Content area
Full Text
ASUTOSH GOWARIKER. INDIA. 2001
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), which pits a scratch cricket team 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 residents of the tiny, dusty, drought-plagued hamlet of Champaner, egged on by a salt-of-the-earth hothead named Bhuvan (played by Bombay superstar Aamir 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 of cricket in just a few short months. At stake is the crushing tithe from their annual crop that the villagers are obliged to hand over every year. (It will be canceled if the locals win, trippled if they lose.) The Indians manage to internalize the spirit of this archetypal...