It’s the year 1990. On a snow-laden pitch in Kashmir, a few boys play cricket with a single bat. India and Pakistan are at loggerheads in a cricket match being broadcast on a radio nearby. A couple of young men warm their hands by a fire as they animatedly debate Sachin Tendulkar’s competence. “Tendulkar does a full-toss! It’s a six!” exclaims the radio commentator. Shiva, one of the little boys, starts yelling Sachin’s name in excitement. The young men look over as Abdul, Shiva’s friend, rushes to stop him. “Don’t shout his name,” he says. “But why?” Shiva asks. “Look over there. It’ll be a problem,” Abdul warns, as another boy begins to tackle Shiva. The young men come over, shouting, “That Indian dog will hit a six? Let’s teach this boy a lesson!” They start assaulting Shiva, and one of them yells, “Say ‘Long Live Pakistan!’ Go on!” As Shiva gets beaten up, Abdul throws fistfuls of snow at the men and manages to pull Shiva. “Run, Shiva!” he says, as the two boys escape from the men.
The arrests of Kashmiris and Muslims for cheering Pakistan in Indo-Pak matches have become a troublingly commonplace affair in the past few years. During the 2023 Cricket World Cup, when India lost the final match, seven Kashmiri students were booked under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for celebrating India’s loss. It would, therefore, seem curious that a Hindi film should open with a scene, where a boy is assaulted for cheering an Indian player in a match—an occurrence divorced from reality. But when it is Vivek Agnihotri’s 2022 film The Kashmir Files, the decision doesn’t seem as surprising. Rather, it comes across as a well-designed inversion of facts and the cricket match, a remarkably intelligent choice to set the tone for what is to follow. Agnihotri knows well the value with which a game of cricket in India is imbued and how it can be used to rile up volatile sentiments in favour of propaganda.
Sports In Cinema
Seldom has sport been just a sport in cinema. Be it Hollywood, or elsewhere in the world, the sports genre has always accrued the social significance of ‘a struggle against all odds’ in the way it props its protagonists—usually an underdog individual or team—and narrates a journey towards the ultimate victory. In India, allegiance to the nation is often the dominant refrain in the typical sports film. And nowhere is this more visible than in stories that are premised on cricket.
From the gullies to the stadiums, cricket has been riding on the tide of collective pride and joy of millions since pre-independence times. Often historicised as a colonial legacy, cricket is not your ordinary sport that merely tests the mettle of its enthusiasts—its ability to mobilise mass emotions is no less than that of a war. It is no wonder then, that India’s victory against Pakistan in a World cup match in June 1999—right in the middle of the Kargil war—served as a major boost for the Indian soldiers. While talking to reporters after the win, one of them was reported to have said, “We have won the battle of nerves and will surely win the battle of bullets also.”
It is this very impetus that Hindi cinema has capitalised in the wake of economic liberalisation—when private television channels saw a lucrative opportunity in the sport and began pumping massive resources into live cricket broadcasts. Cricket has served as a pivotal backdrop in earlier Hindi films as well, dating right back to Subodh Mukherjee’s Love Marriage (1959), in which the decade’s heartthrob Dev Anand played the role of a star cricketer. Even the Khans saw a chance in the sport early on in their careers—while Aamir Khan featured in Dev Anand’s Awwal Number (1990), Shah Rukh Khan appeared in Rajiv Mehra’s Chamatkar (1992). However, it was not until Ashutosh Gowariker’s magnum opus Lagaan (2001) that producers realised the immense potential in combining the two opioids of Indian popular culture—cricket and cinema.
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Bollywood
Lagaan (2001) altered the landscape of Bollywood in numerous ways. For one, it turned Hindi cinema into a major source of India’s soft power on the global stage, with its nomination in the “Best Foreign Language Film” category at the Academy Awards. At home, it augmented the sports genre as a credible thematic of interest for cinemagoers. On a stylistic level, the idea that the nation’s history could also be imagined through a game of cricket germinated from Lagaan. An odd bunch of villagers, coming together to defeat their colonial overlords at their own game for a tax exemption, became everyone’s favourite underdogs.
Thereafter, there was no stopping the influx of cricket into cinema. In 2005, Nagesh Kukunoor made Iqbal, where Shreyas Talpade—in the titular role as a deaf and mute boy fixated with cricket—won the audience’s hearts with his tender performance. Then there was Anurag Singh’s Dil Bole Hadippa! (2009), ‘inspired’ from Andy Fickman’s She’s the Man (2006). In the film, Veera (Rani Mukerji) cross dresses as a man to win a place in the men’s team, so she can play for the World Cup. With its slightly daft and roundabout ‘feminist’ take, the film attempted to speak about opportunities denied to women because of their gender. Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che! (2013)—adapted from author Chetan Bhagat’s The Three Mistakes of My Life (2008)—was also a tale spun around cricket. Set in Ahmedabad in the early 2000s, the story centres three friends who want to open a cricket academy together. However, their friendship is put to test amidst the devastation caused by the 2001 earthquake and the communal hate fuelled by the Gujarat riots.
The aspirations in these films weren’t just limited to the Indian cricket team—in Nikkhil Advani’s Patiala House (2011), the character of Gattu (Akshay Kumar) was loosely based on the English spinner Monty Panesar. While the film tried to build an interesting premise of Sikh migration from India to countries like the UK post-Partition, the narrative logic lost its way in its attempts to hark back to a diasporic nationalism that seemed misplaced in the plot.
Cricket’s imbrication with cinema only deepened with the Indian Premiere League, established in 2007. Bollywood stars were no longer merely playing the roles of cricketers in movies—they were now also buying them at auctions for the franchise teams they owned. From Shah Rukh Khan to Preity Zinta, actors appeared in live-telecast auctions, adding to the glamour of a format that would eventually transform the fundamental nature of the sport.
The late 2010s also saw the emergence of cricket biopics. Films were made on prominent names from the cricketing world like MS Dhoni and Mohammad Azharuddin. Sushant Singh Rajput’s restrained and composed portrayal of Dhoni in Neeraj Pandey’s MS Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016) was appreciated by critics and viewers alike. However, there was criticism from various quarters about the omission of key controversies that marked Dhoni’s career from the narrative, turning the film into a sanitised hagiography. Anthony D’Souza’s Azhar (2016), on the other hand, was all about the match-fixing controversy that Azharuddin found himself embroiled in, with very little game in it. While the film itself was drab, it generated significant public debate about the clean chit given to the cricketer in the story. Law enforcement officers who were involved in the case rejected its depiction, asserting that Azharuddin’s confessions of his involvement in match-fixing were on record.
While cricket undergoes ceaseless facelifts to remain relevant in a media-saturated environment, cinema’s investment, if anything, has only increased in the sport. Films like 83 (2021), Shabaash Mithu (2022), Jersey (2022), Ghoomer (2023) and Mr. & Mrs. Mahi (2024) continue to be made relentlessly to profit off the more or less consistent popularity of the sport among the masses. However, the excitement around such movies has begun to wane, with the industry having nothing new to offer to cinema lovers. The plotlines remain hinged on dull, melodramatic trajectories and there is no fresh insight into the game provided by their stories. As Bollywood undergoes a crisis of content and inspiration, now would be a good time to take a lesson or two on reinvention from its cultural counterpart, cricket.
Apeksha Priyadarshini is Senior Copy Editor, 해외카지노. She writes on cinema, art, politics, gender & social justice
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
This article appears in 해외카지노 Magazine’s June 21, 2025 issue, Innings/Outings, which captures a turning point in Indian cricket —from retiring legends to small-town stars reshaping the game’s power map. It appeared in print as Screen Shots.
