I watched Lagaan again, not on a laptop, but in a cinema hall, with my 17-year-old son Ashvin sitting beside me. The immediate provocation came from my friend Suhasini Mulay, who played Yashodamai, Bhuvan’s mother, in the film. Suhasini asked me to take Ashvin to watch the film on a large screen, as it completed 25 years. I took that suggestion seriously.

That suggestion also carried a political memory for me. Suhasini is not only an actor from many much-loved films or serials but a public intellectual who has stood by minority rights, feminist positions and unpopular democratic causes when many others found silence more convenient. That mattered to me while watching Lagaan again, because the film itself is not merely about a cricket match but about who stands with whom when power demands conformance.

When I first watched Lagaan 25 years ago, I was just out of college. The film was already larger than cinema to the history student in me: a village, drought, tax, cricket match, colonial wager, and a people who had to learn an alien game in order to defeat an empire at its own sport. Watching it now as a father, the film felt even more audacious. Ashutosh Gowariker did not make a small film pretending to be large. He made a large film that worked because every detail was treated seriously — the landscape, bodies, sweat, dust, silences, costumes, the rhythm of village speech, carefully cast faces, and the refusal to paint poverty into postcard beauty.

The landscapes of Bhuj and Kutch shape the film. The parched earth, circling clouds, village square, temple, palace, cantonment and the cricket ground all become political locations. The camera showed how land becomes memory, drought becomes history, and taxation becomes punitive. I still remember how the film made me look at land differently and contributed to my understanding of how to photograph it.

The craft remains impressive. Anil Mehta’s cinematography gave the film scale without losing intimacy. Nitin Chandrakant Desai’s art direction made Champaner into a lived-in world, not merely a film set. Bhanu Athaiya’s costumes carried class, caste, occupation and geography with élan.

The casting remains one of the great achievements of this Bollywood legend. Aamir Khan’s Bhuvan is not a superhero but stubborn, playful, vulnerable, occasionally foolish, egalitarian and deeply democratic. Gracy Singh’s Gauri watches, decides, resists, loves, doubts and participates. Rachel Shelley’s Elizabeth is not reduced to colonial guilt but becomes the moral contradiction inside the empire. Paul Blackthorne’s Captain Russell is effective: arrogance with boots, cruelty with carefully crafted words. And then there are Bhura, Ismail, Deva, Guran, Bagha, Arjan, Lakha and Kachra — not ‘supporting cast’ in the shallow sense, but the making of a subaltern resistance.

Even the language is a political achievement. The film does not surrender to Sanskritised Hindi. Its idiom moves through earthy speech, Avadhi-Bhojpuri-Braj inflections, village humour and anti-elitist irreverence. The scene where heavily Sanskritised Hindi is mocked still feels like a small linguistic revolt. Lagaan understood something the RSS does not: a civilisation does not live in purified grammar or divine language; it lives in people’s tongues.

But the biggest awe of watching Lagaan today is not the cinema. In 2001, India was under a BJP-led government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, with L. K. Advani, the home minister, as the ideological hard centre of that formation. That government had its own grave politics, majoritarian shadows and complicities. Yet there remained some architecture of democratic pretence. The media was still largely independent, and civil society actors had space to intervene.

Twenty-five years later, we live under the same party’s more brutal avatar, under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, where the NDA framework often functions as a decorative scaffolding for dictatorship. We should not mince words: this is a regime many of us experience as fascistic in method, corporate in loyalty, majoritarian in imagination and vindictive in temperament. It has normalised fear, weaponised religion, converted media into obedience, and turned dissenters into suspects.

It is in this India that Lagaan returns as a difficult reminder. Here is a film where Hindus and Muslims are not staged as enemies. Ismail does not have to prove his patriotism by dying for the Hindu hero. He plays, limps, bats, and belongs. Bagha, who cannot speak, drums, loves, suffers and contributes. Kachra, the Dalit man marked by caste exclusion and disability, becomes the decisive bowler and the 11th man standing. Bhuvan’s insistence that Kachra must be part of the team is one of the film’s most openly anti-caste moments. The village first rejects him with the old poison: untouchability disguised as custom, injustice disguised as religion. Bhuvan breaks that consensus. He does not deliver a lecture on social justice. He does something more dangerous and dares to go alone with his convictions – an audacity that many in today’s India are losing fast. To me, that is the politics of Lagaan.

