Last night I saw the movie Lagaan (I doubt many people here will see it, but I put the spoiler warning in anyways). It tells the story of a group of villagers in 1890’s India who are challenged to a cricket match by the ruling British commander, with the stakes being three years’ taxes. As Indian movies go, it actually was fairly well-made, lacking much of the cheesiness of a lot of Bollywood stuff.
Now, I’m pretty sure that most of the details/characters are made up (there’s a love story, and one of the players is a crippled Untouchable), but the movie seems to imply (in the typical final voiceover) that this was some sort of actual event.
I know it’s a long shot, but I was wondering if anyone here’d ever heard of a cricket match like this being played. The only details I have are from the movie, and web searches lead me to believe that even if the game was real, the people & places might all have been changed. The details as I know from the movie :
It takes place in “Northern India” – somewhere prone to droughts; the village is called Champoner. The farmer who leads the village team is named Bhuvan, the villainous British man who issues the challenge is Colonel Russell. After the game, the British either abandoned the province or moved the seat of local government (I wasn’t clear on that), presumably due to embarassment.