Whether the hyperbolic praise poured on Lagaan smacks of patriotic bias or not, whether it wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Film this year or not, Lagaan will remain a landmark movie in the history of Indian cinema and the history of cinema as such, for it is a film that has successfully and judiciously blurred the frontiers between commercial and art cinema on the one hand and Hollywood and Bollywood on the other.

Indeed Lagaan picks up the thread from the inimitable master Satyajit Ray himself as regards the use of games as a metaphor for cross-cultural power negotiations. If in Shatranj Ke Khiladi, it is the British who change the rules of the Indian game, in Lagaan it is the Indians who learn to beat the British at their own game. However, Lagaan is not just an attempt at the Empire 'shooting back'. It is much more subtle. Pitting Captain Russell against Bhuvan, its purpose is not to draw battle lines between East and West but cinematographically illustrate Kipling's oft forgotten lines:

But there is neither East nor West
When two strong men stand face to face

Beyond cultural polarities, the film explores the recreational impulse of humanity. In the Mahabharata, Yudhistra gambled away his kingdom to the Kauravas. As a mythologically informed Indian, Bhuvan cannot afford to lose his stakes. Captain Russell's gambling instinct surfaces when he raises the stakes. But he is not allowed to jeopardize the Empire's resources. He loses his posting in India. Lagaan is an Indian match for the Hollywood action film, Victory (1981), in which a football match is organized between Nazi soldiers and a team of Allied prisoners during the Second World War. The paradox of the game-induced equality somehow transforms confrontation into an encounter.

The fact that the film has not veered away from the beaten track of Bollywood tradition and pitches whiteness against blackness, power against weakness, arrogance against helplessness, craftiness against credulity, opulence against poverty, youth against old age, the upper caste against the untouchables, the Hindus against Muslims, the white cotton sari of the widowed mother against the bright and colourful uniforms of the British officers, aridity against fertility does not prevent it from venturing beyond. What we finally get is not the clichd triumph of the one over the other but rather a contamination of the one by the other. Thus Bhuvan embraces Kachra and Elisabeth betrays Russell before Lakka agrees to spy for the enemy camp. If the betrayal motive introduces the Bible as an intertexture, Gowri and Bhuvan dance in the Radha/Krishna style is an obvious allusion to Indian mythology. The knowledge of this mythology is what will give strength to Elisabeth when she is obliged to wrench herself free from the love of Bhuvan and India. The learning process therefore is not one-sided. Elizabeth's declaration of love, made yet not understood by Bhuvan, strikes a fine balance between Indian and Western aesthetics.

The postcolonial twist to the plot comes when it turns the White woman against the White man and the Empire against the White man. As Captain Russell is transferred to the South African desert, we see the agents of the Empire become its victims as much as its subjected peoples. It is by daring to show the British people how they were exploited by the Empire that the film scores its victory over its Orientalist rivals such as David Lean's A Passage to India. Similarly the slow and progressive orchestration of a multicultural team that emerges in the face of an outsider and a common enemy lays bare the painstaking process of nation building. The inclusion of the song and dance routines may be viewed as a vestige of the formulaic Hindi cinema. Yet, they provide a wonderful counterpoint to the games, though games, songs and dance form part of the performance idiom. While only males participate in cricket, men and women mix when they dance. Games stage conflict, whereas singing creates harmony. Besides, preserving the song and dance routines is a sign of resistance to the fast forward culture, as the spectators are obliged to stretch their attention span. It helps re-appropriate popular cultural forms through modern technology.

The pitfall to avoid was the transformation of the character of Bhuvan into a performing monkey. Aamir Kan's subdued performance achieves exactly that. His pursed lips and clenched jaw in the face of provocation sets him apart from the Hindi film heroes too ready to respond to the savaal with a jawaab. When he agrees to take up the challenge, the process of cultural translation starts. According to him, Cricket is only gilli-danda in a different apparel and played with exotic tools. Elizabeth too performs this cross-cultural journey fraught with dangers. Her daydreaming of Bhuvan depicted in the Indian fashion nevertheless succeeds in presenting her experiments with Indianness through purely visual effects. The red colour of her dress permeates the spectator's image of Gowri in her red garment and tikka. Some stills of the movie are reminiscent of British landscape paintings of India during the Raj. But far from being a mimetic salute to these painters, these stills serve as sophisticated postcolonial tribute by Indian artists to their fellow British artists.

The only disturbing aspect of the movie is the panoramic shot of the central playground in which the match actually takes place. For a second, spectators may be tempted to perceive Bhuvan as a gladiator. Fortunately this imperial grandstand view is offset by the scenes of rehearsals in a peripheral space on the fringes of Champaner. More than the immediate tax exemption at stake in Champaner in 1893, the larger interests of the colonies against the Empire's ruthlessness, Lagaan, thanks to its very title, is emblematic of the ongoing struggle against global capitalism. Just as the centrality of romance in Hindi films has been pushed to the margins in Lagaan, the values of love and fairness are being relegated to the background in the global game of profit-making. The quasi sacred acquisition of the cricket ball in the film and the manufacturing of bats and pads like handicrafts by the villagers open the spectators' eyes to their own loss of autonomy as they become actors in a global economy and wield alien objects. Lagaan straddles not only two cultures but also two periods. That's why it has a contemporary and worldwide appeal.