Delinking “The Gentleman’s Game”: Visual Epistemic Representations in the Film Shabaash Mithu

Abstract

Indian Hindi language sports drama films centered on cricket function as performative documentaries depicting the lives, accomplishments, and trajectories of cricketers playing for the India men’s national cricket team, also known as Team India or the Men in Blue. These films, as cultural artifacts, are embedded in the establishment of a homogeneous episteme that consistently fails to offer alternatives to unsustainable development and pluralism of knowledge. Their persistent renditions of hegemonic masculinity and the gendered structure of cricket shape the politics of representation, positioning women of all classes, castes, and ethnicities as “others” in the sphere of mediated sport. In this regard, the Indian Hindi-language biographical sports drama film Shabaash Mithu (2022), directed by Srijit Mukherji and streaming on Netflix, serves as the first feasible approach to display the inspirational and empowering journey of Mithali Dorai Raj, the former Test and ODI (One Day International) captain of the India women’s national cricket team. In this paper, we argue that delinking and unlearning the dominant episteme associated with the representation of cricket in Indian Hindi films brings forth an episteme that can make the cultural representations comprehensive. In doing so, we analyze the multifaceted visual epistemic representations and establish that Mithali Raj and her team not only experience the subjugations of epistemic hegemony but also delink those and make their episteme visible in layered ways.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are very thankful to the editor-in-chief for his kind support and assistance throughout the whole publication process.

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Notes on contributors

Goutam Karmakar

GOUTAM KARMAKAR is an NRF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa. He is one of the editors of the Routledge book series on South Asian literature. His areas of research are South Asian literature and culture, women and gender studies, postcolonial studies, and ecological studies. His forthcoming and recently published edited volumes are Nation and Narration: Hindi Cinema and the Making and Remaking of National Consciousness (Routledge, forthcoming), Modernist Transitions: Cultural Encounters between British and Bangla Modernist Fiction from 1910s to 1950s (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature (Routledge, forthcoming), The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature (Routledge, 2022), and Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (Routledge, 2021). He has also published articles in over a dozen academic journals. E-mail: [email protected]

Payel Pal

PAYEL PAL is an Asst. Professor of English in the LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur. Her current research areas include South Asian studies, Women and Gender studies, Cultural, and Film studies. She is one of the editors of the Routledge book series on South Asian literature, and has also published articles in over a dozen academic journals. E-mail: [email protected]