Lagaan : Cricket As National Destiny

Lagaan goes deep into the psyche of the Indian masses. It is a collage of themost powerful in Indian mass culture, a colourful and patriotic tale of the glories of Indiancricket, toldthrough the medium of Hindi cinema . It  brings together the two most potent symbols of Indian culturallife --  the magicof Bollywood and cricket told against the setting of the traditional Indianvillage. 

The infallibility of this formula is not accidental. Hindi films andcricket are the two pillars upon which Indian public culture rests and Lagaan deserves our kudos for blending the two successfully (unlike other films whichhave failed miserably whenever they have tried in the past -- one involvingAamir himself, in the execrable Devanand starrer, Awwal Number)

The film is a tale of a team of village men playing cricket against anoppressive colonial regime in the village of Champaner in Kutch to save theirlives, families and land. Capt. Russel the arrogant British army officer incharge of the cantonment is outraged that a young, spirited, peasant boy Bhuvan,describes cricket as feringhee version of gilli danda, a game which he, Bhuvan,has played since he was a child. He challenges Bhuvan in front of the provincialRajah, and the rest of the villagers to beat the English team in a cricket matchfailing which the entire province would be charged three times their share ofthe annual tax or Lagaan . In case these country bumpkins achieve the impossibletask of defeating the English team, their taxes would be revoked for threeyears.

Thus the cricket match becomes an arena for asserting indigenous strengthagainst the colonial state. Their sporting prowess helps them emphasise thattheir 'Indian' identity is in no way inferior to the whites. The native masteryof a colonial sport thus becomes the leveller between the colonizer and thecolonized.

Indeed there is an element of the feel good of the Bollywood blockbustergenre (Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander, Ghulam) to the plot. But, there is much more goingon which distinguishes it form other representatives of this genre. Lagaan is afilmic contribution to India's lost cricket history. 

As a  sport historian,working on the historical centrality of cricket in Indian socio-economic andpolitical life, I read Lagaan not simply as a lore of Indian resistance toBritish imperialism, or the victory of rural solidarity against the might of thecolonial state. Lagaan , for me is a commentary, in the filmic and imaginativemode, on the evolution and development of cricket in colonial India.In the last scene of the film, there is a voice-over by Amitabh Bachchan,lamenting that despite his valor on the sporting arena Bhuvan has been relegatedto the dusty shelves of newspaper archives. A very apt comment on the losthistory of our national game.

Historians of the game have represented cricket as a sport appropriated fromthe British as an emulative enterprise. The close links, if any, between cricketand nationalism are seen as a very contemporary phenomenon. That the two couldbe linked historically is still seen as an unfounded and fallacious proposition.

According to existing historiography, the primary factors which stimulatedthe Indian/Parsi initiative (they were the first Indians to play the game) toappropriate cricket was the community's possession of capital, its westerneducation and an urge for social mobility within the colonial framework. Allthese factors, it may be noted, were also present among other Indians of theearly 19th century. Yet they did not take to cricket until the 1880s and 1890s.Hence the explanations advanced so far fail to successfully account for thegenesis of cricket in India.

In many ways the story of cricket as told in Lagaan shows how other Indiangroups started playing cricket not simply to copy the British like the Parsisdid.

Further, the Parsi initiative also came to be perceived as nationalist incourse of time. Interestingly, in Lagaan the match is played in 1893, just acouple of years after the Parsis had defeated the touring British side led byG.F.Vernon in a game witnessed by over 12,000 spectators in Bombay. This game,contemporary records indicate, generated considerable patriotic fervour.

In thisgame, as in the film, the British complained about the bowling action of anIndian bowler, H.Modi, who did bowl in the rest of the match, despite complaintsagainst him, as does Goli in Lagaan .

When Aamir Khan playing Bhuvan appears on screen having marshalled his teamof local villagers to take on the whites, the entire audience seem to hold theirbreath. This 1 hour 40 minutes match becomes the site in which the racialsuperiority debate with the whites is enacted.

In the match itself when Guran,the village godman plays an impossible shot behind the wicket-keeper theaudience erupts with joy. This hit can easily be perceived as that moment ofdeparture, when an indigenous brand of Indian nationalism finds fulfilment. Analmost  identical innings as the one played by Bhuvan, was played inreality by C.K.Nayadu against the touring MCC side led by Arthur Gilligan in1926-27. This inning of 153 against the British, symbolic of Indian cricketingprowess has now become part of our cricket lore.

