"Lagaan," cricket and post-colonial India
Shivaji Sengupta - 22 March 2002

This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated the Indian feature film Lagaan as one of the five best foreign films. When I was in Delhi last October, everyone was flocking to see the movie, so upon my return to the United States, Lagaan was the first film I saw.

Assuming that the movie is extremely well-known by now, I will refrain from giving the summary of the story. But given the present tensions regarding the South Asian cricket boards and the International Cricket Council (ICC), I thought the theme of Lagaan very relevant.

Basically, the movie tells the story of one Indian peasant taking up a challenge from an Englishman to beat his team at their own game. Needless to say, neither the Indian nor any of his farmer friends have hardly seen a cricket bat or ball, much less played the game. In the ensuing game, however, the Indians win, with all the drama and action that such films are expected to provide. The realistic viewer has to undergo a “willing suspension of disbelief,” as the poet Coleridge put it, and enjoy the film for what it is - an aggressive post-colonial statement on the exploitative aspect of the British-Indian relationship during the Raj. The Indians win on the sheer will-power of a handful of men.

Lagaan's success in India, and its subsequent acknowledgement by the Oscar group, indicates the change in mentality of postcolonial India toward not only its former rulers but also the white race itself. Indeed, present-day cricketers often show an I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude when it comes to English or Australian cricketers.

Time was when Indian and Pakistani cricketers, regardless of their own skills and talent in the game, looked deferentially at English and Australian cricketers. Stalwarts like Polly Umrigar and Vinoo Mankad rarely ever confronted their counterparts on the field except for occasions allowed within the rules of the game. When Bill Lawry’s Australian team visited India in 1969, for example, there was frequent sledging on the part of Graham Mackenzie, Keith Stackpole, Paul Shehan and others. Only Farokh Engineer replied back once, and he was immediately cautioned by the Indian authorities.

It is my contention that post-independence Indian cricketers like Sourav Ganguly and the now-banned Ajay Jadeja are less willing to take any “nonsense” from say a Steve Waugh because, although they respect his cricketing abilities, they are not daunted by him just because he is Australian. In this sense, Ganguly and the others who belong to a "nuclear" India, as well as the sixth- largest economy in terms of total national product, have a mentality quite distinct from not only the colonial Indians but also from the generation that grew up immediately after 1947.

Lagaan's appeal is that, by virtue of hard work and sheer ingenuousness, the Indians show their English masters up. While England itself is no longer the cricketing force it used to be, the Indians were able to put the present masters of world cricket in their place last winter. Ganguly answered back to every statement made by Waugh and Ian Chappel, was stand-offish during the toss, did everything, in fact, that English and Australian captains have done to Indians in their own country. (Peter May kept Pankaj Roy waiting for the toss at Lords in 1959 because he was on an urgent “family phone call." Roy simply acquiesced.)

In passing, the World Cup of 1983 could even be seen as the real- life precursor of Lagaan, when the Indian team won as 100-1 odds in England's backyard.

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