Anniversaries encourage bad film writing. We polish a classic until it becomes a civic monument, praise everyone involved and avoid asking why the industry that produced it learned so little. Lagaan, now twenty-five years old, deserves better than incense. It remains a thrilling, imperfect demonstration that a major Hindi film can be original, popular, formally ambitious and completely legible to a mass audience. The embarrassing part is not that Bollywood has failed to make another Lagaan. No industry should copy its landmarks. The embarrassment is that producers increasingly behave as though such a gamble is conceptually impossible.
The anniversary has received international attention, including a Variety report on its Melbourne screening. That account notes the film’s enduring global standing and Academy Award nomination. I am less interested in the trophy cabinet than in the original bet. Aamir Khan and Ashutosh Gowariker built a long period drama around drought, colonial taxation and a cricket match featuring villagers who must learn the game. No sequel number, cinematic universe or recycled hit song explained the proposition. The film had to teach audiences how to watch it.
Scale came from storytelling, not clutter
Lagaan is routinely described as “epic,” which now means a drone shot, a large battle and a budget announcement. Its scale is actually narrative. The village has social texture; the match has rules; each player has a function; the tax creates material stakes. When the climax arrives, a raised finger or dropped catch matters because the screenplay has spent hours making consequences clear. Modern spectacle often reverses this process. It begins with the poster moment and then hires dialogue to connect one expensive image to another.
The film is not subtle about heroism, and Bhuvan is very much a star vehicle. But stardom operates in service of a collective. Aamir does not merely arrive with invincible competence. He persuades, fails, recruits and learns. Supporting characters are drawn broadly, sometimes too broadly, yet the story cannot proceed without them. Compare that with contemporary ensemble marketing, where six famous faces occupy a poster while the screenplay gives four of them introductions rather than arcs. Lagaan understood that scale means interdependence.
I will also admit its limitations. Some characterisations lean on shorthand. The romance is less compelling than the match. The British characters vary between effective antagonism and caricature. A modern viewing should not become compulsory reverence. Classics survive criticism; fragile nostalgia does not. Yet even its flaws emerge from attempting a complete dramatic world, not from committee notes designed to protect a release strategy.
Audiences are not the cowards here
Bollywood executives often explain remakes, sequels and star-family packages by invoking audience preference. Viewers, apparently, demand familiarity and punish experiment. This is wonderfully convenient because it turns every timid greenlight into consumer research. Audiences certainly use familiar titles as shortcuts, especially when tickets are expensive. But they also embrace novelty when a film communicates its pleasures. The industry’s job is not to discover that people recognise brands. A shopkeeper could provide that insight. The job is to make unfamiliar material desirable.
Lagaan’s marketing had a star, music and cricket, but none guaranteed success. The running time was long, the setting rural and the language not flattened into metropolitan Hindi. Its makers trusted specificity. Today, “pan-India” is often misunderstood as the removal of local texture. The opposite is usually true. A story travels when its world feels inhabited and its emotion is clear. Generic production design does not become universal merely because it is expensive.
Nepotism enters this problem not because every industry child lacks talent. Some are excellent. It matters because a risk-averse system substitutes familiarity in casting for evidence of suitability. A project already based on a known property then adds a known surname, remixed music and a publicity narrative about legacy. Each decision insures the previous one until the film has been protected from surprise. When it fails, audiences are blamed for losing the habit of cinema. I have no patience for that circular defence.
The screenplay is the missing special effect
Lagaan spends an enormous amount of time establishing tasks: assemble a team, overcome division, learn technique and survive the match. That structure permits digressions without losing direction. Many modern Hindi films possess incidents but no dramatic engine. A hero encounters a villain, songs occur, a flashback explains pain and the climax waits patiently for its appointment. Writers are then asked to repair the material with punch lines. Dialogue cannot supply architecture after construction.
Producers must pay writers earlier, give them time and allow disagreement before shooting makes every change expensive. This sounds less glamorous than announcing a universe, which may explain the resistance. Development has no paparazzi photographs. Yet the classics everyone claims to love were built on decisions about motive, rhythm and character. Technology can enlarge a frame; it cannot tell us why the frame matters.
The film also demonstrates the usefulness of genre literacy. It is a sports movie, musical, colonial drama and underdog fable, and it honours the expectations of each. The match is not embarrassed to create suspense. The songs do not apologise for existing. The politics is carried through conflict rather than a lecture pasted onto publicity. Contemporary filmmakers sometimes mistake tonal confusion for sophistication. Lagaan is ambitious because it coordinates genres, not because it refuses pleasure.
Stop commemorating courage and start financing it
No sensible critic should demand another three-and-a-half-hour cricket musical. The lesson is institutional. Give a filmmaker with a developed script the resources to build a specific world. Cast for the film rather than the announcement. Use a star to attract attention without allowing vanity to erase everyone else. Test whether the climax completes the story instead of merely advertising the next instalment. These principles are old because storytelling did not become obsolete when opening-weekend spreadsheets arrived.
Streaming was supposed to widen the space for risk, and for a while it did. Then algorithms developed their own familiarities: crime, espionage, grim lighting and seasons that end with administrative permission for another season. The medium changed; timidity adapted. A film like Lagaan reminds us that popular art need not choose between accessibility and authorship. It can explain itself without simplifying itself.
I will happily attend an anniversary screening. The music will soar, the match will work again and an audience will applaud a result it has known for decades. But nostalgia should leave us irritated as well as moved. Bollywood possesses more money, technology and distribution than the industry that made Lagaan. What it often lacks is the nerve to place those assets behind an untested idea. The audience has already demonstrated its courage by following a village into an impossible match. Producers are the ones still standing at the boundary, waiting for a franchise to fetch the ball.
