Journal of Sport & Social Issues

http://jss.sagepub.com The Double Temporality of Lagaan: Cultural Struggle and Postcolonialism

Grant Farred Journal of Sport and Social Issues 2004; 28; 93 DOI: 10.1177/0193723504264410 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/2/93

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JOURNAL 10.1177/0193723504264410 CULTURAL OF SPORT STRUGGLE & SOCIAL ISSUES AND ARTICLE POSTCOLONIALISM / May 2004

FOCUS

THE DOUBLE TEMPORALITY OF LAGAAN: CULTURAL STRUGGLE AND POSTCOLONIALISM

Grant Farred
Using postcolonial, psychoanalytic, sports, and cultural theory, this article explores the ways in which temporality constitutes a crucial element of the 2002 Bollywood movie, Lagaan. In critiquing this film about cricket, the article explicates how the political moment that is the Indian present functions as a problematic backdrop to Lagaan, which is set at the end of the 19th century. The film is read as text that inhabits, and articulates, a double temporality: Lagaan (tax in Hindi) is a movie that looks, simultaneously, to the colonized past and the postcolonial present. Cricket is posited as pivotal to the anticolonial project, and Lagaan demonstrates how the imagined Indian nation (which includes all of the Asian subcontinent) conflicts with the Indian and Pakistani nations that emerged after the Partition of the Raj. This article shows how these many ideological pressures operated in Indian society and affords gender a critical part in that analysis. Keywords: temporality; cricket; postcolonialism; colonialism; gender; India; India; the Raj; resistance; culture; Bollywood; Lagaan
To the Englishman abroad literature was his wife and sport his mistress. Books and games provided the twin consolations by which he came to terms with an alienand potentially hostileculture and climate. Ramchandra Guha, Corner of a Foreign Field (2002)

ithin the ambit of Anglophone colonial and postcolonial culture, cricket occupies a signal place. Cricket is, as the Trinidadianborn intellectual C. L. R. James (1983) reminds us, a game of high and difficult technique, if it were not, it could not carry the load of social response and implications which it carries (p. 43).1 The games difficulty, however, is not restricted to its technical demands. It is a sport stubbornly inaccessible, impenetrable to those who did not participate in the experience of British colonialism. Cricket terms such as googly, wides, off-stump, and long-on, to say nothing of cricket colloquialisms such as overs and maiden, constitute its own idiosyncratic vocabulary. Who, besides a cricket fan, understands that the googly is a ball that spins slowly in unpredictable ways, that a maiden is a six-ball over in which the score is not advanced by the batsmen though it may increase because of extras, unearned runs?
Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Volume 28, No. 2, May 2004, pp. 93-114 DOI: 10.1177/0193723504264410 2004 Sage Publications

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More than any other sport born in Britain, cricket epitomizes the complicated cultural bondthat locale where the history of colonization is ameliorated by the history of shared, often memorable and intensely combative, encounters on the cricket ovalbetween the colonizer and the colonized. Cricket historicizes the relationship between imperial England, on one hand, and the Caribbean, Australia, southern Africa (consisting of teams from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Kenya), and the Asian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the last only recently admitted to the fraternity of cricketing nations), on the other. Because of colonialism, cricket (a sport reputedly born in France and transformed by the English) became the cultural practice shared by the colonizer and the colonized alike; it is a love that has been shared, equally, by the English ruling classes and the subalterns in the Raj and the Caribbean. Cricket is a sport that arouses passions, excites nations, and moves spectators to poetry. Cricket is the repository of overburdened cultural links freighted with history, antagonism, and racism, all of which amount to a great deal of social response because it has long been the site where, during the imperial era, the colonized made culturally manifest their resistance to British rule. At the core of Beyond A Boundary (James, 1983) is the argument that cricket is the primary vehicle for Black Caribbean resistance to White colonial rule. They, the brilliant Trinidadian all-rounder Learie Constantine reminded his friend James, are no better than we (James, 1983, p. 112). Cricket was the cultural and political language of democracy transcribed onto the ovals of England, the Raj, and the Caribbean. Released in 2001, the Bollywood film Lagaan is suffused with an anticolonial spirit of Beyond A Boundary, framed by Constantines democratic verities, and brimming with the kind of hostility that Guha (2002) hints at in A Corner of a Foreign Fieldespecially because in the film the climate is often hostile to the natives.2 Cricket is to India, and the West Indies, Australia, and Pakistan, what football is to Brazil or Mexico or the Cameroon: It is the defining cultural practice, the Indian national obsession, the Indian national pathology, and contains within it the Indian poetic. Through charting the history of cricket in the subcontinent we can also map, for want of a better phrase, the genealogy of a national essencethe production of an Indian-ness or a Pakistani-ness. Which other sport could produce a richly, sadly paradoxical phrase, a pathos-ridden self-indictment such as snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? A phrase used all too frequently when the Indian cricket team appears to self-destruct when victory seems certain. Over the past century or so, cricket has become the very instantiation of the Indian national popular. It is this process, the cultural and ideological means by which cricket comes to dominate the Indian national popular, that this article critiques through the concept of double temporality. Lagaan is posited simultaneously as a critique of the anticolonial past and the postcolonial present. Through the 19th century event of the cricket match between the British cantonment and Champaners villagers, Lagaan stages

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an impacted episode of Indias anticolonial history that problematizes the politics of cultural struggle. How is it that cricket, a sport imposed by or, at best, imported from the British, obtained such cultural preeminence? How Indian is cricket? Why was it cricket, the sport of the British elite, and not, say, football, the pride of the metropoles working classes, that achieved such a celebrated status? What is the sustainability of cultural struggle? These inquiries acquire a special pertinence when it is framed by a double temporality, when the present is made to review the past as a moment that is imaginatively similar but ideologically disruptive, when the past irrupts across the cinematic surface of the present. As a South Asian movie produced in 2000/2001 but located more than a century earlier, Lagaan establishes a complicated dialogic between the discourse of the retrospectivethe colonized pastand that of the prospective the imagined postcolonial future, between the moment of cultural reception and the locus of historical enunciation. The complicated relationship between these temporalities, however much this dialogic sometimes privileges the former temporality over the latter, renders Lagaan a text of cultural mourning in the Freudian sense. Freud (1957) defined loss as not only the reaction to the loss of a loved person but also to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of [a loved] one, such as ones country, liberty, an ideal, and so on (p. 243). The event of the past is experienced by the present as a political loss, ironic because the film is set in the glory days of the British Raj, when the subcontinent was colonized, and an irretrievable model of the idealized Indian polis. Why mourn the loss of the Empire? Does such a social response not constitute, as Freud (1957) suggested, a grave departure from the normal attitude to (postcolonial) life? (p. 243). The Raj is mourned, this article argues, because Lagaan constitutes an Indian, rather than an Indian, movie. The Lagaan imaginary designates the Raj, its locus of enunciation (the cinematic moment of and from which it ideologically speaks), as a singular, undivided, pre-Partition geopolitical unit; Lagaan is produced for a postcolonial (Indian) nation (and global, diasporic audience) in a putatively postnational moment. Does Lagaan constitute a posterior nostalgia, a nostalgia for a sociopolitical formation that did not exist? A peculiarly prospective, postcolonial desire for the (culturally produced) political unity of the colonized past?3 A posterior nostalgia that can only be articulated through the complex cultural roots that cricket has in Indian society? By implicitly critiquing contemporary postcolonial failure as much as it celebrates unexpected, historic cultural triumphs, the film demands an engagement with the nation as psychological and cultural construct. Crucial to the representation of anticoloniality, and absent from texts such as Beyond A Boundary (James, 1983) and Corner of a Foreign Field (Guha, 2002), is the pivotal role Lagaan assigns womencolonizer and colonized alike, though they are too often set in conflict over the heroic man. The films two main female protagonists perform a vital pedagogical role

