country where we have schedule caste system. Is this not racism??? We have Bungis and untouchables. Who has coined these names? The very Indians brahmans who play cricket and want to be treated with respect. Piss on you all cricketers of India."
A posting at an Indian Express email discussion forum on �racism�

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 hard-sell 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. About the same time that Lagaan�s nomination for the Oscar made news, Indian newspapers and television channels devoted more than the usual space to some unusual cricket news.

In Madras, Karnataka had won the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Cor-poration National Cricket Championship for the Blind, defeating Delhi. A �liberal-secular� newspaper which has no qualms calling itself The Hindu (February 13-14, 2002) extensively reported the tournament and even carried two-column pictures. Tamil television channels covered it as the �soft story� of the day in their news bulletins. It looks like the World Cup for the Blind will be hosted by Madras in December 2002. Some multi-national corporation, driven by late-capitalist guilt and the �we-care� spirit, might sponsor that event too. As I begin this, I feel weighed down by the burden of addressing (the �liberal�?) readers on the regressiveness of a film like Lagaan, and even more weighed down by the prospect of convincing them that cricket in India has been a truly casteist game � a game best suited to Hinduism. Burdened, because even those most critical of overriding nationalism jump with joy when their national team wins. In fact, as a friend points out "apart from eating with our fingers, unfortunately both cricket and Hindi films unite South Asians". For a Subcontinent that so obsessively watches cricket and Hindi cinema, Lagaan offers cinema-as-cricket and cricket-as-cinema. In the Hyderabad of mid-1990s, as a university-bound hostelite watching a one-day match in the common room I saw all groups and communities �cheering for India�.

Telugu-speaking Dalits, Oriyas, Malayalis, brahmans, Kannadigas, M.Tech students alike would all come in identifiable gangs, reserve seats, and be �united� by cricket even if they had battles to fight outside the common room. The other programmes that drew huge collective viewership were film song-countdowns in Hindi and Telugu. To understand the vulgarity of Lagaan one needs be alive to who actually plays cricket in India, even as the myth is fabricated that everybody can participate in the game � you open a can of Coke and a sixer materialises or a wicket falls, so you keep consuming Coke for the team and the nation�s good, as Aishwarya Rai leads by example during commercial breaks between overs. Even as direct participation in cricket seems an impossibility for most Indians � one half of the population, women, are effectively excluded � it encourages them to become consumers of the game irrespective of their caste, class, gender and religion. You consume cricket like Aishwarya consumes Coke in the advertisement.

Quite the same happens with cinema produced in Madras or Bombay. Even when the hero � be it Rajinikant, MG Ramachandran, Chiranjeevi or Aamir Khan � is on most occasions discoursing against the Dalits, OBCs, women and Muslims (�subalterns�), there are millions of fans from these very groups who identify with their filmic presence: consumption, with the illusion of participation. And, in a nation of one billion only 14 can make it to the �national� team. Yet, during a one-day match even the poor who cannot afford a TV, or when they can, are unable anyway to afford the pay channel that beams the match, congregate outside electronics shops and watch the game even as pockets get picked. Lagaan, which partakes of and perpetuates this folklore of cricket as universal social solvent, lends itself very eminently to a �casteist� reading precisely because of its thematic inflections and its choice of things to celebrate and suppress