The publicity still for the forthcoming Sourav Ganguly biopic uses the obvious image: the shirt waved from the Lord's balcony. Depending on your view that moment was either the end of Indian cricket's deference to England or simply an India captain swearing with his shirt off at Lord's, which purists found crude.
The argument that has followed is not about Ganguly. It is about Rajkummar Rao, who is playing him and who looks nothing like him. The complaint, made at length online, is that when Rao waves the shirt the body underneath is too lithe and too sculpted, where Ganguly's was fuller. This may be the first time a belly has been treated as a casting disqualification.
Screen history does not support the objection. Jesse Eisenberg did not look like Mark Zuckerberg and Joaquin Phoenix did not look like Johnny Cash, and in both cases the performance carried the resemblance rather than the other way round. Indian cinema has its own version of this: an actor friend of the writer has played Indira Gandhi seven times across four films in different languages, and the actor Avantika Akerkar has argued that playing her was a matter of performance rather than looking like her.
Bollywood has a long relationship with typecasting. Iftekhar played police commissioners so often through the 1970s and 1980s that a story persists, possibly untrue, about his children believing he was one. That is the interesting question underneath the argument. Audiences accept an actor as a figure when the performance convinces them, and the demand for physical likeness is usually a demand made before the film exists, which is exactly when it can be argued about most and tested least.