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offering a cultural education, the White woman teaching the villagers the British game, an intervention that stands as an ideological betrayal of the colonial enterprise by one of its ownand an anticipatory, mediating function in the filmdeploying the Bollywood romance genre as a trope for and of national imaging. The two women, the loyal village girl Gauri, who is politically astute and overly domesticated, and the English woman Elizabeth, who is a teacher of cricket and student of Indian culture, achieve a centrality in the movie not afforded them in crickets literary canon; the womens centrality is, however, complicated by the fact that they are (in varying ways) constrained by patriarchal authority and the triangulation of desire that pivots on the films young hero, Bhuvan, played by Aamir Khan, and pits Gauri against Elizabeth, the brown woman against her White counterpart. Bollywoods conventions and traditions enable the film to explore anticolonial resistance and incipient nationalism through the cinematic prism of romance, sentimentality, and repressed sexual desire. As a palimpsestic document of resistance, layered as the text is with betrayal, desire partially expressed and linguistically suppressed, and a protonationalist political imaginary, Lagaan is true, at least in terms of the expectations of sentimental romance and grandiose resolution, to the ethos of Bollywood.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIAN CRICKET

Cricket is a very humanizing game. It appeals to the emotions of local patriotism and pride. It is eminently unselfish; the love of it never leaves us, and binds all brethren together, whatever their politics and rank may be. Andrew Lang (1987)

Set in a subsistence farming community in the Rajs Central Province, the community of Champaner finds its existence threatened by natural disaster (drought) and colonial exploitation (the tax, lagaan, from which the movie takes its title). Already chafing under the bit of economic depravation, the Champaner situation worsens immeasurably when Captain Russell decides to impose a double lagaan because of the previous years unpaid taxes when the villagers visit the cantonment asking for relief. (In addition to its textual meaning, lagaan also has an etymological one that adds depth and complexity to its political usage in the film. Lagaan also means rent payable or accruing on land (McGregor, 1993, p. 879). The Champaner peasants are doing little more than holding the land in trust, which leaves the community vulnerable to punishment by the owners, the Raj, or its comprador administrators, when they are incapable of paying the rent on time. The semifeudal structure of property rights was such that the peasants land ownership was always in jeopardy. In addition to the threat of taxes accruing to the peasants, such was the system of penury that at about the same historical moment that the Champaner community was resisting colonialism through cricket, many individuals and indeed entire

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communities were so indebted because of lagaan that they became vulnerable to the promises of indentured labor in the Caribbean, parts of Africa, and Asia. Although the threat of indenture does not hang over Champaner, it functions as a crucial economic and political force in the late-19th-century Raj. Rendered impotent by Russells decree, the impetuous Bhuvan produces the movies defining event by accepting the captains challenge: a cricket match between the cantonment, those well schooled in the game, and Champaner, the village novices. Through this, and other such defiant moments, Bhuvan becomes the very incarnation of Indian resistance: He symbolizes a Gandhian India, the subcontinent united. He is the heroic young villager grown impatient with the injustices of colonial rule, disaffected with the complicity of the colonized, and tired of economic hardship. Bhuvans anticolonial impulses propel the epic conflict: the culturally advantaged colonizer against the colonized compelled into learning the masters game when the fate of the subaltern is on the line. The chances of a Champaner victory are negligible, given the cultural inequities; however, Lagaan suggests that it is only by contesting colonialism on its most sacred cultural terrain that a Central Province (temporarily) free from economic tyranny can be imagined. Bhuvans intention is not to achieve postcoloniality, though he is figured in the film as an incipient nationalist, but to simply obtain economic respite. Such is the symbolism written intoand onto the cricket contest, however, that the very future (and failure) of the Raj can be said to depend on its outcome. With the final 80 min of an almost 4-hr movie dedicated to the cricket match between the villagers of Champaner and the adjoining British cantonment, Lagaan dramatizes the historic role cricket plays in developing and expressing a subaltern Indian consciousness: The film metaphorizes the role this difficult game played in producing a nascent Indian sense of national identity through cultural conflict in the late 19th century. Lagaan is located in the moment of the British Raj, imbued with a pre-Partition sensibility so it imagines a singular India that has no postcolonial corollary. (At the moment of Partition, the Raj was divided into secular, predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.) In pitting the cultural familiarity of the English colonizers (with cricket) against the desperation and navet of the colonized, Lagaan implicitly pays tribute to the history of cricket in the Asian subcontinent. Instead of paying triple lagaan, an unfair tax capriciously levied by Capt. Andrew Russell of the British cantonment, the film allows for the opportunity to honor the earliest generation of Indian cricketers; those who learned from and learned to beat the colonialists at the game they (would come to) love so much. Lagaan locates itself within the originary moment: the late 19th century, that era when Indian cricket was born and in which its first accomplishments were recorded. Official Indian cricket history begins with the 1932 Test (international match) against England at Lords, the spiritual home of the game. Lagaan, however, attends to the games formative years. It is set at the end of

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the 19th century and imagines the birth of the game in the Indian outpost of the Central Province, as opposed to its colonial headquarters, the Presidency of Bombay, as is commonly claimed in Indian cricketing history to be the games subcontinental home.4 Moreover, representing a moment when the Indian prince, an arch-loyalist from western India, Ranjitsinhji was mesmerizing the English with his eloquent batting, Lagaan evokes his contemporarybut a cricketer by only rarely deemed Ranjis equal Palwankar Baloo.5 In historical terms, Baloo (without question Indias first great slow bowler)6 is the cultural model for Lagaans Kachra (a Dalit, Untouchable), who completes, because of his capacity to spin the ball, Champaners rag-tag team of village cricketers.7 If Baloo is the historical referent, then, in terms of physical deformity, Lagaans Kachra recalls a more recent Indian cricketer, the great 1970s Indian spin bowler, Chandrasekhar, another player with an arm withered by polio who could make the ball do extraordinary things with his deficient limb. Very similar to (the physically impaired) Kachra, whose main bowling partner is a Sikh, the colonial army veteran, Devan, so Chandrasekhars chief bowling accomplice was another turbaned player, Bishen Bedi, spin bowler extraordinaire and captain of India in the 1970s. Since the days of Daloo and Ranjitsinhji, India has produced a superb array of cricketers, a roll call that would include the Little Master, Sunny Gavaskar, an opening batsmen who accumulated runs similar to the way in which Brazils Ronaldo treasures goals and the elegant Parsi wicketkeeperbatsman Farokh Engineer; a hallowed place is also reserved for the World Cup winning all-rounder and captain, Kapil Dev. Shadowing them all, however, is the contemporary genius, the universally loved Sachin Tendulkar, a batting maestro and the Indian icon to whom Lagaans Aamir Khan refers analogously. In an interview conducted in 2002, Khan remarked in tones that at once recall the heroic Bhuvan and invoke the massively venerated Tendulkar: Whatever I do, I do with passion. I am like Sachin Tendulkar who goes out to play with the idea of making every inning a memorable one for the spectators. I try and do my movies in the same spirit (Mukherjee). Making like Sachin, a native Bombayite possessed of his own movie-star good looks, is the gold standard for Indians in every cultural walk of life. Khans Tendulkar analogy demonstrates the cultural ascendancy of cricket in Indian life. Until very recently, aided by the deregulation of Indian television just over a decade ago, with the media saturation, the famous victory by Kapil Devs team in the 1983 World Cup, and the cinematic, quasi-theological promise of the Tendulkar phenomenon,8 cricket was culturally secondary to Bollywood. Now, in the era of Sachin, cricket functions as the pivot on which every cultural metaphor and all comparisons turn.

THE POLITICS OF DOUBLE TEMPORALITY

There is yet another road in the road, another chance for migration. Mahmoud Darwish, Another Road in the Road (2003)

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As a movie, Lagaan signifies a double temporality; or it signifies aporetically in the sense that articulates itself through and across the temporal divides that mark its staging and its reception. The film marks that gap between crickets origins (the colonized past) and its contemporary import (the postcolonial present), and it bridges these two political moments, collapsing Indian cultural history into a fragile cinematic singularity; even as it ostensibly trains its lens determinedly on the last years of the 19th century it operates from a very different moment of historical production. The doubling of temporalities means that the film invariably speaks two historical languages, always implicitly addressing two epochs either the past that it is re-creating or the present that it figures beyond its historical scope but to which it addresses its concerns. Clearly the doubling of temporalities also signals the splitting of the historical lens that reflects the history of (national) division of the Raj. Out of this division, two countries, India and Pakistan, emerge; the collapse of the Raj produces political entities very different from that which the Champaner villagers envisaged in their struggle. Lagaans double temporality produces, through political struggle, a post-Raj polis: out of the singular Raj a religiously divided subcontinent is produced, a division that is both more than and less than its constituent parts. In Lagaan, division is figured and experienced as a Freudian loss: The mourned abstraction, India, the country, liberty and ideal that it implicitly represents to the cricketers, is never fully realized and is, for this reason, elevatednot reducedas a loved object. The splitting of India marks a brutal halving, the temporality before, the time when Champaner housed the Other (Indian) who had no Pakistani or Indian Other. Lagaan is a nostalgically critical response to the segregation of Champaner into Muslim and Hindu where, previously, there was only an incipiently imagined postcolonial India. India and Pakistan mark a postcolonial advance over India; however, it also is not the singularity imagined by the Hindu Bhuvan or the Muslim Ismayeel when they are batting together against the cantonment. Lagaan reproduces, in Rushdies acerbic terms, nothing so much as Raj nostalgia, the novelists description of Indias propensity to unreflectively mourn its colonial, and insufficiently forgotten, past. The doubling of temporality results in the (often violent) division into an irreconcilable religious and national identity. Ultimately, cricket is the only sociopolitical practice that binds India and Pakistan, Hindu and Muslim. The passion learned on the scorched earth of the Central Province will later spill over, with disastrous consequences, on the ovals of Calcutta and Lahore; the unity achieved through cultural struggle will dissipate in IndiaPakistan matches in Madras and Karachi, sometimes into violence in the post-Partition era. It is for this reason that Lagaan is so burdened by nostalgia, by a desire to return that Other temporality: The film represents the staging of the past historical event as an ideological riposte to the postcolonial future. In this film, the past figures as an instructive event. Borne out of historical contingency and necessity, the villagers of

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Champaner endeavor to produce a new kind of politics by unlearninga process that requires partially rejecting, reluctantly shucking offthe praxis of the present. Very similar to how the Subaltern Studies scholars of the 1970s and 1980s turned to the Indian past to recover a radical tradition to critique the violences and failures of the postcolonial Congress Party, so Lagaan recovers the origins of cricket to posit the possibility, not only of an India, but of an India that might function according to different ideological preceptsthe culturally produced religious tolerance that comes to dominate Champaner in the moment of historical crisis. Lagaan offers itself, in Darwishs (2003) terms, as another road that India can now take that is, however, not the path of India. Lagaan represents not only a politics of and for tolerance, though it certainly does that, but an implicit dissatisfaction with fin de siecle India. In this film, India stands as a strong critique of India. It is a nostalgia for the past that is simultaneously advocating for a differentpast like, Champaner-likepresent. At the ideological core of Lagaan, there is this mournful element. The film offers the political accomplishment of the past, that which the film mourns so spectacularly as a conceptual loss, as a nostalgic form of making a new secular politics in the present. In the films idyllic vision, the path to Indias future (not Pakistans, however) can be glimpsed in the multireligious, massively tolerant, and ostensibly ecumenical Champaner. It is, moreover, through, because, and out of cultural struggle, out of cricket, the sport of the colonizer, the cause of the loss of gilli-danda,9 that Lagaans India can be produced. In the Lagaan imaginary, India comes to cricket not through choice or idle mimicry but through historical and cultural necessity. Lagaan emerges out of the vulnerable psychic space created by the threat to subaltern existence; the aporia is the product of an ideological and economic crisis. As important, there is also a growing discontent with the various articulations of imperial rule. This ranges from the intense dislike for lagaan to equal dislike for the physical punishment meted out against subalterns at the cantonment by Russell; from the barely latent dissatisfaction with the impotence of Champaners representative to the Crown, Raja Puran Singh, the nominal chief of the Central Province who cannot intervene on behalf of his villagers, who cannot stay or oppose Russells autocratic and unjust decrees to a chafing against Indian disenfranchisement. The film dramatizes the narrative disruption in thinking subaltern politics in colonial India. Lagaan demonstrates how the violence of colonialism constitutes the narrow but profound gap that separates the 19th-century Indian subaltern from the managerial Indian elite. Puran Singh may be colonized, however, his subjection is of a different order from that of Bhuvan and the Champaner villagers. Lagaan reveals how stratified Indian life was during the Raj. Recognizing this intra-Indian inequity, Lagaan develops it ironically by transferring subaltern agency from the comprador class to the rural peasants. Puran Singhs fate, when the cricket match and its terms have been decided on, depends not on his access to the inner sanctum of the cantonment but on

