The Double Temporality of Lagaan: Cultural Struggle and Postcolonialism

Abstract

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 pivotalto 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.