Cultural Connections: Lagaan and its audience responses

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 26, Issue 3 SPEC. ISS., 2005, Pages 517-524

  Stadtler, Florian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KENT   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURE; FILM; MEDIA INDUSTRY;

ASIA; EURASIA; INDIA; SOUTH ASIA;

EID: 32844454814     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436590500033891     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. S Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh, London: Vintage, 1996, pp 148-149.
2. The film critic Nasreen Munni Kabir term has given up the fight to name it accurately 'Hindi/Urdu cinema'. Since the term 'Bollywood' is an Indian invention it makes arguments about neo-imperialist appropriation obsolete. Furthermore, it has become a term with which Indian popular culture is identified all over the world. With Indian cinema pushing more and more into the global arena it also gains more and more currency and accuracy.
3. Bollywood produces around 800 films a year, a far greater output than Hollywood. Bollywood includes the Bombay based Hindi film, but also the many regional centres such as Chennai (Madras) and Hyderabad. The regional commercial cinemas of South India, Telugu- and Tamil-language films, are the largest in terms of output, while the concentration of cinema halls is also at its greatest in these areas. However, these films remain regional and are rarely shown outside their heartland. Although in recent years dubbed versions have had increasing success in Northern India.
4. Lagaan, A Khan (producer) & A Gowariker (director), India: 2001, 215 minutes.
5. V Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, New York: Routledge, 2002, p xviii.
6. In the US, Monsoon Wedding has grossed in excess of 13 882 786 (Source: ibosnetwork.com).
7. 'Spotlights and saris', Omnibus, BBC1, June 2002.
8. Quoted from 'Spotlights and saris'.
9. This is not true of Lagaan's release in India, which coincided with one of the worst crises the film industry had to face in recent years. For a more detailed account see S Bhatkal, The Spirit of Lagaan, Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2002, pp 222-243.
10. Quoted from 'Bollywood for beginners', Channel 4 Television, September 2002.
11. S Bhatkal, The Spirit of Lagaan, Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2002, p 25.
12. C Hastings & S Bisset, 'Anti-British Indian film in chase for Oscar', The Sunday Telegraph, 25 November 2001, p 9.
13. G Farred, 'The double temporality of Lagaan: Cultural struggle and postcolonialism', Journal of Sports & Social Issues, 28 (2), 2004, pp 93-114.
14. J Nehru, 'Tryst with destiny', in S. Rushdie & E West (eds), The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1957-1997, London: Vintage, 1997, pp 1-2.
15. G Farred, p 104.
16. S Sen, 'Enduring colonialism in cricket: From Ranjitsinhji to the Cronje a.air', Contemporary South Asia, 10 (2), 2001, pp 237-249.
17. Ibid, p 246.
18. See G Farred, p 107.
19. S Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947-1987, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992, p 150.
20. See G Farred, p 109.
21. J Winter, 'Bombay breakout', The Guardian Friday Review, 12 December 2003, p 11.
22. Aamir Khan elaborates on this in an interview with Asif Kapadia at the NFT: When we planned the film, we planned it for an Indian audience. The first inkling we got of the fact it might have an audience outside of India was when the actors read the script and really liked it. The first festival we went to was Locarno in Switzerland. The director of the festival had seen the film in London and insisted that we enter the film in the festival. But we were not able to meet the deadline because we were unable to get a video cassette copy of the film for the committee to view. Piracy is a big issue in India...So I said that I was sorry I couldn't enter the festival, but I didn't have a video cassette. Finally the director broke all the rules and entered the film in the festival. She was the person who really got the film there. It was shown in an open-air venue which seats about 8000 people with a huge screen and wonderful sound. We were really concerned about the reaction to that screening, because here was a Swiss, German, Italian, French-speaking audience who was probably watching Indian cinema for the first time. It's three hours, 40 minutes long, and it's about cricket. They didn't know anything about cricket. So we thought it was going to be a horrible screening but, amazingly, it was one of the best screenings of the film. Some people told us that they had planned to come and just watch the beginning so they could go to a party in the evening, but they sat through the entire film and there was applause after every song. They started to interact with the characters on the screen. In the scene where the bet is set you could hear in German, French and Italian, 'Go for it! Take him on!' It was quite a sight. That was a really amazing screening and we won the Audience Award. From then on we got invited to a lot of festivals and a lot of distributors wanted to acquire it for mainstream screenings. So it's been shown all over the world..
23. J Winter, 'Bombay breakout', p 11.