Further, when Deva hurls his deliveries with increasing speed at the Englishbatsman, nationalism is at its moment of arrival, when the colonial mission ofimporting sport as a civilising tool is successfully turned on its head. Being anon-violent arena of assertion, cricket is successfully transformed into a toolto subvert colonial rule.

The film however, also goes beyond the cricket-field, eventually becoming anarena for the fulfilment of the Gandhian notion of the pristine villagecommunity. This community is glorified and valorised and the Indian farmer takescentre-stage in the film by becoming a modern citizen.

While the movie is based on a work of fiction, its portrayal of cricket isalmost an exact comment on the evolution and development of India's nationalsport.

The initiation of cricket in the film as a sport played by the whites andseen by the Indian princes, is exactly what happened in India in the second halfof the nineteenth century. Further, the way the local achhoot is ostracised initially by the other members of the team in the film is similar tothe way dalit cricketers like Baloo or Semper were treated by theircounterparts.

It was in 1892-3 that Baloo, a slow left arm spin bowler (as is Kachra in the film, except that he bowls right handed) was first taken into the uppercaste Hindu team.

Kachra's final inclusion into the Champaner XI justified byhis talent, symbolising a triumph of meritocracy is identical to Baloo'sascendancy as the leading Indian bowler by the 1911 tour of England.

Finally, the way the village team was formed, demonstrating a process ofindigenisation and appropriation of a colonial sport follows the trajectory ofthe development of cricket in India. By the early years of the twentiethcentury, Indian cricket had brought within its fold a number of lower and lowermiddle class Indians. While Lala Amarnath and D.D.Hindelkar came from a familyof farmers, Amir Elahi was the son of a butcher.

Even the peculiar dress which the villagers play in, finds parallels inIndian cricket history. There are a number of instances of Indians playing thegame clad in dhotis. These attempts, records indicate, led to major clashes withthe British teams. In a match between Mohun Bagan Club and the Calcutta Cricketclub on January 3, 1930 the game had to be abandoned because the natives wereinsulted by the white Governor R.B.Lagden on account of their clothing. TheIndians refused to play demanding an apology from Lagden, in the absence ofwhich the match had to be abandoned. Six months later a similar incidentoccurred in a match between the Vidyasagar College and the Calcutta CricketClub.

As depicted in the film, history reveals that it had become imperative on thepart of the Indians to devise an effective strategy to counter the excessivedemands of colonialism by the second half of the nineteenth century. However,just as in the village, there were certain constraints upon their conduct, forsuch strategizing had to be done from within a society where the physicalexpression of such actions would be severely suppressed. Sports became the arenain which this heavily politicised, but veiled strategizing took place. We maydate this development to the 1880s and 1890s. Accordingly sport rooted inphysical culture which was earlier deemed unimportant became an integral part ofthe Indian identity towards the close of the century.

This turn to 'European sport' came at a very difficult moment in thepost-mutiny period when Indian military initiatives were crushed and most of thewars of annexation had been won by the Raj which was more secure than ever inits paramountcy. This was no time for the disarmed and defeated subjectpopulation to flaunt its armed strength. It was a time to propagate charitrabal(strength of character) rather than bahubal (physical might). The Indiansbarred from staging violent demonstrations or other acts which would physicallychallenge British superiority naturally looked upon 'leisure' pursuits with neweyes. This factor clearly distinguishes Indian sports from its Englishcounterpart. Colonialism and the realities of being a subject population werethe conditions that made possible Indian cricket and informed its developmentand evolution.

The portrayal of a peasant cricket match as becoming an arena of nationalistassertion is unthinkable in the British context.British village cricket hasalways been valorised and glorified as one untainted by the rigours ofindustrialisation, commercialisation and politicking. In India however, in thelate nineteenth century, apparently leisure settings helped provide an excitingimaginary where a certain role reversal from real life occurred. Imitation ofreal life political encounters between the coloniser and colonised was key, butminus the attendant dangers and risks which would otherwise characterise thesesituations. A key aspect of this change was a clear critique of caste prejudiceswhich had kept the lower classes away from the sporting arena.

Enlightened Indians like Nagendraprasad Sarbadhikary (corresponding to Bhuvan,the role played by Aamir in the film) who belonged to an orthodox Hindufamily ignored all caste prejudices while establishing a series of sportingclubs. His critique of such practices is clearest in the incident surroundingthe induction of a potter's son into the Wellington club. 