This is why Lagaan cannot be reduced to a patriotic cricket film. Its anti-colonialism is not merely about sending the British back. It asks who gets to stand on the ground when freedom is being fought for. Bhuvan, Ismail, Bagha and Kachra do not merely defeat Captain Russell but the idea that the oppressed must remain in their allotted social corners. The match is a people’s assembly disguised as sport.

The film is equally daring in its handling of religion. Think of the song Radha Kaise Na Jale. In today’s poisoned climate, that song itself could invite television debates, police complaints and social media mobs. Here is Bhuvan, teasingly and publicly saying that Krishna loved Radha but married Rukmini. By today’s standards of manufactured hurt, it could be called blasphemy. Some self-appointed guardians of faith would claim that Kanhaiya had been insulted. Some primetime fraud would declare Hindu sentiments hurt. Some party spokesperson would demand apology, or worse, put a price on the heretic Muslim who wrote the lyrics.

But Lagaan’s music is not decorative. A. R. Rahman and Javed Akhtar gave the film a people’s score. Ghanan Ghanan is agrarian longing set to rhythm. Mitwa is the sound of collective courage being assembled. Chale Chalo is almost a march, but without militarism. O Paalanhaare is prayer without hatred. Radha Kaise Na Jale is desire without vulgarity, devotion without fear. Even O Rey Chhori; I am in love performs a delicate crossing – between Gauri and Elizabeth, village and empire, Hindi and English, longing and unrequitedness.

The film dared to be a full musical when the industry itself was not certain such a risk could work at this scale. Who would make a nearly four-hour, anti-colonial, anti-caste, rural, cricket-based musical today and expect producers to back it? Who would allow songs to carry politics instead of sizzling item-numbers? Who would trust an audience to sit through drought, dialect, collective training, caste confrontation, comic interludes, a full cricket match and a prayer song written by an atheist poet?

And what a contrast with the present cinematic atmosphere! Today, too much of mainstream cinema and media has moved from storytelling to mobilisation, ambiguity to propaganda, narrative to spectacle and courage to market-tested aggression. Films like The Kashmir Files, Kerala Story and the more recent national-security blockbuster ecosystem around films such as Dhurandhar are not isolated cultural products.

There are exceptions, of course. Good filmmakers, brave writers, and actors with conscience still exist. But the system around them has hardened.

That is why Lagaan hurts today. It reminds us that popular cinema need not be stupid to be successful. It need not be communal to be patriotic. It need not humiliate minorities to invoke patriotism. It need not erase caste to speak of unity. It need not make women decorative in order to be memorable. It need not flatten faith into hate. It need not shout ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ every three minutes to be patriotic.

In fact, Lagaan is anti-colonial precisely because it understands oppression in layered ways: the British officer, frightened king, priestly prejudice, village patriarchy, caste wall, drought economy, tax regime, and the politics of hunger. Even the vegetarian king of Champaner, Raja Puran Singh, is shown with complexity. He is humiliated by the British, but he is also compromised, hesitant, and trapped in the rituals of royalty while his people starve. The film does not let him become the hero.

Watching it with a 17 year old, I kept asking myself: what did we inherit from 2001, and what have we allowed to be stolen? The answer is uncomfortable. Yet the film itself trumps despair. Lagaan does not say that people are naturally united. It says they can be united when politics reorganises fear into courage. It says caste can be challenged, but only when the excluded are brought to the centre. It says faith can sing without becoming fundamentalism. It says women can desire, decide and dissent. It says the colonised can learn the master’s game and still play it in their own rhythm. It says even a cricket match can become a freedom struggle when the stakes are land, hunger and dignity.

Twenty-five years later, Lagaan is no longer only a classic but a mirror reflecting our opportunism, weakness and vulnerabilities.

Published in special arrangement with TheWire.in