Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
2001 · Ashutosh Gowariker · Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India on Sightlines
Clouds come over Champaner. The ground under them has split into plates, and the whole village stops work, turns its face to the sky and starts to sing. "Ghanan Ghanan" is a song for rain sung by people who badly need it. Anil Mehta shoots it as a struggle between dust and light: hard sun, gathering gray, a horizon that might give and might not. Keep that picture of a village looking up. Everything in Lagaan grows out of the gap between what these farmers can see and what they can do about it.
The year is 1893. The British cantonment has decided the village owes its land tax, the lagaan, drought or no drought. Captain Russell offers a wager: beat his officers at cricket and three years of the tax ride on the result. Bhuvan, a young farmer played by Aamir Khan, accepts before anyone can stop him. Nobody in the village has ever played the game.
You know this shape. Gilles Deleuze gave it a name: the action-image, in what he called its large form. A situation surrounds the characters and presses on them. A hero gathers his forces and meets it head-on in a duel. That act changes the situation into a new one. Deleuze built the idea mostly out of American cinema, out of Ford and the western, where a community and its landscape call forth the man who will act for them. He also believed the form had broken down after the Second World War. Its heroes began to stand frozen, watching situations too large to answer, and out of that paralysis came modern cinema. So why bring him to a Hindi epic from 2001? Because Lagaan rebuilds the old form with total conviction, half a century after it was declared exhausted, and Deleuze helps us see exactly how it manages that.
The trick is in the screenplay. Colonial rule is the kind of situation Deleuze's modern heroes can only stare at. It is everywhere and nowhere, and no single farmer can strike it. Gowariker squeezes it into a game, with rules, a field, a fixed day and a scoreboard. Deleuze calls the surrounding situation the encompasser: here it is drought, tax and humiliation, the sky itself. The duel, which he calls the binomial, turns the colonizer's own sport into the ground where the colonized can push back. One reckless bet gives the whole sensory-motor chain something to grip. Seeing becomes acting again.
Deleuze also describes an imprint, the way a milieu stamps itself on the people inside it. Lagaan takes care over this. Bhanu Athaiya's costumes sort the villagers by caste, trade and means, and set rough homespun against the starched cantonment. Aamir Khan's production built a whole working village in the Kutch region of Gujarat and shot largely in sequence, recording sound live rather than dubbing it later, which mainstream Hindi film of the time rarely did. You hear the place: wind, animals, voices carrying across open ground. André Bazin, the critic who prized films that respect the unity of real space, would have recognized the instinct, and it is a surprising one to put at the service of a fable whose subtitle, "Once Upon a Time in India," openly announces a myth.
Then comes the team. Following Seven Samurai, the film recruits its players one by one, each a type with a skill: the Sikh, the fortune-teller, the wounded, the comic. The most pointed recruit is Kachra, an untouchable, and the film treats his inclusion as its sharpest statement about caste. Here is where Lagaan gets more interesting than its formula. Deleuze argued that classical political cinema could take "the people" for granted, already formed and waiting for a leader, while modern political cinema, especially in formerly colonized countries, starts from the fact that the people are missing and still have to be invented. Lagaan sits between the two. It uses the classical form, but its people are not given at the outset. They are divided, wary and unequal, and the film assembles them on screen, player by player. By the time the big tableaux arrive (assemblies, processions, the packed crowd at the match), Deleuze's word dividual fits: a mass that moves and feels as one body without dissolving its members.
The songs carry what the dialogue leaves unsaid. A.R. Rahman's numbers do structural work, as songs did in Mughal-e-Azam: devotion, a romantic triangle, the village making up its mind. Deleuze saw something similar in the Hollywood musical, where a dancer's private movement swells into a movement of the whole world. He called it world-movement. In "Ghanan Ghanan" the swell is literal: individual hope rises into clouds, light and wind, the village's longing spread across the sky.
The match takes up the last act and runs for a long stretch, and it is pure action-image craft. Mehta keeps the geography plain: bowler, batsman, field, and faces reacting. Ballu Saluja cuts between play and crowd, the parallel montage Deleuze traced back to Griffith, where separate lines converge on a single outcome. Deleuze's term respiration-space describes the rhythm: the film breathes out into the huge open ground and the stands, then pulls tight along the line of a single ball. The ritual stretching comes from Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. The training before it comes from Rocky. The model of a village-defense ensemble staged widescreen on one ambitious shoot was set by Sholay. Under all of these sits Mother India, where a village's fight against exploitation stands in for the nation.
One more Deleuze lesson hides in the running time. In the movement-image, he said, time is measured by movement, the way a clock counts out the hours. Lagaan runs close to four hours, and in the match every minute is an over, a run, a dropped catch. The film insists that catharsis has to be paid for in time. That conviction is a big part of why it brought confidence back to the mainstream Hindi epic and carried it all the way to the final five for the Academy Award.
So when you watch, look past the scoreboard. Look at who stands beside whom when the team walks out, and at which faces the camera finds in the crowd. Watch the sky in the first hour, and notice how often the film asks the village to look up before it lets them act. The real contest isn't only against Russell. It is over whether this many different people can become an "us" in time.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form, S–A–S′) — The screenplay squeezes diffuse colonial exploitation into a single wager with rules and a deadline: drought and tax (situation), the cricket match (action), the stake of three years' lagaan (transformed situation)
- synsign / the encompasser — Drought, cracked earth, the punitive tax and the hoped-for monsoon sky make an encompassing milieu that presses the whole village toward action
- binomial (the duel) — Bhuvan's village against Russell's garrison on the colonizer's own game, cricket turned into an instrument of resistance
- imprint (empreinte) — Bhanu Athaiya's costumes sort villagers by caste, occupation and means, homespun against starched cantonment; the purpose-built village and live-recorded location sound bind characters to their milieu
- dividual — The team recruited as a deliberate cross-section of village society, including the untouchable Kachra, and the large tableaux of assemblies, processions and the packed match crowd
- world-movement — In 'Ghanan Ghanan' the villagers' collective longing for rain spreads into cloud, light and open horizon; Rahman's songs carry the interior states the dialogue leaves unspoken
- organic (American) parallel montage — Ballu Saluja's cross-cutting between play and crowd across the long match, built so momentum swings converge on one outcome
- respiration-space — Mehta's clear bowler–batsman–field geography alternating with the vast open ground and stands; Leone-derived ritual drawing-out of the showdown