computer animation like 300, the retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, and will follow the travels of Jesus. Casting for other suitable Bollywood and Hollywood actors has begun.

"We think that Indian religions and Buddhism, especially with the idea of meditation, played a big part in Christ's thinking. In the film we are looking beyond the canonised gospels to the 'lost' gospels," said William Sees Keenan, the producer, who is currently making Lindsay Lohan's Poor Things.

The theory that Jesus's teachings had roots in Indian traditions has been around for more than a century.

In 1894 a Russian doctor, Nicholas Notovitch, published a book called The Unknown Life of Christ, in which he claimed that while recovering from a broken leg in a Tibetan monastery in the Ladakh region, close to Kashmir, he had been shown evidence of Christ's Indian wanderings.

He said he was shown a scroll recording a visit by Jesus to India and Tibet as a young man. Indian experts claim that documentary proof remains of this Himalayan visit.

"I have seen the scrolls which show Buddhist monks talking about Jesus's visits. There are also coins from that period which show Yuzu or have the legend Issa on them, referring to Jesus from that period," said Fida Hassnain, former director of archaeology at the University of Srinagar.

Hassnain, who has written books on the legend of Jesus in India, points out that there was extensive traffic between the Mediterranean and India around the time of Jesus's life. The academic pointed out that in Srinagar a tomb of Issa is still venerated.

"It is the Catholic church which has closed its mind on the subject. Historians have not."