The Ugliness of the Indian Cricket Fan

Consider the following excerpt from the chat client of an online cricket streaming website:

Desi_dude: INDIA WILL WIN TODAY!!!
Maakichoot: Sachin n Sewag will score century
ABC: bharat mata ki jai...angrezon ki gaand maro!
PakiBoy: Losers...totally overrated team.
Maakichoot: ur country is a loser...fuck off pig
Desi_dude: I WILL FUCK U SISTER PAKIBOY!!!

This exchange will sound typical for anyone who follows live cricket online. Now and then, the moderator intervenes to kick out someone from the chat room. But more often than not, such exchanges continue unabated on one side of your screen until you turn off the chat client. I certainly turn it off whenever I watch cricket. But that does not shut me out from the wider set of exchanges among Indian cricket fans that circulate in the virtual and real worlds. It must be admitted that I take a perverse interest in these exchanges, but only because they regularly demonstrate to me the ugliness of the modern Indian cricket fan, and more generally, the depressingly disgusting nature of metropolitan Indian life today.

After all these years of watching cricket, it is clear to me that most online viewers are males between 18 and 35. They watch mainly the games that India play. Usually, they cheer for boundaries and sixers. Occasionally, the bowlers receive praise, though they usually cop as much abuse as the opposition. Statistics offer solace and a sense of community: how else would you know that Virender Sehwag missed Gary Kirsten's record for the highest score by a batsman in a World Cup by fourteen runs? The slightest provocation, real or imagined, invites a torrent of four-letter words directed at Pakistan. English or Australian or South African teams fare slightly better for these young male viewers, partly because they offer alluring models of sporting success and partly because most of these viewers live in one of these countries or the US/Canada. Abuse invariably takes traditional North Indian forms of expression: mothers and sisters feature prominently, of course. Graphic descriptions of the female sexual anatomy, similarly, become the canvass for projecting fantasies of rape. Sexual aggression is closely allied to fervent nationalism: to win is to rape one's opponent's mothers and sisters. To win repeatedly implies total domination of others. This is, therefore, the goal of the typical online cricket viewer.

It seems easy to diagnose what's wrong here. These kids, some would say, need to be taught some manners. But I have no doubt that these viewers are lovely, well-mannered middle-class youth studying or working to further their mundane ambitions. And by their own admission, they eat and breathe cricket. Moreover, they view themselves as patriots defending the nation's pride at every opportunity. Their parents and families are surely proud of them. And they will grow up to be successful at work and financially. So what's wrong then? Am I just being curmudgeonly? Perhaps, but I'd argue that jingoistic nationalism stands for a wider malaise in modern India, and its implications for sports and life are equally pernicious.

Jingoistic nationalism is arguably the bane of modern sport. Orwell wrote of "war minus the shooting." But a tough sporting contest does resemble a war to its participants and a gladiatorial battle for spectators. It is only when politics that matter little to the sporting contest enter the fray that things get ugly. It is purely a matter of historical contingency that nation-states exist and that too in their present forms. The West Indies are not even a nation-state. England competes on its own instead of calling itself Great Britain. Both India and Pakistan have split into separate nations and cricket teams. Where is the need to get so riled up over national identities and rivalries? The IPL T20 tournament, modeled on the English Premier League, is divided into ten franchises, each associated with an Indian city. Supporting one's favorite cricketers across cities is commonplace there. Yet the Indian cricket team is the object of endless praise and ridicule, agony and ecstasy.

This paradoxical state of affairs is understandable only if we see the wider context for nationalist assertion over the past decade or so. The idea that India is a global superpower-in-the-making haunts the urban imagination. There is a restlessness, bordering on insanity, that desires a never-ending stream of glory and wealth. The metropolitan Indian obsession with the national GDP and its growth rate are worth noting in this regard. There are global cricket rankings, much like there are global GDP rankings, and success is defined narrowly as rising up the rankings. The anxieties and insecurities of the rising middle classes in urban India thus get projected onto sport. Personal anxieties intertwine with national ones, and a toxic mix is produced indeed.  For those living outside India, the problem is even more acute: the louder and more brashly one expresses one's love for one's country/culture/civilization, the more nationalistic one imagines oneself to be. A seamless garment knits together personal aspirations and anxieties with the desire to assert civilizational pride and national success. Do not be surprised to hear about "black Madrasis," "Habshis," or "Aussie convicts" when watching cricket. They are part and parcel of the new Indian identity: vulgar, insecure, and rotten to the core.