The latter had amembership of nearly 500 from all classes of society. However whenNagendraprasad wanted to induct Mani Das, the potter's son the richer members ofthe club protested vehemently. Nagendraprasad refused to buckle before thepressure arguing that a sporting club was beyond any prejudice and decided todismantle the Wellington Club and by combining thevarious sporting clubs he had established -- The Boys Sporting Club, FriendsClub, Presidency Club, the erstwhile Wellington Club -- founded the SovabazarSporting Club. Moni Das, the son of the potter whose presence was the causebehind the dismantling of the Wellington club was one of the first members ofthe Sovabazar Club. He later  distinguished himself as one of the best cricketersof Mohun Bagan Club. This attempt by Nagendraprasad to free sports of all casteprejudices in the 1880s was the first of its kind in India. 

By the 1890s it was felt that mastery in the manly (manly by Europeanstandards) sports could be an effective reply to colonial exploitation. Thisveiled political motive lay at the root of the flourishing of Indian cricket inthe late nineteenth century. A display of talent in English games like cricketcould infuse in the Indians a sense of pride and purpose helping in articulatingthe desperation in the Indian soul.

Even children imbibed this feeling of superiority that came from victory incompetitions against the coloniser. A passage from the contemporary Bengalijournal Sakha is redolent with these sentiments. The editor recalls aconversation he had one evening with a "young friend" who reportedwith glee that he had successfully beaten the sahib in a game of"bat-ball". "I wondered", he writes, "what is so greatabout defeating the sahibs? Boys of all nations indulge in play. So what is itthat has marked out English boys as superior to their young counterpartsespecially the Bengalis?

"The answer lies in the fact that while the sahibs playthese manly games almost regularly, Bengalis are averse to any form of physicalexhaustion. Since the sahibs practice athletics, cricket etc their bodies arestrong and they acquire skills which cannot be matched by the natives. Manlysports are therefore an exclusive English preserve. It is precisely the act ofhaving defeated the overlord on his own ground that filled his young friend withsuch glee".

From this analysis it is evident that the notion that defeating the sahibs intheir own game was no mean achievement had already filtered down to young boysby the mid 1880s. Achievement in a manly sport like cricket, it was felt wouldcontribute significantly to combat the colonial stereotyping of the natives.Thus, as depicted in Lagaan , Indian cricket can only be meaningfully analysed byplacing its inception against the wider political canvas of the colonial state.

This is not to say that one can read a straightforward narrative of the rise,spread and flowering of anti-European sentiment into sports. Existinghistoriography of cricket in India reads very much like a simple narrative oftransposition - where the specificity of sport itself is lost and it can beeasily replaced with matters such as western education, or Indian entry into thecivil service and still make as much sense!

In other words, Indians did not play these games simply to be like theBritish and to then defeat them on their own turf. It was not simply an act ofmimicry which would invariably bring in its wake an allegation of not quite, notwhite. Its roots went much deeper -- to certain ideas of self-cultivation,manliness and self worth. Cricket was not played as a simple ladder to socialmobility. Rather the game became the mirror in which an Indian identity assesseditself, and in that sense these games can be seen as early breeding grounds ofnationalism.

Aside from the political character, another  significant aspect ofcricket as an activity, was that it came with none of the violence thatassociated such proto-nationalist ventures which led to their failure andsuppression. Sports is a sphere of competition rather than violence. This factmade early European sports in India a safe haven within which feelings ofself-worth, strength of character and so on could be articulated without thetension and fury that would accompany them in the "political" sphere.I would argue that these covert yet deeply politicised moorings of cricket gaveit a longevity and tenaciousness found missing from indigenous  sports.

It is not only on account of its worth as a game per se, but the politicalmessage that was so inextricably linked to it from the beginning that it hasendured on Indian soil. As Lagaan justifiably demonstrates, the history ofIndian cricket was always imbued with meanings whose roots went beyond thesporting arena. The birth narrative of cricket only makes sense when we takeinto account the colonial context, read in terms of power equations between thecolonizer and the colonized.

Lagaan is also a comment on the broader history of the game. Even ifunknowingly, it dates match fixing back to the late nineteenth century.

The wayLakha sabotages his side (his reasons are different of course) finds manyparallels in late nineteenth and early twentieth century discourses on the gameshistory. Further, the practise of sledging articulated beautifully in the filmhad already reached a sophisticated form under figures like W.G.Grace by the1890s. Yet the notions of virtue, fair play and sportsmanship displayed by theolder generation of English officers and the umpires reflects why cricketcontinues to be labelled as a gentleman's game even today despite all thesepersisting anomalies.