Eating with Our Fingers, Watching Hindi Cinema and Consuming Cricket

India is a billion-weak nation thirsting for truly international sporting glory. Every four years, the fact that Olympic success eludes India is lamented in public fora. Karnam Malleswari's weightlifting bronze in the 2000 Olympics, PT Usha's almost-bronze many Olympics ago and fading memories of the men's hockey team's successive golds offer little consolation. But the last two decades have seen a phenomenal hardsell of cricket. Though cricket is truly an uninternational sport — played by hardly 12 nations, all of them former colonies of the British empire — India's success in the 1983 World Cup, followed by the hosting of the Reliance Cup in the Subcontinent, and the subsequent television boom spurred by the policy of 'liberalisation' (a very clever word), corporate sponsorship and subsidisation, resulted in cricket effectively being marketed as the game that mattered. Cricket, like popular cinema, became a product of mass consumption, especially after one-day games became a regular fixture. More physical sports such as hockey and football have been effectively jettisoned for 'the gentleman's game'.

The celebration and success of the movie Lagaan as a nice little good-vs-evil, David-vs-Goliath tale must be understood in this context. Lagaan has won an Oscar nod for inclusion in the 'best foreign film' lineup. After a year of hype and accolades in the Indian media and deft packaging for select Western festival circuits and in Hollywood, producer-actor Aamir Khan seems to have almost pulled off what he set out to achieve.