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the success of the culturally unschooled villagers; in the colonial calculus, the Rajahs subject as less his, Lagaan makes clear, than Russells. Similar to Gauri and Bhuvan, Puran Singh is vulnerable to the dictates of colonial rule. Through that democratizing maneuver, Lagaan temporarily annuls the Rajahs local authority, renders him an indistinct (his wealthy apparel apart) subaltern and privileges the newly acquired skill of the unlettered peasants turned cricketers. Lagaan maps the inverse relationship of spatial proximity and power inequalities between Champaner and the British cantonment. The distance between these two antagonistic locales is in direct disproportion to the inequities of colonialism that separates the peasants of drought-stricken village from the well-endowed barracks that houses Capt. Andrew Russell and his occupying force. The shrubby, parched, starkness of this landscape, the modern-day state of Gujurat, functions as a cinematic metaphor for the condition of the Champaner peasants. The space between the two groups, with the Rajahs quarters largely out of sight (the colonial overseer intent on protecting his own interests and therefore only available in moments of crisis or when his self-interest is threatened) functions as a territorial inscription: Bounded and bonded to the land, the peasants future is figured visually as a portentous lack of possibility. It is a parcel of land where the monsoons tease but do not fall, a village abandoned by nature but still held economically accountable by colonialist fiat. These are the damnes de la terre, the wretched of the colonial South Asian earth who are asked to produce that which not only do they not have but that which they can never hope to have. It is the perpetual threat of violence, emasculation, poverty, and indenturedness into perpetuity that compels Lagaan s incidental anticolonial hero Bhuvan to take up the dastardly Captain Russell challenge: triple lagaantriple the tax levied on the peasant farmers for their own protectionor no lagaan for 3 years. What do the villagers of Champaner have to lose but their very lives? Because they cannot pay lagaan, how could they possibly pay triple lagaan? For that reason alone, why not take the Rousseauean bet? If, as Rousseau (1994) claimed in the opening lines of The Social Contract, Man is born free but is everywhere in chains, why not gamble on a cricket game for liberty because the villagers have nothing to lose but their lagaan? However, as much as the Champaner peasants exhibit an acute sense of hopelessness, struggling against their destiny (that is nothing but destitution), having been abandoned by their Rajah, left to face the Empires resident forces on their own, Bhuvans decision is neither a foolhardy nor an unconsidered one. As he says to his mother in one of the movies few subdued scenes, I did not accept out of bravado but because I had no choice. In that iteration, nothing is as evident as the villagers sense of ontological exhaustionpsychic and physical fatigue produced by continually battling unbeatable historical odds. Bhuvans perceived lack of choice is precisely what provides the movies dramatic impetus. To accept, out of bravado or not, the choice that Bhuvan makes has serious consequences. (And, make no mistake, there is

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no small amount of disingenuity in Bhuvans denial because Lagaan is propelled in no small measure by his bravado and machismo, especially in those scenes where he and Russell are pitted mano-a-mano.) Not only for him and his village but for everyoneall those who in any way fall under the auspices of Russells cantonment. It is not only the peasants of Champaner who are angry at Bhuvan for his hardheadedness; however, the entire Central Province as we see in the scene when Champaners angry neighbors come in search of Bhuvan. In this encounter, when the men from the other parts of the Province descend on Champaner in search of the reckless cricketer, Bhuvan is depicted as more vulnerable, to the wrath of his (extended) community, than even before the authority of the Crown. This is because as much as the threat of triple lagaan means nothing to the provinces droughtstricken, economically beleaguered villagers, it means everything to them: To be indebted for one years single lagaan is a daunting enough prospect, an economic hole from which they will struggle long and hard to dig themselves out ofthe multiplication of that debt renders them financially bankrupt for the rest of their lives. The threat of triple lagaan operates on at least two levels: the material and, more important, the psychic, where debt times 3 constitutes a traumatic violence. Triple lagaan derives its disciplinary power from contradictory sources that complement each other. The prospect of paying a tax three times, when they already cannot scrounge together enough to pay it once, is at once unimaginable and all too concrete. The triple tax is considerably beyond their economic means and certainly far outside of their psychic conception. How could they possibly pay it? the Champaner peasants keep asking Bhuvan. They make this inquiry repeatedly, not because they expect an answer from him but because the linguistic interrogative is the only means through which they can give the economically unimaginable psychosocial substance. How can they pay that which they cannot conceive of rhetorically? The threat of taxation constitutes the language of historic trauma for the subalterns, and the Indian elite, of the Central Province. Inconceivability and a violent materiality conjoin in the Champaner villagers interrogative attack on Bhuvan. His bravado not only reminds them of their poverty but also brings starkly into view their lack of prospect as Bhuvans acceptance, paradoxically, renders conceivable debt preferable to unimaginable, unpayable, infinite future liability. It is not so much that Bhuvan has made their debt inexorably worse, but that he has, in a sharp historical irony, transformed their conceivable debt into a better option: Single lagaan is always better than triple lagaan. Through his resistance, Bhuvan created the illusion of choice: The Champaner villagers could choose between single or triple lagaan, insolvency for a sustained period or penury for life. There lurks, beneath the cinematic text, the deeper historical fear of the era that the debt incurred through unpaid taxes will turn into indenture, that the impoverished bodies of Champaner will find themselves, because of lagaan, not doing cultural battle on the cricket field but transported from the fictitious Central

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Province into a very different kind of circulation: the Kala Pani, the dreaded voyage over dark waters into the conceptually unknown, so markedly different from encountering and participating in cricket as an unknown cultural activity. Because of lagaan, these Indian bodies could become part of a very different kind of economic calculus; they could become indentured laborers in the cane fields of Trinidad or South Africa where there will be the cruel illusion of a debt that can, figuratively but not literally, be paid. In place of the trauma of the Kala Pani deracination, Lagaan inserts India violently into popular cultural history. Lagaan stands as the lapsarian event, the moment that the Raj peasantry loses its cultural innocence and obtains a critical knowledge of the functionings of colonialism; and, in that self-same process, they acquire a capacity to resist imperial rule, however contingently and fortuitously the occasion of the cricket match might be; it is through cultural conflict that Champaner acquires an anticolonial politics. Lagaan signifies that instance through which the Indian peasantry, doubly oppressed by the indigenous landlords and the British colonizers, enters modernity, that moment when the primitive/rural is necessarily abandoned to participatefor the most part, unwillinglyin the cultural economy of the urban cantonmenta proxy for the metropolitan site that is the colonial enterprise. The Champaner villagers learn cricket under the threat of systemic violence (and possible death): under the Foucauldian threat of being both culturally disciplinedof Russell putting Bhuvan in his rightful, subservient placeand economically punishedof having to pay triple lagaan when an iota of that amount is beyond the means of the entire province. It is because of their entre into cricket that the villagers come to adopt a new game and to gradually abandon tradition sports such as gilli-dandathe sport to which the ebullient Bhuvan dismissively compares cricket. The price of modernity is, implicitly in Lagaan, the loss of tradition as much as its acquisition marks the entrance into a larger anticolonial culture. Bhuvans invocation of the gilli-danda is resonant here because competing in cricket marks a complicated cultural transition: the transmutation, or the liquidation, of one game (the familiar, traditional native practice) into another (the imperial unfamiliar on which the socioeconomic fate of all native life rests). In the conflict between colonizer and colonized, cricket represents, alternately, a cultural elevation and a cultural acquisition. For the colonialist Captain Russell, Champaners initiation into cricket signifies as upward cultural mobility: from the primitive to the civilized. For the Champaner villagers, courtesy of Elizabeth Russell, learning cricket stands as an anticolonial cultural education: She teaches them the game initially because of her stereotypically British belief in fair play, a cultural convention her brother is knowingly violating. Moreover, Elizabeth knows that without her instruction the villagers have no chance of competing against the cantonment. Champaners learning the game marks an epistemic break in colonial history: The game can only be played by those who know it, those who, in Jamess (1983) terms, understand its difficulties and learn its techniques. Elizabeths determination to play by the (unspoken) rules of

