Lagaan, the Cricket Match Against the Raj Filmed in Kutch, Was One of Five Oscar Nominees in 2002 and Won Eight National Film Awards

Lagaan was one of five films nominated for best foreign language film at the 74th Academy Awards, held at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on 24 March 2002. The Academy’s page lists it with France’s Amelie, Norway’s Elling and Argentina’s Son of the Bride. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s No Man’s Land won. Back home, Outlook reported on 26 July 2002 that Lagaan took the popular-film prize and seven more at the 49th National Film Awards.

Ashutosh Gowariker directed the film, and Aamir Khan produced it and played the lead. It opened on 15 June 2001 and runs 224 minutes, according to Scroll. Khan’s whole career, Dangal and the China release included, is covered in tuput’s article on Aamir Khan. This one is about the film.

A drought, a tax and a bet on a cricket match

The story is set in 1893 in Champaner, a village that does not exist. The University of Iowa’s Indian cinema guide says the setting is deliberately vague: the film was shot in Kutch, in Gujarat, but mixes architecture, dress and dialects from north and central India into an archetypal village.

A drought makes the lagaan, which means tax and which the film shows as a levy on the crop, harder to pay. The local Raja collects it and the British take most of it. Captain Andrew Russell, the British officer, challenges the villagers to a match. If they beat his team, the tax is cancelled for three years. If they lose, it triples.

Khan plays Bhuvan, the farmer who accepts the bet. Gracy Singh plays Gauri, Rachel Shelley plays Elizabeth, Russell’s sister, who coaches the villagers, Paul Blackthorne plays Russell and Kulbhushan Kharbanda plays the Raja, Puran Singh. Amitabh Bachchan narrates the prologue. A. R. Rahman composed the music and Javed Akhtar wrote the lyrics, Scroll notes.

The tax was a real instrument even though the village is invented. The wider system is described in tuput’s articles on how Britain drained India’s wealth and on the tax on salt.

Building a village near Bhuj

A piece in Open magazine marking the film’s tenth anniversary reports that the whole film was shot in Bhuj, and quotes Gowariker saying the crew built Champaner from scratch. It also says Khan first turned the story down, thinking it outlandish and doubting that any producer or actor would take it on.

For the crowd at the match, Khan asked for 20,000 extras. The number was whittled down to 10,000, and Open reports that a local contractor reached about 90 village heads so that the extras arrived by truck from that many villages. Film Companion, drawing on Satyajit Bhatkal’s documentary Madness in the Desert, adds that Kutch had only three hotels, so the cast and a unit of about 300 stayed in a rented residential building, and that local craftsmen built the sets. Bhatkal’s film, Film Companion says, won a National Award.

The cinematographer Anil Mehta said in a Hollywood Reporter India feature that, because the story is set in a drought, the team avoided greens and blues and chose a barren stretch of land, and that the cricket sequences took about 30 days of outdoor shooting. He rejected the idea of filming the match like a sports broadcast. “This is a drama film, not a sports film,” he said.

The University of Iowa guide puts the cost at about Rs 25 crore (roughly $6 million) and reports that the film recovered its full cost from music and overseas rights before release.

A team of different castes and faiths

The villagers who join Bhuvan are not a single community. The University of Iowa guide lists a team that includes Ismail alongside Ishwar, Arjan, Guran, Deva Singh and Bagha, and says they represent a range of castes and communities. Lakha, Bhuvan’s rival, comes round in the end. Kachra, played by Aditya Lakhia, is a sweeper regarded as an untouchable, with a limp hand that makes him a key bowler.

Nandini Ramnath, in Scroll, describes the team as multi-faith and multi-caste and the film as old-fashioned in its approach, with an inclusive vision of patriotism. She also criticises how it handles social divides and its treatment of Elizabeth’s character. The Iowa guide faults the film’s simplified history, in particular a picture of princes as kinder than many of them were.

The nomination and the night at the Kodak Theatre

The Tribune reported on 23 February 2002 that the cast and crew had gathered at Khan’s home in Pali Hill, Mumbai, from 2 pm on 12 February and learned of the nomination on television that evening. Gowariker told the paper the nomination was an achievement the whole nation would be proud of. Lagaan was the third Indian film nominated for the Oscar, after Mother India and Salaam Bombay!, Wisden CricInfo noted.

Khan and a publicist based in the United States planned a campaign, which the Tribune estimated at Rs 5 crore, to get Academy voters to watch the film. Gowariker opposed shortening it, the paper said, arguing that its Indianness comes through only when it is seen in full.

On the night, Wisden CricInfo reported on 25 March 2002, No Man’s Land beat the favourite, Amelie. By February that year, CricInfo said, the film had taken about $2 million in North America and Britain. The Numbers lists a United States total of $835,767.

Eight National Film Awards and a Locarno audience

Outlook’s report of the 49th National Film Awards, announced on 26 July 2002, lists Lagaan’s wins. Besides the popular-film prize it took best music direction for Rahman, best lyrics for Akhtar, best choreography for Raju Khan, best audiography for H. Sridhar and Nakul Kamte, best art direction for Chandrakant Desai, best male playback singer for Udit Narayan on “Mitwa” and best costume design for Bhanu Athaiya. That makes eight, though a Screen Daily report of 31 July 2002 gave the total as seven. Dweepa, a Kannada film directed by Girish Kasaravalli, was named best feature film, and Dil Chahta Hai won best Hindi feature film. Feature jury chairman K. S. Sethu Madhavan described the decisions as unanimous.

Abroad, Lagaan was screened in the Piazza Grande at the Locarno festival in August 2001, where swissinfo reported that the crowd applauded each time a British wicket fell. The Tribune says it won audience awards at Locarno and at the Leeds festival.

What critics wrote

Roger Ebert called it “an enormously entertaining movie, like nothing we’ve ever seen before, and yet completely familiar,” as Eastern Eye quotes him. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, per the same article, called it a lavish epic and a rollicking adventure yarn. The Iowa guide calls it stylish and intelligent throughout, while saying its clichés weaken it.

The historian Andrew Roberts told CricInfo in February 2002 that the film overplayed the negatives of the Raj, which he said brought peace, progress and stability. Blackthorne, who played Russell, replied that the British of the time were not far short of mafiosi and that the film depicted them accurately. The two views are on the record side by side, and neither is settled by the film.

Opening against Gadar, and the trade figures

Lagaan opened on 15 June 2001, the same day as Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. Film Information, the trade weekly, wrote in its issue dated 16 June 2001 that the Bombay opening at Eros and 18 other cinemas was historic though good rather than great everywhere, and that both films were going very strong. United News of India wrote in June 2026 that Lagaan did well with urban and critical audiences and Gadar with rural and semi-urban ones.

Box-office totals differ between outlets. Bollywood Hungama’s table for 2001 lists Lagaan at a lifetime Rs 34.31 crore with the verdict Hit, third among the releases it shows, behind Gadar at Rs 76.88 crore and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.

For its 25th anniversary the film returned to Indian cinemas on 12, 13 and 14 June 2026, according to a caption from Aamir Khan Productions reported by the Tribune.