Sharmistha Gooptu in London
As India and England stood evenly poised at the end of the third day’s play, and I enter to the early buzz in the media centre here at Lord’s on Day 4, I’m replaying in my mind the closing scene of the last over of yesterday’s play.
Much has already been written and commented on the drama of the last over with Zak Crawley’s delaying tactics, and Shubman Gill and KL Rahul coming into a heated exchange with the England opener. Mohammed Siraj was seen running in to add a few words. And at the end of day, by some quirk of fate both sides stood poised at the same score of 387.
Cricket is an English game at which Indians now excel. Its dominance in the Indian public psyche, however, is also in part a carry-on of the vestiges of colonialism that’s so deeply embedded in us. Cricket carries in itself a sort of power that possibly no other sport in India carries in quite the same way – the power that comes from it having been the sport of the British, played by the rajas and maharajas, and only much later democratised.
Yesterday, as the day’s play drew to a close, that power of this sport, originally of the English, exerted in a reverse mode – the one that’s become potent with the game’s democratisation. Gill and his men went aggressive, in so many words calling out the English batter to be a man and play the game. Several among the Indian journalists in the media box who had been listening to the commentary on their earphones, and who caught Gill’s words on the stump mic, were seen laughing and smirking. The staid and generally soft spoken Gill had transformed into that iconic character from Indian cinema – Bhuvan of Lagaan, challenging an Englishman on his home turf.
Today’s Gen Z will be mostly alien to the emotions generated by the film when it played to full theatres way back in 2001 – the tears and joy and memories it produced. Gill himself was an infant when the movie became part of public lore. Yesterday, in his mantle of the new challenger, he reincarnated Bhuvan of Lagaan – he is ready to pay ‘dugna lagaan’’ but he plays the game on his terms.
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