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Home , Ashutosh Gowariker, Lagaan, Social realism, Spaghetti Western

Teaming Multitudes — and the Nation in Globality

Dirk Wiemann

NCE UPON A TIME IN INDIA,” the subtitle of the 2001 Bolly- wood blockbuster, Lagaan, by (scriptwriter O and director) and ’s (producer and lead role), seems to announce a fairy-tale, raising Orientalist expectations of Arabian Nights and marvellous possessions. At the same time, the main title – Lagaan (land tax) – with its pecuniary overtones and its connotations of social runs coun- ter to such exoticizing and romanticizing impulses. The tense juxtaposition of these elements of fantasy and realism, introduced by the title/subtitle con- figuration, will serve as a cue and a clue for the following reading of that film – a reading necessarily limited by the circumstance that am neither systema- tically trained in film studies nor initiated into the complexities of popular cinema. My contention is that even an overtly ‘national’ film like Lagaan partakes of a more general tendency characteristic of post-liberaliza- tion productions: namely, increasingly to address target-groups located inside as well as outside India: The ensuing availability abroad of Hindi movies in subtitled versions on videos and DVDs; the international box-office and/or critical success of films such as Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, which ranked number three in the British film charts for 2001; the heightened interest, on the part of metropolitan academic cultural criticism, in the output of the world’s largest film industry – all these are tendencies that might gradually render insufficient (without, of course, relegating to obsoles- cence) the strictly national frame of reference within which Indian popular cinema used to be placed.1 Lagaan certainly typifies a new breed of Indian

1 See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Indian Cinema,” in World Cinema: Critical Approaches, ed. John Hill & Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000): 151–56. 154 DIRK WIEMANN «•» film that is designed to be internationally compatible without dismissing those features that most strikingly characterize Bollywood cinema: song-and-dance, , and extremely lengthy running time (in the case of Lagaan, three hours and 47 minutes). Both highly popular and critically acclaimed, Lagaan worked not only in and Delhi but abroad as well: nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film, decorated with the audience’s award at the 2001 Locarno Biennale, Lagaan turned out to be one of the most successful Bolly- wood films ever on an international scale. In at least three respects, the English subtitle to the Hindi film locates Lagaan right from the outset in this dual framework of the national and the global. Most immediately, in terms of address, the subtitle seems to posit an ideal reader who is proficient enough in Hindi, or Urdu, and English to de- cipher that composite title. The opening credits include the title, Lagaan, in Latin, Devanagari (i.e. Hindi) and Urdu scripts. The subtitle, by contrast, is given exclusively in Latin script, and, moreover, in English only. With the rate of in English at some five percent in India, and transnational lite- racy in metropolitan countries approaching zero (except for the diasporas themselves), the calculated effect of such double coding seems to be a re- minder, for the majorities of both Indian and audiences, of the illegible material carried along with transcultural flows. The viewer, thus con- fronted with the unreadable, is, however, by no means discouraged from con- necting with the film; rather, s/he is invited to make do with a provisory read- ing based on the acceptance of an only partial mastery of the text. On a second level, the subtitle activates a chain of intertextual and self- referential resonances that require a degree of literacy not only in linguistic but also in cultural terms, calling again for a dual move of decoding: It coalesces with the Hindi title into an allusive arrangement whose reference- points are located both in a normalized middlebrow Western cinematic canon and in the palimpsestic appropriation of that canon by classical Hindi cinema. “Once upon a time in India” overtly alludes to ’s 1969 produc- tion, Once Upon a Time in the West and, by extension, to Bollywood classics such as (1975) that draw heavily on the formulaic protocols of the spaghetti-western .2 Lagaan’s subtitle thus establishes a continuity both with Western and with genuinely Indian cinematic traditions. Madhava Pra- sad convincingly argues that the incorporation of the (Italo-)western formula into the Bollywood mainstream enables, in the context of early-1970s, im- mediately pre-Emergency India, the displacement and re-articulation of “a

2 See the resonating opening sequences of Once Upon a Time in the West and Sholay with their deserted railway stations in the middle of nowhere; the cold-blooded slaughter of entire families at peaceful picnics; the ideological ambiguities of the representatives of legi- timate order entangled in private missions of revenge.