The wider post-liberalization context of jingoistic nationalism in India today goes far beyond Orwell's notion of sports as a kind of war between nations. This is because it rests fundamentally on the sexual insecurities of young men who band together to participate in exhibitions of hyper-masculinity. Try watching a cricket match with a bunch of men in their 20s, and you'll know what I mean. "Mardangi" (masculinist assertion) holds the key to understanding the cricket fan's love of the motherland. For, in this view of nationalism, fighting for the nation means fighting for one's mother and land simultaneously. Logically, this kind of nationalism means destroying others' mothers and lands. Cricket victories are analogous to rapes and imperial conquests. All three terms (victory, rape, conquest) are used interchangeably in popular parlance. Asserting national pride goes hand in hand with a deep fear of what might happen if one were to lose a cricket match. Effigies are burned, cricketers are stoned, and their parents' homes vandalized or burned. Losing a match is akin to betraying one's nation and mother. The traitors must be punished for their crimes.

These extreme responses suggest deep-seated and unresolved sexual tensions in the minds of the male cricket fan. The graphic descriptions of the female body and violent sexual activity suggest more than a passing familiarity with the standard modes of pornographic representation of women. They represent a deep personal sense of sexual frustration/persecution or a thwarted desire to master the female body. The chasm between unsatiated lust and boundless desire accounts largely for the sexual politics of the jingoistic cricket fan. Winning is experienced as a bodily pleasure that partially offsets the frustrations of everyday life. The self and nation thus get braided together, and the desire for sexual recognition gets caught up with the quest for national glory in cricket and much else. The basic dictum for the Indian cricket fan thus appears to be "do unto others before they do unto you." In short, let's conquer the opponent on and off the field before they do the same to us.

When cricket or any sport is reduced to a mere assertion of jingoistic nationalism, does it really matter intrinsically? Can one really be so intent on personal/national conquest and yet admire a freakish leg-break or a sumptuous cover drive? I doubt it. The modern fan's experience of cricket is mediated more by statistics than ever before. This is obviously so for those who follow cricket in the form of text commentary on Cricinfo or the BBC. But even for those who watch on television, stats are constantly shoved down one's throat, but the viewers demand even more. Sehwag's average or Harbhajan's strike-rate have now become common knowledge. In an age of player auctions, these statistics are also an "objective" basis for evaluating cricketers. When I cast my mind back a couple of decades ago to the days of Mohinder Amarnath and Sunil Gavaskar, I shudder to think what might have occurred if those players were judged solely by their batting strike-rates or averages. Or if Ian Chappell's captaincy could be compared decisively to Clive Lloyd's after reducing both of them to a set of "objective" numbers. Statistics have always mattered in cricket, even in the nineteenth century, but they did not serve until recently as the principal basis for evaluating cricketers or experiencing the sport. And woebetide us all for the blight that rots our imaginations and blinds us to the many pleasures of the game.

All sport is, ultimately, a metaphor for life. It is meaningful only within the context of rules that seem entirely arbitrary and nonsensical to those who do not follow the sport. The virtues of fair play, courage, concentration, cunning, skill, athleticism, and leadership, to name only a few, are inextricably tied to sports. Cricket has arguably been an exemplar of sporting virtues insofar as its Victorian origins and colonial provenance made it a model of moral conduct long ago. As Thomas Arnold, the schoolmaster at Rugby told Tom Brown a century and a half ago, cricket is more than a sport, it's an institution. Cricket is a demanding game for a viewer. There are many moving parts, so to speak, and for the most part, the movement is rather slow. The extraordinary feat or heroic performance is the exception to the humdrum rhythms of bat and ball. Cricket's rules, too, are perhaps more complex than any other sport. Try teaching cricket to an American, and you will realize soon that the game is meant for men and women of higher intellectual qualities. This does not, of course, make it a patrician affair, since the plebs have always taken a keen interest in outdoing their social superiors at batting and bowling alike. As one social historian put it, had the French noblesse played cricket with their serfs, they would not have had their chateaux burnt. If sport is a metaphor for life, then cricket is a most intricate metaphor to unravel.

Still, millions have unravelled the metaphor of cricket. The English aristocracy has always had a tender spot for the underdog, so it is hardly surprising that cricket has never been an exclusively bourgeois sport. Working-class Englishmen, and later, colonials in the Caribbean, Australia, and the Indian subcontinent partook of the myriad joys of the game. To deceive one's colonial masters with a well-bowled googly or to impress the patricians at Lord's with a century has always been a key part of the game. It is wrong to believe that the spread of the game to the postcolonial world has rid cricket of its peculiar virtues. It has only broadened the range of skills and talents exhibited on the cricket field. It is hard to imagine cricket today, for instance, without the definitive contributions of the West Indian teams of the 1970s and 1980s. In India, the spread of the game beyond a small princely elite have given us the likes of Kapil Dev, Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Kumble, and Mohammed Azharuddin. Most of our cricketers today come from fairly humble backgrounds, outside the big metropolitan cities, and work hard to hone their cricketing skills and achieve fame for their exploits on the field.

My own introduction to cricket came from a man born and raised in Bankura in West Bengal, who came to work in Calcutta, as it was called then, and kept alive his passion for the game by transmitting it to others such as myself. Joydeb knew the value of Dean Jones' quick singles, David Gower's stylish on-drives or Inzamam's towering sixes. He knew the personal idiosyncrasies of every player even before he had set eyes on them on television. Radio commentary had told him all he needed to do about Richards' imperious manner or Srikkanth's twitchy nose. Once, on a trip to Eden Gardens, he had found himself surrounded by nearly a hundred thousand  Bengalis cheering wildly for Kapil and Azhar. He couldn't make out most of what happened on the field, but he remembered Chris Lewis, the forgotten English all-rounder outdo the much-touted Pringle and Botham with a century and a bagful of wickets. It reminded him, he said, of the manner in which he had imagined Alvin Kallicharan sent the hapless Indian bowlers on a leather hunt all those years ago. On another occasion, Joydeb despaired that the rain-rule in one-day games needed to be revised drastically so that it could be a fairer contest for the team batting second. He rued the 1992 World Cup semi-final between South Africa and England as a classic example of justice denied. And he despaired that Kapil Dev had prolonged his career needlessly to overtake Richard Hadlee's bowling record.

Richie Benaud or Neville Cardus could not have understood the game better. Joydeb knew and loved the game without malice or contempt for anyone. I sometimes wonder nowadays what he might have made of the IPL or T20 cricket more generally. I cannot tell, to be honest. But I do know that he'd have detested the ugly jingoism that the Indian fan brings to the game today. It is true that he enjoyed an Indian victory on the back of some fine performances by his favorite players, Kapil and Azhar. But it did not happen often, less so outside India. To see, however, Viv Richards or Shane Warne in action was, for him, a marvel to behold. That men could push the frontiers of possibility by batting or bowling the way Richards or Warne did, seemed to him to be the primary reason for following the sport. No matter what we do or how much we earn, there is an unspeakable sense of exhilaration every time one's hero comes to bat or bowl. Words cannot capture what the mind and heart do instinctively. In those brief, flickering moments, the world comes alive with wondrous possibilities, and all else is forgotten. But when the hero is caught at slip or smashed for six, you sigh and realize they -- and you -- are mortal, after all. Therein lies the magic of sport. I can only feel sorry for those who can never experience it. 

Sheela ki Jawaani ka Bhaavaarth

प्रस्तुत उत्तेजक गीत हिन्दी फिल्म जगत के नवीनतम रत्न 'तीस मार खान' से लिया गया है. यह गाना नायिका के संगमरमर जैसे शरीर से आकर्षित होने वालेलंगोट के ढीले पुरुषों पर नायिका की अपमानजनक प्रतिक्रया को व्यक्त करता है. नायिका उन्हें सीधे और कटु शब्दों में बताना चाहती है कि शीशे के पीछे रसगुल्ले कीख्वाहिश करना एक बात है और उसे चखना दूसरी बात!