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cricket is girded by a complex amalgam of desire and a sense of justice. (Elizabeth recalls, in both instances, other English heroines in fiction and history. In terms of her desire for the Other, she resembles Adela Quested of E. M. Forsters [1980] A Passage to India, the English woman who is attracted to Dr. Aziz;10 in terms of her commitment to fair play and taking the side of the colonized against her own, she echoes the kind of struggle waged by Emily Hobhouse against British injustice and ill treatment of its enemies during the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War. Hobhouse campaigned on behalf of the Boers, especially the women and children left destitute by the British armys scorch-earth policy, and their right to proper treatment and protection from the red-coated armys tactics of destroying homesteads and crops.) The striking Elizabeth, unlike the plain Adela Quested, is attracted to Bhuvan and, as important, recognizes that the consequence of a Champaner defeat would be more devastating than Bhuvan can imagine. Cricket may be, for him, a stupid game; however, the effects of the contest will be felt in all of Central Province long after the final ball has been bowled. The encounters between Bhuvan and Elizabeth are riddled with ambivalence: Is he really so oblivious to her interest or is he simply ignoring it? More cynically viewed, is he aware of it and playing the figure of the trickster, performing obliviousness so that he can exploit her attraction, entangled as it is with her Hobhousian political sensibility, for the cultural knowledge he can extract from her? Is he using Elizabeth to save Champaner? Faced with a dire threat, the match against the cantonment compels Lagaan into an anatomical examination of the Raj and the construction of unity out of several differences. Lagaan represents an imagining of how Hindus, Muslims, Dalits, and Sikhs can cooperate to defeat the Raj by joining together in a single cricket team. The film speculates the colonized of the Raj into an ethnic and religious coherence through the village of Champaner, a metaphor for Indian singularity; moreover, Lagaan posits an Indian unity that resonates across more than a century and addresses itselfas the retrospectively idealized imaginary national communityto ethnically driven, religiously tense and divided, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) India 2001. Bhuvans is, conceptually, more Gandhis team than Nehrus or, more assuredly, Atal Bahari Vajpayees. Lagaan conceives of India in its Raj instantiation, pre-Partition, pre-Pakistan, wholly democratic and anticaste. Through its double temporality, the movie offers a salient commentary on contemporary India because the movie is set in Gujurat, the very province that witnessed Muslim-Hindu tension and bloody violence in the same year as the films release. The village of Champaner is, more than a century later, an ideal unrealized by postcolonial India, a national community where the retrospective time of Bhuvans team represents a historic unity. The film represents a metaphoric longing for the cultural victory and ethnic unity that was achieved in the 19th century that doubles as an indictment of how that dream was sacrificed by the machinations of the ethnically overdetermined, ostensibly secularist postcolonial Indian state.

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Cricket serves as the screen memory, to invoke one of Freuds concepts, where the national pathologyand barely articulable, sometimes speakable only as Raj nostalgiais confronted and cinematically resolved; cricket is where the national fantasy, or, the fantasy of the ideal nation, can be imagined, recuperated, and lived as Bollywood reality; Bollywood gives cinematic substance, form, and historical context to the dream of the nation that is not, the nation amputated into dual nations, the nation split into the double temporality of Hindu/secular India and Muslim Pakistan; the historical, postcolonial time of Hindu India is rendered distinct from Muslim Pakistan by religion, even if customs, values, traditions and the historical encounter of the Raj is shared. Instead of this, Lagaan offers dream displacement [emphasis in original] . . . the psychical intensity, significance or emotional nature of the thoughts become transposed in sensory vividness (Freud, 2001, p. 18). The dream displaces Indian and Pakistan with a sensory vividness, a term that aptly describes the cinematic spectacularity of Bollywood productions. Lagaan also serves as the cultural locale of dream displacement because it bears the weight of the psychical intensity and emotional nature that characterizes the transposition of social and ideological expectation from one historical moment to another. The political desires for the nation that was not, that did not come into being, are displaced onto the cinematic cricket field. The dream of singularity is only recoverable through the dream work of the cinema, a dream only Bollywood has the capacityand, arguably, the willto make come true. If the game of cricket constitutes a dream language of and for the nation, a syntax of dream elements (Hindu-Muslim cooperation, singularity; defeating the feringhees, or Whites, at the their own game), then the cricket field becomes the cultural site where dream work can construct, through nostalgia, the longed for post-Raj, non-Partition national formation. In this way, the fantasy, the deliriousness of the sporting event (best exemplified in the deliriousness that overwhelms the Champaner team and their supporters at the moment of triumph over the cantonment), serves as a direct link to the political unconsciousness of the nation; the longed-for nation, in its past-perfect and future-perfect formations, is only accessible, articulable, in the moment of deliriousness, when the mundane (drought, indebtedness, the fear of indenture, and the fear of triple lagaan) is suspended by the fantastical reality of (temporary) victory. The secondary elaboration of dream work, in this psychoanalyticcultural conception, is that it makes possible the reading of the national (pathology and fantasy) through sport, which is itself only available as a critical screen because of Bollywoods production of Lagaan.11

WOMEN WHO KNOW THEIR PLACE, WOMEN WHO DONT

He wanted somethingwanted the thing she had always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1977)

