In his wonderful short book The Tao of Cricket, the Delhi-based cultural critic Ashis Nandy refers to the former village pastime of aristocratic English amateurs as "an Indian game that happens to have been invented by the British." The Bollywood blockbuster Lagaan (Land Tax, 2001), which pits a scratch eleven of impoverished Gujurati villagers against their British overlords, during the high-Raj period of the mid-19th century, could have been devised to illustrate Nandy's paradoxical thesis.
The film is an irresistible underdog fantasy with gratifying post-colonial implications. The ordinary rural villagers in Lagaan manage to internalize the spirit of this archetypal colonial import so deeply that, even when armed with hand-carved bats and pads made from bundles of sticks, they are able to hold their own against the sport's ostensible standard bearers, toughing it out right down to the final wicket. "To become cricket," Nandy suggests, "a game must leave open the possibility of the meek inheriting the earth."
Both Asutosh Gowariker, the movie's writer and director, and Aamir Khan, its star and producer, have acknowledged that Lagaan was strongly influenced by the famous French comic book stories about Asterix the Gaul. "It is our version," Khan has said, "of the little Gaulish village standing up against the Roman Empire." The residents of the tiny, dusty, drought-plagued hamlet of Champaner, egged on by a salt-of-earth hothead named Bhuvan (Khan), recklessly accept a sporting challenge thrown down by Captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne), the commander of the local British cantonment, and proceed to master the game in just a few short months. At stake is the crushing lagaan, or land levy, the tithe from their annual crop that the villagers are obliged to hand over every year. (The tax will be canceled if the locals win, tripled if they lose.)
So you needn't go in expecting a savage historical expose of colonial atrocities. Lagaan is a precisely calibrated commercial entertainment, in which every stomach-tightening reversal of fortune, and every soaring emotional high (most of which are expressed in glorious "world music"-flavored song and dance sequences composed by A.R. Rahman), has been lovingly hand-tooled. What prevents the movie from coming across as cynical or manipulative is the buzz of Gowariker's pleasure in the storytelling process, and his frank affection for all the characters, even the nasty British ones. Gowariker began his career in movies as an actor, and every member of his village home team, a multi-ethnic "bomber crew" that includes a Muslim, a Sikh, and even a Dalit, gets the time and the space he needs to register as a vivid individual. It's typical of the movie's light touch that while all the central traditions of Bollywood cinema are honored, many of the obligatory melodramatic subplots are only allusively sketched in.
Lagaan's only nod in the general direction of a conventional romantic-triangle, for instance, is the deliberate ambiguity that creeps into the lyrics of the song "O Rey Chori" ("Oh, Girl"), in which it becomes momentarily unclear whether Bhuvan is singing about his doe-eyed childhood sweetheart, Ghauri, or about the sympathetic gori-memsahib, Elizabeth (Rachel Shelly), the Captain's kid sister and the villager's clandestine cricket coach. (A long section that was deleted from the film before release, but is included on the current DVD release, hits this subplot right on the head, and was wisely removed.) Gowariker and Khan offer us an object lesson in how to gracefully shrug off commercial expectations that don't fit in with a more ambitious game plan.
Of the two, Khan shoulders the larger burden. He is the only movie star in the cast, enjoying an enormous following in India as a romantic leading man with a flair for comedy. But Khan is also one of Bollywood's best and most subtle actors, and he plays Bhuvan without a trace of condescension, as an ordinary, limited man who becomes a hero mostly by default, because he can't stop himself from mouthing off in the presence of his superiors. Aamir Khan energizes the kind of naively determined straight-man role that would seem a thankless chore to many performers. He makes the character's sure-footed sanity magnetic.
It is also an enormous advantage that cricket, like baseball, is a near-perfect movie game, a sport with a built-in narrative structure in which everything can suddenly hinge upon the achievement of a single player who is called upon to transcend himself. For Ashis Nandy cricket in its pure, classic, test match form is nothing less than "a critique and defiance of modernity in a world moving toward post-modernity." But it's bit much to hang that metaphorical albatross around the neck of delightful movie like Lagaan, which, at bottom, wants nothing more than to share with us the manifold pleasures of a good story well told. That modest accomplishment may be no small thing, however, in this day and age. It could be downright revolutionary. In Hollywood it's practically a lost art.
See also the recently published and beautifully readable history of Indian cricket A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport, by Ramachandra Guha (Picador India, 2002). "The making of modern India is its theme," Guha says, "with cricket as my chief source of illustrative example." The book is only occasionally puzzling to the non-cricket playing Yank, and it suggests that some elements of the Lagaan screenplay are not as far-fetched as this firangi had assumed. For example, Guha notes that a prodigious Dalit spin bowler, Palwankar Baloo, was one of the first superstars of Indian cricket, joining Hindu uppercaste players on the field as early as the late 19th century. Lagaan is discussed briefly, although Guha sounds an ominous note: "The film was a runaway success, commercially as well as critically. It has, however, been criticized by scholars of post-colonial studies, who have been swarming around it like hyenas around a carcass, sniffing its shots and dialogues for traces of misogyny and collaboration."And sure enough, the published schedule for the 31st Conference on South Asia, held at the University of Chicago on October 10-13, 2002, includes this announcement for a panal discussion:
Representing Once Upon a Time in India: Lagaan at the Oscars. Chair: Ronald Inden, University of Chicago
"In Search of the International Audience: The Production and Distribution of Lagaan": Jayson Beaster-Jones, University of Chicago
"Lagaan: Cricket and the Imagination of the Nation": Atiya Khan, University of Chicago
"Film Songs and the Picturization of Identity in Lagaan": Niyati Thakur, University of Chicago.
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