I know you want it

But you never gonna get it

Tere haath kabhi na aani

Maane na maane koi duniya

Yeh saari, mere ishq ki hai deewani

गाने की शुरुआत नायिका के ईमानदारीपूर्ण वक्तव्य से होती है. वो जानती है कि इन मर्दों को उसकी भावनाओं, दिल और प्रेम से कोई सरोकार नहीं. वो तो बसएक ही चीज चाहते हैं. पर वो उन्हें मिलने वाली नहीं. उन्हें मुंह में भर आये पानी से ही अपनी प्यास बुझानी होगी. दुर्भाग्यपूर्ण, परन्तु सत्य.

Hey hey, I know you want it

but you never gonna get it

Tere haath kabhi na aani

Maane na maane koi duniya

yeh saari Mere ishq ki hai deewani

Ab dil karta hai haule haule se

Main toh khud ko gale lagaun

Kisi aur ki mujhko zaroorat kya

Main toh khud se pyaar jataun

नायिका पुनः दर्जनों पुरुषों में उसके प्रति जगी वासना पर प्रकाश डालती है. वो अपने आस-पास मंडराते छिछोरों को बताती है कि उनकी दाल नहीं गलने वाली. परसाथ ही यहाँ नायिका के व्यक्तित्व का एक और पक्ष उजागर होता है.

सौंदर्य से जागृत अहंकार का पक्ष. वो अपनी सुन्दरता से इतनी प्रभावित है कि उसे किसी पुरुष की ज़रुरत नहीं. वो अपने अन्दर की स्त्री के लिए खुद ही पुरुष बनजाना चाहती है. अब इसे अहंकार की पराकाष्ठा कहें या आत्म-प्रेम की मादकता!

what's my name

what's my name

what's my name

My name is Sheela

Sheela ki jawani

I'm just sexy for you

Main tere haath na aani

Na na na sheela

Sheela ki jawani

I'm just sexy for you

Main tere haath na aani

अब नायिका अपना परिचय देती है. अपना नाम बताती है. और नाम भी ऐसा जो बूढ़ी नसों के लिए वायाग्रा का काम करे. उनमें यौवन का झंझावात ला दे. नाम बताने के साथ वो यह भी बताती है कि वो बहुत ही ज़्यादा सेक्सी है. अपने मुंह मियाँ मिट्ठू. पर इस आत्म-प्रशंसा में भी अहंकार की सुगंध है. वो खुद को इतना ज़्यादा सेक्सी बताती है कि वो सबकी पहुँच से बाहर है. एक ऐसे चन्द्रमा की तरह जिसकी चांदनी तो सबको उपलब्ध है, पर उस चाँद को छूकर उसे महसूस करना किसी के बस की नहीं. यहाँ यह सिद्ध होता है है किनायिका सौंदर्य की साधक ही नहीं, बल्कि अहंकार से भरी चुड़ैल भी है.

Take it on

Take it on

Take it on

Take it on

अब नायिका सीधे शब्दों में चुनौती देती है. एक ऐसी चुनौती जो शायद मर्दों में शराब के बिना भी साहस ला दे.

Silly silly silly silly boys

O o o you're so silly

Mujhe bolo bolo karte hain

O o oHaan jab unki taraf dekhun,

baatein haule haule karte hain

Hai magar, beasar mujh par har paintra

अब नायिका उनका उपहास करती है. उन्हें मूर्ख कहकर पुकारती है. उन्हें ज़लील करती है. वो मर्द नायिका के बारे में गुप-चुप बातें कर सकते हैं, पर उसकेसामने जुबां नहीं खोल पाते. वासना<

On the Delhi Metro

As the grey train hurtled towards me on that gloomy day, I stood still and waited in anticipation of what lay in store for me aboard. I felt muscles twitch as a general air of uneasiness spread around me. Soon, the grey train opened its doors to us and exclaimed, "HUDA City Centre." My fellow passengers ran helter-skelter and sought desperately to seat themselves. Confused, I read the bright green signs that urged me not to sit on seats reserved for women, the elderly, and physically challenged persons. I wandered down to the next compartment. It was almost empty. I wondered why others didn't join me. Perhaps there's nothing like the warmth of humanity in winter.

