The stunningly choreographed "Ghanan Ghanan" is a show stopper in which the entire village celebrates in anticipation of a thirst-quenching and crop-saving rainstorm which never quite comes. Rahman) play an active role in pushing the narrative forward, and are not employed as burdensome time wasters. However, these enchanting songs (composed by South Indian maestro A. Lest one forget, this is also a through-and-through musical, with six such interludes sprinkled throughout. The rest of the film explores how Bhuvan assembles a team of eccentrics, falls in love with the lovely village belle (a fesity Gracy Singh, making her screen debut) and negotiates oppression, prejudice and difference (in and outside of the village.) Russell's kind-hearted sister Elizabeth (Rachel Shelley) opts to secretly help the Champaner team with learning the game, hoping to even the playing field between the two sides. Naturally, Bhuvan's fellow villagers are absolutely outraged at his agreement to these terms, but our hero has conviction in spades. If the Champaner contingent loses, they will have to pay three times lagaan to the regent, along with the rest of the accompanying villages in the region. He will forgo lagaan for three years - not only for Champaner, but for the entire province - if they are able to beat him and his seasoned teammates in a game of cricket (" gilli danda" for the villagers). Russell, bored with the unadventurous status quo, makes a bet with the desperate villagers. When a cocky young farmer from Champaner named Bhuvan (played by Aamir Khan) catches the ire of snotty Captain Andrew Russell (Paul Blackthorne) from a nearby British cantonment, the stakes are raised. In turn, this tithe is handed over to the British, who offer the Raja military protection from neighboring feudal lords. This is a cause for major concern for the entire hamlet, as the villagers are obligated to hand over a third of their agricultural produce as tax ("lagaan") to their Raja (seasoned actor Kulbhushan Kharbanda).
Champaner, a small village in the state of Gujurat, has been suffering through a period of crop-stunting drought for two years. Call it the anti- Gandhi if you will: these agrarian farmers of Champaner resist not with swords and fists in the tradition of those mindlessly violent and easily swayed masses, but with cricket bats and a fierce determination to resist imperialist greed.Īs the film's narrator (Amitabh Bachchan) informs the audience, it is 1893, and British rule is well established across South Asia. For this reason, I open with Guha's tremendously influential words because they hint at the lens through Gowariker represents and gives a voice to the ignored subaltern. In fact, the temptation to simplistically (even condescendingly) frame it as a Bollywoodized "David versus Goliath" feel-good cricket fable has been so tempting that many have overlooked the significant implications made about colonial India, native resistance and the long road to Independence in 1947.
The film is a rare specimen in that it was able to enchant audiences and critics alike, scoring mightily at the box office in India, winning every national award in sight, and riding that ecstatic word of mouth all the way to the 2002 Oscars (it is only the third film from India to receive a Foreign Language Film nomination, alongside Mother India and Salaam Bombay.) Unabashedly steeped in the conventions of commercial Bollywood cinema (a near-four hour running time, musical dance numbers, unrepentant melodrama), the film also serves as an impressive critical intervention in South Asian historiography without ever becoming inaccessible or lofty.
LAGAAN SONGS REVIEW MOVIE
Even those moviegoers largely unfamiliar with cinema from South Asia can still make reference to that "long Indian movie about cricket". Ranajit Guha, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India", Se lected Subaltern StudiesĪshutosh Gowariker's Lagaan: Once Upon a Time i n India (2001) is perhaps one of the most visible and oft-celebrated Indian films ever made, and for good reason. fails to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite, to the making and development of this nationalism." Both these varieties of elitism share the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness - nationalism - which informed this process were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements. "The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism - colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism.