著者

Cross Robert

出版者

同志社大学

雑誌

言語文化 (ISSN:13441418)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.11, no.4, pp.[493]-514, 2009-03

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The American Academy Award nomination garnered by the Bollywood film Lagaan in 2001 focused worldwide attention on this parable of the fall of the British Raj that unfolds in the drama of a cricket match between colonizers and colonized. The protagonist, an Indian villager by the name of Bhuvan, embodies simultaneously the iconicity of the Indian cricket captain and star batsman Sachin Tendulkar and the nationalist and inter-communal ideology of Mohandas K. Gandhi. set in the closing years of the 19th century, the deeper discourse of the film constructs an ideal post-Independence "India" in which the ideals of Gandhi, far from dying with his assassination and the ethnic cleansing of Partition, have been fully implemented in the imagined new order. The fantasy of this 'post-dated' Gandhian idyll, however, is problematised by the film's treatment of the non-Hindu minority communities-the Muslims, the Sikhs and the outcaste Untouchables (Dalits)-particularly when considered in the broader context of the rise of Hindutva fanaticism and inter-religious violence in present-day india.