In two minutes, we were at the next station, IFFCO Chowk, and in another two minutes, at MG Road station. Office clerks, call center employees, college

students, housewives, children, and senior citizens scrambled in through the doors to find places to sit. I pulled out a book and pretended to read. On my left sat a couple eager to know each other better. This quiet, brooding call-center employee sat listening to his partner's endless explanations for what she perceived as her inadequacies. "You know I feel my English and Hindi are worsening here in Gurgaon. I really did speak well in Bara Banki." Hmmm, muttered her boyfriend. "You know I don't really drink. It was just that one time when my Assamese flatmates forced me to drink and I got so drunk that I puked all night. These Assamese girls do it every week. I just don't know how they manage!" Hmmm, muttered her boyfriend again. "I hope you don't believe all the rumors about me in the office. They're all lies." Let's go, he said this time, the station's here.

"Guru Dronacharya," the announcer screamed. What a delicious irony that the ancient Mahabharata tale about Gurgaon has found favor with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation in 2010!

In walked Old Father Time himself through the gates. Dressed in a yellow silk kurta and a Nehru jacket, Father Time smiled and seated himself next to me. "Where are you going?" he asked. "Patel Chowk," I replied. "Long way to go, my boy. These coaches are old, you see, but the new ones they've got will be faster and smoother without the jerkiness we have now." Hmmm, I responded, wondering how he knew about the DMRC's plans. I suppose my laconic responses put off the old man. So he began talking to a rotund gentleman who seemed intrigued by the tidbit about the new coaches. "Bhaisahab, there is no hope for us Hindus nowadays. See how the government equivocates when it comes to terrorism. They didn't even want to hang Afzal Guru." Bhaisahab concurred: "And now they speak of Hindu terror. What a travesty!" That comment clearly struck a chord. It promised to pave the way for a long discourse on minority appeasement and Hindu insecurities in contemporary India. But nothing of the sort happened because a young, bespectacled man in a skullcap and sherwani stood beside us. The joys of Indian secularism!

If you look outside from the window of your metro coach

on the Delhi-Gurgaon route, you will discover much that had been hitherto hidden. Greenery everywhere with only small shanties breaking up the verdant landscape. Hardly any people to be seen in this bustling metropolis bursting at its seams. The orderliness of the armed forces inside their residential colonies. The opulence of farmhouses that are exposed now to the public eye. And the elegance of the Qutb Minar towering over Mehrauli. Thereafter, we are creatures of the dark in the underworld. Who knows what's happening above us? A mosque had been demolished that day, in fact, and Mathura Road and its vicinity were jam-packed with cars. But we couldn't know that inside our metro compartments. What we did see and know, however, is that we were packed together with a motley bunch of human specimens with different colors and smells enveloping us. The rough-and-ready manner of democracy, Indian-style.

Aboard the Metro, we were left to decide whether to offer seats to ladies and older people.

Every time someone offered his seat to a lady (not often!)he seemed positively pleased with himself. The elderly were not so lucky. They had to request seats, explaining that they had a long distance to travel, and even then, sitting could not be guaranteed. When an old lady came in at Jorbagh, ostensibly after cleaning some posh houses there, no one bothered when she asked for a seat. She deserved a seat under two of the three categories of the "abnormal" (old and female), but she apparently did not know that the unwritten class dynamics of Delhi had permeated underground into the Metro too. Unwritten also meant unspoken since no one offered an explanation for their rudeness: they simply looked away or continued talking as if they had not heard the woman at all. When I offered my seat to the lady, a young student with his ears plugged to his I-Pod threatened to shove his way ahead of her. I had to physically block his way to let her sit. Everyone looked displeased. An unwritten, unspoken law of the city had been broken.

Another such law concerns women. The DMRC has recently extended North India's zenana culture into the public transport system of the future. A reserved coach for women essentially means segregation. It is quite obvious that the majority of women will choose to avoid getting

their butts pinched or breasts grabbed in the other coaches. But with the new reserved coach for women, the "normal" passengers (male, aged 15-60 years) can rule the roost elsewhere and ignore the bright green signs that dare to impose a kind of civility in the early days of the Metro. Butt-pinching and breast-grabbing are now perfectly acceptable in three-quarters of every Metro train. Indeed, they are vital to maintaining the new zenana culture: "segregate, or else we'll, molest you" is the message to women.