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One of the salient features of Lagaan is the crucial role it assigns the white womanthe feringheein the project resisting colonial injustice. Lagaan interpellates Elizabeth into the Bollywood convention of the sentimental romance by triangulating the desire but singularizing her function. Bhuvan forms the pivot of this (primary) love triangle with Elizabeth and Gauri who perform a balancing act between their different cultural traditions to win his affections. The main distinction between the English woman and the Indian one is their capacity for mobility. Unlike the culturally embedded Gauri, Elizabeths role is textured by the complicated relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. The complexity of Elizabeths position is revealed in her multiple functions. She is cultural translator, instructor, organizer, and benefactor. She does more than teach Bhuvan and his team the game. It is because of her that Ismayeel, who is opposed to Bhuvans scheme for a considerable time, joins the team. Seeing Elizabeth coach the still fairly hopeless Champaner villagers, Ismayeel feels compelledby history, culture, and a sense of decencyto throw in his lot with Bhuvan. It is the presence, the utter shock of her cultural, racial, and ideological betrayal of the cantonment, and the commitment of the feringhee woman that shames Ismayeel into regional (or national) community, that shames them into aligning themselves with Bhuvans cause. The Muslim, later a key player for the Champaner team, is morally compelled to the cause of his own village because a White woman, the purest instantiation of the enemy, is willing to risk ostracization for the underdog subalterns. Elizabeth inadvertently imposes subaltern unity merely through her presence; a presence, of course, that is originally motivated by a deep sense of justice but is soon overwrought and dominated by her love for Bhuvan. Her assistance, soon after she encounters and befriends Bhuvan, is never motivated solely by her cultural philanthropy, teaching them the game and bringing them a real cricket ball, but byto cast it in Wildean termsher love that cannot, and will not (at least not in the mutually intelligible Hindi), speak its name. In a maudlin, melancholy scene, she says I am falling in love with you, Bhuvan, an overdetermined articulation because he cannotor, will not understand her because of his underdeveloped English and because of her reluctance to commit herself publicly in Hindi. Unlike Virginia Woolf s heroine, Bhuvan does not want Elizabeth to tell him that she loved him. It is through her declaration that she simultaneously uncovers herself emotionallyimplicitly, and explicitly, showing her love for Bhuvanand betrays herself. Her sense of what is possible is shown, in that melodramatic encounter, to be limited to the realm of the cultural and the precipitously anticolonial. She believes in the possibility of the village beating the cantonment; however, her love for Bhuvan is, similar to all her sexual desires, repressed to her intensely private psychic imaginary. Elizabeth will not openly admit, even though Gauri (more than Bhuvan) especially is aware of this xenotropic attraction, the depth of the her affection for him. (Gauris intuitive grasp of Elizabeths attraction for Bhuvan constitutes one of the films more stereotypical moments: Female psychology is such that the

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women understand each other, at least each others desire for the same man, despite the language barrier. Bhuvan might or might not understand what Elizabeth is saying; however, Gauris sexual antennae are honed to the point where she has an almost visceral grasp of Elizabeths desires.) Elizabeths love can find no public utteranceexcept in her language, English, where theytellinglyshare no common vocabulary. Elizabeths betrayal of herself (in this linguistic maneuver where she, at once, reveals and conceals her love) is full of striking contradictions. She is willing to incur the wrath of her own community; however, she will not declare her love for Bhuvan. She is prepared to ignore her brothers pleas for fealty to the Crown and, in return, expects and is shown little loyalty by the people of Champaner; her loyalty to Champaner and Bhuvan is evident in the latenight scene where it is she who reveals Lakha, who is not so secretly in love with Gauri and for this reason constructs Bhuvan as his rival, a love that is not requited, as Judas figure. Elizabeth comes to Champaner to tell Bhuvan that Lakhas poor fielding performance on the first day of the match is part of a treacherous plot to win Gauris loveLakhas plot is hatched in consultation with Russell, explaining his treachery all too easily. All this, of course, after Elizabeth herself had been betrayed to Captain Russell by Lakha who reported her help to Bhuvans untutored cricketers. Elizabeths loyalty contrasts not only with subaltern disloyalty but foregrounds another, overlapping, secondary, love triangle, which again locates Bhuvan at its center, Lakha sabotaged the Champaner cause because he wanted to win Gauri away from Bhuvan, and the only way he believed himself capable of doing that was through ensuring the villages loss to the cantonment. Amid the emotional clamor of the Champaner cultural struggle, Elizabeths desires are lostor, sublimatedin the Freudian sense that unacceptable desires are sublimated into art, where cricket constitutes an art form. However, no matter her invaluable cultural assistance and integration via her role as cricket coach, Elizabeth occupies a split locale within the films sociopolitical cartography. She is simultaneously located at the core of their resistance and permanently outside of the community of Champaner. Through her role as coach, Elizabeth suggests a mutual dependence between the (exceptional, xenotropic) colonizer and the culturally unschooled colonized. Without the instruction of the colonizer, the Champaner side would have had no chance of defeating Andrew Russells team. Without Elizabeth, Bhuvans challenge would have been foolhardy, the villagers would have failed in their efforts to avoid triple lagaan, and they would have suffered economic hardshipor, worse, indentureship. Without Elizabeth, the colonizer turned cultural renegade by her sense of fair play and love, Champaner faced socioeconomic extinction. Without the feringhee Bhuvan, more than his neighbors and friends, would have recognized, too late and at too high a price, that cricket is not a stupid game. It is telling that the punitive possibilities of Russells challenge are not lost on Gauri, however oblivious Bhuvan may be.

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Because of the ways in which the fate of the cricket game, and the metonymic fate of the British empire, rests on a womans intervention, assistance, and unrequited love, Lagaan locates women as not simply incidental or ornamental characters. Instead, it is the women who elucidate, in a way that men such as Bhuvan do not, how sport is a political confrontation that is not only conducted by, for, and through menor patriarchal discoursebut is, in fact, a cultural conflict in which women perform a central, even definitive function. The Champaner-cantonment game may be played by Brown and White men; however, its outcome was significantly influenced a priori by a White woman who can imagine herself subalternized into a rural, incipient Indianness. Although Elizabeth and Gauri are not cultural equals, they are wellmatched foes in the game of romance. Unlike the emotionally oblivious Bhuvan (how can he not know of Elizabeths attraction to him? Is he really so oblivious? Is he playing erotic games not only with Elizabeth but also with Gauri? Why else would it take him three quarters of the movie to respond to Gauris sketch of her ideal Champaner man?), Gauri recognizes almost immediately that she and Elizabeth are competing for Bhuvans affections. Soon after Gauri is alerted to her rivals intentions, the Englishwoman finds her attempts to coach the Champaner men repeatedly interrupted by the village girl. Gauris determination to hang onto her childhood sweetheart, a relationship established early in the movie, produces a few comic moments because Gauri regularly disrupts the teams practices with that most domestic of strategiesshe claims that the players have to be fed just as Elizabeth is explaining a key tactic or technique to them. Because of Gauris vigilance, Elizabeth finds her time with Bhuvan restricted and the xenotropic relationship can only be sustained through displaced, imagined consumation. Counterposing a Champaner scene with a cantonment one, Elizabeth first imagines herself dancing with Bhuvan at an officers ball and then, clad in Indian garb complete with doti, succumbs to her Indian paramour in his modest village hut. Both of these scenes are overburdened by ideological impossibility. The officers club is off limits to Bhuvan, much like Elizabeth is precluded from integration into Champaner life beyond preparation for the cricket match. Coaching cricket is the limit of Elizabeths erotic horizons. She can help the village, but there is no place for her in village life; certainly none as a village wife. Elizabeths outsiderness is cruelly confirmed at the triumphant end of the match when, rushing to congratulate Bhuvan and share in the victory she helped achieve, Bhuvan and Gauri share, in a typically Bollywood maneuver, a chaste, but sufficiently suggestive embrace. Elizabeth can do nothing but turn and head into cultural and romantic isolation. Shunned now, it is inferred, by her brother and his fellow officers for her betrayal, she is excluded from the cantonments clubby social life; she is also affordedas the camera makes poignantly clearno place in the Champaner celebration. The empire, as the truism goes, might have fallen because of the White woman, but Elizabeth finds no reward, only double alienation.