On my way back, two call-center employees sat beside me all the way to Gurgaon. They seemed less-than-thrilled by their jobs. But they were even less thrilled by their friend Raghu, who seemed to them to be engaged forever in long telephonic conversations with his girlfriend. "What's there to talk to these bitches? They're good to fuck now and then after work. And it's great on the weekends. But there's nothing really to talk to them about." His misogynist co-worker agreed heartily: "I don't waste my time like that. Better to go out drinking with your buddies. Or stay home playing video games. These bitches are so demanding: if you get talking to them, they won't let you do anything else in life." This is how the "normal" passengers of the Metro are expected to behave. The misogyny of the streets is normalized now as it gets braided with the zenana culture of the old courtly elites. This is the culture of neoliberalism: selective appropriation of cultural pasts to reinforce existing power equations.

But neoliberalism is not simply trade liberalization and privatization,as many are wont to believe. The Delhi Metro is a dramatic statement by the Government of India in an era where the rotten core of private sector corporations has come to the fore like never before. Leviathan, too, can be efficient and profitable as it builds critical infrastructure and breathes life anew into the city. The state, as entrepreneur as well as regulator, is the new face of neoliberal reforms in India. If M-NREGA

is its most visible face in rural India today, the Delhi Metro is the blueprint for urban transformations in India today. Move over, Narayan Murthy and the BATF. Metro coaches are awash with public sector advertisements for yoga and naturopathy from the Health Ministry and mobile and internet plans from MTNL and BSNL. The state continue to enforce the writ of the law throughout the metro station. If you spit or travel without tokens, be prepared to pay a hefty fine. If you enter the women's coach forcibly, be prepared to be pulled out by a cop policing the gendered borderlands between the coaches. And don't urinate on the platform or clamber atop the train! The government hopes to impose a distinctly bourgeois civility on those whose notions of morality are characteristically different. It is not clear yet who or what will prevail.

There is no doubt that the Delhi Metro is the best thing to happen to the Capital for decades. Delhi lacks the planning apparatus of Mumbai or Bangalore. It is a segregated city that offers innumerable opportunities to the new migrant even as it blocks off many others. The Metro re-engages the energies of young aspirants to middle-class rank and privilege. It brings the city together in unprecedented ways, yet re-inscribes older prejudices of gender, age, and class in a neoliberal garb. In the stations and trains, the democratic populism of the streets battles the neoliberal moral order directed by the government. Little wonder then that the mall-going India Shining public shies away from the Metro: it is too plebeian for their tastes. And yet their college-going children may well end up sweating and scrambling beside less-privileged passengers who look and smell so different from them. In this tortured, tortuous way, the promise of the modern city comes alive and the century-old legacies of the colonial capital threaten to fall apart.

Surjya Sen in 2010

This weekend, I watched Bollywood's tribute to Surjya Sen, teacher and revolutionary leader in eastern Bengal during the 1920s. Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Se notes at the start that it is "a true story." By this, the viewer is expected to know that Surjya Sen was indeed a local schoolteacher in Chandanpura who was revered as Master-da; that he organized a revolutionary youth group in his locality; that he and his young followers entered the annals of Indian history with the Chittagong Armoury Raid on April 18, 1930; that he and his comrades were eventually caught by the British in the Jalalabad Hills and then sentenced to death or life imprisonment.

But why are we being told about Surjya Sen today? If we must pick some Bengali revolutionary leader outside the mainstream Congress ranks, then why not go for, say, Khudiram Bose or any of the followers of Anushilan? After all, Anushilan and Bose resonate more to Bengali Hindus today than Surjya Sen in distant Chittagong. But this is as much a film about Chandanpura as Lagaan was about Champaner. It's an all-India film in which geography and language are necessarily subordinated to the meta-narrative of the nation. But still, is it not curious that Ashutosh Gowarikar chose Surjya Sen, Congress district committee president of Chittangong and founder of the Jugantar unit there? On purely historical grounds, I admit, it is exceedingly difficult to find a satisfactory answer to that question.

But that question has a very contemporary answer. Here is what Gowarikar says about the film: "It's about the zeal of patriotism…the desperation to throw away the oppressor- the British Raj. The oppressor is there in present times as well…it may be the socio-economic factor, or it can be moral issues…there are several oppressors today. Even today we need to address all of that and different kinds of revolution do need to come in to fight the social evils we are facing at the moment." The socio-economic factor, moral issues, several oppressors, different revolutions. What is he talking about? Why is he being so vague?