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Elizabeths simultaneous victory and defeat, in a single telling instant unselfconsciously realizing her role in the Champaner triumph and processing the unspeakability of her romantic loss to Gauri, demonstrates the extent to which Lagaan functions as a national allegory for 21st-century consumption. Through Elizabeths metaphoric expulsion from the historic Champaner win, the (nascent) postcolonial nation is restored to purity. The Hindu hero is safely in the arms of the young Hindu woman. Paradoxically, even the disloyal Lakha can be redeemed into the nation, forgiven his potentially community-threatening transgressions, but the loyal Elizabeth must be symbolically denied inclusion at the moment of triumph. Xenotropic desires, never cast as promiscuous, given only marginal, untranslatable latitude because Bhuvan and Elizabeth speak different emotional languages even as they forge a common cultural discourse out of cricket and Hindi, are banished when the implicit, repressed romance has served its instrumentalist purpose. Elizabeths exclusion at the critical, victorious political moment signals a dual subaltern triumph. In the masculinist realm of cultural contestation, the cantonment has been beaten, quite literally, at their own game. In the Bollywood domain of romance, racial order has been re-established; the films sexual borders, permeable just moments earlier because of cultural collaboration, have been unceremoniously sealed the instant cultural victory is secured. The feringhee has taught the subaltern how to defeat the master; the White woman has catalyzed a religiously and politically disparate group into unity and coached them to triumph. Her sexual desires, however, have to be sublimated, displaced to, if not resolved in the Freudian imaginary. Elizabeth can only be erotically active in that dimension of human consciousness where desire is articulated as day dreaming, the unfulfillable desire that can be visualized if not realized. Gauri, the epitome of the Indian domestic, the woman whose horizons are restricted by geography, patriarchy, and culture, the woman who feeds and nurtures Bhuvan, the woman who is approved of by her prospective mother-in-law, reaps the reward. The nation may be culturally dependent on the rebellious feringhees of the Empire in its incipience, but it will not be genealogically bastardized when it approaches its founding. For this reason, Elizabeth finds herself policed not once, but twice. She is reprimanded by the colonizer, which will not permit her engagement with the subaltern (whom the officers frequently refer to as darkies in her presence), and discarded by the colonized in their moment of triumph. Her philanthropy was expediently used, and expeditiously rejected when her desires were deemed sexually transgressive. White women may be a threat to the maintenance of empire because of their xenotropic desire, but subaltern womens desire is exemplary and proper because it requires no policing. Fixed into an ahistoric domesticity by their culture, subaltern women are quintessentially loyal to their own community, unlike their White counterparts. Subaltern women instinctively, unerringly, know their place. When victory is achieved, these

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women are, similar to Gauri, rewarded for their loyalty and their subservience even though the victory was secured by Elizabeths intervention and cultural pedagogy. Her willingness to go against her brothers explicit wishes ends in the exile of both Russell siblings, the brother to Central Africa, the sister to emotional destitution such as the female villagers of Champaner have never known. Elizabeths is overwritten with pathos, Russells is tinged with cruel irony: The cantonment captain who could have been responsible for the mass deracination of colonials, is now sentenced to a Kala Pani of his own. Disgraced because of his cultural arrogance, Russell will have to cross the Indian Ocean, albeit in far more comfortable quarters than those inhabited by the indentured. He will, however, be banished to a place significantly different from the Raj Province he so imperiously ruled.

THE FUTURE ANTERIORITY

This is the use of memory: For liberationnot less of less but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past.

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding (1963)

Lagaan ends, ostensibly, with a double moment of hope: First, the Champaner villagers, thanks to Bhuvans heroics and Kachras unsteady defiance with his bat, win the match. They thereby spare themselves the unimaginability of triple lagaan, and, no small triumph in itself, they banish Russell from the Central Province in the Raj to Central Africa, evoked in the film as the desolate, undesired Conradian specterthe horror at the very end of the empire. Second, the movies conclusion reverses the cruelty that nature visits on Champaner in the opening scene when the rain clouds yield nothing but shattered economic hopes and the prospect of another years impoverishment. After the headiness of cultural victory, the monsoons immediately follows, and there is agricultural plenitudelagaan free, no lessand the business of planting and farming and metalwork and ayurvedic medicine to go back to. Normalcy, it appears, has returnedthe natural order of Champaner life has been restored. This time the fickleness of the monsoon favors the villagers whereas at the beginning of the film it frowns on them. Lagaan offers itself as the future anterior. Champaner represents the future of the secular Indian state imagined through its anterior location in the originary moment: It is the Indian present that is iterable only in terms of Lagaan, the state that is symbolically opposed to the Hindu nationalism of the BJP, religious fundamentalists struggling for the official primacy of Hindus in India; a campaign always framed in opposition to state-sponsored Muslim predominance of Pakistan. Lagaan represents that which is desired, the future return to a secular politics in India, and that which has been lostthe practice of a secular politics, an India where it was more difficult, if no less insidiously part of party politics, to give public credibility to

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Hindu fundamentalism. It is in Lagaan that the anticolonial past and the reimagined Indian future coincide: The film is the site of, in a single gesture, mourning and hope. It constitutes an imagining of what India symbolically was during the Raj and what it should be, because of those past, cooperative cultural triumphs, now cast as anything but historically pyrrhic, and how they are made to resonate in the present. In Lagaan, the future is constructed through the cultural accomplishments of the past. The victory over the cantonment is rendered as a temporary respite from the abject, not as the articulation or anticipation of a postcolonial vista that is just over the horizon. Instead, the triumph of Bhuvans team precipitates, in Judith Butlers terms, an unstable and troubled terrain, a crisis of knowledge, a situation of not-knowing. Despite the welcome rains, Champaner will always be subject to economic instability because it will always function under the threat of colonialisms vagaries. Captain Russell may be banished, but the colonial bureaucratic memory is elephantine, and the loss of income incurred from the Champaner win will most certainly be recovered; the cantonments new administration will surely exact retribution from the villagers. More serious, however, is the epistemological crisis, the condition of not knowing what lies beyond the isolated, unexpected cultural triumph: How can Champaners victory, marked in and by Lagaan as the inauguration of a South Asian postcolonial project, be translated into more than a singular event? How can Lagaan stand as more than the unexpected, disruptive cultural encounter between the colonizer and the colonized? The salient enunciatory event that has to speak for all other instances of anticolonial cultural resistance? Lagaan represents the retrospectively foundational moment in Indian postcoloniality. The film inaugurates a discourse of postcoloniality episodically, not as a complete discipline. Lagaan demonstrates how the anticolonial cultural past can be reclaimed piecemeal, through individual snippets that, in turn, through accretion and critical accumulation, come to constitute its own genealogy. The Indian postcolonial present is rerouted through the recovery of the resistant, anticolonial past. As the antecedent ideological imaginary, Lagaan anchors the postcolonial present and future, making possible a rereading while simultaneously, because of the critical acclaim feted on the movie, encouraging the Indian film industry to rethink what it produces and for whom, of course. Lagaan is, in this way, the text that does more than simply disrupt the colonial trajectory; it produces an act of future anteriorityreconfiguring the present through the pastby interrupting the cultural production of the present and the future. As singular Indian postcolonial text, Lagaans recovery of the historical experience and historic agency of the subaltern, locates this simultaneously nascent and historicized intellectual tradition firmly within the paradigm of antipostcolonial South Asia. Similar to the Subaltern Studies historiographers12 that researched and interpreted underclass experiences and employed them against hegemonic colonial and postcolonial histories,

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Lagaan salvagesthrough a cultural reimaginingthe past to make it usable. Although the subaltern school focused on actual historical occurrences, Lagaan constitutes the first, episodic instance of retrospective cultural imagining. The film locates politics in popular culture, inserting the popular experience of the subalterns into an anticolonial resistance and implicitly redefining how Indian politics works, how the Raj was resisted, and how contemporary Indias obsession with cricket can be historicized and politicized. To recast Jamess (1983) formulation, Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I did not have too much to learn (p. 61) in Lagaans terms, Cricket did not plunge the Indian subaltern into politics. Anti- and postcolonial India was conceived in cricket. The Raj may have been rocked by the 1857 Mutiny, but its end was scripted and gloriously foretold when Bhuvan lifted the cantonments fast bowler Hardy, who proved not to be quite so hardy, for a six to win the match. The path from gilli-danda to cricket may been more treacherous than Bhuvan imagined; however, when asked to learn the game while playing it competitively for the first time, the Indian subalterns proved themselves capable of batting, bowling, and fielding on a culturally unknown wicket. On this occasion, even when all seemed lost, the Indian team in its incipient, Champaner form, dramatized by a Bollywood that had for more than a century ignored it as cinematic material, resolutely proved themselves able to snatch victory from jaws of defeat.

AUTHOR
Grant Farred is an associate professor in the literature program at Duke University. He is author of Whats My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Midfielders Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Westview Press, 1999). He is editor of Rethinking C.L.R. James (Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1996). He is general editor of The South Atlantic Quarterly and a contributing editor to the Journal of Sport and Social Issues.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This essay is for Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube: Cuidad de Mexico, 2002. I would like to thank Srinivas Aravamudan, Tess Chakkalakal, and Negar Mottahedeh for their criticisms.

NOTES
1. Within Indian literature there is a tradition of writing in the Jamesian mode, most notably Ashis Nandys The Tao of Cricket (2000) and, of course, Guhas A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002) which has the telling subtitle: The Indian History of a British Sport. 2. See The Cricketing of an Indian Village, (2002) Lagaan, www.culturevulture.net/ Movies4/Lagaan.htm, and Lagaan, www.offoffoff.com/film/2002/lagaa.php3 for reviews that engage the cultural intervention, the cinematic move away from the Satyajit Ray, that the film constitutes.

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3. It might also be possible to conceive of nostalgia as, judging from the number of Bollywood movies that insist on how, albeit problematically, Indians and Desis belong to a common national fold, as a demonstration of the politics of double temporality. In this way, posterior nostalgia functions less as a political anachronism than as a repository for both a retrospective and a prospective desire for historical, and geopolitical, singularity. 4. See Guha (2002) and Nandys (2000) work for an account of the origins of the game in India. 5. See Gandhi and Cricket, for a recent account of Baloos standing in the Indian game. The eldest brother in his family, Palwankar was Indias first great slow bowler. In 1923 Palwankars younger brother, Vithal, a classy batsman, captained the Hindus to victory in Bombays Quadrangular tournament. (See Note 11.) 6. The Indian bowler is known in the game as Prince Ranjitsinhji. At the same moment that Ranjitsinhji was establishing himself as a player of renown in England, the Dalit (Untouchable) Baloo was perfecting his craft as a bowler with various clubs (all of whom, Parsi and Hindu alike, subjected him to various forms of discrimination) in Bombaywhich limits the analogy between Baloo and Kachra. The annual Quadrangular tournament in Bombay, until just a few years before Indian independence, pitted four teams against each other: the Hindus, Parsis, Europeans, and the Muslims. In 1940, when it became the Pentangular tournament, the fifth team was simply named The Rest, including the Dalits. 7. Such is the impact of Sachin Tendulkar that there are pictures of him, short, babyfaced, and evocative of Krishna as he is, with other Hindu deities in homes all over India. Around Tendulkar there is a kind of theological transference, the human (cricketer) elevated to the status of Krishna. Tendulkar has attained, almost literally the status of cricket godor, the cricketer who plays like a god. He is, in any event, a transcendent figure, the cricketer who has achieved for himself a standing that far exceeds the game. In the process he is also, more problematically, transfigured into a repository of the Indian nation as an exclusively Hindu formation. 8. It is also sometimes spelled gulli-danda. 9. The difference between Forsters heroine and Lagaans resides not simply in the fact that Elizabeth is physically attractive and Adela is not but in the responses of the Indian men and the fates that befall them. Whereas Dr. Aziz, who keeps a picture of his late wife in his drawer and is completely uninterested in Adela, Bhuvans position is more, as I suggest in the article, ambivalent; however, the key distinction is that Dr. Aziz is punished by the colonial administration for his supposed rape in the Malabar Caves while Bhuvan, whose Indian love interest is very much alive and adept at fending off Elizabeths advances, emerges victorious over the Raj. 10. Lagaan is India rendered anatomically whole by virtue of its cooperative, constituent ethnic and religious elements. There is Ismayeel the elegant and courageous batsman who returns after being cruelly struck on his foot by the English fast bowler Hardy. The Muslim Ismayeel is one of Bhuvans most trusted lieutenants even though he is reluctant to join the team initially (without his contribution on the final day of the match Bhuvan would not have been able to guide his team to victory on the last ball); there is, of course, Kachra, the silent spinner who weaves magic with the ball only because he is physically deformed, the player accepted onto the team only because Bhuvan, egalitarian and anticaste figure that he is, berates all his teammates for their religious and caste prejudices. Finally, and most remarkably, there is Devan the redoubtable Sikh fast bowler. Devan is not only the only genuine Champaner bowler, he is also the opening batsmen. The Sikh is also the only player with any experience in the game; an experience gained, ironically, while serving in another regiment of the self-same army that he is now trying to defeat. Devan, similar to his Champaner alter-ego, the wild-eyed sage Guran, who is fiercely antiimperialist, and when Guran pronounces in prophetic terms, He that rules you is a tyrant, he may as well be echoing the intense and focused look that is permanently

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affixed to the Sikhs face. Devan is arguably the instantiation of the Gandhian ideal of transreligious and ethnic cooperation because he is the only player on the team who is not a Champaner resident. He comes in search of the village because he has heard of the match, and he comes only to offer cultural and ideological resource, as an Indian helping his countrymen combat colonialism. Devan, who has learned the masters tools and is now intent on using them against the English, is not affected by the fate of Russells challenge, however he is still no less committed to the cause of the village. It is in this way that, conceptually, the Indian nation is incipiently and idealistically born: multiethnic, religiously tolerant, inclusive, resistant to colonialism. Lagaan is the Indian nation in idealized and macrocosmic prototype. 11. See A Subaltern Studies Reader and Selected Subaltern Studies for an overview of this school of Indian historiography that was profoundly influenced by the work of British Cultural Studies. The writing of Ranajit Guha is especially crucial in this project.

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