What the film effectively does is to present a historical narrative that pits an oppressive state against a bunch of young, idealistic revolutionaries. For those who have seen Gowarikar's Lagaan, the narrative clearly builds on an earlier precedent. This is his Rang De Basanti, a film directed at metropolitan Indian youth to recognize an obscure patriot outside the Congress pantheon of nationalist historiography. The "moral issues" Gowarikar speaks of in today's India are linked to state oppression. The "social-economic factor," as he puts it cryptically, is a consequence of that state-directed oppression of Indian society. And the solution, he secretly suggests, is violence as an expression of idealistic revolutionary politics to overthrow the oppressive regime.

Reading between the lines in this way, one can appreciate why Surjya Sen is meant to matter in 2010. Consider the scene in which the enthusiastic young revolutionaries speak of their love for the motherland. When these boys then speak of their hatred for the government, Sen (the portly Abhishek Bachchan) chides them by saying that he merely opposes its unjust domination of ordinary people. Next, consider the scene in which the young men (and women) plot to seize the armoury and acquire enough weapons to cut off supply lines to Chittangong from Calcutta. Anyone today should be reminded of the parallel with guerrilla strategies being employed today in Dandakaranya or the Jangal Mahals. Lastly, consider the visuals of the revolutionaries on the run in the Jalalabad Hills even as they lose their comrades one by one. This is a tragedy, we know already, but the idea of revolutionary violence is meant to matter to viewers because it signifies sacrifices towards a better tomorrow. That tomorrow ought to be not only free from state oppression, but also one characterized by communal amity and gender equity. In this context, recall how Tarakeshwar Dastidar is nursed back to good health by a Muslim couple and the overall significance of Kalpana Dutta (the de-glamorized Deepika Padukone) in the film. These are the multiple revolutionaries Gowarikar hopes to ignite.

Sadly, much like his protagonists, the filmmaker too fails in his mission. Abhishek Bachchan is appallingly bad as Surjya Sen. The younger Bachchan resembles, as in many of his recent films, an overfed cow that has been disturbed from its regular chewing habits. While his comrades follow Anushilan-style military training, Bachchan is conspicuously absent. Chewing, presumably. His dialogues lack conviction and inspire no one. The enthusiastic boys outdo him by some distance. The other big star in the film, Deepika Padukone, is happiest playing badminton with her friend. For much of the film, however, she is drawn away from the court to sleepwalk through the revolutionary plot. It does not help that she mouths insipid dialogues, but even then, Padukone is hopelessly miscast. Imagine Ajay Devgan in place of Bachchan and Vidya Balan instead of Padukone. A far better film would have resulted. As it stands, however, Gowarikar flatters to deceive. A golden opportunity to reinterpret the past in the service of contemporary politics has been squandered. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the film has opened poorly throughout the country this weekend. What a waste of a storyline!

The Spirit of Guy Fawkes This November

Did the spirit of Guy Fawkes visit us this November? WikiLeaks and the Radia Tapes in India have exposed the hollowness of our rulers and their cronies in the media, in big business, and the army. Some of us distrusted them anyway, but now, the evidence is before everyone. Suddenly, it's not the Maoists or Al-Qaeda or some such phantom in the news. It's the state and its allies.

The emptiness of neoliberal "governance" also now stands exposed. We were told that smaller government would mean a more vibrant civil society. The media appeared to be a symbol of that vibrant civil society. Ordinary people can only express shock and dismay at events well beyond their control. Now alas, the grand strategy of neoliberalism has been exposed now as rotten to its core.

Nearly four hundred years after his public execution, Guy Fawkes remains significant for us. What we call freedom might be simply servitude. What we call rights might be merely legal fictions. What we call civil society might be simply a chicken coop belonging to our masters. John Locke, often considered to be the bourgeois philosopher par excellence, had a simple solution to this problem: dissolve an unresponsive, unaccountable government by exercising one's right to rebel. It is unclear what Locke thought of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, but it is quite apparent that the audacious radicalism of Fawkes' actions reverberated down to Locke's age. The Second Treatise of Government opens with an assault on the divine rights of rulers and ends with the conditions under which governments no longer deserve our allegiance. This is the essence of modern democracy. It is nothing without its radical edge. If we ever needed a reminder, this November has given us two.